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7 Examples ( and fixes ) showing most remaining balance issues are due to busted design/mechanics.


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![](https://i.imgur.com/CsQTCoL.png "")

As the dust from the balance mega patch has finally somewhat settled, things are overall...well, fine. A lot of the easy oneshots have been toned down and overall the game seems to be in a better state. And yet, the nerf threads keep coming. Nerf FB monkeyspam! Nerf Auramancer auras! Nerf Rev teleports! Nerf Thief everything! Nerf Ranger damage!

But if you take a broader look at the meta, most remaining issues have a root cause that lies in broken mechanics rather than broken skills, and that's what this thread is about. This is more or less a series of suggestions on how to make things better, and if you pay close attention you will notice that every single suggestion I am about to make touches on every build in the meta in some way.

This thread is thus a sort of psuedo-succesor to my old cheese thread ( https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/86519/the-elephant-in-the-balance-room-how-cheese-has-evolved-to-hurt-gw2-pvp-more-than-balance/p1) with the goal of going over some core rules of the game and how they can be tweaked to make the game feel a lot better. All without completely gutting whatever spec is on top of Metabattle every month with the recent "Increase a cooldown here, reduce sustain by 2% there, reduce a number by 10 over yonder" style of balance passes we have been getting recently that have been somewhat 'swings and a miss'.

Mechanic change #1 - Improve the quality of animations, strongly consider adding a UI option that lets you see the cast bar of nearby enemies.

I'll start this thread out with the most obvious one. GW2 unlike GW1 doesn't have cast bars. If it did, I imagine it might look like this:

9fdvKhr.png

Poor animation quality continues to be possibly the most serious issue in all competitive modes. There are tons of very strong abilities in the game that are a lot stronger thant they deserve to be in PvP because they look barely any different than an auto attack and thus get lost in the visual clutter of more vibrant abilities. Necro fears, many weapon skills, tons of utilities all continue to have weak or no animation or cast time to them at all. Powerful boons like stability still have no visual effect. On the flip side, you also get skills with gigantic animations like Ghastly breach which can potentially just make visual clutter. Cast bars are one way to add a simple but discerning animation to most skills without making those animations take up an entire screen.

The design of GW2 was to not have cast bars because animations would be good enough. But are they really? There continues to be a ton of skills and effects in GW2 that have little to no tell, and fixing this would go a long way towards better PvP.

Mechanic change #2 - Change Quickness to stack intensity, up to 5 times. Each stack would grant "increases attack and action speeds by 10%"

Quickness is very busted. +50% attack/animation/cast speed is an absolutely insane buff in any PvP setting. Quickness in its current form allows builds that exploit it to flat out ignore the balance between "Animation time / effect" turning skills that would normally have perfectly fair casting time into feeling instant-cast. Because quickness alone allows people to do immense amounts of near unavoidable damage, it also allows for people to play very passively and defensive while their quickness-engine recharges. Not exactly interactive gameplay.

The first thing making quickness stack intensity does is give the balance team some breathing room when trying to split PvE/PvP skills. In PvE, quickness is mandatory for Raids. In PvP, it's busted. This has resulted in a lot of skill splits where quickness duration on many PvP skills has been nerfed down to only a few seconds. Problem is, what makes quickness so strong is its burst capacity, so even a few seconds of quickness is plenty enough to press 2345 and blow someone up. This change allows quickness to be balanced for PvP without changing how it functions in PvE.

Having quickness stack intensity means a lot of quicknesss granting skills like elixir U and Phase traversal can now be properly balanced by making them grant only 2 stacks in PvP for +20% speed. Still useful, but a lot less oppressive for damage spikes and a lot less enabling of the "save everything for quickness lol" playstyle.

Mechanic change #3 - Change condition removal to prioritize higher stacks first, instead of by order of application

The current system of condi removal "first in last out" is effectively inherited from GW1, which had several distinct differences from GW2. Back in the GW1 days, having condition removal based on order of application made perfect sense. This is because GW1 did not have tons of passives that apply free condis, did not have stacks, did not have anywhere near the amount of condition application methods, and most importantly of all did not have condition damage as a stat ( all conditions did a base-value effect ). In GW1, putting cover conditions was a neat way to protect more powerful conditions from removal.

However, this system is terrible for GW2 for several reasons. The existence of stacks makes it so a condi may or may not be powerful and the order of application may or may not have anything to do with skillful play. Applying cover conditions in this games is also hilariously easy compared to GW1, to the point that most condi builds have multiple traits that automatically add 1-3 cover conditions for you. In GW1, hitting a target with 6+ conditions in PvP required careful team coordination. In GW2, hitting a target with 6+ conditions requires zero team effort and in many cases can be done with one or two instant cast abilities. GW2 is a completely different game. This means that skills that remove 1-2 conditions that were effective counterplay in GW1, aren't really an effective counter in GW2. Before you even get into the problem of "which skills and traits are making this build OP" the issue standing in front of it is that condi builds are boosted by flat out having superior stats as there is very little reason for them not to monkey-up with rabid/sage/etc.

The biggest problem changing condi removal to prioritize stacks immediately fixes is it puts condi builds in a position where speccing into only condition damage runs the risk of having your damage negated by any build that runs several small condition removals. This means that in order to do optimal damage as condi, you could no longer get away with running nonsense such as "Rabid amulet + every defensive trait in the book" and would instead have to run Sinister/Destroyer just like how power builds are forced to run Berserker for optimal damage. This has been a serious balance problem in GW2 for a very long time. Power builds need all Power/Precision/Ferocity to work. Condi builds just need Condition damage, leading to the problem of "Condi + Vitality/Toughness/Healing amulut + defensive traits / weapons" being chosen. This is why "Condi bunker" builds in GW2 have always been very monkey / low skill low effort high reward and why every condi meta always ends up feeling extremely degenerate and spammy.

Mechanic change #4 - Make "reveal on cast" the default behavior for using damage abilities from stealth, as opposed to "reveal on hit". Make the stealth outline graphic that is normally only visible to allies also visible to enemies in PvP if they are within a radius of 300 unit range. Double the duration of most stealth skills.

The current mechanics of how stealth works in GW2 completely lack any meaningful interaction or counterplay. It can infinitely reset fights. It can be used to make any animation invisible and therefore carry with it the same design problems of instant cast skills. It can be used as a get out of jail free or an engage. And the biggest problem of all, it allows mistakes to go unpunished. Say you are stealthed playing a P/P thief and you shoot a guardian using Shield 5. Guess what? This doesn't reveal you since your attack didn't hit and was blocked by shield 5s projectile block effect. Just one of many of the silly mechanical issues that comes with reveal on hit instead of on attack. This is not good PvP game design. This makes stealth reliant builds neither fun to play as ( unless you don't feel insulted by the blatant hand-holding ) nor fun to play against.

Most other PvP games usually have built in restrictions to stealth that require the use to actually require some thought and have some sort of counter to them. Such as making stealth visible within a certain distance, putting hit confirm on stealthed players, or putting a delay between unstealthing when can you can attack. GW2 has none of these restrictions, leading to stealth being a mechanic that is almost impossible to balance right. This proposed change would make stealth last longer, but have restriction in place to prevent the abuse/mindless gameplay that the current system enables.

Mechanic change #5 - Add roughly 2 seconds of stability to most stunbreaks in the game, but only if the ability succesfully breaks a stun similar to how the Revenant trait "Glaring resolve" works.

Stability and CC are hard to balance. Too much stability-on-demand leads to the mindless gameplay style of "Pop stability and then spam attacks without fear of being interrupted", such as what pre-nerf Elixer U was for holosmiths where they would basically just "press elixir U press photon forge press 2354111" -not exactly skillful gameplay. On the flipside, too little counters to CC leads to the playstyle of "zerg down a single target while spamming CC" which is honestly where we are at now.

Making stubreaks give stability when a stun is actually broken as a default behavior for breaking stuns is a good way to address this issue. Because you wouldn't get the stability unless you are actually CC'd first, it doesn't carry the "pop stab spam abilities" problem that on demand stability gives. It's a simple way to tone down CC spam and thus requiring more skillful use of CC without permitting the problems that comes with too much CC immunity.

Mechanic change#6 - Drastically nerf downstate in competitive game modes. Make it no longer increase health pool, give it double bleedout speed, and reduce the healing by 60%

This is sort of a compromise between the "this is fine" camp and the "remove downstate from PvP" camp. Downstate is currently way too easy to res out of by any support spec, especially now after the damage-nerf megapatch a few months back. This leads to certain team comps being able to win fights they normally shouldn't win just because they can keep ressing over and over and over again to reset the fight. Rallying is also way too easy because of how long a target can stay downed

Nerfing downstate so that it's significantly shorter and easier to take out is one way to balance it without completely removing the mechanic from the game. It would give teams a small window to Res a play that downed, but not such a huge window that they can carry fights and exploit rallybots by doing so.

Mechanic change#7 - Give a balance pass toward reducing the radius on many AoE skills.

This one is a bit controversial because it could make PvE players sad, but the reality is GW2 has too many skills that hit the entire point, and too many balance changes that actively encourage this sort of playstyle.

An example of this would be Revs "Call to anguish" skill https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Call_to_Anguish This skill had its radius buffed to 360 and changed into an AoE CC. The meta eventually realized that this was broken, and thus the skill was heavily abused, then nerfed. But it wasn't fixed, oh no. It was simply given an energy cost nerf, completely ignoring the extremely high possibility that maybe just maybe the radius buff should just be reverted? Condi Rev is still meta btw. Any skill that can CC the entire point is just going to be automatically very strong in a game mode around holding points. Symbolbrand is another good example. What reason does "monkeybrand" have to not just randomly spam symbols and buffs all over the point when symbols can cover 85% of the point? Not much of a reason at all really.

Again, it's all about counterplay. Abilities that hit the entire part of the map that matters, especially those that have a continuous effect, are going to be very difficult to counter despite being extremely easy to abuse.

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anims are pretty obvious in this game, i'm not sure a visible cast bar is necessary.

theres no reason to do that to quickness, it simply has to have reduced durations and maybe even reduce the overall level to 30% or something.

dunno how I feel about the 3rd one. that would kill the condi cover thing but clean up team fights a lot.

no to stealth change. someone in professions subforum said that there should still be visible damage numbers against people in stealth, as well as one other change. it sounded pretty good to me.

yes to stab on stun break.

no lol. downstate isn't that bad, all this constant qq is really annoying. just make rally 1:1.

yeah aoe is kind of ridiculous. imo the duration should be shortened instead and the effects increased. maybe some aoe radius nerfs.

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I agree with pretty much all of these except maybe #7, all other changes should come first.

suggestion #2 will not happen. A-net doesn't want to split how stuff like this works between modes. Partly because "oh noes new ppl wont understand, we want consistency!" excuse we always get, and the other part being how apparently complicated it is to implement something like that. As much as I like the suggestion, I think a simpler and healthier solution (as to not step on the toes of #1's attempt to "Improve the quality of animations") is to just remove quickness from PvP, or make it so it only works for interacting with objectives.

I don't think this will actually "fix" the balance, even with these mechanical changes some classes over perform while others are over-nerfed.Suggestion #3 and #5 as an example: Although I think are healthy overall; it will likely cause some builds to survive to long, and that will need to be addressed. Also anything currently under-performing isn't going to change.

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1 nice to have2 sure but reduce reaper shroud cast times3 not sure about that cause of fear and cover condis stoping it from being cleansed4 on for stuff like theif stealth attacks the ones that is on auto attack position cause it would be broken if you use your heal to heal while in stealth and it reveals you and the part about seeing enemy’s in stealth is a big no way too strong of nerf5 is ok but de values traits that are on berserker and maybe not worth cause necros can corrupt that stab, and just would stop warrior stun lock6 no don’t touch what’s not broken the stuff like toss elixir r should be just nerfed to a level like necro blood well heal7maybe but would change the game substantially.@Master Ketsu.4569

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@"Daishi.6027" said:

suggestion #2 will not happen. A-net doesn't want to split how stuff like this works between modes. Partly because "oh noes new ppl wont understand, we want consistency!"

Quickness actually would work the same in PvE and PvP with my suggestion.

The difference is making it stack intensity means most quickness skills would grant 1~2 stacks in PvP and 4-5 stacks in PvE. I would like to think most people could get used to it, and raids would still have access to permanent 5 stacks.

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:

  • theres no reason to do that to quickness, it simply has to have reduced durations and maybe even reduce the overall level to 30% or something.

As someone who has been in top 250 with power shiro / rev builds multiple times I can tell you no it really wouldn't. Quickness even at 1 second is long enough to blow someone up if you know what you are doing.

Reducing it to 30% would work though. The problem with that is PvE. Raids are designed/balanced around the current 50% quickness, and I guarantee PvErs would cry a hurricane of tears if the boon was nerfed to 30% because anything that lowers their DPS numbers too drastically causes an absolute metric ton of butt-hurt. Making it stack intensity lets the boon function the same in both game modes, while just making it easier to reach max stacks in PvE.

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@"Master Ketsu.4569" said:

![](https://i.imgur.com/CsQTCoL.png "")

As the dust from the balance mega patch has finally somewhat settled, things are overall...well, fine. A lot of the easy oneshots have been toned down and overall the game seems to be in a better state. And yet, the nerf threads keep coming. Nerf FB monkeyspam! Nerf Auramancer auras! Nerf Rev teleports! Nerf Thief everything! Nerf Ranger damage!

But if you take a broader look at the meta, most remaining issues have a root cause that lies in broken mechanics rather than broken skills, and that's what this thread is about. This is more or less a series of suggestions on how to make things better, and if you pay close attention you will notice that every single suggestion I am about to make touches on every build in the meta in some way.

This thread is thus a sort of psuedo-succesor to my old cheese thread ( https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/86519/the-elephant-in-the-balance-room-how-cheese-has-evolved-to-hurt-gw2-pvp-more-than-balance/p1) with the goal of going over some core rules of the game and how they can be tweaked to make the game feel a lot better. All without completely gutting whatever spec is on top of Metabattle every month with the recent "Increase a cooldown here, reduce sustain by 2% there, reduce a number by 10 over yonder" style of balance passes we have been getting recently that have been somewhat 'swings and a miss'.

Mechanic change #1 - Improve the quality of animations, strongly consider adding a UI option that lets you see the cast bar of nearby enemies.

I'll start this thread out with the most obvious one. GW2 unlike GW1 doesn't have cast bars. If it did, I imagine it might look like this:

9fdvKhr.png

Poor animation quality continues to be possibly the most serious issue in all competitive modes. There are tons of very strong abilities in the game that are a lot stronger thant they deserve to be in PvP because they look barely any different than an auto attack and thus get lost in the visual clutter of more vibrant abilities. Necro fears, many weapon skills, tons of utilities all continue to have weak or no animation or cast time to them at all. Powerful boons like stability still have no visual effect. On the flip side, you also get skills with gigantic animations like Ghastly breach which can potentially just make visual clutter. Cast bars are one way to add a simple but discerning animation to most skills without making those animations take up an entire screen.

The design of GW2 was to not have cast bars because animations would be good enough. But are they really? There continues to be a ton of skills and effects in GW2 that have little to no tell, and fixing this would go a long way towards better PvP.

Mechanic change #2 - Change Quickness to stack intensity, up to 5 times. Each stack would grant "increases attack and action speeds by 10%"

Quickness is very busted. +50% attack/animation/cast speed is an absolutely insane buff in any PvP setting. Quickness in its current form allows builds that exploit it to flat out ignore the balance between "Animation time / effect" turning skills that would normally have perfectly fair casting time into feeling instant-cast. Because quickness alone allows people to do immense amounts of near unavoidable damage, it also allows for people to play very passively and defensive while their quickness-engine recharges. Not exactly interactive gameplay.

The first thing making quickness stack intensity does is give the balance team some breathing room when trying to split PvE/PvP skills. In PvE, quickness is mandatory for Raids. In PvP, it's busted. This has resulted in a lot of skill splits where quickness duration on many PvP skills has been nerfed down to only a few seconds. Problem is, what makes quickness so strong is its burst capacity, so even a few seconds of quickness is plenty enough to press 2345 and blow someone up. This change allows quickness to be balanced for PvP without changing how it functions in PvE.

Having quickness stack intensity means a lot of quicknesss granting skills like elixir U and Phase traversal can now be properly balanced by making them grant only 2 stacks in PvP for +20% speed. Still useful, but a lot less oppressive for damage spikes and a lot less enabling of the "save everything for quickness lol" playstyle.

Mechanic change #3 - Change condition removal to prioritize higher stacks first, instead of by order of application

The current system of condi removal "first in last out" is effectively inherited from GW1, which had several distinct differences from GW2. Back in the GW1 days, having condition removal based on order of application made perfect sense. This is because GW1 did not have tons of passives that apply free condis, did not have stacks, did not have anywhere near the amount of condition application methods, and most importantly of all did not have condition damage as a stat ( all conditions did a base-value effect ). In GW1, putting cover conditions was a neat way to protect more powerful conditions from removal.

However, this system is terrible for GW2 for several reasons. The existence of stacks makes it so a condi may or may not be powerful and the order of application may or may not have anything to do with skillful play. Applying cover conditions in this games is also hilariously easy compared to GW1, to the point that most condi builds have multiple traits that automatically add 1-3 cover conditions for you. In GW1, hitting a target with 6+ conditions in PvP required careful team coordination. In GW2, hitting a target with 6+ conditions requires zero team effort and in many cases can be done with one or two instant cast abilities. GW2 is a completely different game. This means that skills that remove 1-2 conditions that were effective counterplay in GW1, aren't really an effective counter in GW2. Before you even get into the problem of "which skills and traits are making this build OP" the issue standing in front of it is that condi builds are boosted by flat out having superior stats as there is very little reason for them not to monkey-up with rabid/sage/etc.

The biggest problem changing condi removal to prioritize stacks immediately fixes is it puts condi builds in a position where speccing into only condition damage runs the risk of having your damage negated by any build that runs several small condition removals. This means that in order to do optimal damage as condi, you could no longer get away with running nonsense such as "Rabid amulet + every defensive trait in the book" and would instead have to run Sinister/Destroyer just like how power builds are forced to run Berserker for optimal damage. This has been a serious balance problem in GW2 for a very long time. Power builds need all Power/Precision/Ferocity to work. Condi builds just need Condition damage, leading to the problem of "Condi + Vitality/Toughness/Healing amulut + defensive traits / weapons" being chosen. This is why "Condi bunker" builds in GW2 have always been very monkey / low skill low effort high reward and why every condi meta always ends up feeling extremely degenerate and spammy.

Mechanic change #4 - Make "reveal on cast" the default behavior for using damage abilities from stealth, as opposed to "reveal on hit". Make the stealth outline graphic that is normally only visible to allies also visible to enemies in PvP if they are within a radius of 300 unit range. Double the duration of most stealth skills.

The current mechanics of how stealth works in GW2 completely lack any meaningful interaction or counterplay. It can infinitely reset fights. It can be used to make any animation invisible and therefore carry with it the same design problems of instant cast skills. It can be used as a get out of jail free or an engage. And the biggest problem of all, it allows mistakes to go unpunished. Say you are stealthed playing a P/P thief and you shoot a guardian using Shield 5. Guess what? This doesn't reveal you since your attack didn't hit and was blocked by shield 5s projectile block effect. Just one of many of the silly mechanical issues that comes with reveal on hit instead of on attack. This is not good PvP game design. This makes stealth reliant builds neither fun to play as ( unless you don't feel insulted by the blatant hand-holding ) nor fun to play against.

Most other PvP games usually have built in restrictions to stealth that require the use to actually require some thought and have some sort of counter to them. Such as making stealth visible within a certain distance, putting hit confirm on stealthed players, or putting a delay between unstealthing when can you can attack. GW2 has none of these restrictions, leading to stealth being a mechanic that is almost impossible to balance right. This proposed change would make stealth last longer, but have restriction in place to prevent the abuse/mindless gameplay that the current system enables.

Mechanic change #5 - Add roughly 2 seconds of stability to most stunbreaks in the game, but only if the ability succesfully breaks a stun similar to how the Revenant trait "Glaring resolve" works.

Stability and CC are hard to balance. Too much stability-on-demand leads to the mindless gameplay style of "Pop stability and then spam attacks without fear of being interrupted", such as what pre-nerf Elixer U was for holosmiths where they would basically just "press elixir U press photon forge press 2354111" -not exactly skillful gameplay. On the flipside, too little counters to CC leads to the playstyle of "zerg down a single target while spamming CC" which is honestly where we are at now.

Making stubreaks give stability when a stun is actually broken as a default behavior for breaking stuns is a good way to address this issue. Because you wouldn't get the stability unless you are actually CC'd first, it doesn't carry the "pop stab spam abilities" problem that on demand stability gives. It's a simple way to tone down CC spam and thus requiring more skillful use of CC without permitting the problems that comes with too much CC immunity.

Mechanic change#6 - Drastically nerf downstate in competitive game modes. Make it no longer increase health pool, give it double bleedout speed, and reduce the healing by 60%

This is sort of a compromise between the "this is fine" camp and the "remove downstate from PvP" camp. Downstate is currently way too easy to res out of by any support spec, especially now after the damage-nerf megapatch a few months back. This leads to certain team comps being able to win fights they normally shouldn't win just because they can keep ressing over and over and over again to reset the fight. Rallying is also way too easy because of how long a target can stay downed

Nerfing downstate so that it's significantly shorter and easier to take out is one way to balance it without completely removing the mechanic from the game. It would give teams a small window to Res a play that downed, but not such a huge window that they can carry fights and exploit rallybots by doing so.

Mechanic change#7 - Give a balance pass toward reducing the radius on many AoE skills.

This one is a bit controversial because it could make PvE players sad, but the reality is GW2 has too many skills that hit the entire point, and too many balance changes that actively encourage this sort of playstyle.

An example of this would be Revs "Call to anguish" skill https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Call_to_Anguish This skill had its radius buffed to 360 and changed into an AoE CC. The meta eventually realized that this was broken, and thus the skill was heavily abused, then nerfed. But it wasn't fixed, oh no. It was simply given an energy cost nerf, completely ignoring the extremely high possibility that maybe just maybe the radius buff should just be reverted? Condi Rev is still meta btw. Any skill that can CC the entire point is just going to be automatically very strong in a game mode around holding points. Symbolbrand is another good example. What reason does "monkeybrand" have to not just randomly spam symbols and buffs all over the point when symbols can cover 85% of the point? Not much of a reason at all really.

Again, it's all about counterplay. Abilities that hit the entire part of the map that matters, especially those that have a continuous effect, are going to be very difficult to counter despite being extremely easy to abuse.

You could just drop the smoke and mirrors and ask them to delete condi from the meta entirely. Your proposal is as realistic and the outcome would be the same. Ask yourself do hybrid builds work? And would they be more or less attractive if players simply removed the largest source of condi damage first when cleansing?

Let's talk about build diversity, too. So, these new condi hybrids you dreamed up. They run what amulet again? Ah, right. Grieving, grieving or, who knows? Maybe....grieving? So, I'm going to try and win the glass cannon game, but instead of going full power burst, I've decided I want to be adventurous and deal a little damage over time (that you can just auto-cleanse anyway)? Sign me up for that!

So not only are my opponents given license to drop most of their condi cleanse and slot more damage, at the same time I'm going to have to grab some additional defense from somewhere to survive my no-payoff handicap decision of running condi hybrid in the first place! But it's okay! I can afford to run additional defensive skills along with the usual assortment of skills that support condition damage, because I'm going to be dealing so much additional damage from power?

Again, this plan just doesn't make sense to me. Am I misunderstanding? I admit it was a lot to read and a lot of it sounded good. I just really take issue with this part.

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I absolutely love your approach to changing quickness and think it is a particularly elegant way of reducing its effectiveness in PvP/WvW while leaving it intact in PvE. I have been trying to think of a way that tones down the cheese factor of Phase Traversal port-bursting with power Rev while still maintaining the current synergy the stab-consuming effect Brutality has with the various quickness sources the class has access to. I really love this. Give Phase Traversal 1-2 stacks, make SotM-Shiro scale stacks based off number targets hit, and reduce Brutality's strength, and I think the class would feel much more fun to fight against.

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  1. More animations might be good in 1v1, though it's hard to say with how cluttered player models can be. Would definitely be useless in teamfights, it doesn't matter how unique and telegraphed a player's animations are when they're drowning in particle effects. The cast bar thing sounds interesting though.

  2. I don't really have any strong feelings one way or the other regarding this suggestion, quickness hasn't struck me as that huge of a problem. On the other hand, that sounds like one of those changes that would be impossible to add only to pvp, and when it comes to changes like those, Anet will always favour PvE 100% of the time, make of that what you will.

  3. That'd immediately kill condi builds. The way I see it the problem with condi is a power creep tug of war between condi application and condi cleanse. We have way too many condi cleanse options to make stack-cleansing not immediately kill condi builds. The best option imo would be to tune down both condi application and condi cleanse, then we can start exploring such options.

  4. Reveal on cast sounds real good, I'm into it. The "outline when close to enemy"? Eeeeeh that thing's so easy to see you might aswell just make a radial reveal, not into it.

  5. This is a great suggestion, I'm all for it.

  6. "This leads to certain team comps being able to win fights they normally shouldn't win". People keep bringing up this as if it's an argument. You're using logic from other games to justify changes to GW2. Downed state is a mechanic, if a team won a fight because they managed their downed better than the enemy team, then they earned that win, it's not like they cheated because they made appropriate use of a mechanic that doesn't exist in other completely unrelated games. That being said, nerfs to rally and a balance pass on revive/downed skills are needed, but the mechanic itself is perfectly fine.

  7. If you can do this without touching PvE, yea sure. If not, Anet will prioritize PvE which means this will never happen.

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1- I've got no real opinion on this one, that said, the most threatening skills tend to be the instant one, the one that already have a cast time tend to already be recognized by the player base. So I'm not sure another visual layer will really be usefull.2- I think you nail it and this is the "better" fix for Quickness.3- This downgrading the non stacking conditions. This change could have unforseen issue where "soft" conditions (chill, cripple, weakness, slow) end up feeling overwhelmingly strong in PvP environment just because they become "harder" to cleanse (or easier to cover if you prefer).4- I don't think it's the proper way to adress stealth. Imo the problem isn't stealth per se but the ability to burst out of stealth. In itseflf, it's fine that the thief can take cover in stealth and reset a fight at will.5- I tend to disagree with this one. I'd rather see toughness reduce hard CCs duration/effects. I believe interrupts are good for the game (especially in sPvP) while long CC duration are a cancer. Having more means to reduce the duration of CCs instead of plainly block them feel like the better way to adress the CC issue.6- Well, nope. Increase the penalty when being rallied, add visual clue (broken shield going from yellow to red like armor in PvE) about the penalty, maybe add some "weakening" effects lingering afterward.7- Personally I'd agree on this one as long as it's an sPvP only change.

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I guess some optional cast bar on enemies would be nice. (People that don't like it could disable it in the options.) Might be interesting when a lot of people are fighting together and tons of effects are on the screen. Easier to pay attention to such a bar.

Maybe balancing quickness so people can't have a lot of uptime ... would be enough. (I mean one big duration with huge CD or some small durations with shorter CD are okay for example.)

For conditions I'd prefer if you manually could make some settings. Some small script-like settings option in the char screen somewhere. (Additional tab there.) Maybe some people would like to remove movement impairing conditions first. Highest stack first would make sense in most cases I guess. If ... condition removal were changed to removing a set amount of stacks ... that would be even better. Could make - if balanced towards conditoin applying on the attack skills - it balanced so removal would not get too overpowered.

(Also blindness should not affect AoE skills. Weird if AoE kann miss lol. Imagine a guy being blinded while throwing a nuclear bomb and nobody getting killed because the attacker was blinded. Weird. :D)

Stealth yeah ... I don't know about that. In most other MMORPG I like the stealth system more. Here in PvE it works just fine. In PvP ... I guess some classes are balanced around the current system and big changes might change the whole classe (like thief). I'd prefer if there was some "slow movement + backstab with one time high damage and then revealing the thief and him being able to go back into stealth only if out of view again" but that is not just possible here.

Stunbreak + stability seems great. Would prevent stun-locking a bit.

Downstate seems fine to me ... only rallying should be removed in PvP. I guess with the mini season 3 vs. 3 we'll see some play that also could use rallying. 1 downed 1 rezzing or killing (to help rally the other guy) and the 3rd one keeping the downed guy alive (keep enemy from stomping by using CC). Though 3 vs. 3 without rallying ... it would be a great idea to test "no rallying" here.

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Disagree with pretty much all of it. It's using a sledgehammer to fix a few loose nails.

  1. Animations are still mostly reliable (turn on standard enemy models). Most of the problems come from: attacking from stealth, where you don't see half the animation, abilities under 0.75s cast time being not realistically avoidable, and quickness making animations faster than the 0.75s threshold. A few others are from glitched animations.

  2. Stacking quickness solves nothing. You'll eventually get builds which find a way to stack it higher, which gets us back to the same spot we're in now. Why not just nerf the boon in PvP then - it's a lot easier and caps it. But still doesn't fix it. The problem with quickness is that it's too plentiful, especially when paired with attacks which cross the 0.75s realistically dodge-able threshold. Quickness needs to be removed where appropriate and replaced with something else. Reaper should not have permanent quickness in shroud for example.

  3. The problem with condi is a handful of abilities which stack conditions too quickly. Burn guard has always been in that boat, but is also the easiest to remove from it. Fix the outliers, don't change the mechanic.

  4. I kinda like the idea if reveal on cast, but it puts thieves at a huge disadvantage against guardians due to Aegis. The rest is unnecessary. Thieves survive more because of evades and teleports than stealth. Damage from stealth problems happen from certain specific combos.

  5. No to stability on all stun breaks. Part of skill is using stun breaks well. It hampers CC-centric builds in small fights, but does nothing against heavy or targetted CC in large fights. The few abilities which have one 1s stack of stability on stun do so in order to allow the cast of the ability to finish because the stun break happens first.

  6. I don't see a major problem with downstate. Rez abilities means giving up a utility slot. The traits have been toned down. This seems to be a "like it or hate it" mechanic, and adjusting numbers won't fix that.

  7. This is a problem with a few specific skills and should be addressed that way.


What I would look at globally is reverting Might and Vulnerability stacking changes which were made years ago. Instead of a single stack with longer duration, its many stacks with short duration. This allows burst builds to be very strong. Rev in particular can talk 20 vulnerability like it was nothing.

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Mechanic change #3 - Change condition removal to prioritize higher stacks first, instead of by order of application

highly against that, covering conditions is part of skilled gameplay, if you remove the ability to cover high stacked dmg conditions, you can pretty much remove condition at all.

Other Stuff is fine tho.

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@"Exedore.6320" said:Disagree with pretty much all of it. It's using a sledgehammer to fix a few loose nails.

  1. Animations are still mostly reliable (turn on standard enemy models). Most of the problems come from: attacking from stealth, where you don't see half the animation, abilities under 0.75s cast time being not realistically avoidable, and quickness making animations faster than the 0.75s threshold. A few others are from glitched animations.

  2. Stacking quickness solves nothing. You'll eventually get builds which find a way to stack it higher, which gets us back to the same spot we're in now. Why not just nerf the boon in PvP then - it's a lot easier and caps it. But still doesn't fix it. The problem with quickness is that it's too plentiful, especially when paired with attacks which cross the 0.75s realistically dodge-able threshold. Quickness needs to be removed where appropriate and replaced with something else. Reaper should not have permanent quickness in shroud for example.

  3. The problem with condi is a handful of abilities which stack conditions too quickly. Burn guard has always been in that boat, but is also the easiest to remove from it. Fix the outliers, don't change the mechanic.

  4. I kinda like the idea if reveal on cast, but it puts thieves at a huge disadvantage against guardians due to Aegis. The rest is unnecessary. Thieves survive more because of evades and teleports than stealth. Damage from stealth problems happen from certain specific combos.

  5. No to stability on all stun breaks. Part of skill is using stun breaks well. It hampers CC-centric builds in small fights, but does nothing against heavy or targetted CC in large fights. The few abilities which have one 1s stack of stability on stun do so in order to allow the cast of the ability to finish because the stun break happens first.

  6. I don't see a major problem with downstate. Rez abilities means giving up a utility slot. The traits have been toned down. This seems to be a "like it or hate it" mechanic, and adjusting numbers won't fix that.

  7. This is a problem with a few specific skills and should be addressed that way.


What I would look at globally is reverting Might and Vulnerability stacking changes which were made years ago. Instead of a single stack with longer duration, its many stacks with short duration. This allows burst builds to be very strong. Rev in particular can talk 20 vulnerability like it was nothing.

I was going to write something then you summed it up here nicely. To be honest stealth is more of a problem with long duration, reduce it down for the cases where it's too long and prevent it stacking and most problems with stealth will go away. Of course you'd need to keep an eye on mesmer and thief as they are balanced at their core around stealth but a few CD decreases here or +1s extra stealth there would sort it out.

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A lot of these suggestions sound good on paper, but would likely just reduce the amount of skilled play even more.

  1. As others have stated, the problem isnt animations, its visual noise from effects, and low cast times. Watching for specific animations is much more interesting and engaging that watching cast bars.
  2. Quickness itself isnt an issue, the problem is how abundant it is. Skills like time warp are very fair and well balanced. Skills like frenzy, stalwart speed, and reapers onslaught are much more questionable.
  3. Condi has always been a mess, its going to take a lot more than 1 simple change to balance it properly. This would also make passive cleansing far too powerful.
  4. I personally am in favor for reveal on cast, and transparent outlines while stealthed, but it would require significant changes to class mechanics and will never happen.
  5. This sounds like a good way to prevent stunlocking, but stunlocking itself isnt the main issue, the abundance of cc and its ease of use is. Adding stab to every stun break would cause a huge drop in skilled gameplay.
  6. Downstate is fine if people accept how its intended to work. It seems like most of the complaints come from losing the rally in close fights, or not being able to win an outnumbered fight vs a support class. It takes skill to recognize when a fight is worth committing to, and when its possible to secure a kill.
  7. This is the one that I agree with. Aoe has been made far too common with elite specs, and some skills should definitely get toned down.
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@Paradoxoglanis.1904 said:

  1. As others have stated, the problem isnt animations, its visual noise from effects, and low cast times.

Considering Anet's past attempts to deal with visual noise (looking at you auras), I feel compelled to mention that the greatest culprit of visual noise are the persistent fields and rings left behind by abilties, aswell as the on-hit effects that take up an entire character model worth of space. In a game like GW2 where you can fire off multiple abilties back to back, stacking ability visual effects like that is too frequent. For reference, this doesn't happen as often in a game with equally if not more flashy abilities than GW2 like FFXIV, because in FF by the time you start another ability the particle animations of your previous cast already ended. It'd be best to deal with those problems first before looking at character animations.

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That UI option would get confusingly cluttered by all the buttons presses, at about 4 button presses anytime I do anything it would be meaningless.

It's a neat idea, I'm not against it but I don't see how much of a help it would be a higher levels. Being hand fed information that already exist more obviously. It should be more of a practice thing IMO.

Personally BOONS, should display above enemies. Considerably the fresh ones, such as Stability or Resistance that are often first. The rest of it if necessary can be looked in more details checking the above UI. Honestly if Stability had a tell like Resistance, it would already be a step in the right direction.

It's been often suggested in the past by me and others that all stunbreaks should share a 2 seconds stability (Only Revenant has to trait for it because of their stunbreak access), I still stand by that fact so people stop using so many CC's at once. It discourages CC spam altogether which will slow down the pace of the game a little but in a healthy way where it's not always AJNIDADUBANDUAN dead. IE, should you burst after your stun or make it a skill bait. Not only that but one stack of stability is /considerably/ much weaker than having 2 because multi-cc skills can go through those which is another aspect of balance in giving it all to stunbreak skills, it doesn't make someone completely immune to CC, only give them a chance to do something for a sec.

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@"mrauls.6519" said:I wonder if anet will read this

I wonder if they read anything on these forums, anything substantial that is. Half of forum suggestions are unrealistic, especially at this point of the game, and really just gigantic walls of text. I don't really blame em! I don't know about you all, but in this digital age and in college I have enough walls of text to worry about!

That being said:

  1. It's ok
  2. meh....
  3. I support it along with the following: that condition damage be dealt with degeneration levels, as in gw1, instead of ticks per second
  4. Nah...
  5. Better yet, cut down on CC period
  6. Nah...delete it...
  7. Yeah and also cut down on AoEs, make more single-target skills
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@"Paradoxoglanis.1904" said:

  1. This sounds like a good way to prevent stunlocking, but stunlocking itself isnt the main issue, the abundance of cc and its ease of use is. Adding stab to every stun break would cause a huge drop in skilled gameplay.

if the stab is 1 or 2 seconds long how exactly is that going to "impact skilled gameplay"?

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