duelist class are now full bunker

[Firebeard.1746]

@Bazsi.2734 said:The meta we had before was more like an FPS, it was more about predictions and reaction times. Fun, but not really what an MMO should be. So a-net started shifting it towards a different balance, where fights last longer, and lacking superior reaction times can be made up with good tactical decisions.

Have you played PVP? condi meta is still burning people down fast, and it's annoying that some classes like engi have their condi convert abilites an a really long cast time but other classes can do it passively or quickly with traits and/or other abilities.

[Bazsi.2734]

@Firebeard.1746 said:

@"Bazsi.2734" said:The meta we had before was more like an FPS, it was more about predictions and reaction times. Fun, but not really what an MMO should be. So a-net started shifting it towards a different balance, where fights last longer, and lacking superior reaction times can be made up with good tactical decisions.

Have you played PVP? condi meta is still burning people down fast, and it's annoying that some classes like engi have their condi convert abilites an a really long cast time but other classes can do it passively or quickly with traits and/or other abilities.

"started shifting it towards a different balance"... I did not imply that we're there yet, or that condi is good/bad or anything... what point are you trying to make?

[UNOwen.7132]

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@"Kuma.1503" said:Instead of nerfing sustain again, we need to bring damage back up a tad and reduce the cooldown of #2 skills. Both of these changes were done to slow down the game, make choices more deliberate, but they went too far in their intended goal.

Lower weapon cooldowns, raise damage across the board. Bring damage back to heavily telegraphed CC skills like Executioner's slap, Prime light poke, drop the squeaker, big ol' fart, and backscratcher.

Each of these tweaks should have followed the feb patch.

We've need to stop trying to solve issues by nerfing what's directly in front of our face and instead ask how it got there in the first place.

Both damage and sustain were so high that attrition style gameplay did not exist. You stacked vitality/thoughness (or both) to survive oneshots, not to deal with pressure.

Except thats wrong on both counts. The few builds that stacked vitality/toughness (other than the standard marauders) did so specifically for long fights. And no, attrition style gameplay did exist. In fact it was the default. Duels between sidenoders usually lasted 30 seconds to a minute. They ended, unlike now, but not very quickly.

Damage was drasticly lowered in february, and then some. Oneshots are gone from competetive PvP, they are banished to unranked meme build status.

The only true "one-shots" that existed back then still exist. Burst still exists. That hasnt changed. What has changed is that in an even fight, whereas fights lasted for about a minute before, they are endless now.

Which was the purpose of the patch, good on A-net. However sustain bunkers are a thing now. You sit on the node(often with 1 another bunker buddy of yours), and you rotate through your defenses. It almost doesn't matter whats trying to attack you. As long as you move out of the most concentrated AoE-s and avoid getting 5v2-d, you can easily draw any fight out to eternity.

They always were a thing. The difference is that before you could kill them. Now you cant. And for that matter, sustain bunkers dont really exist now, because there is no point. Everyone is effectively a "sustain bunker" because of how pathetically low damage is. Full zerkers Holosmith is a bloody sustain bunker.

Sustain is too high, period. The gamemode is about holding/contesting nodes, if any build can just sit on it, it's bad for the game. There should be an intricate dance of jumping on/off the capture point to hold, avoiding pressure, faking out bursts, coordinating spikes... not this braindead "lets just tank everything while we spam defensive rotation and heals" that most of my matches with plat 2+ players devolve into.

Sustain is "too high" is the symptom, not the cause. The problem is that damage is much too low. Even the healing a regular build can put out is enough to survive endlessly. Thats the problem. If you just nerf all healing, then the result is just that the game gets even more braindead and unfun. The game would devolve even moreso into spamming everything you have off cooldown. If you want that intricate dance, then you simply need to revert the february megapatch.

I'd propose to shift supports from raw healing towards damage mitigation. Of course every support could still heal some, but guardians could excel at spamming protection/aegis, necromancers could be the king of condition transfers, druids could mix healing with outgoing buffs/mightstacks etc.

Without nerfing, that would change nothing. If you nerf, you run into the issue above.

The point would be that once you land damage, it matters. Currently the initial midfight 4v4 can go on for minutes. People dipping below 50%, just to get topped off seconds later. This shouldn't be a thing. Healthbars should generally go downwards.

The issue is once again that damage is too low, not that healing is too high. Healthbars should generally go downwards, but that cant happen if everyone hits like a wet noodle.

[UNOwen.7132]

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@Kuma.1503 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@Kuma.1503 said:Instead of nerfing sustain again, we need to bring damage back up a tad and reduce the cooldown of #2 skills. Both of these changes were done to slow down the game, make choices more deliberate, but they went too far in their intended goal.

Lower weapon cooldowns, raise damage across the board. Bring damage back to heavily telegraphed CC skills like Executioner's slap, Prime light poke, drop the squeaker, big ol' fart, and backscratcher.

Each of these tweaks should have followed the feb patch.

We've need to stop trying to solve issues by nerfing what's directly in front of our face and instead ask how it got there in the first place.

Both damage and sustain were so high that attrition style gameplay did not exist. You stacked vitality/thoughness (or both) to survive oneshots, not to deal with pressure.Damage was drasticly lowered in february, and then some. Oneshots are gone from competetive PvP, they are banished to unranked meme build status.Which was the purpose of the patch, good on A-net. However sustain bunkers are a thing now. You sit on the node(often with 1 another bunker buddy of yours), and you rotate through your defenses. It almost doesn't matter whats trying to attack you. As long as you move out of the most concentrated AoE-s and avoid getting 5v2-d, you can easily draw any fight out to eternity.Sustain is too high, period. The gamemode is about holding/contesting nodes, if any build can just sit on it, it's bad for the game. There should be an intricate dance of jumping on/off the capture point to hold, avoiding pressure, faking out bursts, coordinating spikes... not this braindead "lets just tank everything while we spam defensive rotation and heals" that most of my matches with plat 2+ players devolve into.

I'd propose to shift supports from raw healing towards damage mitigation. Of course every support could still heal some, but guardians could excel at spamming protection/aegis, necromancers could be the king of condition transfers, druids could mix healing with outgoing buffs/mightstacks etc.

The point would be that once you land damage, it matters. Currently the initial midfight 4v4 can go on for minutes. People dipping below 50%, just to get topped off seconds later. This shouldn't be a thing. Healthbars should generally go downwards.

snipBut as I said, Anet went too far with reducing damage, increasing cooldowns, and nerfing damage on crowd control. Every time we reach a point where healthbars generally go downwards, people complain about the class(es) doing the damage. If every sustain decrease is met with an equal or greater damage decrease, the problem will never be fixed.

snip

The meta we had before was more like an FPS, it was more about predictions and reaction times. Fun, but not really what an MMO should be. So a-net started shifting it towards a different balance, where fights last longer, and lacking superior reaction times can be made up with good tactical decisions.

Not really? The nature of the sidenoder fights didnt really change. What changed is that fights that lasted 30 seconds to a minute on average now last 15 minutes on average unless +1d. Or in simpler terms, no one dies.

You need way lower damage, and even lower sustain to achive fights last a while but end with someone inevitably running or dying. The current sustain is too high for that. Ever time unranked matchmaking decides im the one fill up that last spot in a match with top 50 premades, I often spend the entire match rotating from fight to fight because we cannot kill anything. Sure healthbars go down, but whoever took my burst and went down to 40%-ish, gets covered in boons and healed back up to full in 2 seconds.

No. If you want fights that last a while but end with someone inevitably running or dying, you simply need to revert every non-QoL change made since and including the february megapatch. Its as easy as that. If you just keep trying to cut damage and sustain more, you get a spammy game with no skill or tactics involved, that is so unfathomably boring I cant see why anyone would put themselves through it.

You do not solve this problem by buffing damage back so I can 100-0 instead of 100-40. Neither will a partial revert achive anything, who cares if my target got healed back from 20% instead of 40%? He's back to full... same outcome.

Yes you do solve the problem by buffing damage back up. In fact, thats the only solution.

You solve it by not letting a target fully healing back after taking bursts like that. And that requires a radical cut to raw healing. One thing I liked about thief heals a few years back is how they healed almost nothing. You used Withdraw to evade something, not to actually heal yourself back up. Same with Hide in Shadows, it was mainly tool to maintain stealth... now it heals like double what it used to, just look at its version history.

What the hell are you talking about? Thief heals values didnt really change Hide in Shadows got a 15% raw healing buff because no one used it, but to put it in perspective, that changed the total healing from 6000 to 6806. All it got was 800 healing. Meanwhile Mug provides 2000 healing, and thief doesnt even use it anymore. Thief healing now is lower than it was before. And yet thief is just as unkillable. Not because there is too much healing. But because there simply isnt nearly enough damage.

So TL,DR: too much raw healing, too much CC. It would do the game good if we cut both in half.

In actuality its just too little damage.

[Bazsi.2734]

@UNOwen.7132 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@Kuma.1503 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@Kuma.1503 said:Instead of nerfing sustain again, we need to bring damage back up a tad and reduce the cooldown of #2 skills. Both of these changes were done to slow down the game, make choices more deliberate, but they went too far in their intended goal.

Lower weapon cooldowns, raise damage across the board. Bring damage back to heavily telegraphed CC skills like Executioner's slap, Prime light poke, drop the squeaker, big ol' fart, and backscratcher.

Each of these tweaks should have followed the feb patch.

We've need to stop trying to solve issues by nerfing what's directly in front of our face and instead ask how it got there in the first place.

Both damage and sustain were so high that attrition style gameplay did not exist. You stacked vitality/thoughness (or both) to survive oneshots, not to deal with pressure.Damage was drasticly lowered in february, and then some. Oneshots are gone from competetive PvP, they are banished to unranked meme build status.Which was the purpose of the patch, good on A-net. However sustain bunkers are a thing now. You sit on the node(often with 1 another bunker buddy of yours), and you rotate through your defenses. It almost doesn't matter whats trying to attack you. As long as you move out of the most concentrated AoE-s and avoid getting 5v2-d, you can easily draw any fight out to eternity.Sustain is too high, period. The gamemode is about holding/contesting nodes, if any build can just sit on it, it's bad for the game. There should be an intricate dance of jumping on/off the capture point to hold, avoiding pressure, faking out bursts, coordinating spikes... not this braindead "lets just tank everything while we spam defensive rotation and heals" that most of my matches with plat 2+ players devolve into.

I'd propose to shift supports from raw healing towards damage mitigation. Of course every support could still heal some, but guardians could excel at spamming protection/aegis, necromancers could be the king of condition transfers, druids could mix healing with outgoing buffs/mightstacks etc.

The point would be that once you land damage, it matters. Currently the initial midfight 4v4 can go on for minutes. People dipping below 50%, just to get topped off seconds later. This shouldn't be a thing. Healthbars should generally go downwards.

snipBut as I said, Anet went too far with reducing damage, increasing cooldowns, and nerfing damage on crowd control. Every time we reach a point where healthbars generally go downwards, people complain about the class(es) doing the damage. If every sustain decrease is met with an equal or greater damage decrease, the problem will never be fixed.

snip

The meta we had before was more like an FPS, it was more about predictions and reaction times. Fun, but not really what an MMO should be. So a-net started shifting it towards a different balance, where fights last longer, and lacking superior reaction times can be made up with good tactical decisions.

Not really? The nature of the sidenoder fights didnt really change. What changed is that fights that lasted 30 seconds to a minute on average now last 15 minutes on average unless +1d. Or in simpler terms, no one dies.

You need way lower damage, and even lower sustain to achive fights last a while but end with someone inevitably running or dying. The current sustain is too high for that. Ever time unranked matchmaking decides im the one fill up that last spot in a match with top 50 premades, I often spend the entire match rotating from fight to fight because we cannot kill anything. Sure healthbars go down, but whoever took my burst and went down to 40%-ish, gets covered in boons and healed back up to full in 2 seconds.

No. If you want fights that last a while but end with someone inevitably running or dying, you simply need to revert every non-QoL change made since and including the february megapatch. Its as easy as that. If you just keep trying to cut damage and sustain more, you get a spammy game with no skill or tactics involved, that is so unfathomably boring I cant see why anyone would put themselves through it.

You do not solve this problem by buffing damage back so I can 100-0 instead of 100-40. Neither will a partial revert achive anything, who cares if my target got healed back from 20% instead of 40%? He's back to full... same outcome.

Yes you do solve the problem by buffing damage back up. In fact, thats the

only

solution.

You solve it by not letting a target fully healing back after taking bursts like that. And that requires a radical cut to raw healing. One thing I liked about thief heals a few years back is how they healed almost nothing. You used Withdraw to evade something, not to actually heal yourself back up. Same with Hide in Shadows, it was mainly tool to maintain stealth... now it heals like double what it used to, just look at its version history.

What the hell are you talking about? Thief heals values

didnt really change

Hide in Shadows got a 15% raw healing buff because no one used it, but to put it in perspective, that changed the total healing from 6000 to 6806. All it got was

800 healing

. Meanwhile Mug provides 2000 healing, and thief doesnt even use it anymore. Thief healing now is

lower

than it was before. And yet thief is just as unkillable. Not because there is too much healing. But because there simply isnt nearly enough damage.

So TL,DR: too much raw healing, too much CC. It would do the game good if we cut both in half.

In actuality its just too little damage.

I'm honored to be answered twice, one will suffice next time though.

Nice long winded way of saying you want oneshot meta damage back.

I think I explained myself clearly. With lower levels of damage, you can still get kills/force disengages if the sustain is even lower. You didn't refute it in any way, you just wrote "but damage though" 3 different ways.

Considering that we have a medium damage&high sustain meta, I'd like you to explain how a medium damage&below medium sustain scenario gameplay would be braindead and spammy, compared to what we have now. Cause I'm 100% sure the opposite will happen, so whats your reasoning?

[lightstalker.1498]

dont lower side node sustain, lower their damage

[UNOwen.7132]

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@UNOwen.7132 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@Kuma.1503 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@Kuma.1503 said:Instead of nerfing sustain again, we need to bring damage back up a tad and reduce the cooldown of #2 skills. Both of these changes were done to slow down the game, make choices more deliberate, but they went too far in their intended goal.

Lower weapon cooldowns, raise damage across the board. Bring damage back to heavily telegraphed CC skills like Executioner's slap, Prime light poke, drop the squeaker, big ol' fart, and backscratcher.

Each of these tweaks should have followed the feb patch.

We've need to stop trying to solve issues by nerfing what's directly in front of our face and instead ask how it got there in the first place.

Both damage and sustain were so high that attrition style gameplay did not exist. You stacked vitality/thoughness (or both) to survive oneshots, not to deal with pressure.Damage was drasticly lowered in february, and then some. Oneshots are gone from competetive PvP, they are banished to unranked meme build status.Which was the purpose of the patch, good on A-net. However sustain bunkers are a thing now. You sit on the node(often with 1 another bunker buddy of yours), and you rotate through your defenses. It almost doesn't matter whats trying to attack you. As long as you move out of the most concentrated AoE-s and avoid getting 5v2-d, you can easily draw any fight out to eternity.Sustain is too high, period. The gamemode is about holding/contesting nodes, if any build can just sit on it, it's bad for the game. There should be an intricate dance of jumping on/off the capture point to hold, avoiding pressure, faking out bursts, coordinating spikes... not this braindead "lets just tank everything while we spam defensive rotation and heals" that most of my matches with plat 2+ players devolve into.

I'd propose to shift supports from raw healing towards damage mitigation. Of course every support could still heal some, but guardians could excel at spamming protection/aegis, necromancers could be the king of condition transfers, druids could mix healing with outgoing buffs/mightstacks etc.

The point would be that once you land damage, it matters. Currently the initial midfight 4v4 can go on for minutes. People dipping below 50%, just to get topped off seconds later. This shouldn't be a thing. Healthbars should generally go downwards.

snipBut as I said, Anet went too far with reducing damage, increasing cooldowns, and nerfing damage on crowd control. Every time we reach a point where healthbars generally go downwards, people complain about the class(es) doing the damage. If every sustain decrease is met with an equal or greater damage decrease, the problem will never be fixed.

snip

The meta we had before was more like an FPS, it was more about predictions and reaction times. Fun, but not really what an MMO should be. So a-net started shifting it towards a different balance, where fights last longer, and lacking superior reaction times can be made up with good tactical decisions.

Not really? The nature of the sidenoder fights didnt really change. What changed is that fights that lasted 30 seconds to a minute on average now last 15 minutes on average unless +1d. Or in simpler terms, no one dies.

You need way lower damage, and even lower sustain to achive fights last a while but end with someone inevitably running or dying. The current sustain is too high for that. Ever time unranked matchmaking decides im the one fill up that last spot in a match with top 50 premades, I often spend the entire match rotating from fight to fight because we cannot kill anything. Sure healthbars go down, but whoever took my burst and went down to 40%-ish, gets covered in boons and healed back up to full in 2 seconds.

No. If you want fights that last a while but end with someone inevitably running or dying, you simply need to revert every non-QoL change made since and including the february megapatch. Its as easy as that. If you just keep trying to cut damage and sustain more, you get a spammy game with no skill or tactics involved, that is so unfathomably boring I cant see why anyone would put themselves through it.

You do not solve this problem by buffing damage back so I can 100-0 instead of 100-40. Neither will a partial revert achive anything, who cares if my target got healed back from 20% instead of 40%? He's back to full... same outcome.

Yes you do solve the problem by buffing damage back up. In fact, thats the

only

solution.

You solve it by not letting a target fully healing back after taking bursts like that. And that requires a radical cut to raw healing. One thing I liked about thief heals a few years back is how they healed almost nothing. You used Withdraw to evade something, not to actually heal yourself back up. Same with Hide in Shadows, it was mainly tool to maintain stealth... now it heals like double what it used to, just look at its version history.

What the hell are you talking about? Thief heals values

didnt really change

Hide in Shadows got a 15% raw healing buff because no one used it, but to put it in perspective, that changed the total healing from 6000 to 6806. All it got was

800 healing

. Meanwhile Mug provides 2000 healing, and thief doesnt even use it anymore. Thief healing now is

lower

than it was before. And yet thief is just as unkillable. Not because there is too much healing. But because there simply isnt nearly enough damage.

So TL,DR: too much raw healing, too much CC. It would do the game good if we cut both in half.

In actuality its just too little damage.

I'm honored to be answered twice, one will suffice next time though.

I missed that both posts were by you. My bad.

Nice long winded way of saying you want oneshot meta damage back.

I find it funny that people keep calling it the "oneshot meta". As if oneshots were a common occurence and not an extreme exception. Like yeah, sure, if you got ganked by 3 people as anything other than a bunker, you got oneshot back then. If you get ganked by 3 people as anything other than a bunker right now, you still get oneshot. And outside of being ganked? Oneshots didnt really happen. No what I want back is a skillful meta where enemies actually died, where cooldowns and timing mattered, and you couldnt just spam your skills completely devoid of thought.

I think I explained myself clearly. With lower levels of damage, you can still get kills/force disengages if the sustain is even lower. You didn't refute it in any way, you just wrote "but damage though" 3 different ways.

Oh sure. That is true. The problem is that the way you get kills and force disengages if damage is that much lower and sustain is that much lower is completely devoid of skill. The meta you envision is a meta where you just spam everything off cooldown. There is no point actually timing your skills, they all dont do a lot of damage, its more important to maximise your potential DPS since all damage sticks, rather than timing them to exploit gaps in their defense. No point going for valuable interrupts either. They can just recast that ability in a few seconds, and youre not killing them by then. GW2s PvP as a whole would devolve even further into facerolling as the optimal playstyle.

Considering that we have a medium damage&high sustain meta, I'd like you to explain how a medium damage&below medium sustain scenario gameplay would be braindead and spammy, compared to what we have now. Cause I'm 100% sure the opposite will happen, so whats your reasoning?

Yeah except thats not what we have. What we have is a medium-low sustain and very low damage meta. Damage right now is below the previous lowest point in the entire games history. What youre proposing is an extremely low sustain and very low damage meta. What do you think happens when you have a meta like that? Ive played games like that before. Its exactly what I said above. Its the worst kind of meta you can have by a wide margin. The only skill-based thing that remains is macro, and good luck getting macro to work in solo Q.

[Kuma.1503]

@Bazsi.2734 said:

You do not solve this problem by buffing damage back so I can 100-0 instead of 100-40.

I'd rather not be accused to putting words in your mouth, so first I'd just like to clarify what's being said here.

Are you stating that taking someone from 100-40 in a burst is commonplace in the current meta? Would that not put it within the realm of possibility to chip your opponent to 60% HP and 60-0 them in a burst? And if so, is that not precisely what you've been asking for? The need to soften your target up before bursting them?

Neither will a partial revert achive anything, who cares if my target got healed back from 20% instead of 40%? He's back to full... same outcome.

If making a comparison, it's standard practice to make sure all other variables remain constant. Otherwise, you'll reach faulty conclusions such as stating that a 80% heal = a 60% heal.

If you're going to compare both scenarios. It would be advisable to start from 20% in both scenarios. In which case the comparison would look like this:

In Example A: The target heals from 20% hp to 100% HP an 80% heal

In Example B The target heals from 20% hp to 80% hp a 60% heal.

Taken a step further, if this scenario were to repeat itself, Target A would survive indefinately wheras target B would eventually die.

Example A. Target takes 80% hp. Drops to 20%. Heals 80% hp. Returns to 100%. Process loops indefinitely.

Example B. Target takes 80% hp. Drops to 20% Hp. Heals 60% Hp. Returns to 80% Hp. Takes 80% Hp. Target B dies.

It's not the same sceanrio.

[Bazsi.2734]

@UNOwen.7132 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@UNOwen.7132 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@Kuma.1503 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@Kuma.1503 said:Instead of nerfing sustain again, we need to bring damage back up a tad and reduce the cooldown of #2 skills. Both of these changes were done to slow down the game, make choices more deliberate, but they went too far in their intended goal.

Lower weapon cooldowns, raise damage across the board. Bring damage back to heavily telegraphed CC skills like Executioner's slap, Prime light poke, drop the squeaker, big ol' fart, and backscratcher.

Each of these tweaks should have followed the feb patch.

We've need to stop trying to solve issues by nerfing what's directly in front of our face and instead ask how it got there in the first place.

Both damage and sustain were so high that attrition style gameplay did not exist. You stacked vitality/thoughness (or both) to survive oneshots, not to deal with pressure.Damage was drasticly lowered in february, and then some. Oneshots are gone from competetive PvP, they are banished to unranked meme build status.Which was the purpose of the patch, good on A-net. However sustain bunkers are a thing now. You sit on the node(often with 1 another bunker buddy of yours), and you rotate through your defenses. It almost doesn't matter whats trying to attack you. As long as you move out of the most concentrated AoE-s and avoid getting 5v2-d, you can easily draw any fight out to eternity.Sustain is too high, period. The gamemode is about holding/contesting nodes, if any build can just sit on it, it's bad for the game. There should be an intricate dance of jumping on/off the capture point to hold, avoiding pressure, faking out bursts, coordinating spikes... not this braindead "lets just tank everything while we spam defensive rotation and heals" that most of my matches with plat 2+ players devolve into.

I'd propose to shift supports from raw healing towards damage mitigation. Of course every support could still heal some, but guardians could excel at spamming protection/aegis, necromancers could be the king of condition transfers, druids could mix healing with outgoing buffs/mightstacks etc.

The point would be that once you land damage, it matters. Currently the initial midfight 4v4 can go on for minutes. People dipping below 50%, just to get topped off seconds later. This shouldn't be a thing. Healthbars should generally go downwards.

snipBut as I said, Anet went too far with reducing damage, increasing cooldowns, and nerfing damage on crowd control. Every time we reach a point where healthbars generally go downwards, people complain about the class(es) doing the damage. If every sustain decrease is met with an equal or greater damage decrease, the problem will never be fixed.

snip

The meta we had before was more like an FPS, it was more about predictions and reaction times. Fun, but not really what an MMO should be. So a-net started shifting it towards a different balance, where fights last longer, and lacking superior reaction times can be made up with good tactical decisions.

Not really? The nature of the sidenoder fights didnt really change. What changed is that fights that lasted 30 seconds to a minute on average now last 15 minutes on average unless +1d. Or in simpler terms, no one dies.

You need way lower damage, and even lower sustain to achive fights last a while but end with someone inevitably running or dying. The current sustain is too high for that. Ever time unranked matchmaking decides im the one fill up that last spot in a match with top 50 premades, I often spend the entire match rotating from fight to fight because we cannot kill anything. Sure healthbars go down, but whoever took my burst and went down to 40%-ish, gets covered in boons and healed back up to full in 2 seconds.

No. If you want fights that last a while but end with someone inevitably running or dying, you simply need to revert every non-QoL change made since and including the february megapatch. Its as easy as that. If you just keep trying to cut damage and sustain more, you get a spammy game with no skill or tactics involved, that is so unfathomably boring I cant see why anyone would put themselves through it.

You do not solve this problem by buffing damage back so I can 100-0 instead of 100-40. Neither will a partial revert achive anything, who cares if my target got healed back from 20% instead of 40%? He's back to full... same outcome.

Yes you do solve the problem by buffing damage back up. In fact, thats the

only

solution.

You solve it by not letting a target fully healing back after taking bursts like that. And that requires a radical cut to raw healing. One thing I liked about thief heals a few years back is how they healed almost nothing. You used Withdraw to evade something, not to actually heal yourself back up. Same with Hide in Shadows, it was mainly tool to maintain stealth... now it heals like double what it used to, just look at its version history.

What the hell are you talking about? Thief heals values

didnt really change

Hide in Shadows got a 15% raw healing buff because no one used it, but to put it in perspective, that changed the total healing from 6000 to 6806. All it got was

800 healing

. Meanwhile Mug provides 2000 healing, and thief doesnt even use it anymore. Thief healing now is

lower

than it was before. And yet thief is just as unkillable. Not because there is too much healing. But because there simply isnt nearly enough damage.

So TL,DR: too much raw healing, too much CC. It would do the game good if we cut both in half.

In actuality its just too little damage.

I'm honored to be answered twice, one will suffice next time though.

I missed that both posts were by you. My bad.

Nice long winded way of saying you want oneshot meta damage back.

I find it funny that people keep calling it the "oneshot meta". As if oneshots were a common occurence and not an extreme exception.That was literally all I played. Most of what my friends played. Sure it needed some skill to identify your windows, or to pull off a mesmer shatter combo without using macros, but the person getting deleted within 0.5 seconds(or less, worldy impact oneshot lol) does not really care what goes into it.So for me it was 100% of my matches which could skew my perception, but most of the time I had to watch out for enemies who could oneshot me, so eh... I'd say it was pretty common in plat 2/3 on EU roughly a year prior to this post.snip

Considering that we have a

medium damage&high sustain

meta, I'd like you to explain how a

medium damage&below medium sustain

scenario gameplay would be braindead and spammy, compared to what we have now. Cause I'm 100% sure the opposite will happen, so whats your reasoning?

Yeah except thats not what we have. What we have is a medium-low sustain and

very

low damage meta. Damage right now is below the previous lowest point in the entire games history. What youre proposing is an

extremely

low sustain and

very

low damage meta. What do you think happens when you have a meta like that? Ive played games like that before. Its exactly what I said above. Its the

worst

kind of meta you can have by a wide margin. The only skill-based thing that remains is macro, and good luck getting macro to work in solo Q.

Way to not answer the question. Round two: We measure effective damage(only stuff that lands) and we get the value X. We do the same for sustain(this is a hard science people, take notes this will be on the test) and we measure a value above X. Lowering sustain to the extent that its comfortably below X would be an improvement over the current meta according to me. You stated it would have the opposite effect. ELABORATE ON WHY. PLEASE.

[Bazsi.2734]

@Kuma.1503 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

You do not solve this problem by buffing damage back so I can 100-0 instead of 100-40.

I'd rather not be accused to putting words in your mouth, so first I'd just like to clarify what's being said here.

Are you stating that taking someone from 100-40 in a burst is commonplace in the current meta? Would that not put it within the realm of possibility to chip your opponent to 60% HP and 60-0 them in a burst? And if so, is that not precisely what you've been asking for? The need to soften your target up before bursting them?

Neither will a partial revert achive anything, who cares if my target got healed back from 20% instead of 40%? He's back to full... same outcome.

If making a comparison, it's standard practice to make sure all other variables remain constant. Otherwise, you'll reach faulty conclusions such as stating that a 80% heal = a 60% heal.

If you're going to compare both scenarios. It would be advisable to start from 20% in both scenarios. In which case the comparison would look like this:

In Example A: The target heals from 20% hp to 100% HP an 80% heal

In Example B The target heals from 20% hp to 80% hp a 60% heal.

Taken a step further, if this scenario were to repeat itself, Target A would survive indefinately wheras target B would eventually die.

Example A. Target takes 80% hp. Drops to 20%. Heals 80% hp. Returns to 100%. Process loops indefinitely.

Example B. Target takes 80% hp. Drops to 20% Hp. Heals 60% Hp. Returns to 80% Hp. Takes 80% Hp. Target B dies.

It's not the same sceanrio.

While you are definitely not putting words in my mouth, I have no idea what you're actually doing right now. A target that recieves less healing than damage over time dies, thats correct... cool?

[Tycura.1982]

Is it that duelists are bunkers or have you ever considered that bunkers are now duelists

[Lord of the Fire.6870]

I getting a headache reading this. (because we had already this discussion so often )

1.) There aren't many bunker builds in PvP besides curtain scrapper builds

2.) What made the rest look so tanky is the reduced dmg vs their life pool + your invulnerable over time skills

3.) Arena.NET like already mentioned reduced sustain a loooot they removed all amulets which you can use as tank , they reduced heal a lot, they reduced up time of protection, resistence and stabi so it is a meme ( everything under 2 s is a meme not a boon)

4.) The reason why people now use their invulnerable over time skills or go full tank is because :

a) They need to compensate for the lose of the HFB = lose of protection , heal , stabi.b) People show this way what they think about Arena.NET balance basically Arena.NET want slower game play ? .. so be it.c) It makes sense to play this way HFB main job was to neutralize the burst spike from the other players by busting heal & boons out on his side. This is something which actually some people in WvW doesn't understand HFB has no mean to constantly heal besides a bit of regeneration. What players in PvP now do is neutralize the spike by being invulnerable. Naturally this prolong the fights it pains me but this basically replace the HFB.

[UNOwen.7132]

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@UNOwen.7132 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@UNOwen.7132 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@Kuma.1503 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@Kuma.1503 said:Instead of nerfing sustain again, we need to bring damage back up a tad and reduce the cooldown of #2 skills. Both of these changes were done to slow down the game, make choices more deliberate, but they went too far in their intended goal.

Lower weapon cooldowns, raise damage across the board. Bring damage back to heavily telegraphed CC skills like Executioner's slap, Prime light poke, drop the squeaker, big ol' fart, and backscratcher.

Each of these tweaks should have followed the feb patch.

We've need to stop trying to solve issues by nerfing what's directly in front of our face and instead ask how it got there in the first place.

Both damage and sustain were so high that attrition style gameplay did not exist. You stacked vitality/thoughness (or both) to survive oneshots, not to deal with pressure.Damage was drasticly lowered in february, and then some. Oneshots are gone from competetive PvP, they are banished to unranked meme build status.Which was the purpose of the patch, good on A-net. However sustain bunkers are a thing now. You sit on the node(often with 1 another bunker buddy of yours), and you rotate through your defenses. It almost doesn't matter whats trying to attack you. As long as you move out of the most concentrated AoE-s and avoid getting 5v2-d, you can easily draw any fight out to eternity.Sustain is too high, period. The gamemode is about holding/contesting nodes, if any build can just sit on it, it's bad for the game. There should be an intricate dance of jumping on/off the capture point to hold, avoiding pressure, faking out bursts, coordinating spikes... not this braindead "lets just tank everything while we spam defensive rotation and heals" that most of my matches with plat 2+ players devolve into.

I'd propose to shift supports from raw healing towards damage mitigation. Of course every support could still heal some, but guardians could excel at spamming protection/aegis, necromancers could be the king of condition transfers, druids could mix healing with outgoing buffs/mightstacks etc.

The point would be that once you land damage, it matters. Currently the initial midfight 4v4 can go on for minutes. People dipping below 50%, just to get topped off seconds later. This shouldn't be a thing. Healthbars should generally go downwards.

snipBut as I said, Anet went too far with reducing damage, increasing cooldowns, and nerfing damage on crowd control. Every time we reach a point where healthbars generally go downwards, people complain about the class(es) doing the damage. If every sustain decrease is met with an equal or greater damage decrease, the problem will never be fixed.

snip

The meta we had before was more like an FPS, it was more about predictions and reaction times. Fun, but not really what an MMO should be. So a-net started shifting it towards a different balance, where fights last longer, and lacking superior reaction times can be made up with good tactical decisions.

Not really? The nature of the sidenoder fights didnt really change. What changed is that fights that lasted 30 seconds to a minute on average now last 15 minutes on average unless +1d. Or in simpler terms, no one dies.

You need way lower damage, and even lower sustain to achive fights last a while but end with someone inevitably running or dying. The current sustain is too high for that. Ever time unranked matchmaking decides im the one fill up that last spot in a match with top 50 premades, I often spend the entire match rotating from fight to fight because we cannot kill anything. Sure healthbars go down, but whoever took my burst and went down to 40%-ish, gets covered in boons and healed back up to full in 2 seconds.

No. If you want fights that last a while but end with someone inevitably running or dying, you simply need to revert every non-QoL change made since and including the february megapatch. Its as easy as that. If you just keep trying to cut damage and sustain more, you get a spammy game with no skill or tactics involved, that is so unfathomably boring I cant see why anyone would put themselves through it.

You do not solve this problem by buffing damage back so I can 100-0 instead of 100-40. Neither will a partial revert achive anything, who cares if my target got healed back from 20% instead of 40%? He's back to full... same outcome.

Yes you do solve the problem by buffing damage back up. In fact, thats the

only

solution.

You solve it by not letting a target fully healing back after taking bursts like that. And that requires a radical cut to raw healing. One thing I liked about thief heals a few years back is how they healed almost nothing. You used Withdraw to evade something, not to actually heal yourself back up. Same with Hide in Shadows, it was mainly tool to maintain stealth... now it heals like double what it used to, just look at its version history.

What the hell are you talking about? Thief heals values

didnt really change

Hide in Shadows got a 15% raw healing buff because no one used it, but to put it in perspective, that changed the total healing from 6000 to 6806. All it got was

800 healing

. Meanwhile Mug provides 2000 healing, and thief doesnt even use it anymore. Thief healing now is

lower

than it was before. And yet thief is just as unkillable. Not because there is too much healing. But because there simply isnt nearly enough damage.

So TL,DR: too much raw healing, too much CC. It would do the game good if we cut both in half.

In actuality its just too little damage.

I'm honored to be answered twice, one will suffice next time though.

I missed that both posts were by you. My bad.

Nice long winded way of saying you want oneshot meta damage back.

I find it funny that people keep calling it the "oneshot meta". As if oneshots were a common occurence and not an extreme exception.That was literally all I played. Most of what my friends played. Sure it needed some skill to identify your windows, or to pull off a mesmer shatter combo without using macros, but the person getting deleted within 0.5 seconds(or less, worldy impact oneshot lol) does not really care what goes into it.

And those builds were not very good. Because it turns out if you put all your eggs in one basket, and the enemy then just activates an invuln or block skill, or hell, evades, youre kinda screwed. Funny thing is, you could probably still make builds like that right now. They just still wouldnt be bad.

So for me it was 100% of my matches which could skew my perception, but most of the time I had to watch out for enemies who could oneshot me, so eh... I'd say it was pretty common in plat 2/3 on EU roughly a year prior to this post.

Being theoretically able to oneshot and it being a oneshot meta are 2 very different things. Its theoretically possible to get ToD'd in FighterZ, but that doesnt make FighterZ a ToD game, because it almost never actually happens. The threat is there, but you could avoid it just as easily. Thats why calling it a oneshot meta is silly.

snip

Considering that we have a

medium damage&high sustain

meta, I'd like you to explain how a

medium damage&below medium sustain

scenario gameplay would be braindead and spammy, compared to what we have now. Cause I'm 100% sure the opposite will happen, so whats your reasoning?

Yeah except thats not what we have. What we have is a medium-low sustain and

very

low damage meta. Damage right now is below the previous lowest point in the entire games history. What youre proposing is an

extremely

low sustain and

very

low damage meta. What do you think happens when you have a meta like that? Ive played games like that before. Its exactly what I said above. Its the

worst

kind of meta you can have by a wide margin. The only skill-based thing that remains is macro, and good luck getting macro to work in solo Q.

Way to not answer the question. Round two: We measure effective damage(only stuff that lands) and we get the value X. We do the same for sustain(this is a hard science people, take notes this will be on the test) and we measure a value above X. Lowering sustain to the extent that its comfortably below X would be an improvement over the current meta according to me. You stated it would have the opposite effect. ELABORATE ON WHY. PLEASE.

I did answer the question. The answer was one that goes against what youre saying, so you ignore it. But if you want that specific part answered, and not "is my solution the best possible one?" (its not, its a lot worse than just reverting), sure, I can answer that specific part as well. So right now there is obviously no skill involved in doing damage. You just spam off cooldown. Now, if you reduce sustain, that doesnt change of course. Doing damage remains entirely skillless. However, right now, since sustain is still actually at least worth a damn, instead of being essentially non-existent like you propose, there is some skill in interrupting key defensive and sustain skills in a situation where you outnumber (in a 1v1 theyre not dying either way). Your suggestion removes that last sliver of skill that exists. At that point all youre doing is turning PvP into little more than an auto-battler.

[Kuma.1503]

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@Kuma.1503 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

You do not solve this problem by buffing damage back so I can 100-0 instead of 100-40.

I'd rather not be accused to putting words in your mouth, so first I'd just like to clarify what's being said here.

Are you stating that taking someone from 100-40 in a burst is commonplace in the current meta? Would that not put it within the realm of possibility to chip your opponent to 60% HP and 60-0 them in a burst? And if so, is that not precisely what you've been asking for? The need to soften your target up before bursting them?

Neither will a partial revert achive anything, who cares if my target got healed back from 20% instead of 40%? He's back to full... same outcome.

If making a comparison, it's standard practice to make sure all other variables remain constant. Otherwise, you'll reach faulty conclusions such as stating that a 80% heal = a 60% heal.

If you're going to compare both scenarios. It would be advisable to start from 20% in both scenarios. In which case the comparison would look like this:

In Example A: The target heals from 20% hp to 100% HP an 80% heal

In Example B The target heals from 20% hp to 80% hp a 60% heal.

Taken a step further, if this scenario were to repeat itself, Target A would survive indefinately wheras target B would eventually die.

Example A. Target takes 80% hp. Drops to 20%. Heals 80% hp. Returns to 100%. Process loops indefinitely.

Example B. Target takes 80% hp. Drops to 20% Hp. Heals 60% Hp. Returns to 80% Hp. Takes 80% Hp. Target B dies.

It's not the same sceanrio.

While you are definitely not putting words in my mouth, I have no idea what you're actually doing right now. A target that recieves less healing than damage over time dies, thats correct... cool?

What I'm doing is stating the obvious in response to a flawed argument. I quoted it above, but I'll do so again.

I was responding to:

Neither will a partial revert achive anything, who cares if my target got healed back from 20% instead of 40%? He's back to full... same outcome.

I'm also trying to hone in on some of the points you've made . You've made a few statements which, if assumed true, would actually work against your argument.

[Multicolorhipster.9751]

@lightstalker.1498 said:dont lower side node sustain, lower their damage

Yes. Agreed. We may as well go all the way and remove damage entirely.

PvP should be a battle of mental attrition. How long can you stare at your opponent until one of you gets bored or uneasy and disconnects?

We'd also be able to spot the bots because they'd start winning every game. This is genius and couldn't possibly go wrong.

[Bazsi.2734]

@UNOwen.7132 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@UNOwen.7132 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@UNOwen.7132 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@Kuma.1503 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@Kuma.1503 said:Instead of nerfing sustain again, we need to bring damage back up a tad and reduce the cooldown of #2 skills. Both of these changes were done to slow down the game, make choices more deliberate, but they went too far in their intended goal.

Lower weapon cooldowns, raise damage across the board. Bring damage back to heavily telegraphed CC skills like Executioner's slap, Prime light poke, drop the squeaker, big ol' fart, and backscratcher.

Each of these tweaks should have followed the feb patch.

We've need to stop trying to solve issues by nerfing what's directly in front of our face and instead ask how it got there in the first place.

Both damage and sustain were so high that attrition style gameplay did not exist. You stacked vitality/thoughness (or both) to survive oneshots, not to deal with pressure.Damage was drasticly lowered in february, and then some. Oneshots are gone from competetive PvP, they are banished to unranked meme build status.Which was the purpose of the patch, good on A-net. However sustain bunkers are a thing now. You sit on the node(often with 1 another bunker buddy of yours), and you rotate through your defenses. It almost doesn't matter whats trying to attack you. As long as you move out of the most concentrated AoE-s and avoid getting 5v2-d, you can easily draw any fight out to eternity.Sustain is too high, period. The gamemode is about holding/contesting nodes, if any build can just sit on it, it's bad for the game. There should be an intricate dance of jumping on/off the capture point to hold, avoiding pressure, faking out bursts, coordinating spikes... not this braindead "lets just tank everything while we spam defensive rotation and heals" that most of my matches with plat 2+ players devolve into.

I'd propose to shift supports from raw healing towards damage mitigation. Of course every support could still heal some, but guardians could excel at spamming protection/aegis, necromancers could be the king of condition transfers, druids could mix healing with outgoing buffs/mightstacks etc.

The point would be that once you land damage, it matters. Currently the initial midfight 4v4 can go on for minutes. People dipping below 50%, just to get topped off seconds later. This shouldn't be a thing. Healthbars should generally go downwards.

snipBut as I said, Anet went too far with reducing damage, increasing cooldowns, and nerfing damage on crowd control. Every time we reach a point where healthbars generally go downwards, people complain about the class(es) doing the damage. If every sustain decrease is met with an equal or greater damage decrease, the problem will never be fixed.

snip

The meta we had before was more like an FPS, it was more about predictions and reaction times. Fun, but not really what an MMO should be. So a-net started shifting it towards a different balance, where fights last longer, and lacking superior reaction times can be made up with good tactical decisions.

Not really? The nature of the sidenoder fights didnt really change. What changed is that fights that lasted 30 seconds to a minute on average now last 15 minutes on average unless +1d. Or in simpler terms, no one dies.

You need way lower damage, and even lower sustain to achive fights last a while but end with someone inevitably running or dying. The current sustain is too high for that. Ever time unranked matchmaking decides im the one fill up that last spot in a match with top 50 premades, I often spend the entire match rotating from fight to fight because we cannot kill anything. Sure healthbars go down, but whoever took my burst and went down to 40%-ish, gets covered in boons and healed back up to full in 2 seconds.

No. If you want fights that last a while but end with someone inevitably running or dying, you simply need to revert every non-QoL change made since and including the february megapatch. Its as easy as that. If you just keep trying to cut damage and sustain more, you get a spammy game with no skill or tactics involved, that is so unfathomably boring I cant see why anyone would put themselves through it.

You do not solve this problem by buffing damage back so I can 100-0 instead of 100-40. Neither will a partial revert achive anything, who cares if my target got healed back from 20% instead of 40%? He's back to full... same outcome.

Yes you do solve the problem by buffing damage back up. In fact, thats the

only

solution.

You solve it by not letting a target fully healing back after taking bursts like that. And that requires a radical cut to raw healing. One thing I liked about thief heals a few years back is how they healed almost nothing. You used Withdraw to evade something, not to actually heal yourself back up. Same with Hide in Shadows, it was mainly tool to maintain stealth... now it heals like double what it used to, just look at its version history.

What the hell are you talking about? Thief heals values

didnt really change

Hide in Shadows got a 15% raw healing buff because no one used it, but to put it in perspective, that changed the total healing from 6000 to 6806. All it got was

800 healing

. Meanwhile Mug provides 2000 healing, and thief doesnt even use it anymore. Thief healing now is

lower

than it was before. And yet thief is just as unkillable. Not because there is too much healing. But because there simply isnt nearly enough damage.

So TL,DR: too much raw healing, too much CC. It would do the game good if we cut both in half.

In actuality its just too little damage.

I'm honored to be answered twice, one will suffice next time though.

I missed that both posts were by you. My bad.

Nice long winded way of saying you want oneshot meta damage back.

I find it funny that people keep calling it the "oneshot meta". As if oneshots were a common occurence and not an extreme exception.That was literally all I played. Most of what my friends played. Sure it needed some skill to identify your windows, or to pull off a mesmer shatter combo without using macros, but the person getting deleted within 0.5 seconds(or less, worldy impact oneshot lol) does not really care what goes into it.

And those builds were not very good. Because it turns out if you put all your eggs in one basket, and the enemy then just activates an invuln or block skill, or hell, evades, youre kinda screwed. Funny thing is, you could probably still make builds like that right now. They just still wouldnt be bad.

So for me it was 100% of my matches which could skew my perception, but most of the time I had to watch out for enemies who could oneshot me, so eh... I'd say it was pretty common in plat 2/3 on EU roughly a year prior to this post.

Being theoretically

able

to oneshot and it being a oneshot meta are 2 very different things. Its theoretically possible to get ToD'd in FighterZ, but that doesnt make FighterZ a ToD game, because it almost never actually happens. The threat is there, but you could avoid it just as easily. Thats why calling it a oneshot meta is silly.

You can try to nitpick this point all you want, I got my Ruthless Legend title playing strictly meme oneshots and nothing else. Which meant I was in the upper 10% of seriuos pvp players by doing "theoretical" oneshots and putting them on "theoretical" respawn. A build doesn't even need to be that good once it has the potential to oneshot. If you secured a kill, just being a body on the battlefield for the next 30 seconds means you're outperforming the enemy team who lost one of theirs.

snip

Considering that we have a

medium damage&high sustain

meta, I'd like you to explain how a

medium damage&below medium sustain

scenario gameplay would be braindead and spammy, compared to what we have now. Cause I'm 100% sure the opposite will happen, so whats your reasoning?

Yeah except thats not what we have. What we have is a medium-low sustain and

very

low damage meta. Damage right now is below the previous lowest point in the entire games history. What youre proposing is an

extremely

low sustain and

very

low damage meta. What do you think happens when you have a meta like that? Ive played games like that before. Its exactly what I said above. Its the

worst

kind of meta you can have by a wide margin. The only skill-based thing that remains is macro, and good luck getting macro to work in solo Q.

Way to not answer the question. Round two: We measure effective damage(only stuff that lands) and we get the value X. We do the same for sustain(this is a hard science people, take notes this will be on the test) and we measure a value above X. Lowering sustain to the extent that its comfortably below X would be an improvement over the current meta according to me. You stated it would have the opposite effect. ELABORATE ON WHY. PLEASE.

I did answer the question. The answer was one that goes against what youre saying, so you ignore it. But if you want that

specific

part answered, and not "is my solution the best possible one?" (its not, its a

lot

worse than just reverting), sure, I can answer that specific part as well. So right now there is obviously

no

skill involved in doing damage. You just spam off cooldown. Now, if you reduce sustain, that doesnt change of course. Doing damage remains entirely skillless. However, right now, since sustain is still actually at least worth a kitten, instead of being essentially non-existent like you propose, there is

some

skill in interrupting key defensive and sustain skills in a situation where you outnumber (in a 1v1 theyre not dying either way). Your suggestion removes that last sliver of skill that exists. At that point all youre doing is turning PvP into little more than an auto-battler.

So question was: how does lowering sustain below damage is bad for the game? And your answer: because then interrupting healskills is no longer considered a skilled play... What?Okay there is clearly no strong argument I need to consider here. I was curios just in case I might missed something, but even if I did, that relevation won't be coming from you.

On dealing damage requiring no skill: the better the enemies are, the harder it is to land damage on them. This is not even up for debate, dealing damage requiring no skill is objectively false, and sadly everything else you derived from this idea is moot aswell. This was an insanely out of touch thing to say, not something I'd expect from someone who's been around as much as you... but hey, I'll be waiting for you in plat 2/3 next season, and you'll get see for yourself what I meant by saying landing damage actually requiring skill!It's actually really nice up here, matches are suprisingly balanced even with duoQ-s around.

Happy new year!

[Kuma.1503]

Well that convo devolved quickly... but at least it ended on a positive note.

Happy New Year everyone!

[UNOwen.7132]

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@UNOwen.7132 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@UNOwen.7132 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@UNOwen.7132 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@Kuma.1503 said:

@Bazsi.2734 said:

@Kuma.1503 said:Instead of nerfing sustain again, we need to bring damage back up a tad and reduce the cooldown of #2 skills. Both of these changes were done to slow down the game, make choices more deliberate, but they went too far in their intended goal.

Lower weapon cooldowns, raise damage across the board. Bring damage back to heavily telegraphed CC skills like Executioner's slap, Prime light poke, drop the squeaker, big ol' fart, and backscratcher.

Each of these tweaks should have followed the feb patch.

We've need to stop trying to solve issues by nerfing what's directly in front of our face and instead ask how it got there in the first place.

Both damage and sustain were so high that attrition style gameplay did not exist. You stacked vitality/thoughness (or both) to survive oneshots, not to deal with pressure.Damage was drasticly lowered in february, and then some. Oneshots are gone from competetive PvP, they are banished to unranked meme build status.Which was the purpose of the patch, good on A-net. However sustain bunkers are a thing now. You sit on the node(often with 1 another bunker buddy of yours), and you rotate through your defenses. It almost doesn't matter whats trying to attack you. As long as you move out of the most concentrated AoE-s and avoid getting 5v2-d, you can easily draw any fight out to eternity.Sustain is too high, period. The gamemode is about holding/contesting nodes, if any build can just sit on it, it's bad for the game. There should be an intricate dance of jumping on/off the capture point to hold, avoiding pressure, faking out bursts, coordinating spikes... not this braindead "lets just tank everything while we spam defensive rotation and heals" that most of my matches with plat 2+ players devolve into.

I'd propose to shift supports from raw healing towards damage mitigation. Of course every support could still heal some, but guardians could excel at spamming protection/aegis, necromancers could be the king of condition transfers, druids could mix healing with outgoing buffs/mightstacks etc.

The point would be that once you land damage, it matters. Currently the initial midfight 4v4 can go on for minutes. People dipping below 50%, just to get topped off seconds later. This shouldn't be a thing. Healthbars should generally go downwards.

snipBut as I said, Anet went too far with reducing damage, increasing cooldowns, and nerfing damage on crowd control. Every time we reach a point where healthbars generally go downwards, people complain about the class(es) doing the damage. If every sustain decrease is met with an equal or greater damage decrease, the problem will never be fixed.

snip

The meta we had before was more like an FPS, it was more about predictions and reaction times. Fun, but not really what an MMO should be. So a-net started shifting it towards a different balance, where fights last longer, and lacking superior reaction times can be made up with good tactical decisions.

Not really? The nature of the sidenoder fights didnt really change. What changed is that fights that lasted 30 seconds to a minute on average now last 15 minutes on average unless +1d. Or in simpler terms, no one dies.

You need way lower damage, and even lower sustain to achive fights last a while but end with someone inevitably running or dying. The current sustain is too high for that. Ever time unranked matchmaking decides im the one fill up that last spot in a match with top 50 premades, I often spend the entire match rotating from fight to fight because we cannot kill anything. Sure healthbars go down, but whoever took my burst and went down to 40%-ish, gets covered in boons and healed back up to full in 2 seconds.

No. If you want fights that last a while but end with someone inevitably running or dying, you simply need to revert every non-QoL change made since and including the february megapatch. Its as easy as that. If you just keep trying to cut damage and sustain more, you get a spammy game with no skill or tactics involved, that is so unfathomably boring I cant see why anyone would put themselves through it.

You do not solve this problem by buffing damage back so I can 100-0 instead of 100-40. Neither will a partial revert achive anything, who cares if my target got healed back from 20% instead of 40%? He's back to full... same outcome.

Yes you do solve the problem by buffing damage back up. In fact, thats the

only

solution.

You solve it by not letting a target fully healing back after taking bursts like that. And that requires a radical cut to raw healing. One thing I liked about thief heals a few years back is how they healed almost nothing. You used Withdraw to evade something, not to actually heal yourself back up. Same with Hide in Shadows, it was mainly tool to maintain stealth... now it heals like double what it used to, just look at its version history.

What the hell are you talking about? Thief heals values

didnt really change

Hide in Shadows got a 15% raw healing buff because no one used it, but to put it in perspective, that changed the total healing from 6000 to 6806. All it got was

800 healing

. Meanwhile Mug provides 2000 healing, and thief doesnt even use it anymore. Thief healing now is

lower

than it was before. And yet thief is just as unkillable. Not because there is too much healing. But because there simply isnt nearly enough damage.

So TL,DR: too much raw healing, too much CC. It would do the game good if we cut both in half.

In actuality its just too little damage.

I'm honored to be answered twice, one will suffice next time though.

I missed that both posts were by you. My bad.

Nice long winded way of saying you want oneshot meta damage back.

I find it funny that people keep calling it the "oneshot meta". As if oneshots were a common occurence and not an extreme exception.That was literally all I played. Most of what my friends played. Sure it needed some skill to identify your windows, or to pull off a mesmer shatter combo without using macros, but the person getting deleted within 0.5 seconds(or less, worldy impact oneshot lol) does not really care what goes into it.

And those builds were not very good. Because it turns out if you put all your eggs in one basket, and the enemy then just activates an invuln or block skill, or hell, evades, youre kinda screwed. Funny thing is, you could probably still make builds like that right now. They just still wouldnt be bad.

So for me it was 100% of my matches which could skew my perception, but most of the time I had to watch out for enemies who could oneshot me, so eh... I'd say it was pretty common in plat 2/3 on EU roughly a year prior to this post.

Being theoretically

able

to oneshot and it being a oneshot meta are 2 very different things. Its theoretically possible to get ToD'd in FighterZ, but that doesnt make FighterZ a ToD game, because it almost never actually happens. The threat is there, but you could avoid it just as easily. Thats why calling it a oneshot meta is silly.

You can try to nitpick this point all you want, I got my Ruthless Legend title playing strictly meme oneshots and nothing else. Which meant I was in the upper 10% of seriuos pvp players by doing "theoretical" oneshots and putting them on "theoretical" respawn. A build doesn't even need to be that good once it has the potential to oneshot. If you secured a kill, just being a body on the battlefield for the next 30 seconds means you're outperforming the enemy team who lost one of theirs.

I mean, you basically admitted it yourself. "Meme oneshots". They were memes. But the playerbase is so low and as a result skill ceiling relatively low, that even memes could work. But memes are not the meta. Quite the opposite, thats why theyre called memes. And the meta? Yeah it didnt oneshot very much. Watch back some MaTs from around that time. Unless someone was ganked, they never got oneshot. Even when they were ganked they often weren't. So calling it a oneshot meta is still strictly incorrect.

snip

Considering that we have a

medium damage&high sustain

meta, I'd like you to explain how a

medium damage&below medium sustain

scenario gameplay would be braindead and spammy, compared to what we have now. Cause I'm 100% sure the opposite will happen, so whats your reasoning?

Yeah except thats not what we have. What we have is a medium-low sustain and

very

low damage meta. Damage right now is below the previous lowest point in the entire games history. What youre proposing is an

extremely

low sustain and

very

low damage meta. What do you think happens when you have a meta like that? Ive played games like that before. Its exactly what I said above. Its the

worst

kind of meta you can have by a wide margin. The only skill-based thing that remains is macro, and good luck getting macro to work in solo Q.

Way to not answer the question. Round two: We measure effective damage(only stuff that lands) and we get the value X. We do the same for sustain(this is a hard science people, take notes this will be on the test) and we measure a value above X. Lowering sustain to the extent that its comfortably below X would be an improvement over the current meta according to me. You stated it would have the opposite effect. ELABORATE ON WHY. PLEASE.

I did answer the question. The answer was one that goes against what youre saying, so you ignore it. But if you want that

specific

part answered, and not "is my solution the best possible one?" (its not, its a

lot

worse than just reverting), sure, I can answer that specific part as well. So right now there is obviously

no

skill involved in doing damage. You just spam off cooldown. Now, if you reduce sustain, that doesnt change of course. Doing damage remains entirely skillless. However, right now, since sustain is still actually at least worth a kitten, instead of being essentially non-existent like you propose, there is

some

skill in interrupting key defensive and sustain skills in a situation where you outnumber (in a 1v1 theyre not dying either way). Your suggestion removes that last sliver of skill that exists. At that point all youre doing is turning PvP into little more than an auto-battler.

So question was: how does lowering sustain below damage is bad for the game? And your answer: because then interrupting healskills is no longer considered a skilled play... What?Okay there is clearly no strong argument I need to consider here. I was curios just in case I might missed something, but even if I did, that relevation won't be coming from you.

Oh there is. Its just an argument you have no answer to. Though you misrepresented the point. I said that interrupting key defensive and sustain skills in a situation where you outnumber, which is currently the only skilled non-macro play, would no longer be relevant. Of course not, if sustain is low enough that the current pathetic level of damage can kill them in a 1v1, what do you think that does for 2v1s? Or 3v2s? Yeah suddenly you can just ignore their key cooldowns and kill them through it. Changing it so every part of the game is just a spammers delight.

On dealing damage requiring no skill: the better the enemies are, the harder it is to land damage on them. This is not even up for debate, dealing damage requiring no skill is objectively false, and sadly everything else you derived from this idea is moot aswell. This was an insanely out of touch thing to say, not something I'd expect from someone who's been around as much as you... but hey, I'll be waiting for you in plat 2/3 next season, and you'll get see for yourself what I meant by saying landing damage actually requiring skill!

In a vacuum, yes, that would be true. In praxis? Not so much. See the problem is that that part only matters if damage is high enough. Here is the deal. Pre-patch that was certainly true. Damage was high, but so was defense. The game was a dance of trying to bait out as many of your enemies key defensive skills to hit your key offensive skills, and maximising the impact of your key defensive skills against their key offensive skills. If you were able to properly open them up, they would take a massive beating, so maximising your DPS was completely irrelevant. You just needed the few good hits that mattered. Which meant you could hold back important skills, and wait for the right timing.

Now, lets take a look at the current super-low damage meta. Unlike the skillful pre-patch meta, here maximising your DPS is critical. Killing enemies takes so long, that delaying even the tiniest bit of damage can really mess you up. And you dont really have "key offensive skills" anymore. Everything doesnt do damage. Which in turn means that there are no "key defensive skills" anymore either. No timing involved anywhere. Instead of a dance of trying to open the enemy up while avoiding being opened up, now both sides have a DPS and a Defense rotation that they use off cooldown. Instead of the pre-patch state, which was akin to a fighting game, you now have essentially an auto-battler. You just follow your rotations and the only thing that really ends up mattering is macro. Or you get bored of doing that, and just do a synchronised dance-off with your enemy, like the Holo and Soulbeast in that tournament a while back. Peak skilled PvP, folks.

Happy new year!

Happy new year.