What makes a profession strong in a PvP/WvW senario? What makes it OP?

[Zexanima.7851]

(wall of text incoming)I'll kick the conversation off...

I'm asking this for everyone as a lot of people who discuss things being "OP" and needing to be nerfed don't really seem to be on the same page, myself included. I'd like to start by saying I don't think my ideas of things are the best or 'right', it's just my personal view. Also, consider not everything can be good at everything all the time. You build for a job and do that job, attempting to do things outside that role will most likely result in suboptimal results (e.g. Zerg scourge build roaming in WvW). So lets get down to the brass tacks.

What makes something OP?

Anything that can be S tier at multiple roles at the same time or completely dominate its role without counter play. I just want to try to get on the same page as everyone here before going into what I think might be overtuned.

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sPvP

SidenoderYou're goal is to stay alive in a small area (the point) while forcing others off and ideally killing them. You also need to be able to sustain and escape out numbered scenarios. What does this mean you need?

• Great sustain. Preferably as much passive sustain as possible such as high health regen, invulns, high health/toughness, ect. You also need cleanse and stun breaks, the more the better.
• Good CC. You need to be able to force others off point or lock them down. Also being able to interrupt key skills can add to your sustain.
• Okay damage, not required. If you can stay alive forever and keep others off point then you don't really "need" damage but it's good to have. If you're wasting the time of 1 or 2 players trying to kill you for a solid 5 minutes then you are doing your job.

Specific mechanics?Blocks, invulns, evades, health regen, barrier, condi removal, stun breaks, boons

What is best at this currently?Spellbreaker, Scrapper, and too a lesser extent Boonbeast

Team fighterThis could be broken down even further but I'm not for spending the time right now to cover all that. For simplicity we'll say you need to bring two out of the following to be useful as a team fighter.

• Damage. You need to win the team fight and you cant do that without damage. It can be condi or power, it doesn't really matter as long as you can land it. The more bursty the better so generally speaking power is best right now.
• Self Sustain. You need to be able to stay alive in the thick of things.
• Team support. This can come in a few forms. Healing, boons, unique group buffs (like basi venom, rite of the great dwarf, ect).

Specific mechanics?AoE, cleave, CC, burst damage skills, team boons, team cleanse, projectile hate, down state aid, safe stomp

What is best at this currently?Firebrand, Scourge, Holosmith, Scrapper, Weaver, Herald (I place herald here because it has ludicrous amounts of damage and decent self sustain, it's more of a +1 but can really decide team fights)

Roamer/+1Roamers are there to decap enemy points and +1 fights to turn them in your teams favor.

• Mobility. You need to be able to traverse the map quickly. You'll need more than just swiftness for this.
• High burst/CC. If you are +1ing a fight you need to be able to burst the unsuspecting enemy or lock them down for your teammate to kill.
• Disengage potential. Don't die, you need to be able to get out if things turn sour and continue to roam and decap.

Specific mechanics?Blinks, teleport, leaps, evades, CC, high single target burst, swiftness, boon removal, personal boon access, stealth

What is best at this currently?Herald, Thief(Core), Soulbeast, and to a lesser extent mesmer.

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WvW

Zerg FrontlineYou need to be able to survive...a lot. You usually have to play a get-in and get-out play style that relies on invulns to keep from getting eradicated instantly.

• Invulns, you can't effectively melee without them.
• Decent damage. You need to at least be able to kill things
• Self sustain. You need to be able to stay alive when you are off tag in the shit

Specific mechanics?Invluns, blocks, evades, cleave, AoE, CC, boon strip, cleanse, stun breaks

What is best at this currently?Spellbreaker, and to a lesser extent Berserker, Daredevil, and Reaper

Zerg DamageYou'll play in front of your support but behind your frontline/tag. You do big deeps, that is your role.

• Damage, damage, and more damage.
• CC. Being able to control the enemy zerg is important.
• Self sustain....haha just kidding, more deeps.

Specific mechanics?AoE, CC, boon strip, spike damage, cleave

What is best at this currently?Scourge, Herald

Zerg SupportYou play in the very back and keep stuff alive, you don't get bags only the satisfaction of keeping your dummy team mates alive.

• Boons. Specifically stability is important, all other boons are nice to have
• Cleanse/Condi conversion.
• Healing, duh

Specific mechanics?Healing, condi cleanse, team boons, stability specifically, stealth, projectile hate

What is best at this currently?Firebrand, Scrapper, and to a much lesser extent Tempest

Roamer/SmallscaleYour job is to flip camps (towers if possible), kill/escort dolyaks, and eliminate other roamers and zerglings returning to their zerg.

• Mobility and disengagement. You need to be able to pick your fights and avoid getting ganked as well as move between objectives quickly.
• Dueling potential. You need to tools to win fights.
• Camp clearing potential. This shouldn't be hard to get.

Specific mechanics?Blinks, teleports, stealth, high burst, evades, blocks, condi cleanse, stun breaks, personal boon access, boon strip.

What is best at this currently?Thief, Revenant, Warrior, Ranger, Mesmer, Engineer, and to a lesser extent Guardian and Elementalist .

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What's OP currently?

I'm not going to go into great detail on why specifically I think these professions are OP in this initial post but will in replies if required.

sPvPMy candidates are Revenant and Engineer. They both have a lot of tools and if played well can fill multiple roles in a match simultaneously or being very overpowering in a single role. If a Revenant joins it can completely snowball a team fight while also providing good roaming potential. Engineer as Scrapper can sustain on a point as a 1v1 or sidenoder forever, even against two opponents. Holosmith has an overpower amount of sustain paired with damage and CC.

I would say a healthy nerf to Herald's damage would help possibly in the form of decreasing their access to max might stacks. Scrapper just needs less survivability, either less barrier or healing. Holomsith needs either a nerf to damage, sustain, or CC.

WvWMy candidates are Revenant, Scourge, Firebrand, and Ranger. These professions completely dominate most all play aspects of this mode. Revenant's hammer is a high burst, low cooldown, ranged weapon that absolutely controls the role of ranged zerge play. Firebrand provides an obscene amount of boons which requires Scourge to corrupt those boons and then Scrapper to convert those corrupted boons. It creates this codependent trinity that can't be avoided because it provides too much and can only be countered by the mirroring it. Soulbeast is a superior roamer in most all regards, this isn't to say the others are bad just that ranger requires less effort do better. It has stealth, boons, great sustain, range, mobility, high burst. It doesn't lack anything for roaming like other roaming professions do.

The trinity all need to be dailed back, specially Firebrand. A good start would be to decrease Revenant CoR damage, decrease the amount of boons Fireband has access too or how often ti can apply said boons and change how often scourge can place their shades. The amount of tools Soulbeast has access to at the same time as a roamer are just too many. It needs to make more sacrifices. Building for sustain it should lose damage and vice versa. Also it has wayyy to much mobility coupled with it's superior range. Maybe it can sacrifice some mobility for some form of team support making have viable builds for zergs? I'm not entirely sure on my changes for these but it's clear there is a problem that needs to be addressed some how.

Conclusion?

I'm not really sure honestly, I'm bored at work and just putting together my thoughts with some explanations. I'm more curious as to what others have to say.

[Loosmaster.8263]

Why is this in the general PvE section? With the subject dealing both with sPvP/WvW, you should almost break up the question and post in the specific subforums because this will probably get moved to one or the other.

[Zexanima.7851]

@Loosmaster.8263 said:Why is this in the general PvE section? With the subject dealing both with sPvP/WvW, you should almost break up the question and post in the specific subforums because this will probably get moved to one or the other.

This isn't a general PvE section, it's GW2 Discussion section and as this includes multiple topics I figured it was better suited since it's more 'general' than specific to one mode or the other.

[Ultramex.1506]

@Zexanima.7851 said:

@Loosmaster.8263 said:Why is this in the general PvE section? With the subject dealing both with sPvP/WvW, you should almost break up the question and post in the specific subforums because this will probably get moved to one or the other.

This isn't a general PvE section, it's GW2 Discussion section and as this includes multiple topics I figured it was better suited since it's more 'general' than specific to one mode or the other.

But you are asking about PROFESSION so it should be in porfession forumAs for which is OP? Really depend on the player that use them

[Jski.6180]

Boon control is what makes or brakes classes in wvw and spvp. This dose nothing in pve as mobs ai cant deal with something that complex out side of spam an attk timer. Its why the balancing in this game is so messed up and anet is unable to see the problems or unwilling to talk about them.

@Loosmaster.8263 said:Why is this in the general PvE section? With the subject dealing both with sPvP/WvW, you should almost break up the question and post in the specific subforums because this will probably get moved to one or the other.

This is not general pve this is every thing pve and wvw as well. Its a good question to ask and talk about here too. The balancing in the game is messed up and just to hid the fact is not good for the player base or the game.

Most of the post on all of these forms now are problem with the game post this game is not in good shape what makes a class good in spvp and wvw needs a hard look by the devs.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

I've mused about this subject for awhile. I never came up with anything solid, though. The reason for this being that a lot of the different effects in GW2 are incomparable. Their impact can't be measured numerically.

Aside from those, it is possible to quantify how strong a class is. It's basically this:

(Effective Health + Sustain) X Base DPS X Effective Power + Total Group Support = Total statistical impact

Effective Health: is the product of your HP multiplied by your total armor rating. The theory behind it is that this product is the scaled overall damage that you can take. It's how little damage you take, for how long you can take it. The maximum efficiency is when health is ten times that of your armor rating. This also includes defensive modifiers, such as innate protection skills, damage reduction traits, etc.

Sustain: is how much you recover health. Technically distinct from effective health, since you're not guaranteed your healing abilities in a fight. However, if your heal skill so go off, those additional points of health act like bonus health on top of your resting HP pool. I.E. a Guardian with 11k HP gets an 8k signet heal, they effectively have 19k health.

Base DPS: is a hard one. The damage formula is fairly simple, except for this one part. See, every skill has itself a base modifier, which says how strong it is. As expected, the average modifiers for each profession is different. It is something hard-boiled into the class. Because of this, it is hard to truly gauge how damaging a class can be off of the more accurate "effective power."

Effective Power is the total number of modifiers for your damage output, applied to the power stat. Basically it is Power X ( Crit chance X Crit Damage + 1 - Crit Chance) X Additional Modifiers , which is a weighted average of how often you crit and how hard you hit when you crit. This includes all of the damage increasing traits you have, as well as your might and fury. Quickness increases this by 1.33 x percentage uptime. The reason why I go with power is because it scales linearly. An accurate way to compare builds without doing benchmarks

Now, there's a small side addition on top of power, but I didn't include it because of how complicated it is. Condition damage doesn't scale linearly like power does. I.E. at 0 condition damage, your conditions still do damage. This means that I can't create a "effective condition power" stat. The closest thing you get is the total condition damage stat multiplied by the duration and all of the weighted modifiers for each condition you inflict. And... it is build specific. But, assuming that you do all of that above and you are on a build that inflicts condition damage.

Total Group Support: This is the amount of raw stats that you push out through boons and non-boon buffs. It's straight up addition, since it is added on top of whatever you hold personally. For example, capping might for 4 additional people adds 750 power to every team mate. This includes group heals, too. All of the other boons are multipliers, which makes the math trickier, but their overall effect is still added to the group.

---

Anyway, all of that gives a decent measurement of how strong a class is at rest. The incomparable effects are ones that don't really fit into the equation above, but still have a meaningful impact on the battle. These include

Active DefensesMobilityBurstRangeCleaveDebuffsControlBoon RemovalStealth

You can try and rig some generic modifiers, like interpreting boon removal as a form of damage and defenses, but it's never as clean as the numbers above.

[Zexanima.7851]

@"Blood Red Arachnid.2493" said:I've mused about this subject for awhile. I never came up with anything solid, though. The reason for this being that a lot of the different effects in GW2 are incomparable. Their impact can't be measured numerically.

Aside from those, it is possible to quantify how strong a class is. It's basically this:

(Effective Health + Sustain) X Base DPS X Effective Power + Total Group Support = Total statistical impact

Effective Health: is the product of your HP multiplied by your total armor rating. The theory behind it is that this product is the scaled overall damage that you can take. It's how little damage you take, for how long you can take it. The maximum efficiency is when health is ten times that of your armor rating. This also includes defensive modifiers, such as innate protection skills, damage reduction traits, etc.

Sustain: is how much you recover health. Technically distinct from effective health, since you're not guaranteed your healing abilities in a fight. However, if your heal skill so go off, those additional points of health act like bonus health on top of your resting HP pool. I.E. a Guardian with 11k HP gets an 8k signet heal, they effectively have 19k health.

Base DPS: is a hard one. The damage formula is fairly simple, except for this one part. See, every skill has itself a base modifier, which says how strong it is. As expected, the average modifiers for each profession is different. It is something hard-boiled into the class. Because of this, it is hard to truly gauge how damaging a class can be off of the more accurate "effective power."

Effective Power is the total number of modifiers for your damage output, applied to the power stat. Basically it is Power X ( Crit chance X Crit Damage + 1 - Crit Chance) X Additional Modifiers , which is a weighted average of how often you crit and how hard you hit when you crit. This includes all of the damage increasing traits you have, as well as your might and fury. Quickness increases this by 1.33 x percentage uptime. The reason why I go with power is because it scales linearly. An accurate way to compare builds without doing benchmarks

Now, there's a small side addition on top of power, but I didn't include it because of how complicated it is. Condition damage doesn't scale linearly like power does. I.E. at 0 condition damage, your conditions still do damage. This means that I can't create a "effective condition power" stat. The closest thing you get is the total condition damage stat multiplied by the duration and all of the weighted modifiers for each condition you inflict. And... it is build specific. But, assuming that you do all of that above and you are on a build that inflicts condition damage.

Total Group Support: This is the amount of raw stats that you push out through boons and non-boon buffs. It's straight up addition, since it is added on top of whatever you hold personally. For example, capping might for 4 additional people adds 750 power to every team mate. This includes group heals, too. All of the other boons are multipliers, which makes the math trickier, but their overall effect is still added to the group.

---

Anyway, all of that gives a decent measurement of how strong a class is at rest. The incomparable effects are ones that don't really fit into the equation above, but still have a meaningful impact on the battle. These include

Active DefensesMobilityBurstRangeCleaveDebuffsControlBoon RemovalStealth

You can try and rig some generic modifiers, like interpreting boon removal as a form of damage and defenses, but it's never as clean as the numbers above.

This is great! I'm not really sure though that knowing how effective a profession is at rest would do any good towards summarizing how strong they are when in use. For instance, Thief would change drastically if we did something like count evades towards effective health or sustain as evades/teleports can nullify a limitless amount of damage. Same goes for invuln skills. You can even consider CC skills. If I knock someone off a cliff with a knockback and it kills them in essential one shot how powerful does that make knockback? Like you mentioned, these skills with limitless potential make it hard to quantify what a profession is capable of.

Does any kind of measurement even matter since it can be essentially ignored by some of these mechanics? Your DPS could be 1,000,00/s but I can reduce that to 0 but going into stealth or leaping out of range. In that case would it be better to consider things like health, damage, and support as just a single mechanics? Then score all mechanics based on how powerful they are in relation to other mechanics. Then we could sum up a professions potential based on it's total score averaged between all its available mechanics. This isn't even anywhere near accurate as we would have to know what each profession's "optimal" build is and in some cases what it might have as an optimal build theoretically could be useless against another builds because of certain mechanics.

All that being said people still come together toward a general idea of what is most powerful. Does that mean the only real way to measure what's best or "OP" is to look at what wins the most and why based on anecdote? It would be nice if as players we had access to some kind of data on this kind of thing. That way we could more intelligently understand what's going on and perhaps why.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

@"Zexanima.7851" said:

This is great! I'm not really sure though that knowing how effective a profession is at rest would do any good towards summarizing how strong they are when in use. For instance, Thief would change drastically if we did something like count evades towards effective health or sustain as evades/teleports can nullify a limitless amount of damage. Same goes for invuln skills. You can even consider CC skills. If I knock someone off a cliff with a knockback and it kills them in essential one shot how powerful does that make knockback? Like you mentioned, these skills with limitless potential make it hard to quantify what a profession is capable of.

Does any kind of measurement even matter since it can be essentially ignored by some of these mechanics? Your DPS could be 1,000,00/s but I can reduce that to 0 but going into stealth or leaping out of range. In that case would it be better to consider things like health, damage, and support as just a single mechanics? Then score all mechanics based on how powerful they are in relation to other mechanics. Then we could sum up a professions potential based on it's total score averaged between all its available mechanics. This isn't even anywhere near accurate as we would have to know what each profession's "optimal" build is and in some cases what it might have as an optimal build theoretically could be useless against another builds because of certain mechanics.

All that being said people still come together toward a general idea of what is most powerful. Does that mean the only real way to measure what's best or "OP" is to look at what wins the most and why based on anecdote? It would be nice if as players we had access to some kind of data on this kind of thing. That way we could more intelligently understand what's going on and perhaps why.

The build with the highest strength at rest is, by default, winning the fight. All the bigger build has to do is chase the smaller one around, spamming DPS skills.

Factoring in all of the dodges and mobility does change a classes performance. Greatly. However, the onus is on the player to be mindful and skillful with using those. An active defense improperly used is nearly useless, and you won't always get to your blocks/dodges. Those are skill based variables, which make them impossible to quantify. But the raw stats... those are always with you. The important thing to note is that active defenses MUST be used to beat the bigger build, but they're optional on the bigger build.

Back when I used to WvW, I played my own little Salvation/Invocation/Herald build based on these principles. In spite of the fact that I'm a nearly blind cripple who's bad at PVP, this build wrecked face. At its peak it had ridiculous modifiers. Something like 60% overall damage reduction, 22k health, effective power in the 60k range thanks to self-capping might and 100% crit rate... it was epic. The main tactic I had was maximum aggression, because I realized something: I don't have to figure out how to win. That's my opponent's problem. My sheer statistical fortitude meant that I could win most fights just by chasing enemies down and spamming the sword DPS skills.

If you want to get into the nitty gritty meta specifics, you can evaluate how much each individual effect has. Stuff like:

Boon removal is a 33% damage and a 50% defense increase, depending on what is removed. Stealth is a default health reduction against enemy targets. Active defenses are part of effective health, while control is the removal of those active defenses, etc. It's possible, but it is usually a stretch and matchup specific.