Vee.6052

I haven't had as much fun with this expac as I would've hoped for, if I'm being honest. A lot of it feels cheap — not because of the reused assets themselves, but because it fails to do anything novel with them. Combat feels incredibly boring and the rift bosses are so pathetic they die within seconds. I don't think I've felt the pressure from any of the new mechanics or even noticed they're there. The mechanics that are noticeable have the exact same moveset as enemies from earlier expansions. There's nothing different about them. I preordered because I knew I'd be playing either way, but after seeing what's actually there...eh? Doubtful I'll do it again unless they really wow me.

while it's nice to see you guys are trying to make changes, this still doesn't fix the core issue brought about by shoving alacrity onto scourge or how it's applied. healers currently are forced to sacrifice any reactivity they have with shades to spam them off cool down to barely eke out just enough alacrity at 100% boon duration while many other classes can press a single button or not have to think about it. it's the same issue with celestial avatar mode on druid: shoving alacrity onto it kills any chances you have at saving it for when it's actually needed. it feels terrible and severely hampers the capacity for healers to provide emergency bursts of healing when needed. alacrity never needed to be on scourge. the quick res potential and boon corrupts fit the theme of the class. if your goal was to reduce the current boon rip spam in WVW then it utterly failed on that front, too, because the other half of the equation is still untouched, which is the actual boon spamming. i used to adore heal scourge. i haven't touched scourge since this patch went live. it's destroyed all of the things i once enjoyed about the class and reduced it to another generic boon support. also, how boons are applied now feels much, much worse in general. my celestial catalyst is suffering. my quickness scrapper feels awkward to use. the entire flow of these classes has been messed with in a way that just isn't enjoyable at all.

I am using all four spheres in my build. I still can't generate enough energy to slap down the spheres in time.

"the false linkage of LGBT rights as human rights" yeahhh I stopped reading right there. my rights ARE human rights and they're not just a western concept. goodbye.

Can you share your build/rotation for your cele build? I just tried to play like I normally do and I could not generate enough energy to spam out my spheres at all.

Playing on my celestial catalyst where I used to have 0 issue upkeeping quickness while cycling through my elements...now I struggle. The intended change here has ironically swung in the opposite direction and made me feel more pressure to spam and blast my way to the next element. I feel like I have no breathing room at all anymore. If they keep this change, they need to increase the quickness duration at base, because right now it feels horrible.

are you making a dig at bud light supporting the LGBT movement because if so...l o l. i have nothing to say to you dude and i have zero interest in continuing a discussion with you.

It's amazing how many members of the community voiced their concerns and dislike of this phenomenally bad idea and Anet ignored it anyway. It's left a sour taste in my mouth. Nobody wanted this. I loved my heal scourge the way it was and now they've all but mangled it. I don't even want to touch Scourge after this.

Nerfing the boon corrupt and res potential of scourge has all but killed my interest in it at this point. I'm so incredibly disappointed that they decided to force Scourge into the same boring, generic role as every other support in the game. My support scourge is going to sit there collecting dust until the end of time now.

Unfortunately yeah, these forums are pretty unhelpful in that regard. I gave myself a day or two to chill out before I posted anything here, and I never have before this point lol I hope the devs can see past the vitriolic anger and emotional immaturity on display with some of these threads to get at what they're trying to say.

This is probably one out of dozens of threads discussing this at this point, but if any of the devs read this then that's good enough for me. There's a couple of things bothering me about this, mainly: Niche vs Mass Appeal Thematic Consistency Niche vs Mass Appeal I understand balancing roles is incredibly difficult. I'm not going to pretend to understand the nuances and technical complications, but I will say I've been an avid enjoyer of heal scourge for years. Running it in open world and struggling pug groups has been a satisfying experience, allowing a lot of people to get back up on their feet quickly. There's a lot of comments going around where people claim this is a good thing because it forces people to "git gud", but I'll just say this: it won't. It'll only make open world content more difficult and instanced runs more frustrating. Some training groups don't allow heal scourge as is, but that restriction is left up to the discretion of the players, not the developers. There is no other heal support role in the game like current day heal scourge. It's powerful at its specific thing without stepping on the toes of other roles, and the places it provides benefit aren't exploitable. The fact is that I, as a single person, do not have time to train every single other player I encounter on how to learn and improve at certain mechanics, and if I can help lift some of that weight and thus actually get content done, then I'm happy to do it. We only have so much energy to give in a single day. Heal scourge feels different from every other support class in the game. I love it as it is. If the intent is to try to raise the number of people playing heal scourge, tacking alacrity on it and gutting its quick res potential won't help. It'll just incentivize people to seek out simpler options. The differences between heal class combat flow are starting to narrow and blend to the point everything starts to feel the same. This doesn't even begin to address the issues many people have raised concerning dps scourge, the required spamming of your sand shade, the fact nabbing downed allies is now even harder with your f4 since it doesn't pulse and the range of the skill can be hard to eyeball in the middle of a fight, etc etc, but I don't have time right now to get into that. tldr; Attempting to provide more mass appeal to heal scourge is only pushing long time players like me away. I don't want to be another alacrity bot, I want to be a necromancer raising my allies from death's door. Thematic Consistency This is a slightly more minor problem but one that still bothers me, personally: why are you giving alacrity to a scourge? What about scourge's design hints at it being capable of speeding up an ally's recharge speed beyond the fact it can be a support class? It's the same thing with deadeye and bladesworn, ableit to lesser degrees: what in the elite spec suggests they'd provide these boons in the first place? In deadeye's case you can at least argue that providing boons has been in the background of its intended design since launch with its traits, but in bladesworn's case...idk. The vague concept of Flow, maybe? It just feels like an afterthought hastily scribbled in the margins of the patch notes. When I read the word scourge, I think of corruption. Disease. Plague. Blighting everything around you and sharing the pain across a massive spread. Ripping boons from people and inflicting conditions on them is thematically consistent. Raising your allies from the dead to fight on and feeding off of their conditions to spam more out to your enemies is thematically consistent. Providing boons and removing the damaging aspect of boon rip on scourge is not thematically consistent. And yeah, I get that a certain level of themeing has to give way to balance and the practical needs of gameplay, but this feels like it swung so hard in the other direction it stripped scourge of key aspects of its identity. Even harbinger has more reasoning for its quickness generation. It doesn't clash nearly as badly with its design as scourge does. I understand you likely don't want to make players feel hemmed in to playing specific classes to provide specific support abilities, but we already have that. There are more classes than ever capable of providing the key boons in the game — and I can say as someone that's been playing since launch, I've never had more options available to me in terms of classes I can play to fill specific roles. You know what limits me instead? Class complexity and flow, effort vs actual reward. Sometimes I want to deal with rotating through tempest's (still broken btw) overloads to maintain alacrity, but sometimes I'm tired and I just want to press a single stupid button on my renegade and be done with it. tldr; Putting alacrity on scourge doesn't make sense from a thematic standpoint. There is, imo, too much of a sacrifice of class identity to force every elite spec into providing a specific boon, even when it already has a useful established niche. I'm not saying that none of these classes could ever provide boons, but I'd encourage your balance team to reassess why, and reconsider some of the sacrifices current beloved builds are having to make along the way. Thanks if you read all of this, I'm gonna go try to be a productive adult now.