Aktium.9506

All the Elixirs have the same damage. Ambition hits harder consistently because the boons are applied before the elixir ever hits and it applies Blight before the damage roll as well so it always hits with the double damage from being past the Blight threshold. The problem mostly stems from the 100% Damage and Condition Duration Increase once past the 5/10/15 Blight stacks they tacked on to Elixir to make Blight less of a badly non-existent mechanic and Elixirs feel less awful and boring. Unfortunately Blight remains a badly designed mechanic despite the band-aid fix itself being broken. A full stack of 25 Might is also way too powerful to self-generate in PvP. We've had this problem with other classes who were capable of maintaining or quickly generating large might stacks on their own before and it was unbalanced then too.

On EU at least it was that there were 3 or so of the WTS-tier teams queue dodging each other. And once you reached a high enough rating you would face no other teams than those. You had the option of either sitting around and queue dodge them yourself which could take ages if you wanted to make sure you wouldn't queue into either of them. Or just bite the bullet and queue into a completely unwinnable match that ends 10-500.

Feels bad man

I'd be ok with it if they increased active life force generation in exchange for this. Or made healing through Shroud possible. Possibly adding a core trait that flips this around as well so you can have a viable duelist and +1 build that's bad at teamfighting.

I liked it. Damage had gotten way too high. The damage and the sustain existing at the levels it did was in and of itself incredibly limiting from a balance design point of view. Bringing the extremes down to a manageable level was a necessary prerequisite for balancing further down the line and making space for more elite specializations. The main problem was indeed that not a lot happened further down the line. In an ideal world, Feb 2020 would have been used as a pivot to help further create a working space for classes to specialize in unique niches and playstyles that were previously outright denied from existing in the high burst meta.

Remove duo queue

That's not enough. I am fully on board with Teapot's goal of 25k. So a 30-35% decrease in total DPS overall of Scourge is exactly what I do want

That's not hard to do. You can add a negative modifier to one of the Scourge minor traits that gives -33% condition damage and expertise just for slotting the traitline kinda like the GM minor for Berserker does with toughness. Or they could buff core Shroud damage in PvE. Make Dhuumfire on core Life Blast slap a big honking 10 burning per shot or just make Life Blast rapid fire.

It was pretty fun back in Aion 2.x when you went pet spec on SM instead of the usual DoT and Fearspam build and watched your Lava/Tempest Spirit zoom at people and delete them instantly.

How is Catalyst also being bad going to make me want to play Harbinger? It's still bad even if Catalyst is worse.

Boon Herald lowkey carries groups tho

I haven't really had time to test it this beta myself due to work, but I have a hard time imagining Harbinger working out well in any content outside of raids with literally no sustain in its kit. The Power traitline still existing at all is absolutely criminal as well. Even the one guy I saw shilling for Power Harb last beta did so because of the health regen being really good. Well, that's gone. The Power traitline should just be replaced with either something that focuses on mobility, boonhate or increasing effects of Blight.

I don't agree. I've played games where the balance philosophy was "If everyone is overpowered then no one is". And it doesn't work well in practice. It's just rapidfire rock-paper-scissors at that point. This is a problem with sustain though. I'm not saying the Feb 2020 was the only option available to them. Another thing they could have tried is increase the base health by 4-5x or even more for all classes. Would have reduced the strength of burst while making sustain weaker.

But you do see how it would have created problems down the line when trying to introduce new specs and skills into that pre-existing ecosystem? How it would have led to a degenerate descent into win button fiestas with big extreme damage skills countered by big extreme defensive skills ad nauseam I always play the tankiest and most durable possible option available to me in all games I play and I severely detest low TTK in games. From MMOs, Fighting games to Shooters. I will not omit my bias.

You truly do not see the issue we had in the game prior to the patch? How everything had gotten pushed to such extremes that it was in a complete downward spiral of power creep? The restrictiveness of such a game state? It had to be torn down for the betterment of the game.

How? In CMC's own words, he did not expect PvP to even be playable at all for a few months after the patch. Instead of giving it the slew of follow-up patches in post and extensive playtesting that it deserved, they slapped unkillable signet core Necros on the hands a bit and called it a day and let it fester instead. It's not that there's no fixing it, it's that they didn't do much to fix it. I understand why, they positioned the balance for the expansion to exist in a semi-rigid state so that they can balance the new elite specialisations in line with the existing balance with as few fluctuations as possible. I don't agree with this method, but I understand the reasoning behind it.

It needs targeted nerfs. I don't know what more to say about this really. They should have been brought on sooner. This falls into the part about their inability to properly follow up the Feb 2020 patch. You my friend completely lack reading comprehension. Have another go at it and reread what I said and maybe it will make more sense to you.

It's almost as if they should make minions require interactivity and micromanaging to function like a proper summoner class in an MMO instead of them being essentially a passive damage aura that cleanses condis near you.

We definitely were not. There was a massive glaring issue with damage in the Pre-Feb 2020 meta. You either had to have blocks, iframes or evades or you would die almost instantly to focus. You can still get deleted from 100-0 in 2 seconds getting +1 by two revs or two thieves. Prior to Feb 2020 you moved the decimal one step to the left though. No way for even two teammates to ress through the sheer damage most classes could vomit out on their own while downed cleaving. The sheer fact that downed cleaving as a way to finish rather than neutralize a ress was better than manual stomping was by all means an atrocity. It was an unacceptable meta hinging on unacceptable gameplay elements. It was enabling nothing except more power creep down the line. It had to go. And we've seen a wider variety of builds and classes in the post-Feb 2020 metagames in my opinion. There have been some absolute issues where stacking Guardians, Necros, Engineers and Revenants have spiraled way out of control. But these problems were not because the decision to go through with the Feb 2020 patch was a mistake or in any way a bad decision. But because ANet was too lax and did not do any follow-up patches until way too late afterwards. I think CMC did a fantastic job all in all. But I also think he most likely got put to work hard on the expansion with no one to fill his place as the balance guy, and that wasn't optimal.

Hell no. I hated, and still do hate, the old pre-HoT Cele meta. It was awful That has nothing to do with the fact that before they even consider balancing elite specs, the core classes should be more balanced. Elite specs being flat out better than core on any class as much as it is for some classes is a complete travesty.

Sounds great. That enables them to bring up the rest of the Core classes to Core Guardian/Necro/Ranger levels. Then they can make the elite specs have proper tradeoffs this time while not being broken overpowered bandaid solutions to broken underpowered Cores.

Excellent. Let's bring HoT and PoF specs down until they are slightly below the level of the EoD specs then.

What we need is a Stronghold mini season. For all its faults, its a better game mode than 2v2 and 3v3. And to some extent possible to balance without affecting Conquest. Although the best way would always have been to have it as a separate game mode where you pick from preset mist champions with pre-existing builds and skills balanced around the game mode (think Caithe transform during the story missions in LW2).

Well, if you remember it, I had a long argument with you about how they should have changed Dagger to be a Condi melee weapon before PoF released. Admittedly, back then it was because I didn't want Scourge to end up only using Scepter and nothing else causing it to have a boring rotation. Which, on another note, is exactly what ended up happening. There was that brief moment where Shade skills had those super short cooldowns with high costs in PvE where you used Dagger to keep life force up after going through your Scepter skills, but that lasted like half a month tops. Anyway, my opinion on that still stands. Dagger should have more of a Condi focus attached to it.

As someone who can consistently bench within 99% of the SC benchmark for Scourge, Tormenting is barely a 1k dps loss from Lich/Nightmare in PvE while bringing immense sustain. Admittedly this is less the fault of the rune and more the fault of ANet for buffing Torment to such insane levels in PvE. Torment should flat out get smacked by a 50% or 66% decrease in damage in PvE. It's way too overtuned.