Ragnar.4257

😂 "equal spot" Meanwhile, all four semi-finalist teams in last EU monthly ran double SpB.

Don't even play anymore, but its hilarious to see a class being stacked 2/3 per team in tournaments, and all the warrior-mains who in past years provided very fair and well thought out criticisms of other OP classes, now meming just as hard that "you just gotta learn to play against it" and "if we just nerf this one thing by 0.3%, that's all it needs".

You need both. Just relying on reflexes won't get you very far if you don't understand both your build and your opponents build, or if you're continualy putting yourself in bad map position. Equally, you can have very deep knowledge of all builds and perfect map awareness, but if you can't react quickly then you'll always lose out to those who have just as good knowledge as you and faster reactions. You don't need crazy reflexes to dodge/interrupt anything with 0.75s cast time or longer, and 0.5s is fairly easy as well if you know the opponents build and are therefore ready expecting them to do x/y/z. Also, alot of builds just spam out interrupts just by playing, they aren't necessarily specifically aiming to interrupt a particular skill.

They alread did that for PvP at the same time they did it for PvE. Then they un-did it. Apparently at no point was increasing its healing considered. I'm also pretty confused that you consider giving the worst heal in the game some minor buffs to be somehow gamebreaking. Traited mesmer mantra heal can heal over 4k instant-cast, isn't an issue, but apparently FB healing more than 200 is. The instant-cast nature of it USED to be balanced out by the long mantra recharge-times, and the incentive to use the more powerful final charge. But since that's been thrown away, they clearly have no idea what to do with it. It wouldn't be so bad for FB that its trash, if it wasn't the case that half the FB traits are designed with it in mind. If you're not taking Solace, there's not much good reason to take FB at all. TBH I'm of the opinion that they simply do not want FB to be viable in PvP. If you want to PvP on guard, play Core or WB, these are the only options presented to you. (DH is fun memes, but not actually good).

And rightly so, it's not just ANet who doesn't want AI to be viable in PvP, nobody serious about PvP wants that. IMO the difference between Mech and Ranger is that with ranger most of the work is still being done by the ranger themselves, the pet is mostly irrelevant outside of directly player-activated abilities, and there are ways to build ranger that can pretty much ignore the pet as a mechanic. Whereas the jade-bot is much more intinsically embedded into the mech traits and provides (or at least used to provide) much more passive value. But you're right that its similar, just a question of degree.

And rightly so, it's not just ANet who doesn't want AI to be viable in PvP, nobody serious about PvP wants that. IMO the difference between Mech and Ranger is that with ranger most of the work is still being done by the ranger themselves, the pet is mostly irrelevant outside of directly player-activated abilities, and there are ways to build ranger that can pretty much ignore the pet as a mechanic. Whereas the jade-bot is much more intinsically embedded into the mech traits and provides (or at least used to provide) much more passive value. But you're right that its similar, just a question of degree.

Have you considered joining ANet? Because your reaction-time to meta shifts is about as slow as theirs. Neither Harb or WB have been considered top-tier for PvP since June. Current top-tier specs are Tempest/Cata, Untamed, Vindicator, Spellbreaker, Chrono, and probably now Holo with latest patch. Mechanist is unfortunately probably doomed to never be good in PvP, since a spec that heavily relies on passive AI should never be allowed to dominate in PvP (same logic also applies to things like minion-mancer). Its called Player vs Player, not Player vs Bot. But that's not really a balance issue, its a design issue. Whoever designed mech clearly had no intention of making something suitable for PvP/WvW.

I look forward to your explanation of why, for instance, Chrono being able to reset time back to a previous state, something that no other class can do, is only a "skill" and doesn't count as a "unique ability". Or ranger being able to command its pet to go and revive an ally, which sounds very similar to your proposed new ranger 'ability' (which is suspiciously close in function to Sic'Em) doesn't it? Or necros being able to corrupt boons into conditions. etc etc. No other class can do that. Why is that not a "unique ability" ? You're just using the word "ability" instead of the word "skill" and pretending that using a different word makes them different, but functionally its the same thing. Press button -> thing happens. All you're proposing here is to add 1 additional skill to each profession, and are being pedantic about calling it an "ability" and not a "skill". Not to mention that some of the examples you're proposing are hilariously overpowered. Thieves being able to open gates in WvW? Really?

At least for PvP, changing the page-recharge or cooldowns won't do anything to bring FB up out of F-tier. You could make all the skills have 0 page cost, and it would still be trash. Equally you could make the page-recharge be 30s, and FB wouldn't be particularly any more bad than it already is. This is because what makes FB weak in PvP is not the cooldowns. What makes it weak is the cast-times and the healing/boon-duration/damage numbers on the tome skills. The amount of time it takes to cast one of these skills is not proportionate to the amount of benefit. In the time it takes to flip into a tome and use skills 1/2/3 in ToR, the amount of damage you will take is massively more than the amount of healing you might get back. So the actual change needed here is not to the pages, cooldowns, or recharge, but rather to the numbers on the skills themselves. If the numbers on those skills were good, the fact that they take a while to recharge would not be a problem. As we see with Heaven's Palm, simply reducing the CD on a skill that is entirely pointless doesn't make it any more viable. The other thing holding FB back in PvP is that most of the traits are tied in to Mantra usage, and mantras have been nerfed into oblivion (199 heal on Solace!!!). Mantras also help with the cast-times on tomes by providing quickness or protecting the cast with aegis/blind/stab. But since mantras are so bad, the two can't work together.

3s recharge would mean being able to use tome skills even more than pre-rework. They would come back so fast, you'd never spend more than ~10s out of a tome. I get that the current system sucks and you want something better, but you gotta ask for something reasonable.

Improving page-recharge, or reducing page-costs, isn't the correct solution. Because that's basically undoing the change and going back to "FB does everything". The proper fix will be to keep the tome-skills as being relatively inaccessible (at least, less accessible than they were pre-rework) but to make the skills you do choose to use have higher impact. They're mostly garbage, with a few exceptions, and while that was acceptable when you could spam several garbage skills which were essentially "free", it doesn't work in the new system.

This is just next-level cringe. All profession skills are already unique. No other profession can use the skills on warrior-shield. If you equip a shield on guardian or chrono or herald, it has different skills. Making it grant group-invuln wouldn't make it any more "specific" or "unique" to warrior than it already is. It would just be a massive buff to an already existing skill. Only guardians can use Virtues. Only thieves can use Steal. Only mesmers can use clones/shatters. etc etc etc. The game already consists of 100% "profession specific abilities". Hey, I've got an amazing "new idea" of allowing players to equip different weapons, with different stats? Maybe equipping a different weapon would give different attacks? I'm so creative. Maybe players should be allowed to choose "traits" to customise their builds, wauw, what an original thought. I would also like to propose that some skills grant temporary buffs, I'm going to suggest we call these "boons". iamverysmart This is literally DH Shield of Courage. Your suggestion to give warrior something "profession specific" is to give it the exact same skill another profession has. This has to be satire, right?

There's been no attempt to balance FB in PvP since March 2020. Not quite 3 years, but only a few months short.

Mate, everyone understands that patches take more than a few hours to cycle through. But they don't take three years. Not if its something that is even vaguely a priority.

You must be new around here. ANet have a track record of dropping massive reworks that need adjusting, and then not following up on them for several years. I dare-say if its totally broken in PvE they'll fix it sooner, but for PvP/WvW we can assume that this is it until 2025. Seeing how things play-out and making iterative adjustments would make sense, if it ever happened. But it doesn't.

Its fine that they want you to pick just 1 or 2 of the tome skills to use, rather than using all of them. The problem, is that the numbers on them, at least for PvP, are balanced on the assumption that you will be using all of them. So now rather than using 5 weak skills, and the total adding up to something worthwhile, now you just use 1 weak skill.

Except, the reality is exactly the opposite of what you say; the incoming design just reinforces that you ONLY use the powerful #4/#5 skills. By making them cost 3 pages, it means wasting a page on the weaker #1/#2 skills is even more punishing. If they all cost 1 page, you might think about throwing a #1/#2 skill into the mix, but now you have to hoard your pages for the #4/#5 skills. What you say would make more sense if the tome-skills had no cooldown, only page-cost, like thief initiative. But the #4/#5 tome-skills actually have quite signficant cooldowns (post-rework). Having shared pages between tomes is a good mechanism to reduce FB's ability to do everything, and force a choice of whether you focus on damage, healing, or boons. But the page-costs themselves within the tomes don't work well with that. Cooldowns would be a better way to stop over-use of the more powerful #4/#5 skills.

Honestly not interested in more tweaks to balance. What I'd much rather see is major buffs/reworks to the stuff that each class has which has been garbage for so long that people have forgotten they even exist. Every class has weapons/utilities/traitlines that haven't seen play in years (or even, at this point, decades). Tweaking Meta-Build-A to be +/- 2% more effective than Meta-Build-B isn't gonna interest me in playing again. Making Build-C, which hasn't been playable since 2013, playable again, that would actually make me care enough to log in for more than 20 minutes.

You can be killed, pushed off and contested from Stillness too (I assume you actually meant Tranq here, but it's the same for both)? Do you even understand what it is you're complaining about? It doesn't "just happen". Do you think it's just randomly occuring or something? Genuinely the only way you can think like this is if you fundamentally don't understand what is happening. Go and play some arena matches on Temple for a while to understand what is happening, maybe read up on the wiki. There is nothing different about how Tranq is acquired or how quickly it provides benefits to any other map mechanics.

So, Bell is not an instant advantage? Skyhammer is not an instant advantage? Beast is not an instant advantage? Just think, for a second, if what you say applies to other mechanics.

- Capping a node gives an "instant cap" when you finish capping the node (the same way Tranq is "instant" once you finish channeling it). If you don't count capping a node as instant, you can't count channeling Tranq as "instant" either. Have you ever even gone to get Tranq? Are you even aware that it has to be channeled and doesn't happen instantly? If you say that a node can be contested, guess what, so can Tranq. Infact it is significantly easier to contest Tranq, as you don't even have to stand near it, just poke with a ranged attack every few seconds. - Using Tranquility requires you to be on the spot to take advantage, exactly the same as Skyhammer. Do you even read back what you write to see that it applies just the same? - No, dominating bell does not mean you've automatically won. Plenty of teams throw by over-committing to bell and leaving nodes in enemy control I would argue that Bell, Skyhammer, are FAR more impactful than Tranq, because they happen more frequently. An individual Tranq "event" is more impactful, but it only happens once or twice per match and can be easily nullified by a prepared team being in position to back-cap. If you play correctly, losing Tranq can have almost zero negative impact, the same can not be said of Bell. In the end, there is no particular difference between Tranq and other map mechanics. You can say "no other mechanic gives you a node-cap", well, I can say that "no other mechanic gives you an instant-rez" for Shield, or "not other mechanic gives you increased point-rate" for Stillness. The fact that mechanics are different to each other doesn't mean anything in and of itself.

Go and compare the healing/cleansing numbers on Virtue of Resolve (with Absolute Resolution), to Tome of Resolve. They're basically the same numbers (2-3k healing + ~5 cleanses) except that VoR is insta-cast and 25s CD, while ToR takes several seconds to go through all its cast animations, and is on 50s CD. In PvP, several seconds is all it takes to go from 100% HP to dead, its a LONG time to be casting kitten-weak heals. Being able to cast VoR while stunned is a massive advantage. There is literally no upside to ToR over VoR. You can do the same comparison with Justice and Courage. And ALL of that is ontop of the fact that FB traitline is garbage compared to Valor/Honor/Virtues, one of which you have to give up (quickness is not relevant in PvP, maintaining Justice passive is also not relevant to supports in PvP). There are 3 reasons you might choose FB over Core. Tomes, Axe, Mantras. As this thread has already discussed, Mantras are nerfed into nothing, so Shouts is better. Axe cooldowns have been nerfed to be way too long, and Axe isn't particularly useful for support anyway, so you won't take Axe. And as we've just demonstrated, Virtues are better than Tomes. If you're not taking Mantras, you're not taking Axe, you're not getting benefits from Tomes, and there's no key traits you're gaining in FB traitline, why would you take FB over Core? FB got nerfed hard in March 2020, top teams kept trying to run it for a while, but were finding that their FB would just keep on getting focused and dying. FB still provided decent support, but it could simply no longer survive as well as Tempest or core-guard. See:

Nobody plays Firebrand in PvP, for exactly this reason. It's not a bug, it was intentionally nerfed into uselessness to remove Firebrand as a viable choice in PvP. Best advice is to pick another spec to play.

You realise this description applies just as much to nearly all other map mechanics (lord, beast, skyhammer, bell, sword/shield buffs), and, for that matter, applies to regular point-capture as well?

Stronghold will never be a popular choice among PvP players as long as: 1. Too much time spent gathering/transporting supplies. PvP players don't want to be doing this boring admin stuff. 2. Too much focus on escorting/killing NPCs. Current setup incentivises the attackers to play boring support types that just keep NPCs alive, and incentivises defenders to ignore the attacking players and just focus down the NPCs. This isn't PvP. Fighting other players is actually playing sub-optimally, which is absurd for a PvP mode. Simply upping the rewards for Stronghold won't cut it. Without a redesign addressing the above 2 points, nobody will want to play it.