Linnael.1069

The reason every spec uses sword now is because sword is the only ele weapon with good auto-attacks. We should be long past the 2012 design philosophy, every other class gets to have good auto-attack DPS these days. Make lightning whip less of a waste of time and maybe we will have other options than sword/warhorn.

I dunno what's worse, the thought that they know the reaction is going to be bad and are just sticking their heads in the sand, or the thought that they can't preview it because they're still cobbling together last minute changes in a crunch.

Yeah that obviously won't happen since its been pitched a million times already. Maybe a new suggestion might actually see the light of day.

In all game modes??? It's not like that in raids or hardest strikes, so endgame PvE, not in PvP, not in WvW small-scale. Literally only easy-moderate PvE or zerg WvW is "zerg ball". People who say this really expose what kind of content they play.

You are dropping a giant sword from the sky on them. It's the perfect flavor for a finisher skill. And it would help with ele being the least suited to standing still and channeling the finisher animation. And the game needs more finishers anyway. It's perfect all around. Might even make it worth the 180s cd (lol).

We already know what it looks like when range is objectively superior to melee lol, so put away your hypothetical fantasy. There is no reason to play melee anywhere right now yet people still play it because its close enough. If range is nerfed but close enough it will still get played for all content, and still be superior in some content anyway. Much healthier than ranged being equal for brainless no movement content and way OP for the rest.

You're still not grasping it. Nobody is saying "melee should get a bigger power budget". The suggestion is that "range should be factored into the power budget". Currently you could think of ranged weapons having the same power budget as melee weapons, except as it is now they also have MORE free power on top of that because they have long range, not paid for in the budget. The big advantage of long range should be accounted for in the power budget, not this extra thing stacked on top for no reason.

Few people remember this but the game used to have smarter AI. It would walk out of aoes and avoid stuff like hundred blades. Then everyone complained in the first beta weekend that it was too hard and the entire game was dumbed down before release. Smarter AI is possible but they don’t do it because they don’t think players want it.

People in this thread are honestly arguing that we should balance for open world blobs so I don’t think they have any idea how much you lose by going melee in real fights. I think a -15% range tax is fair overall but even -20% wouldn’t be out of line.

It’s objectively true that balance matters more where the margins for success are tighter. As anyone with arc can see, most players in the open world do not get fed up even when other players are doing 20x more dps than them, why would they be fed up by a 2x dps difference between specs? As you said yourself, people in easy content care more about what they want to play than what is objectively most effective. In that content, the efficacy doesn’t really matter. Also, like I said, many contexts in this game are mutually exclusive. You cannot just say balance matters everywhere, inherent contradictions exist between different types of content.

This is a good idea but too ambitious for ANET. IMO the balance should be focused on actually interesting content where you actually have to move and do things. Clearly there can’t be an even playing field for both the content that matters and the content that is just standing still in a stack with no thought. Ask yourself why you don’t see everyone in open world playing scourge? It is highest DPS, most comfortable, most easy by a long shot. It’s because that content doesn’t care at all about balance lol. People talking about the “blob”: let’s be real you would not notice or care if melee was a solid 20-30 percent better DPS than the ranged weapons you use for tagging. We should keep balance discussions focused on the situations where it is actually relevant. If you keep the mindless stacking DPS equivalent between melee and range, you are just saying you prefer to balance that at the sacrifice of balance for actually interesting gameplay.

Anet, why are you balancing 1200+ range options to have the same DPS as melee options? It's painfully obvious that there will ALWAYS be an issue with scourge/virt/etc. when they can just do constant DPS from anywhere, while melee has to stop and run around for mechanics. Can we please remind ANET that range is a big advantage which should come with a trade-off? They seem to have forgotten that.

The point is that they could theoretically read good suggestions from the forum, but the current devs have clearly demonstrated they are not competent enough to even recognize good advice when they read it. I just want people to recognize that suggesting specific fixes is going to go nowhere fast. Maybe you’ll get one lucky step forwards at the cost of five random steps backwards. There is a fundamental problem with the Anet workflow. They are simply not competent enough to make good balance, and they won’t be until that changes.

In light of the “design notes” I feel this point is even more important to remember. The balance patches will not improve. The laughable design philosophy will not improve. Nothing will improve until the source of the problem is changed.

I tried a dagger build and ultimately dropped it because the forced movement is tough to manage in some fights. I will say with around 80% boon duration you can do a 2 element overload rotation instead of 3, so you could drop the air overload part of that. It may be worth looking to see whether that is better or worse, considering the loss of condi runes/sigils on a condi build.

Lol yeah honestly the guard forum is hilarious. Even the dev that balances guard freely admits it is OP but those guys can't...

There is a lot of flexibility to bring more regen/heal. If someone covers a little of your prot uptime of you don’t need projectile reflect you can bring water shout instead of earth; if someone has stab or the boss cc is predictable you can bring the auras regen trait. If you don’t need to completely cover might or you can have people stand in your fire overload, you have water field blasting built into the rotation. Between the swap to water every 10s, heal shout, and water 3/4 there is actually a lot you can throw out there. The problem is mostly having you interrupt your rotation to react to damage. Personally I feel it is pretty rough having such a tight window to maintain alac, and I am hoping we see some changes. If it gets to a place where you can interrupt rotations to do your water burst without dropping alac, then I would maybe say it’s a much better healer than the old condi Druid. Until then this is more just a theory craft for low pressure situations where you want more damage, or random stuff you want to be more self sufficient on (pugging fractals is fun with this, it is cute to watch yourself creep up on the slow dpsers on arc. Also nice when u want to scratch the healer itch but still want to get stuff done in open world)

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PGgEsEWGBrhtwuYkYZN53UB-zxQY1Io8jeHNUQLnREKg0lAecWafYD-e A different take on heal alac tempest. Brings alac and all boons just like heal temp. Worse at healing than most healers. But it benches 16k dps while healing. This is almost like a unique 10% dps buff assuming a 5 man party with 4 dpsers doing 38k+ dps. The reasoning is that alac tempest is locked into a rotation to maintain alac (cannot reactively burst heal) so we should rely on passive ticks from soothing mist/regen, and get as much dps as we can out of the overloads we are forced to do.

Completely agree. The efforts to silence the leaks were appalling.

The community isn't just up in arms because of a bad balance patch, we are up in arms because it has become clear exactly why the balance patches have been so bad. Professions are changed by people who literally don't even understand how they function. A dev literally just keeps guardian OP because he mains it, and we now know that is a self-admitted fact. I really appreciate the quick updates about new fixes coming down the pipe. But those are mechanical changes, addressing the symptom. When will we hear about the cause? I think we would all appreciate hearing about how Arenanet is going to change the clearly broken culture and attitudes at hand.

You are the most desperate firebrand defender ever, but the funniest part is that you don't even realize that by constantly bumping this thread so much you are only keeping it in front of more people's eyes and countering your own goals.

What if Agony Resistance in WvW lowered incoming condition damage and critical damage bonus. 0.1% per point capped at 15% reduction for 150 AR 🤔 Then you could make WvW infusions also give AR. I was trolling at first but I kinda like this idea...

Yeah that's also true, clearly you agree that specs should be viable in multiple modes. The only reason I mention PvE only is because that has been the case for many of the new EoD specs. It's an even bigger failure to not even make a spec viable for PvE since you literally don't even need to change any design, just give it bigger coefficients and eventually it will be viable.

You shouldn't really try to offer balance input if you can't admit to yourself that scourge is completely overpowered right now.

Isn’t this just juggernaut scrapper but worse? Flamethrower is the one weapon in the game that probably cares the least about alacrity considering you only auto attack lol. It is way, way better to have the might and quickness from scrapper.