Karagee.6830

And yet, we have more concentration in a handful of professions and worse representation than at any time durinv PoF, despite 9 extra specialisations. Bizarre isn't?

Well they also killed damage on cc, so they eliminated some of the builds that could give you a window to take down, if not the healbots themselves, at least some of the other guys. I obviously agree with down state. If for whatever reason they don't want to permanently remove it in wvw, they should at least change it. Pretty sure this second option is harder, but you do have skills designed to inta ress players, so it's to eliminate this completely you'd have to look also at other things.

Minstrel was always there, but yes targetcaps are obviously one of the reasons and the changes there didn't help In a lord room while attacking you don't even have to rally from enemies, random NPC guards will do just as well. How is that logical?

You used to have blob busters which were smaller in numbers and could wipe a full blob, but I think that's harder in the current game. First thing to do is to remove rallying from larger groups, maybe even remove manually ressing downies and leave only skills for that. Also reduce the hp of all downed players (since there are people who are against removing down state completely because their classes have easy access to stability or stealth). If you are outnumbering the opponent you should have a buff and that should trigger all of the above.

Or just weaken certain boons. I mean resistance can go completely, alacrity and quickness also, but the rest is fine, just lower the effect of the boon (e.g. protection and resolution reduce damage only by 15%)

As it stands 5 things are required in a group. Support/healers. Alac provider. Quick provider. All other boons provider(s). Damage dealers. The first thing to do is to prevent healers providing alacrity or quickness. Only other boons should be largely available and provided by whoever, dps and support alike.

Exactly the same way unique buffs ensured some classes had a place in raids. If every class has access to everything, it's only logical the overtuned class will be stacked and the rest nonexistent. Just like the current situation. Now it's mechanist, tomorrow it will be scourge or something else. Think about this: if hfb had no quickness and resistance and had to choose between aegis and protection: would it have more or less representation if all support builds were is a similar place with restrictions? What about ham without access to alacrity and stability? It would force parties to make sure you bring classes that have access to boons that can cover for these holes. And also would force parties to choose what they really want from the support healers and/or force someone else to do mechanics (e.g. provide stab, aegis or resistance when needed). Because these is the other consequence of this balance philosophy: the more you compress roles, the smaller the number of people who can carry a group

Not really what I was trying to say. First, nobody should be able to provide quickness and alacrity or either of them and defensive boons. It's just easier to eliminate both or greatly nerf their effectiveness as a matter of facr. Second, you have to remove access to boons where there is overabundance (FB and mech). You shouldn't have access to everything or close to everything. Third, irrespective of what your class has access to, you should also not be able to provide more than 2 or 3 boons to your party (ie you can have aegis and stab, but someone else who also has access to them must take protection and resistance for example). This should be done via trait choices.

You just don't get it do you? The only reason people play mechanist, the most boring and spoon-fed specialisation in the game, in large numbers is that it is wildly overtuned and requires little to no skill. Nerf that and people will simply play their mains. Your claims that people would select engineer over warrior, elementalist, ranger and necromancer are risible. Engi has always been at the bottom of the played professions. I honestly can't see a single person interested in a game with a fantasy setting choosing engineer as his/her first character, even more so if he has experience of other similar games.

Representation IS the issue. That's the only way you can assess balance objectively. It's like saying 1 person is able to play warrior to 1850 rating in pvp, so it should be nerfed. Nevermind that there are no other players in the next 100 spots playing warrior. You see the problem? Balancing around elite players instead of average players will erase entire classes. Because when you have ensured that not even that elite guy can get to 1850, you won't see other players in the top 300... In other terms, nobody cares if an elite player can do 42k on a static golem with build A and 37k with build B, when the average player does 32k with both in an actual situation. Let elite players and speedrunners do their thing and allow everyone else to be able to play the game with the profession of their choice.

If there are no boons or every class can get all boons with minimal effort, then it comes down to whoever has the best combination of damage, sustain and mobility. And some build will be on top. And people will stack that build into infinity and beyond. The only way that comes to mind to ensure wide class representation is to restrict the number of boons each build has access to and restrict even further those they can select via traits and provide to the party. This would help in other game modes as well.

It's blatantly obvious they fail their own stated logic: we remove things so you can use the same gear no matter the scenario...but only for things we want you to. Yeah it's not written anywhere that you need to have only one boon affecting one side of the gameplay. Removing things that have been there for years and worked just fine with no bugs is a choice. The banner offensive buff did not apply the same way might did and you also have other boons which are applied in different way some requires to build stacks and have a range and some are either all or nothing. It's not written anywhere that you can't have 2 buffs or boons affecting the same part of the gameplay. We had this, literally for years. Whether you buy into the argument that there should be only one boon per 'type' or not, it's a design choice, not something written in stone. The only thing they achieve with REMOVING stuff is that you have more specialisations competing for the same spots, which is why (besides also terrible balancing) this patch produced a garbage build representation, as concentrated as it's ever been depite the fact that we now have an all-time high 27 elite specialisations. And now there is no way out of this. Even if they hire some genius to balance the game, the odds are greatly stacked against them, because balancing would need to be so good, that it would offset the loss of diversity from the removal of stuff from the game.

False problem. The transfers are a direct result of the systems in place and of...the transfer policy. Even with the rest of the systems as is (tiers, links etc), they could have made it impossible or much harder and more expensive to stack via transfers. All they need to do is increasing the cost when people start moving and have some servers (the empty ones) free to transfers to. The average wvw player is cynical and will tell you they don't do this because they would lose revenues, but I think even with higher costs people will still transfer, so I wouldn't be so sure: if you halve the number of bandwagoners because on average you charge double, then the revenues would stay the same. And if you can at least manage to split the transfers in 2 groups to 2 different servers, you would already greatly improve the current situation. ^ this requires almost no coding, just half a brain.

All fine and dandy, but in these years they could have just taken a graduate and put him/her to decide links in a vaguely rational way and manage transfers costs dynamically and intelligently, so people would not be as pissed off and dejected by the gross imbalance in numbers we have today. This was easy to do and they chose not to do it. And they need to understand that if Alliances are years away, we need some hot fix, especially if we don't want to scare away the people who will come from steam.

Except when boons and buffs were scarce or unique, you were sort of forced to diversify or the whole party had to take the hit. Now you don't have to and that's why, in a time when we have the most elite specialisations ever, you also have the highest concentration in a handful of builds since PoF was released 5 years ago. What is mind boggling is that out of 9 new elite specialisations only 2 of the feature into this discussion, Mech and Virtuoso, and another 2 are not great, but passable, Specter and Harbinger... They made even the majority of Eod specs unusable/unused in pve!

What are you talking about? Alacrity wasn't 'more' unique, it was unique. It was changed into a boon. More than one class got access to it. People proceeded to whine for years about how that monopoly (of 2 classes) on alacrity was bad. How is that different than turning banner or spotter buffs into boons and giving it to more classes? Please do explain, if you can. Also note that the, let's call it debatable, reasoning by @Josh Davis.7865 and the balance team in their posts that spotter created problems to gear properly...would have been a non-starter if instead of deleting it, they made spotter into a boon, just like they did to alacrity all those years ago. 100% alacrity also is accounted for to calculate how much of certain stats you need on your gear (for example to have 100% boon uptime), so that leads to exactly the same gear considerations (i.e. you need more stats if you have no alacrity). The did not want to do it. The chose not to do it. And if they can delete stat and crit buffs they can do the same with alacrity and other boons. There is no inherent reason to have alacrity and quickness in this game, it's a design choice, just like having the spotter buff or its equivalent boon, and that group of people within Anet, starting with @Josh Davis.7865, his minions and solar, are responsible for these choices. If they were coherent and morally sound people they would have logically removed at least Alacrity as well. It's in fact them now forcing you to have 100% alacrity and quickness...

Perfect example of reading something and missing the point altogether. How many specialisations had alacrity when it was introduced? Yeah you guessed it. And even after it was made into a boon it was pretty much on only 2 classes for a long time (and people continuously whined about the 'monopoly' by mesmer and revenant for years). Now elaborate on how this was fundamentally different than banners or spotter and please explain why there were way way more complaints about lack of access to alacrity and quickness than there were about unique buffs. Obviously when you change it from a single class to multiple classes you also change it from a general buff to a shared boon to avoid stacking. If they wanted they could have given the equivalent of spotter and banner to other classes and turn both into boons which, you know, is exactly what happened with alacrity. They could have done it and chose not to. Do you understand what I was saying now?

Banners stat increase and spotter crit chance increase have been removed from the game and with them 2 out of 9 classes, but quickness and alacrity, oh no, those cannot be removed and need to be given to more classes instead, possibly ALL classes. I see the genius logic of removing buffs and spreading buffs depending on which side of the bed we wake up in the morning.

Never claimed ham has 20% representation, mech has 25% as a specialisation. Note that in a scenario with power alac mech and hfb, the mech is also a support slot providing one of the 2 key boons. Druid is 3.9%. So even if we sum all tempest, druid, harbinger and spectre we are at a grand total of 12% out of 40% (and that assumes that druid also provide alac on their own). So if ALL harbingers and specters in raids are there to provide quick or alac, then it means that 28% of support is shared between mech and fb. Do you agree? Mech and fb pose the exact same problems in terms of balance and should both be nerfed to level them with the field. Note that fb has a 16% total representation and some people do play cfb so at least close to half of that 28% is mechs (let's say 13% mech and 15% fb). Since only tempest and druid are healers, then it means that 5% is covered by these and 15% either by ham or hfb. Since we have seen above that fb and mech are around 50/50 in the larger subset, we can assume that they are 50/50 on healer slots as well (even though ham+qfb is a superior combo than hfb+alac mech). Based on all of the above mech is 25% in total, of which 7-8% is ham (assuming the 50/50 split with hfb), 6% is alac dps and 11% is dps. I never claimed that braindead LI or AA rifle mech has barrier, I claimed that ham has a barrier with no trade-off. Hard to confuse one with the other.

Ok I'll bite, since you appear to like being contrarian and irrational and decided to die on this hill. Which are these equally good support specs that can be taken instead of ham? You said tempest. Tempest can only be support and has 1% representation. What else is equal to ham and can eat into this 20% share that ham covers? Even better, lets do things properly. It's heal, quickness and alacrity. If we assume 4 players are needed for those 3 things, then it's 40% of the slots. 1% is covered by tempest, I'll even magnanimously give you all specters at 4% and harbinger at 3% who else covers quick and alac and healing other than ham and hfb/qfb? We will sum all of those and we are left with the number that is covered by mech and fb. Also note that 1% v 25% is 25 times not 5 times...

Not all support (let's call it hybrid) builds are close in dps to their 'pure dps' counterparts...some builds are more equal than others, as usual. Everything that needs gearing heavily for BD will have a significant drop off the equivalent dps build.

And here we have another trying to explain to us like 25% group representation on kills is due to people being idiots and not playing all the other op support builds (plural) in line with mech. It's not hard to see that ham is currently dominating the meta because of how many utilities it gets for free (like the barrier). It's not balanced and the numbers very much reflect that. On average you have 2.5 mechanists per group and typically mech covers both support and alac slots. So yeah, if in order to have the barrier you had to drop something else, like no access to stab for example, then it would be comparable to other specs. FB is the same, it just gets so much utility for free or minimum sacrifices that if ham didn't exist, you'd simply have 2 hfb and someone else providing alacrity. At some point people will need to stop fantasy land arguments and look at the numbers and group composition. Otherwise please just play tempest and convince a LOT of other people to play all these other support builds you say are on par with ham. So we can see a reduction in mech representation and not weekly increases like we are still witnessing 5 weeks after the patch. We you are successful in reducing ham and mech dominance, we will talk.

Correct me if I'm wrong. You want support dps builds to do 32k dps in the hands of someone who can't play and 40k in the hands of someone who can. And you think this is balanced.

Well it seems T1 and T3 EU are fairly balanced this week, especially if, as you'd expect, Deso will have a good night tonight. T1 will last only this week as GH+WSR will promote next week and they seem to outnumber any other team.

It think everyone else is a pretty clearly inferior version of a willbender either due to inferior survivability and boons or mobility and ability to disengage. Which means everyone else can be killed or chased more easily than a willbender. I agree that harbinger is disgusting though, simply not as frustrating as a good willbender.