Karagee.6830
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Posts posted by Karagee.6830
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6 minutes ago, Sahne.6950 said:
Minstrel was introduced with HoT.
pre feb 2020, you could actually kill minstrel supports.... but nowadays.. good luck killing a minstrel FB or a minstrel Tempest.. not happening.
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.
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5 minutes ago, Sahne.6950 said:
it is completly impossible cuz of the following 4 things.
-Damagenerfs. You hardly can produce enough damage to even make a dent in these "minstrel fueled boonblobs"
-targetcaps. Even if you can produce enough damage to make a dent... you will make a dent in 5 people... thats it... but what about the other 20!?
-minstrel. This stat alone make WvW largescale a snoozefest. In my humble opinion supports should make a decision and be able to take 2 of the 3 thigs. Tankyness, Healingoutput, boonsupport. You can either heal and support boons well, but your squishy, or be able to heal and tank, yada yada... but being the ultimate support, while also being the ultimate tank... makes combat awfulslow.
-Downstate and rally. Even if you did actually manage to kill those 5 people... they are NOT DEAD.... they will be on the ground... aAAAAAAAND... their up again... WvW favors biggergroups so much, that even the attempt at fighting.... idk 15 - 30 is considered nonsense and feeding.... that should actually ring the bell for any dev.
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?
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1 hour ago, Sahne.6950 said:
i think its sad that gameplay has condensed down to:
They are more? We dont even bother.....
sad to say the least....
Thats what i liked about ESO back in the day... a good group of 5 could wipe a 20 man zerg with smartmovements and good use of chokepoints.... heck, we have wiped 10 man groups as a duo.....
meanwhile gw2: boonblob goes BRRRRRR...... not even 10 people can wipe 20..... NOT HAPPENING... sad to say the least.
Boons,slugdamage and Rallyspam completly prevent any smaller groups from winning against biggergroups...
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.
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4 hours ago, Xae.7204 said:
Disable boons in WvW.
Its the only fix.
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%)
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7 minutes ago, Ascency.3580 said:
the issue with ham and fb seeing play everywhere is not their dmg potential. the issue is, healing specs not having to loose anything to still do quickness or alac respectively. show me an instance of anyone playing heal alac tempest? no? its becouse u loose a huge amount of healing and dps potential if u go alac as tempest. also almost any other builds giving quickness or alac are dead becouse u have to sacrifice around 20% dps to be able to supply it, while ham and fb can role compress without a cost associeated with it. why take quick chrono when fb already does it and u still need a healer anyways. and u cant NOT take quick as hfb? they either have to make an actual balance patch, taking into consideration more aspects of the game other then just what they want to sell, or drop this philosophy of quickness and alac being a distinct role in a party and drop the costs related to supplying those boons. better yet up the baseline for quickness by 30% and make quickness boon give the other 20% while theyr at it. same for alac. then those spots wouldnt be as contested making other classes borderline unplayable in group content. and those unable to upkeep own quickness be complete garbage when not in a group.
the current balance is a complete shitfest. two of my friends already quit the game, after couple of years of enjoying it HARD. im not gonna stick around much longer.
best they could do is:
-make dmg modifiers smaller and additive instead of multiplicative so they could start actually balancing the game.
-change all the core specializations to modify weapon skill use, kind of like bountiful blades on mesmer works, but make the choice between modifying some skills over others in different ways on a same weapon so u could actually see diverity in buildcraft. (choosing between 20% dmg increse over having a one min internal cd passive condi cleanse is lazy and bad design)
-make all the core specs have parts for dmg, support and defence and balanced between each other, allowing for actual diversity in buildcraft (specializations having a "flavor" related to them is fun on paper, but in reality every single player in the end uses the exact same build or gets kicked for not playing meta)
-make elite specs modify class specific mechanics only.
-fix quickness and alac
-balance everything around a single, simple set of rules applying to every class.
only then will there be room for balancing the game and making every class feel fun and unique depending on what tackles anyones fancy and how they want to play their favourite class.
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.
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18 hours ago, GWstinkt.6094 said:
How would this create more class representation.
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
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1 minute ago, Mell.4873 said:
That sounds like what we currently have, there are no unique class boons and every class can provide one of the two main boons (Quickness or Alacrity) some professions can even provide both.
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.
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On 8/7/2022 at 7:02 PM, ThunderX.6591 said:
Well, obviously, EOD get more new people to the game, what new people choose as class? They see a nice robot at the window login, search the class with robot, find Engi, get it, get elite for the robot, see is an easy class to play, use it.
What you want? You want Anet to loose money here destroying the class who bring the cash home with the new players? Go and buy NCSoft, after, maybe, (maybe, money is a bitter wall to surpass) you can change the game as you want it.
But simple ask to buff the "not so good classes" is too hard to do for you?
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.
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13 hours ago, Ashen.2907 said:
Representation is irrelevant. Relative performance is what matters. Of course performance can feed into representation, but the representation itself is not the issue.
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.
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24 minutes ago, Mell.4873 said:
Wouldn't removing boons make every profession the same, like what we had at launch. I mean one of the reasons Warrior were so dominant at launch is because they had the best survivability.
Honestly what they need is more trinity that way its more the team cohesion that is a factor in clearing content. I mean the only reason people like HB over other supports is because they have most access to unique boons. If everyone can contribute it would diminish the need to have 1-2 HB in end game content. If anything I want to see more unique boons, stances are a great one to try and standardise.
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.
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12 hours ago, GWstinkt.6094 said:
So removing alacrity is a moral decision now? 😄
We already have boons that boost damage, defenses and crit chance. Banners, spirits and stat traits don't fit in the boon table at all.
Should they just have made "Might 2", "Fury 2" and "Protection 2" instead of deleting them? 😄Yeah, it is a design choice. Alacrity and Quickness are strong, unique buffs that change how combat feels. Having them around offers us something unique and valuable. The existence of the very powerful, yet somewhat limited boons is the main reason we have a dedicated boon role. It creates build diversity. The stuff they removed was literal stat buffs. It was very strong having them, but not very interesting or fun.
Whats so great about having these stat boons that they should have been kept around? And what's so terrible about quick and alac that they must go? I rarely see people provide reasons other than they don't like it.
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.
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7 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:
Well Raymond Lukes was still working on wvw all this time, so......
But I think people need to realize it's not easy putting together the links as they think it is, they also rejected the idea to help make it easier in the first place, so we really have no one to blame but the players for moving so much. 🤷♂️
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.
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58 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:
They've changed directors a couple times after and everything was still stalled. Work apparently doesn't go on without a main direction and those other people probably just fell back to working on living stories until things got figured out. Not until Colin and Josh were brought back those top roles did it seem like stuff started rolling again, namely a new expansion. It's just obvious wvw stuff is side stuff to do in the off times, and will never have full development commitment again. And yes the "cornerstone" was just a carrot to get wvw players excited about an expansion they were getting nothing out of.
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.
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1 hour ago, ThunderX.6591 said:
The problem in all this is a really simple thing that many don't remember; when boons was "limited", the power of the boons was different too.
When we had limited quickness, quickness was like 100%, not like now, the same with alac, alac was more like 66% and then, reduced to 33% (now is 25%), but the power difference was huge.
Now the difference is more bland, and we have more access to boons then before, so, isn't a simple "change 1 thing", but more, "change 2 things" and balance ensued.
And yeah, obviously, when there is a scarcity of boons, more dps is the answer (top dps class too), not a more diversification roster.
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!
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2 hours ago, GWstinkt.6094 said:
Quickness and alacrity are boons. Boons are a system all professions share. It's easy and makes sense to integrate more rare boons into the existing skills and traits of each profession.
Banners and spirits are skills unique to their profession. We cannot simply give every single class access to banners without causing some other problems or doing a lot of work.The unique buffs that were removed were all stat boosts. Most importantly they shared precision. This made hitting the crit cap quite awkward, because how much precision you needed to build yourself was dependent on whether your group had: banners, spotter and the mistlock bonus stats. Anet was (rightly so) unhappy with how this all played out, so removed those stat sharing traits and skills. Removing some of the non precision stat sharing traits was probably about consistency. The focus of group buffs is shifting stronger towards boons, probably because every profession can interact with them. So your ability to support is less dependent on being a specific class with a specific trait selected.
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...
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4 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:
The difference is that if you give access to important boons to multiple professions, there are then multiple professions that can fulfil that role - however, having multiple characters in a subsquad filling that role wouldn't stack. Ranger spirits and warrior banners, however, offered unique buffs that stacked with everything except another ranger or warrior using the same spirits or banners respectively. So they each created their own role that they had a monopoly over.
The common thread, or "genius logic" as you put it, is in removing monopolies. Things that can be practically added to other professions, such as boons, are given to multiple professions so groups don't feel forced to take a specific profession to fill that role. Things that were inherently unique to a specific profession were removed so groups don't feel forced to take a specific profession to fill that role.
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?
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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.
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28 minutes ago, Raven.1793 said:
HAM does not have 20% representation. Mechanist does and most of that rep comes from rifle-mech. There is not enough room for more than 1 healer in a group and it's preposterous to think that HAM is always chosen as healer-support. There are at least as many healbrands. Druids are common in raids while heal tempest is new and only starting to get recognition. What I see is that rifle mechs are extremely popular, it's rare to see a group without one. The reason rifle mechs are popular has nothing to do with what HAM. Rifle mechs don't even have barrier.
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.
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16 minutes ago, Raven.1793 said:
If we're looking at the representation numbers, that explanation is simple. Mechanist has 5 good builds: HAM, condi-alac, power-alac, rifle-mech, and condi-dps. Add those up and it shouldn't be surprising to see 5 times as many mech players as elite specs that only have 1 good build.
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...
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1 hour ago, Mungo Zen.9364 said:
The numbers are arbitrary, but currently support do about 20% less DPS than Pure DPS.
The idea speaks to your idea of “make specs viable at entry and able to carry at elite” which is why I quoted both of you.
By making the skill level required for good DPS and Support the same, you allow all players the ability to join in (assuming they meet that minimum skill level). By giving Support builds the ability to stretch into ‘elite skill’ makes a lot more sense then giving some DPS builds the ability to reward high skill Pure DPS players with more DPS. Instead, an already handicapped Support build isn’t expected to add that extra DPS only to provide boons or heals. So any additional DPS they provide would be a bonus.
Thusly, a design space capable of rewarding high skill high APM players and builds could be found in Support DPS. This would work well for PvE, probably warp PvP and WvW a bit but given how skill splits are, likely not that much.
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.
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4 minutes ago, Raven.1793 said:
I'm not really sure what you mean when you say that Mechanist does not have tradeoffs. Since you're comparing with Firebrand, I'm going to assume that you mean heal alacrity mech (HAM). First, it's important to note that HAM itself is very well-balanced against other heal support specs like healbrand and heal alac tempest. Barrier output on HAM is very good but that makes up for the poor raw healing output that mostly comes from regen and medical dispersion field. HAM relies on core engi utilities like medkit, elixir gun, and mortar kit for condi clear, burst healing, and some cc. HAM does unusually good dps for a pure support but 5k dps over the 0 dps from a heal alac tempest is not much to talk about. From this perspective, HAM is not out of line with other heal support builds.
If we expand the scope to include build flexibility and dps support options, then I should point out that firebrand and tempest both have an equivalent dps support build. As far as I am opposed to having pure dps and support dps based off of gear, I don't think this is a problem for heal support vs dps support. This is because some groups decide to go no-healing and it's convenient for the healer to switch to an equivalent dps support build. Nobody is going to stack healers with partial boon support.
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.
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30 minutes ago, Mungo Zen.9364 said:
I think it would be interesting to have Support builds provide 20% less DPS than Pure DPS builds, however allow Support builds to cater to high skill ceiling players who can make up that 20% DPS difference if they are very skilled.
This way you could have (for example) Power Chrono doing 38-40k and Alac or Quick Chrono doing 32-40k depending on the skill level of the player.
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.
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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.
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2 hours ago, Telgum.6071 said:
I've seen elementalist doing this countless times.
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.
Playing a single class vs best in slot
in Professions
Posted
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?