[My biggest "Pain point" with WvW atm]

2 minutes ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

WvW is easier than raids...if you only care about the pips. As I said before:

You don't have to participate in WvW Raids or organized groups to get your pips. So to get pips in WvW is definitely easier than Raids, but it does take longer.

Can we see your kps and achievements to just make sure you know what you are talking about? You can gg on every raid boss to get the LIs you need, that's why you have pretty simple collections to do for raid gear, but even for those there are ways around it. Either way you can get the LIs required in 6 weeks actually doing absolutely nothing other than gg'ing every 5-10 minutes

[My biggest "Pain point" with WvW atm]

10 minutes ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

You do have to learn your rotations and you do have to know the mechanics, which you learn best by communicating with other players. And you do feel responsible for not performing up to par. What you think is easy, is not easy for everybody. You just don't want to understand a different pov.

Why are you talking about me? I just say that I understand OW PvE'rs. I am aware that there are raids in WvW but you don't have to participate in them to actually get legendary armor. 

So really, your comments are laughable.

It's easy enough for me who play every game mode. It's definitely easier and MUCH faster than both pvp and wvw (gvg or raiding). And if you think that gg'ing in a raid CM encounter and getting hard carried is harder than flipping camps, then you are truly delusional. Most normal raid bosses can be done in 6 people, taking into account mechanics.  

I like how it's always subpar people with no kps who talk up PVE's difficulty in this game...

[My biggest "Pain point" with WvW atm]

12 minutes ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

I think you do not understand how much OW PvE'ers generally hate doing Raids. It's like sitting 22 weeks in uncomfortably warm water or 6 weeks in boiling water. That's how you should understand the mindset. In WvW you do not have to play in groups where you have to communicate with other people, you don't need to learn your class and master it (just like in OW) and you won't feel like you'll be responsible personally for bring your team down when you fail. 

 

This is laughable. You don't have to communicate in PVE either, you just need to know your rotations and what you are supposed to do to deal with mechanics. That's it. And let's not talk about this ridiculous buff you get for 1 wing every week nowadays.

Also it's probably not your fault, you likely never learned that there are people raiding in WvW too and that all you said for PVE which isn't true, it is actually true for WvW. You need the gear, you need everyone to be on voice as people need to move together and use abilities and dodge as the raid leader ask them to and a sub failing to give stab, cleanses or boonstrip when required will almost certainly result in everyone getting killed. Unlike in PVE the only game mode where you can carry people at ANY level and for ANY content: not just any raid CM, but even HT CM is being sold now.

[My biggest "Pain point" with WvW atm]

6 minutes ago, Jitters.9401 said:

You have never stepped into WvW have you? What you just wrote tells me this. 

 

Pve mobs/bosses never change.  Once you know the rotation that's it. Easy Peasy. Do it until you win. 

 

I solo roam. I regularly fight multiple humans.  Not pve mobs or bosses that run the same abilities/patterns every time you fight them.

 

With humans you need to be aware of much much more than any pve battles. 

 

You need to be aware of the classes and sub classes. So one fight I come across could be condi virtuoso + mechanist. Another fight could be dps virtuoso + scrapper + soul beast.

 

Then by how they move/act/react I need to determine "On The Fly" are they bunker, are they glass, are they in the middle. 

 

I also have to figure out in a hurry their skill rotations used. I need to figure it out in the first 5 seconds of a fight as well as make sure to keep in mind at what point they use their heal skills so I can capitalize on that. That includes tricking them into thinking I am about to go down when in reality I am setting them up. 

 

No fight is the same unless it is the same person/people, same build(s), every time. 

 

When I took on 6 Humans and won. I had to move in a way to keep them huddled to where my aoe attacks could hit the max number. That means knowing who my opponents are (melee,ranged,mix thereof) and again, on the fly, changing how move to compensate for how they act.

 

I did world of warcraft and raided a lot. Once you knew the timing that was it. Succeed, don't succeed.  Either way you retry using the exact same rotations/skills till you succeed.

 

But wvw is infinitely more complex than simple pve.

 

In PvE you just have to learn a finite set of movement/skills/ and trust others to do their roles properly.

 

In WvW I have to figure out everything by myself while adapting... and that includes adapting to any changes they make to try to out maneuver me. 

 

So while you learn 10 things over a longer period of time that others figured out for you, I'm learning and adapting to 2x 3x 4x 5x as many things you are depending on how many opponents I face, in every fight, in a mere fraction of the time you used to learn repetitive patterns from pve mobs/bosses. I will even go through combat logs just to make sure I know where I am weak depending on what I just faced or to correct mistakes.

 

I write this using "I" but the reality of it is that everyone in wvw has to do this but with varying degrees of success. 

Yeah PVE is BY FAR the easiest and least time consuming way to get legendary armor. Even if you only ever pug raids.

[Target Painters Are Your Friend. USE THEM]

4 hours ago, Jitters.9401 said:

When in WvW....

(1) I make my inventory window as small as possible.

(2) I place my inventory weapon right  above skills 8,9,10 of my skill bar in an easy to reach location.

(3) In my most left "Shared Inventory Slot" I place my target painters.

 

If I am on a mount, and I know I'm going to go after a thief/deadeye I hit "I" to bring up my inventory window , double click the target painter stack, then no matter how I dismounted, as long as I am 1200 or closer I throw it at my target. 

 

If I am somehow not in range I weapon swap it away, but my inventory window is open for when I need to grab one quickly. 

 

I do not like any build that has close to unlimited stealth capability so I remove it from them. Then they die.

 

Nigh permanent stealth builds tend to get arrogant and cocky. Remove stealth and 90% of the time they panic and the fight is much easier. 

 

This is a good suggestion actually. I always have to bait stealth classes by not healing so they don't run away and try to get the kill, but this is actually better: I don't need to pretend and just erase them out of existence

[My biggest "Pain point" with WvW atm]

1 minute ago, Jitters.9401 said:

Never done a raid.

Never done a strike.

 

In WvW i have to keep moving and changing maps so I can make sure I stay at max participation. 

 

So question...

If someone spends 2 hours in a raid/strike (arbitrary number) while I am non stop moving for 2 hours in WvW to keep max participation...  then why is my effort considered less in worth by pve people? 

 

I'm literally moving non stop. I would actually like to run yaks and guard towers but to do so means I lose participation so I don't. 

pve does not require you to play the game mode for 17 and a half hours a week. You may not be skilled/experienced enough to kill the raid bosses and so your expected weeks to get a leggy set my be double the theoretical minimum, but I reckon most people can pug their way to 12-15 LIs / week with a 3-4 hour time investment. And you need 150 LIs for the first legendary set. 

[My biggest "Pain point" with WvW atm]

39 minutes ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

oh right. I never looked into that because I hate PvP (in GW2 at least) and people always say that WvW takes the longest so I just assumed they knew what they were talking about. So I looked it up and it says that you need to complete 3 seasons of PvP, but also with a non-season month in between each season. So yeah, that does make it longer. Well, one more reason why OW PvE'ers would not choose the PvP route then.

You are not thinking straight. People can do the math on how many matches and hours of play are needed to get the Byzantium chest in pvp assuming Gold 2 or 3 (assuming this is the average player) rating and a 50% win rate.

A new player in wvw gets 6-8 pips every 5 minutes (with wood done the previous week) and needs 1450 pips to get diamond every week. Assuming 7 pips/5 minutes you need 208 ticks or 1040 minutes per week. That's roughly 17 and a half hours a week.

In 17 and a half hours you could play around 70 pvp matches (I counted 14.5 minutes per match including queue and set up). A 35-35 record at Gold 2/3 should get you Byzantium or very close. 

So the time investment for 1 week in wvw is about the same as a the time investment required for a whole season in pvp, if your goal is the leggy armor.

Pvp, unlike wvw and pve, also does not require to gear up and has significantly better rewards than wvw.

[My biggest "Pain point" with WvW atm]

9 hours ago, BlaqueFyre.5678 said:

Pvp takes longer than WvW to acquire the Legendary armor a total of 26 weeks vs 22

You can't compare the time investment in pvp v wvw. In the hours you spend to get diamond in wvw how many times will you get the final chest and rewards in pvp?

WvW has the lowest barriers to get legendary armor, but the time investment is many times higher than both pvp and pve.

[Please stop players getting into keeps and towers with no siege]

40 minutes ago, Daredevil.2745 said:

What is not bannable is allowed, have fun loosing upgraded keeps and towers! Working as intended.

But then Anet should just come out and say it's ok: exploits are not hacks. Then we'd all be doing it and it would be fine. However as long as Anet sticks to the story this is bannable, then they need to act accordingly.

Interestingly I also caught the group probably doing it. Me and 2 other roamers killed all 6 of them. It's funny how it's always people who can't play resorting to these sort of things or who make towers and keeps into death stars building siege right up to the limit, isn't it?

[Please stop players getting into keeps and towers with no siege]

29 minutes ago, Daredevil.2745 said:

You simply need to scout better and fight those players open field so they don't have chances to jump over gates.

Yeah I will get into the 3rd server's keeps without siege and scout for them

[Please stop players getting into keeps and towers with no siege]

1 hour ago, Svarty.8019 said:

Hahaha, such optimism! 

Every now and again we need to bring this up so they don't think we forgot or think it's ok.

This type of thing is worse than the worst balance they ever managed to create.

[Please stop players getting into keeps and towers with no siege]

The situation is actually ridiculous with BB, I think the majority of towers and keeps they flip are done this way.

 

Fix it.

[World Linking 9/30/2022]

1 hour ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

You want to screenshot this? the wiki and scoring sites have them as host with no link in t5.

Must have been something with the api following the beta I guess. Now it looks correct.

[World Linking 9/30/2022]

What happened today? It seems the linking has changed and Baruch Bay is a link, not even a host server??????

[A "thank you" for rifle mechanist]

2 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

It still worked out to have the same 40k cap, though, and I was referring to the balance protocol from way back before he was in charge. It was pretty predictable (until, perhaps, now) that any build that got to 41k was going to eat a nerf, pretty much without fail, and pretty much as far back as I've been paying attention to the benchmarks.

I'm pretty sure the 40K cap was a philosophy that was independent of whoever was in charge of balancing at the time (again, until, possibly, now, since the new team has expressed that they understand now that balancing based on optimal conditions wasn't the right approach).

That's the "decide how much DPS they want the average endgame content player to achieve" part, whether that number is 34k or even lower. Nerf the rifle metanist down to that point, and then balance other power specs to a point where they are competitive with rifle mechanist in the hands of the average endgame player. The ease of rotation makes it a suitable, well, benchmark spec for pegging at whatever they want a typical player to be doing, while allowing players who learn more difficult rotations to be able to get above that. Get metanist down to the numbers they consider reasonable, and then aim to balance other power specs so that they're used roughly as much.

Yeah and when players who only want the 0 APM build will complain they are 35th on the benchmarks or quit, I will still be here arguing how that build may need more nerfs because the damage in raids is not 35th but 10th.

The funny thing is that these people who like to offend others on forums think those calling for nerfs do not play mrchanist themselves, so they don't know things first hand...

[A "thank you" for rifle mechanist]

7 hours ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

You'd better hope they don't follow your advice because the picture is even more lopsided for less-skilled players than it is at the high end.  Pmech is the easiest build in the game to play and perform well with.  At the high end, players can match or exceed it on some of the highest performing builds as long as the range and passivity factors don't come into play too much.  But there is pretty much zero chance of any build competing with it at lower skill levels because it performs much closer to optimal than any other build realistically can.

This. It's laughable people are sneakily suggesting the idea that it is elite players who used to stack Catalysts who are now playing Mech. It's the people who found Virtuoso and Scourge too hard who are playing it in huge numbers. Either way, whatever the reason this spec has 33% representation it must be nerfed into the ground and Grouch seem to have understood that.

[A "thank you" for rifle mechanist]

28 minutes ago, Lynx.9058 said:

What's vital to the longevity of the game is not driving away players, and PROPER balance.  "nerfing into the ground" is just as bad for the game as a spec being overtuned.

Just to clarify since there seems to be a misunderstanding here: nerf ro the ground = nerf way way below the benchmark of any build which actually requires some effort to play. Because rifle mech requires no effort and it's fully ranged the gap between benchmark and actual performance is much lower than for any other build, this also needs to be accounted for, not just the benchmark in a vacuum (which is already a problem in its own right).

14 minutes ago, Lynx.9058 said:

In a 10 man raid, 3 of any one class or spec comes out to that.  I've been in plenty of raids with 3 firebrands, because they've been about as overplayed as mechanist up until recent patches (and they're still probably second highest).

Dropping a DPS spec to 20k makes it irrelevant when there are at minimum 14 other builds capable of benching over 30k, and some of those offer just as much support at the same time.  Hell, there's a low intensity firebrand build right now that benches 34k with 17-19 APM; do you see anyone bitching about that like everyone is about mechanist?  No, because it's been that way for so long everyone has gotten used to it being an eternal FOTM.

You want better representation from other specs?  Get them buffed and made less intensive, and you'll see them more often.  Nobody wants to play weaver or holosmith or any other build that requires crippling APM to even make it onto the meters.

First that's an AVERAGE and it's so out of proportion that I don't even have to argue. Just go look at wingman data and tell us how many builds have ever passed 25% in the history of this game.

18-20k autoattack for a build which is very close to the benchmark in a raid scenario, with nearly 100% uptime being fully ranged, with golems ignoring mechanics players have to do is plenty to kill anything bar some CMs.

I won't be baited in the trite cop out that all other builds can be buffed far above mechanist so there is no need to nerf it. Power creep is bad for the game, autoattack builds that do more damage than the majority of builds including HI builds are bad for the game. The simplest solution is also the best. And it won't affect people who can't play HI builds because they will still be able to perform at a decent level with basically no effort. They simply won't be top dps anymore.

Also the difference between 19 APM and 0 APM should be clear to anyone.

[A "thank you" for rifle mechanist]

7 minutes ago, Lynx.9058 said:

What's vital to the longevity of the game is not driving away players, and PROPER balance.  "nerfing into the ground" is just as bad for the game as a spec being overtuned.

Yeah it's horrific for a game with 27 elite specs to have 1 with 33% representation in raids. Never before, even with just 9 elite specs, have we had 33% representation from a single one.

Players, good players, already quit when mech became utterly dominant. If players who want to press no buttons (and don't want to play the game) feel that doing less than 20k dps on the golem is not acceptable, they can 'play' something else, I mean some other game. 99% of GW2 players will have absolutely no problem with that, I promise you. Because ultimately having more viable specs and losing a few players ia definitely better than having 1 specialisation dominating and losing a lot of players.

Most of the threads on profession forums are about balance. That already tells you that's one if not the most important thing for a lot of players. 33% representation of a single specialisation is as little balance as anyone could possibly come up with, trying deliberately to favour one over the rest.

[Remove Mech's Trade-off too]

On 9/26/2022 at 7:24 PM, TexZero.7910 said:

You do realize that the site uses arbitrary reporting to dps.report right ?

That before arcdps was main stream there were entire eras of multiple classes being stacked.

If you don't let me remind you of when condi bersker was so dominant it took most of the DPS slots in a raid. We also had the age old 6/6 Necro and Ele dps days. Now we have people complaining about upto 4 slots being played by Mech. SMH.

You do realise you just made the case for 'before we stacked multiple classes and now we stack just mech', don't you?

Wingman's pretty clear that the representation mech currently has is unprecedented.

[Can we scale back wvw legendary armor requirements?]

7 hours ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

Also you need to get provsioner tokens. I got them for sigils and they're pretty annoying.

Basically you need to go one of a bunch of various vendors. They take some crap like obsidian shards but it's usually a specific type of rare armor. Problem is that it's time gated per item you can give so you usually have to go to a bunch of vendors. So I ended up parking multiple characters at the vendors with bags full of that crap.

It's annoying enough to make me glad I did WvW for armor.

  

That is true too. 2 wings were good enough for me, lol. I suppose I could do more if I had them on farm but there's a good reason they're weekly.

6 weeks seems realistic for someone that was already good at raids.

You can easily get around 13 tokens per day at a reasonable cost, if you can craft. Once you grt used to what you need to craft you can make the items you need almost automatically. 

[Can we scale back wvw legendary armor requirements?]

On 9/3/2022 at 12:44 AM, Endilbiach.4132 said:

They're a little ridiculous.  Assuming perfect weeks every week it takes 22 weeks to get the set of legendary armor that looks the same as the precursor, 29 weeks to get the fully blinged out version.

Compare that to raid armor, and it takes 6 perfect weeks (less now actually) for the first set of legendary armor and 12 perfect weeks (again, less now) for the next sets.  That's 28 weeks of clearing every raid wing to get every suit of legendary armor, vs 22 to 29 weeks to get a SINGLE suit of wvw legendary armor.

And the Raid armor is supposed to look way cooler and be the 'be all and end all' of armor.  There are plenty of players who want legendary armor but can't do raids, can't drop thousands upon thousands of Mystic coins or whatever they're trading for that now for the credit for the raids, and look at the wvw requirements and realize that it's never happening.  Case in point, the last person I spoke to about this?  Their first suit of leggie armor was from wvw, it took them 18 months.

Literally all I'm asking for here is that we roll back how many skirmish tickets it takes, the current amounts are patently absurd.

If you play wvw then you will get the first set much faster than 18 months even assuming you don't play enough to get diamond every week (which is almost certainly more than 2 hours per day). When you start getting 12, 13 pips per tick it will go much faster. But hey you could invest in a tag, learn to lead and make your life easier by running your own open tag. Yes, PVE is faster and requires a different kind of time commitment (you need to raid all wings, so realistically you will need to raid with a static group). If you do 2 wings per week (reasonable for most people for a night) and get, say, 8 LIs, it will take you 19 weeks. Of course you only need to play 1 night a week instead of several hours per day but in WvW you can afk and you don't need to be on your toes and focus for 2 hours. You can leisurely flip camps while watching tv or something.

PvP will also take longer than 22 weeks for most people btw. It greatly depends on the offseasons.

[The actual balance of Mechanist]

3 hours ago, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

It's the fallacy of finite definition.  To accurately describe reality would require an infinite amount of words, so it is disingenuous to latch on to whatever factor wasn't included, and hypocritical to then do it yourself.  There were a lot of small differences in how each of the builds and strategies worked, but at the end of the day I used the old rev AA build to solo champion and legendary mobs without dodging, and it did comparable damage to the current day rifle mech.  

Show me the 33% rev representation in raids in whatever period of your choosing and then you will have a semi-reasonable, semi-intelligible point and we can debate the merits of your claims. Next.

[The actual balance of Mechanist]

47 minutes ago, pallas.8150 said:

An easy spec should do less damage and have less access to supports.

A harder spec should be able to do more damage and have access to more supports.

You can both do things - but the one putting in the time and effort should be able to do it better.

 

 

 

How people don't understand that taking 4k (benchmark mind you, it would be lower in less ideal situations) baseline damage is not gonna make Mechanist disappear is frankly beyond human comprehension. It would still be very usable and because how easy it is to use, it would have solid representation, probably more than any other spec. It's just that the next steps in terms of difficulty like virtuoso or scourge would take some of its share if they were doing reliably more damage in actual encounters (and more complex build even more than that).

What it's frankly baffling is that a minority of people argue that mechanist should stay top dps in the pug meta on a AA based build. 

[Quick Update on the Skills and Balance Team]

7 hours ago, thorrand.6548 said:

Then don't play it? The fact it's played so much is a decent indicator they did something right. Before I had a viable alternative I would putter around between all of the professions and decide what I had the reaction time to play that day. Now on my bad days I still have something I can pick up and play and not be a hindrance to group content. It got me confident enough to dip my hand into fractals and soon would like to try strikes. Calling for nerfs to that instead of suggesting buffs other professions need is not good for people like me. It really makes me feel unwelcome in the community.  

The fact that it's played so much is just an indication of how IMBALANCED that spec is. And you are wrong feeling unwelcome: the people who are unwelcome are those NOT playing mechanist as groups clearly exhibit in lfg.

As I said, if you did 25k instead of 29k autoattack damage on the golem, absolutely nothing would change for you or your experience of the game. If you cannot play anything more complex than an autoattack build which would now do more damage than AA mechanist, then you will still be playing AA mechanist and do enough damage to clear any group content bar HT CM.

I don't get why people a small minority of people feel the need to whine and moan, when there is overwhelming evidence that there is a massive imbalance, it's a massive problem and it's massively bad for the game as a whole. Nerfing mechanist AFK damage will not make it unusable, it will make it comparable to everything else this game has to offer.

[Quick Update on the Skills and Balance Team]

38 minutes ago, pallas.8150 said:

I see it as they acknowledge that there has been no overall philosophy and its been based on the individual hired at the time rather than the company as a whole.

I think Josh has received the memo (ie the wrath of the playerbase) and understood that it is important that balance is really a necessity - and has been putting together the infrastructure internally to support it. These things do take time.

 

Well when he tried to do some damage control after that 28 June debacle, he clearly stated that they had a balance philosophy, it may not be written, but it was a thing and they would formalise it and share it publicly. He never said he had received incorrect information and there was no such thing, no philosophy, no guidelines, no wider concepts behind balance decisions. I mean, we all assumed it and you talking about a new infrastructure is also speculation, but he never retracted his original statements on the matter. If he's now instructed his team to come up with a logical policy from scratch, that's great. Perhaps he can confirm this is the case.