Karagee.6830

hahaha, ok so you are not able to provide evidence of the fake news you repeated in this thread, you are not able to provide any logical reasoning to why mechanist has 26% representation and these other builds are nonexistent, but you refuse to listen to explanations by people who understand the issue with this. Virtuoso is not comparable to power mechanist, none of the builds you suggested are comparable to mechanist. You cannot compare a 30+ APM build to a 0 APM build. Comprendes? 'Easy' rotations lol This is so wrong on so many levels that it suggests a disconnection in basic level of understanding. If you cannot understand why 26% (of which 2/3 are not support) representation for an elite spec out of 27 available specs is a problem for this game, in particular now that we are about to get an influx of new players, then you're on your own. Let me just say that the justification for buffing this braindead build was to allow more freedom in raids for people to pick whatever they like to play (in particular those who can't play difficult builds to a satisfactory level) and that the effect has been the exact opposite (forced people to play this spec to get into raids). No, I think able people should do more damage by pushing buttons and playing that game than not pushing buttons and not playing the game.

You are in denial if you keep harping about nonexistent builds. I have already explained none of those builds perform the same as power mech with autoattacks and 0 apm. Now please, provide autoattack benchmarks to support your claim or stop spreading fake news and misinformation, thank you. If you want to say that virtuoso which has the second highest representation in raids among non-support is also quite easy to play that's fine, but it's a different story. Again, for the millionth time, the problem with mech is the COMBINATION of overtuned damage, utility and survivability, with no effort or next to no effort. It's a problem of convenience, which is also why virtuoso, and not other builds, are comfortably second behind mechanist. Would you rather get $10 million for free by doing absolutely nothing or $11 million by working for a year in a mine 12 hours a day? Disabled people would be able to play power mechanist (but no other imaginary autoattack build) in raids even if it did 5k+ less damage, so your other argument is also completely irrelevant.

Ah the irony about complaining about people (rightfully) complaining. No we want mechanist nerfed to be in line with every other auto attack build in the game and clearly below, let's say 35%-40% below at least one high intensity build per specialisation (including the very same mechanist). 20k dps is plenty to kill things in raids, you will need to do mechanics or push buttons for more dps. And until all other classes are at that level, mechanist should be brought in line with everyone else. Also it's not a matter of wanting to play mechanist or not, it's a matter of not getting into any raid as a pug with other builds, because it's required by whoever runs the group. Mechanist is the most toxic specialisation in the history of gw2 and that includes broken spvp and wvw builds.

Denial is truly scary. People play power mech because they can just autoattack and do more damage than with any other build and more (or very close) damage than other classes played at their best. It's also been repeated ad nauseam that benchmark and performance in actual encounters are very different things and that the former is a guide and nothing more, because a build that can hit 40k dps with a perfect rotation may end up doing 30k or less in an acrual scenario where you need to move and the rotation breaks down (so the burn phases may not align well with your burst for example). Guess who doesn't have this kind of problems and therefore performs comparatively much better in an actual scenario? Auto-attack and low intensity builds. Thankfully Anet devs and balance team have finally understood that theoretical benchmarks are not the same as actual performance and that representation in groups is, in fact, a clear indication of performance/convenience. We've had plenty of builds at the top of the benchmark list with nearly zero representation in raids (less than 1%) for years. The problem is not that mechanist played to perfection does 37k damage and a bunch of other builds do 38k dps. The problem is that, if you ignore all of that and just press no button, you will do 75% of that benchmark and that's too much. And the fact that that kind of number is too much and the build has a greatly overtuned base damage for the utility, survivability and ease-of-play is very obvious when you look at class representation. I have not seen a single valid and rational argument to keep mech in the state it is other that we need to help disabled people (yes we learned there are a lot of such people who by their own admission play this game, that was news to me) succeed and we need to allow anyone who can't press buttons to kill every content the game has to offer. And even then there is no explanation on why only muchanist should be this way and the other 8 classes and 26 specialisations don't have anything remotely close to it.

yeah or when they go into wvw and suddenly all cc skills do no damage, because, you know, between 3.0 and 0.01 Anet could not find any suitable middle ground

I think there should be serious concerns about warrior having 2 viable specs on Tuesday next week for pve: power bladesworn and condi berserker (possibly both carrying banners). Power berserker will get a 3.5% or 4.5% dps increase from the 32k max damage gutter it's in, depending on whether we're talking about banner or dps, which isn't going to make it anywhere relevant. I can see warrior being among the most picked classes by steam new players. And while it does have 2 builds that can be played in endgame, one has a strange theme that is also frankly quite conflicting with the class description and doesn't play like a melee smasher and the other, well the other requires you to play with bow, arrows and a torch. I can see people being not very pleased having to go from core warrior to one of those options, thematically.

It's not a problem per se. But as people have repeated ad nauseam, it's a problem when that build does more or equal damage than medium and high intensity builds and there is no other comparable LI/afk build in terms of 'convenience' (ie. the combination of damage, utility, room for error, survivability and ease of play). If you had 4 or 5 of such afk builds, then it would not be such an issue, but we don't live in that parallel reality, do we? And before you tell me that build x or y can do as much damage as mech with just autoattacks (you are welcome to provide dps logs and show build and gear), please find a reasonable explanation of why we only see mechanists and none of those strutting around.

At the end of the day why those mechanists did the numbers they did is neither here nor there. They were picked for the job (most likely by people who can play multiple classes and builds at a very high level, mind you) and the successfully completed it. End of story. If your point is that other classes can do better, you cannot use the ranking within that party to justify your wrong opinion. You need to prove that a different composition performs better both in terms of efficiency and convenience/ease of play. For example you could start with bringing another 10 logs with no mechanist. What you are doing here is like saying heal scourge is not the best healer for boneskinner and then bring a log that shows he provided less sustain than the other support players. Yet somehow, not only that group, but every pug group always request and bring one scourge (except for that one time the raid leader wanted to do all strikes with only guardians)...

Then care to explain the actual numbers in raids? Because you know, you are entitled to have wrong opinions, but it's best if you reconcile them with the reality of class distribution first.

The point of contention is that rifle was the last straw, something that allowed a build already dominating the meta to get EVEN MORE featured because rifle has even MORE margin for error and easier damage uptime than other weapons. They REWORKED a core weapon for the class with the dominant specialisation, something they haven't done for any other class mind you, and issued nerfs left, right and centre.

The answer is obviously yes. You can't see how toxic this specialisation is and that's ok. There haa never been a specialisation crushing the pug meta like this before in this game. LI intensity builds always existed and were perfectly fine. What didn't happen is that raid leaders asked people to take those builds over anything else. THIS is toxic. Now you fixed inclusivity and (in theory) allowed more people to be able to clear content....by forcing players to play this toxic build. Is it progress because literally anyone can play it, even with one hand? No it's not progress, at least not the right kind. At best, you partially solved a problem and created another one. The trade-off between convenience and ease-of-play and effectiveness must be real, otherwise you will always end up in a situation where 1 espec dominates, 6 are viable and featured in the meta and 20 are useless or non-existent. A lot of players already quit after the 28/6 patch. New people from steam will pick classes they like, they won't pick based on raids. Engi has always been the no. 1 most disliked and least played class. Guess what will happen when people will ask them to reroll, level again from 1 to 80 and gear a mechanist for endgame content?

Ok let me ask people a very simple question about boon support builds, since it seems there is some communication disconnection between the 2 sides on this. Right now, we have a situation where 20% of slots in raids go to boon support and of that 20% mechanist and firebrand take around 15% (when you eliminate the numbers for the alternatives). So what percentage of the top 2 boon support builds do you think we should see going forward, to say the balance team has done a good job to make more or all support builds viable? To be perfectly clear if in the future tempest and druid are taking 15% of the spots the situation would be the same as now, balance-wise.

They just told you they will finally not balance around speedruns and you talk about...speedruns? In that kill you don't know the relative skill of players. Maybe the mech players are weaker than the other dpsers, not in the sense that they can't hit a tougher benchmark than Mech, but maybe they have trouble staying alive or performing some mechanics on other builds. The problem with mechanist is not just the dps that is too high for such an easy build, the real problem is overall convenience (and boon access). It's a similar problem it shares with firebrand and it has only marginally to do with rifle. Mechanist was this way even before rifle, mace is superior anyway, rifle just gave it an even easier option. This further increased the convenience and guess what? High Mech dominating numbers in raids increased even more. To be honest they badly miscalculated with the buffs from betas to Eod and then doubled down, this spec should have never been allowed to get into the game the way it did. But I guess it's good they seem to recognise there is a problem and are willing to learn from their mistakes.

Open World is irrelevant for balance purposes, because there are literally hundreds of builds that will allow you to solo the majority of content and many that will allow you to clear what was meant to be 5 man content. Most wvw builds with half decent sustain, even with adjustments or lacking gear or sigils or runes, will make you feel immortal in OW. Anyway this is not what Josh Davis meant with his statement about the change in philosophy. He meant that instead of focusing on benchmarks and theoretical theorycrafting they will focus on actual performance and actual group composition in endgame content. And frankly it's only logical because when you see a speedrun record you don't see the work that it takes for it to work, the wipes, the lucky breaks that go into it even with all the players being good to elite. And the main issue with afk and LI builds is that the gap between what is theretically possible (benchmark) and what is actually achieved is MUCH smaller than for normal and HI builds. So while one can check the benchmark for LI power mech and find it uninspiring in an ideal scenario, the actual performace in an actual encounter is comparatively MUCH better, because there is enormous room for error and any imperfection will not lower your dps or uptime. Taking an average of the dps done for each encounter will almost certainly show LI power mechanist having a much much higher floor than other dps options and a comparable ceiling in actual encounters.

And relinks every 2 weeks? This doesn't do anything for those stuck in T1 or T5 fighting the same people for the better part of 2 months. I mean they could reshuffle matches faster but the problem is that rewards are tied to matches also, if you change that then you need to link the reward system to the weekly reset rather than the match. Once you go down this path, why not shuffling every day (not in a promotion style system) and get some overall strength ranking (by team) based on the overall results

Presumably after they see what exactly they have created with this patch, since it is very much up in the air for everyone including the devs. I think it's better if they check what happens in pve first before adjusting coefficients in wvw and spvp, just in case. They made a lot of changes, imagine if the coefficients are not tuned right, stuff like rifle berserker may one-shot (ok, 2-shot in 2 seconds) people in wvw. They already could in the past.

yeah because power mechanists using kit (superior to rifle), flamwthrower (superior to rifle) and mace (superior to everything) don't exist. If you take some context around half of that 26% are dps. Count all the other support specs (give an estimate to the hfb v qfb split) and you can calculate it yourself.

Don't worry, it's all good. You seem to be well known around here lol. I am very confident what I say will happen, not least because people will continue to complain about it in large numbers. Despite all the evidence and common sense you see things differently. Good for you. It's good to be different. Good luck.

yeah I just saw I'm pretty sure I have been insulted also.

I don't care about power rifle mr strawman.

Can we report for trolling? I agree this is probably trolling.

You are right and if you make a poll on whether Mechanist should be brought in line, it would receive way more than 90%. The (very) few that don't want nerfs are asking for ALL other afk and LI builds to be buffed instead, imagine that. You seem to ignore that we've not seen stacking on this level since...we've never seen it, even when we had only 9 elite specialisations. Many of the people who play mechanist are among those who think it should be nerfed. Playing the most convenient build available is a perfectly rational choice and doesn't make them delusional. You also seem to be very confused about that 26%. Nobody is saying that mechanist has the highest benchmark. Nobody is saying you cannot play inferior specs to mechanist. This is why mechanist is 'only' 26%. However, because Anet's devs team has finally realised that top-end stacking of catalyst or bladesworn is irrelevant for 99.99% of the players in this game, while having 1 specialisation taking over 1/4 of the spots in the average raid is a problem, you are out of luck. I like how you dodged the point that one of us will be vindicated in the follow up patch. At this point I have to agree with others you have absolutely nothing constructive to add other than sneakily inserting borderline insults in your posts.

In the immortal words of @Josh Davis.7865. Following this change in philosophy (finally), Mechanist as currently constructed and utterly oppressing the pug meta IS NOT WELCOME IN THIS COMMUNITY.

exactly how polls also never work and are wildly inaccurate because there is no relationship between samples and distributions. Oh, wait. Let's recap the facts: Fact 1) A single elite specialisation (out of 27) has 26% representation Fact 2) The overwhelming majority thinks this is not ok and should be brought in line (and note that in this case, the vocal people are very much what matters and the fact that Anet already radically changed their approach is also a clear indication of this) Your argument is that, despite the above, you think I'm making baseless statements based on some imaginary world. Okay mate: do you agree that we will see who is right and who is wrong in the following patch, because it's going to go one way or the other?

Do you know how statistics work?