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Delete any skill with a power coefficient over 1.5 and poof 4/1 are not runnable anymore. Like someone said on a discord when everyone started the 4/1 meta: "this always has been the most efficient way to play. Having one dps able to do a 20k sure-hit has always been more efficient than having 2 dps that can't go over 10k in one burst". Other, less boring solutions, include (re)adding big boon rip bursts to the game. As for the "solution" of nerfing supports, it's actually only a solution because the 4/1 meta happened at the same time as anet nerfed the old scrapper and slightly buffed other supports. Top guilds were already running that comp before the chrono buffs, which only allowed it to be played by anyone. I'm very afraid that if you nerf support abilities too much, you will lock the game into having 4 /1 comps and nothing else. The truth behind people running 4/1 is that it is the only solution to have everything a support can offer at your disposal (strong heal, barrier, stability, aegis, cleanses, resistance, rezzes, alacrity, quickness, protection, fury, might, ritual of the great dwarf,...). Frankly, you could stack 3 supports and you would still miss at least 1 of those... which means that if the opposing zerg has them all, it is at a tremendous advantage and will probably win. The point of imbalance in there is that the same thing does not apply to damage. One player is enough to ditch out enough quantities of damage to compensate for having 4 supports. So, in conclusion : - if you reduce support without changing damage powerlevel, you just worsen the situation (maybe you will just force people to not go melee anymore since it will be death sentence... but pirateship metas are the worst kind of metas we've had in this game so far) - if you reduce support and the damage power level of the same ratio, then you actually did not change the situation - if you reduce power level and not support, you will give the possibility for people to make "pacifist blobs" that just can't be kkilled but won't be able to get kills unless 2-manning So that leaves it at : reducing both support and damage, but reducing damage slightly more in order for a 3/2 group to be able to kill 4/1 and for 4/1 not being able to pass through the support abilities of a 3/2. This will also force guilds to make choice about what support aspect they want to leave out (since 3 supports can't really cover all aspects).

well ok not so much compared to any other classes The only 2 classes that have a bigger hp pool than rev are warrior and necro... I don't know from what content you are talking from, but you should probably have a talk with your healers well they've been reworked since (and it was already annonced when you made this post). 2 remarks on that note : 1. Dwarf utilities are all used in different settings. You litterally have a CC (which you are expected to use), the best stab utility in the game (which you are expected to use) and an upkeep skill (which you are expected to use for energy managment) (which also happens to be the best maintained damage skill for revenant in a WvW setting). The elite is the only known counter to the current WvW zerg meta. Demon is more niche (but it's not far from being the only viable option for cRev), and when you equip it, you are using all its abilities. For Shiro, you're either using IO or the rest of its kit. AAAND I hope you're not using impossible odds in PvP... 2. When you compare revenant as a whole to other classes as a whole, the amount of skills you don't use on other classes is far higher. You just don't notice it because you don't slot them. And since revenant has access to two times (3 times for vindicator) the utilities of other classes, I'd say being forced to take 1 or 2 that you will only use in specific situations is a correct trade-off. - dwarf chains - demon pull - ventari knockdown - shiro elite (with stab rip on shiro if you play herald) - glint elite - kala has a daze - axe 5 - hammer 5 - short bow 5 I mean, I didn't even count sources from the conditions, and rev applies a lot of them Let's not forget the fact that revenant has the brutality trait, which can ensure a CC to pass against ennemies using stability if your timing is right Best ranged spike damage non-projectile weapon, maybe after mesmer's greatsword. I mean, this has been the go-to dps weapon in pirate ships metas from 2015 to EoD (with a few months of scourge-based pause in 2017) Conclusion Revenant is maybe not the "best class" ... but it's clearly not the "worse class". You clearly have all the tools at your disposal to do any content, be it PvE, WvW or sPvP. What I can say maybe is that in competitive modes, rev asks you to be able to understand what your opponent is able to do to 1v1 them, just because you have a lot more planning to do with energy management and the fact that all your tools are not always directly at you disposal. Which means it's a very rewarding class to play in those modes. In the end, you can find comments like you own in every class profession : - thief and elem and guard will complain about low health bars, and probably other design choices specific to their classes - rangers will complain about pet design that limits all specs except soulbeast - inge will complain about being a flipper ball class in terms of balance - war will complain about the design of some skills on greatsword, about the state of berserker (despite it being the only consistently played war e-spec) - mesmer will complain about all their utility skills being niche - necro will complain about their e-spec not being the ultra-top dps in every encounter I mean, you can take it from this list that the game is in a very bad shape, and in some ways it is (just look at the WvW zergs). Or you can look at it as each class having a design flaws which comes as a trade-off from their strenghts -- which we all tend to forget about when talking about these topics.

AoC is being designed around this. Your idea will just have the effect of spreading the whole WvW population from 5x4 maps to at least the double of that. Not mentionning most PvE maps are just not designed for competitive encouters. straight up a bad idea.

While you are mostly right in what you are saying here, some corrections though : - the first healing spot for druid is not regen, it's glyph of the stars (even in normal version). If you play with karakosa and stone spirit, it's in the third position. And if you combine all AC abilities together, it's even the fourth spot. - druid has a bit of utility outside of raw numbers nonetheless, since it has better stealth save than scrapper, and for smaller scaled content can stop stealth save *on target* with sic'em (which one of the 3 abilities in the game able to do this, albeit the least powerfull of those 3, but the only one on a viable support class) - you don't test actual survivability in your scenario, even less in the current meta. The question behind survivability is not so much a question of "time before downstate" than a question of leeway. No support in the game have the ability to counter a bomb. It was not the case during the herald/scourge Era, nor during the zerker era and much less the case in the holosmith meta we have now. What you should mesure is the ability for your dps to be able to evade the bombing. All other damage is litteraly irrelevant, and if It were to kill someone is more indicative of the level of the support player than anything else. That's even the reason I also said you are mostly right. The main aspect you should look to see if a class is "broken" or not support-wise is its ability to provide resistance, aegis, stability, stealth, quickness and alacrity in real situations. While you can say that "health is a timer" in most mmos where the ratio damage/health of players is being pushed towards the health, it's not really relevant in GW2. Any average players can reach numbers where they can kill any class in less than 4 seconds, and if their target is being healed I guess it can go up to 10 seconds at most. And that's only using mean numbers you would find with something like a ranger barrage - which is a known bad profiled damage skill. Most of the time, you will find yourself against an holosmith's overdrive or a zerker's greatsword burst that will just one-shot you. No timer there, you just didn't dodge when you should have. This is the real reason druid is not as op as arc dps shows.

If you are talking about WvW support, I'll ask you to consider this : - auramancer has about he same cleansing potency as druid, with a bit less flexibilty but more precision its usage - hvindi has the same healing potency as druid, a bit less cleansing power but can maintain resistance 100% of the time, which is more effective than any cleansing capacity - the weak point of hChrono is that it is on the weak side healing-wise (because it does not have the riffle yet) , but otherwise can litteraly replace any other support class (including firebrand) and still keeping leeway to have additional utility. - hScourge. Barrier, alacrity, and transfusion go brrr... I'm not saying that druid is not an excellent class that has high numbers. But keep in mind that druid has near 0 resistance (7 seconds over 30), which is the current meta defining boon since we are playing with 1 dps per sub and you better make sure weakness and blindness does not affect its damage even for a fraction of a second. Also arcdps is fine, but you need to critically think about it as well. Druid dispelling is strong phases where a pulsating AoE can tick multiple times (during crosses or in Chinese gameplay for example), which are situations that are enabled because there are a lot of hvindi and hchrono. So druid basically leeches its own numbers because classes with a bit less over cleanse potential allows for the dps to bathe in enemy bombing.

Fortunately, you are already getting this, and gaining a weapon that doesn't suit your class fantasy will not take away any existing option you already have. The only reason you would find to want a weapon other than class fantasy are gameplay related... and ranger certainly does not need another projectile weapon in its kit . We already have LB (power), SB (condi), axe (mid distance both power and condi), half of OH dagger,m and half of OH axe, half of torch (the three of them having one melee and one projectile), which makes for half of the ranger weapons with at least half their kits based upon projectiles. Not mentioning that often when you ask yourself if a class need a weapon for a gameplay related reason, you often wonder "what weapon can fit this niche that I want to cover ?" Rather than "what niche can I find for this weapon that I want ?". If both questions are fine to you, I hope you're not the kind of person to complain about fan service in other games. Seriously, the only reason I see anyone would want a riffle on ranger is because they want a WoW hunter fantasy (TM) in GW, and don't want to understand that the day it will be delivered is the day anet stopped making an effort to fit marketed content of new paid expansions with the boundaries they set themselves.

yeah, and the game is better like that. the time people used PVT gear was before the siege rework, when a single siege weapon could go far over 100k damage (maybe the AC could only go up to 72k over all its pulses), and even then with the knowledge of the game we have now I'm not sure we would have used PVT gear at all anyway. Furtermore, and if memory serves well, there was at most 1 year between the siege rework and the introduction of minstrel gear, which rendered completly pointless the use of statistics like PVT. Your "before the age of boon" at most refers to this time frame, and it's a time when having boons or not was the difference between random pick ups and organized guild raids. Or maybe, just maybe, players finally understood that spezializing offers better results than every one being tanky. But it has nothing to do with the matter at hand, which is "is boonball the worst meta yet ?", the anwser being clearly "no, even if it has not enough counters in the current balance".

Augury Rock on EU, litteraly a mid tier server

you say that, but I had to wait 15 minutes for a queue to drop yesterday in order to be able to play, it was not even prime time yet and all 4 queues were up. Maybe you're just on server that was deserted recently due to a guild leaving ?

I said "the expection is to counter a zerg using a zerg". Did not speak about boon balls. And if you're making that remark, then you clearly missed the point of my message. The point of that particular sentence is that it is a choice that I find reasonnable to not allow 3 players on siege to stop 50 players from playing. Nothing more. The reason I spoke about the boonball earlier with my comment is that I stand on my point that I prefer boonballing to pirateshiping, but also that I also would prefer it they sped up a bit the fights as long as we stay in a melee meta. And doing that requires one thing : un-nerfing the boonrip.

In pirate ship, 2/5th of the squad had something to do while the rest sit and watch just in case the ennemy would be bored with kitting and would decide on doing a stealth bomb more or less skillfully, resulting in your zerg just all backpedaling for 18 seconds. I don't call that "fun". At least melee-range metas do require you to be very reactive, to know the difference between 240 and 450 range and actually needs you -and your support- to find your keyboards. The triple support compositions we have today is also a result of melee skills being tendancially more dangerous, meaning you need less dps players to generate downstates and more supports to survive. Also currently, engaged zergs have a harder time to disengage, which means that if you decided to go in-fight you have to commit. There's not as much of this "back and forth" that was just not fun. Again, the fact that reacting supports, especially the chronomancer and the vindicator are so strong due to the boonrip being low in the current meta is the problem. But I prefer that over the time when you just stacked dps scourges and that was it. The conscious choice behind the balancing here is that you need a zerg to counter a zerg. Which is kind of a reasonable expectation. 1. if you can use 40 sieges, then you actually have the better option of engaging yourself rather than arrowcarting the f* out of your ennemies. Siege shouldn't be the most efficient course of action if you stack enough that you need a zerg to operate all of them. 2. Siege is mainly used in order to discourage groups to attack structure if they are not organized enough. The max I'd excpect out of siege is to slow down organized groups, not stop them. If you want that, you can still go and see how siege is done in Warhammer RoR and how castle sieges are about 5 people doing a QTE while the 45 other are just staring at their screen 50 meters back, because if the ennemy decides to use the oil they just one shot the whole zerg. 3. Adding a boon rip on a high cooldown for arrowcarts may be a good idea, though (btw, you can still strip the stab with the 2nd skill of the shield generator) 4. Poison won't reduce much healing if it's cleansed.

Not saying the boon ball meta is good, but I disagree it's the worse one yet. Pirate ship scourge was boring AF. At least now, melee uptime is high, which I find far better.

Tested it with our guild (WvW-oriented). I don't know for PvE, but this weapon just is not supportive enough on bladesworn or berserker, and makes spellbreaker feel a worse version of greatsword scourge (heal or power). I don't know the tooltip is incorrect or if there's a bug, but it indicates "3 unblockable" in WvW and only provide one per target (is 3 in PvE). I do admit that only one single unblockable in WvW, combined with the fact that the effect only procs on ally-targeting, makes the weapon really meh/won't use-tier. I still wouldn't use it in blobs -only in small scale- anyway, but I do admit I don't see much use for the weapon as currently. I could even stand a much higher cooldown, in exchange for more stacks. The effects of the second skill are... how should I say... underwhelming ? At least make it a leap finisher, or something, because except moving, we don't get much from using it.

So, we just finished our tests with my guild. For context, we are mainly WvW players and are seeing the weapons from this point of view. We did not exactly tests numbers yet. The ranger weapons are about the only ones for which we don't have concerns about their real viability. Both the dual masses and the mass/WH seem to be karakosa-compatible, which is actually more than enough to turn any weapon support-oriented. If I could make my chirstmas whishlist, I'd maybe ask for the condition-removal on the fourth skill to affect ally as well (even if when you only apply damage) and the heal on the second skill to become a barrier. But hey, good enough without that. Also, thank you for not making the fifth skill static (maybe the fifth skill on rev's shield next time ? :p). This was THE thing I was afraid of. Edit I'll also add that I actually did not try to proc that force of nature buff, just used the mass for double-blasting with WH. I'm not really sure that buff is practical currently, as it requires too much time to build. I really hope it will either be subject to better quality of life or won't be taken into account when balancing the weapon effects

Funny, I have screenshots from AR discord that say the exact opposite. Maybe FSP is doing it on purpose, I don't know. As long as you don't provide the so-called proof from both discord, I suggest people to take this message with a grain of salt EDIT : and by "proof of match manipulation", I mean message where people say they target equal score in order to keep UW in T5. Not messages where people ask to "come play to even the score" because they don't want to be demoted.