Darklord Roy.2514

No, I meant objectively. People can still dislike changes even if they are undoubtedly positive for the overall health of the game.

Okay, look. I haven't seen a single piece of positive feedback to this release that didn't come with some bit of caviat or constructive criticism of the various features. We all know it isn't perfect and there are plenty of things that *need* to be changed for the overall health of the game. HOWEVER. You are being an absolutely unhinged doomer child with this post. You act as if there is not a single even remotely positive or redeeming quality about any features of the expansion, as if the entire world is falling down around you, and that is OBJECTIVELY untrue. Take the wizard's vault, for instance. The single biggest complaint that everyone has with the game right now. I completely agree that it 100% sucks that we are locked into 3 specific tasks each day in the current iteration with no option to do a variety of tasks, regardless of what game mode you pick. You get 3 (plus logging in) and you have to do every single one of them for the daily reward, period. That does suck. On the flip side, the actual vault rewards themselves are.... pretty sweet? People have worked out the math and if you're diligent about doing dailies and weeklies you can still earn pretty close to the same amount of gold/laurels/clovers/etc as the old system AND have leftover AA to buy other rewards. Being able to choose which rewards you want is undoubtedly better than the previous "you get what you get" system, they just need to focus on fixing the actual dailies themselves. That's a you problem, not a game problem. Myself and the vast majority of other players don't have any issue getting around the new maps, and they're fun to explore. Blatantly untrue, you have nobody to blame for this but yourself. This was announced MONTHS ago. I think you just needed something to be angry about without any thought to any other emotions and this fit the bill. Nothing is AS BAD as you're making it out to be.

Soooo here's the problem. There are a *lot* of people on the flip side of the coin from you. There are players who despise PvE so much that they pretty much exclusively play this game for either PvP or WvW (or a mix of both). Enter in the fact that every single legendary weapon requires you to play PvE to some extent, and yet somehow these players who hate PvE so much are still going out completing their legendaries. Gen 2 legends are an even bigger standout since you can't just buy them from someone, and on top of the usual map completions you also have to grind a bunch of account bound currencies for them. And then you have your Gift of Battle, which as others have pointed out requires the utmost minimum effort in WvW to actually get. If you don't like normal WvW activities, the game isn't forcing you to do them. You can run around slapping guards and completing the easy dailies on a regular basis, and it won't take more than 15 minutes of your day if you don't want it to. Point being, you got the easy end of the stick. Crafting legendaries has always been something for fully dedicated players since the game's inception. If you aren't able to fully dedicate, grind for gold and buy a Gen 1 or Gen 3. If you desperately want a Gen 2, you're gonna have to suck it up like everyone else who takes the time to do all the steps even if they don't enjoy every aspect.

I get the frustration, Gyula Delve had super questionable story and it's a pretty bland strip of content overall (even though the metas are insanely profitable from a GPH standpoint). LWS1 is just rehashed old content released over several months that we got a single strike from. It hasn't really been all that exciting this year for long term players. However, this whole notion of "I don't like this content so you have just been wasting time" is a bit of a nonsensical argument. LWS1 may not have been a fun, new release for us veterans, but it was also 100% necessary for them to re-release it into the game for the sake of new players. For more than 9 years the story has been missing that section of story between core and HoT, and it has been a sore spot for new lore enthusiasts. Gyala Delve was far from a perfect set of releases, but it still gave us a brand new pretty map with an actually popular meta. On top of working on those two things, they've been working on the expansion and balance/QOL updates this entire time. It also took a fair bit of their time to implement the Steam release late last year, which led to a pretty sizeable surge in new players. It hasn't been my favorite year of the game either, but to insinuate that they haven't done ANYTHING for the game and they're just twiddling their thumbs is just a huge disservice to the game development industry. Much more has happened for the game because of the things they've done than you give them credit for.

People often forget that shredder gyro is like, 8 or 9 whirl finishers? I can see why they avoided implementing that, it would just be quickness spam on 1 ability. Ease of access to boons on supports is definitely weird right now. Classes like Deadeye can more or less do it brain dead, while Druids have to be olympic medalists to keep all of their standard boons up with no falloff.

You've either intentionally or otherwise ignored the point of my reply, so my conversation with you has ended. Hope you can get over your leering self-righteousness and learn to actually converse with other humans.

It is not a meaningless discussion if it provokes thought in a constructive way. That's all I came here to do, provoke thought and bounce ideas off of my peers (and maybe dream a little). I'm not gonna call you a jerk for wanting engage in a complicated conversation topic that suits your train of thought, there's nothing wrong with that. What I won't entertain, however, is this idea that wanting to partake in an active, civil discussion about something less complex automatically means that we "don't know what we're talking about" or that the discussion has no value. I have a firm enough grasp of game design and development to understand exactly what I'm suggesting without you having to explain every facet of it to me in a condescending way. These forums are a place for the community to come together and discuss problems and questions with like minded individuals. Not a place for you to bash other people's conversations because they aren't as "big brained" as you are. Either discuss the actual topic at hand in an appropriate manner or find a more suitable thread to discuss your deeper rabbit hole of thoughts.

Gonna take this little snippet into account. This is exactly the opposite of what I am suggesting. The entire point of my desire to remove quickness and alacrity is to remove the crutch of needing them to make builds viable in the first place. Removing quickness and alacrity will REQUIRE Anet to balance around the removal, not just take them away and say "good luck." Going to your point about build diversity, I'm of the opinion that there is no *good* reason that any number of builds should be deemed "not viable" or "barely useable" solely based on their ability to provide quickness or alacrity. Forcing every build in the game, whether it is the top of the meta or just a middling build, to take one of these two boons in order to keep up with every other build is not build diversity. Apologies for not mentioning other bits of your post, I'm trying to keep the topic as focused as possible. Again, I understand where you're coming from with the science perspective, but I think part of the reason you may have gotten disheartened the last time you wanted to discuss this concept is that when people want to discuss concrete issues, going off on several tangents isn't going to make them pay more attention or understand better.

You've kinda dodged the issue that Scourge players have with this change. Passive buffs aren't the issue, it's the fact that your shades, which are the core identity of Scourge, had their active time cut by over half to bake in a change that should have been put onto a different trait. Changing the passive buffs doesn't fix the issue, which is that now you actively *need* to spam shades to keep your AoE's active instead of being able to reposition them reactively. Same thing goes for their barrier application, you're forced to spam out barrier off CD to keep up alacrity instead of saving it in fights for when you actively need to protect your team from big damage. Herald is admittedly in a similar position as before, but again, now you *have* to swap legends at sometimes inopportune moments in order to keep up your quickness. This brings up another thing a lot of people are bothered by, which is why some support classes rely on getting concentration to maintain boons and others don't. New druid has to jump through so many different hoops to provide its normal boons, yet classes like chrono and herald can just kinda do it automatically without having to worry about it. That's all baked into a similar issue.

All classes having them is one hurdle to jump on it's own, and I've gone over my thoughts on that in some of my other replies. However, the MAIN issue that myself and a lot of people are having is the way that Anet elects to make changes centered around them. The June patch is the most recent example of them making massive, drastic changes to mechanics that are central to some specializations in the name of them trying to bulldoze in quickness and alacrity changes, but it's certainly not the first time it's happened.

Well, yes. I get where you're coming from, from a metaphysical standpoint at least. The concept of separating games by the categories you've listed certainly exists and plays a role in determining the level of complexity and "difficulty" that balancing a game can be. The thing about it is, I'm not really been trying to dive into the scientific reasoning behind how games are balanced or why changing aspects of games can change their base nature. I've broached the topic of quickness and alacrity because they are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the biggest outliers when it comes to balancing this game by far. Whether or not the conversation needs to be as deep or difficult to understand for the general public as your comment suggests, it is still a noticeable issue with the game's current state. All due respect, I know you put a lot of thought into this reply and you clearly have a strong opinion about it, but I don't think the conversation actually has to be that intrinsic unless we force it to be. As I've said, I know that adding or removing *any* integrated mechanics is inevitably going to be a complicated and transformative process for the team. However, regardless of what category the game transcends into after making changes, we are at a point where we have to start thinking about what is *best* for the game as a whole. It's apparent that the current way the game is being balanced (with a focus primarily around keeping quickness & alacrity in check, giving major alteration to class gameplay on a regular basis across the board to compensate for these boons) is making the playerbase generally unhappy and stressing the balance team out. The way they tend to haphazardly make wild changes to class-defining features is consistently causing the players to lose trust in them, and the June patch isn't the first time it's happened. Quickness & alacrity are the heart of this issue. They are so prolific in this era of GW2 that every single balance decision must be made with them at the front of the dev's minds. Compare that with other boons, like might or fury, which are (generally) self-sustaining enough that they can almost be afterthoughts during patch times. I feel that these issues deserve to be discussed, even if there IS some portion of the general playerbase that won't understand it as well as others.

Equally viable option. If the devs want the game to be faster, just make it faster at it's core without having to rely on conditional boons that force a certain style of gameplay. Then they don't have to tweak numbers nearly as much.

I think there's a happy median we can find with all builds even if both boons end up getting scrapped. If we see a world where they DO actually remove them, I would hope they would also take the time to heavily alter things like damage numbers and resource gains on a lot of skills across the board. For everything they take away from a build they're gonna have to give a little bit back, and with some time it could create a much happier and healthier game state without the need for the devs to devote so much time to these two specific boons.

Basically this. This is mostly how the original game was implemented, before alacrity existed and before everyone and their mama had access to group quickness, and it feels like it would lead to significantly higher build diversity and player retention.

Good insight and good read, thanks for that! I'd offer some quick counter points to some of what you've brought up. For one, GW2 is in an interesting predicament right now where, specifically with boons and unique modifiers, we are experiencing both homogenization and bloat at the same time. To the point that, on top of each class being able to do basically everything, there are so many modifiers available that all of them equate to about TRIPLE the size of the current buff bar UI. While that is a bit of a separate issue, I believe it lends a bit to the thought that removing one or two of the biggest outliers for balance issues wouldn't affect the overall state of the buff bonanza too heavily. In contrast, to a degree it feels like either removing or heavily restricting quickness and alacrity will actually open up build diversity, since not only would we not be relying on those boons themselves for determining our rotations, we also wouldn't be dedicating so many builds directly to their application. Currently, the state of the game for any content, whether it be group or solo for the most part, has just become "Guild Wars but faster" with how accessible quickness and alacrity are. Nearly every build in the game from open world to raids to WvW and PvP feel like they MUST have access to one or both boons in order to not completely fall behind their peers, which is inarguably an unhealthy game environment (especially for new players). Logically then, if these two boons have transformed from their original application to nothing but making it feel like the regular game but at 2x speed all the time, then removing them will do basically nothing except make the current game feels slower. That isn't inherently a good thing by itself, so what do we do next? The objective at that point becomes tweaking the numbers to make the game feel like it has returned to it's normal state to compensate, not too slow and not too fast. Granted, this would be a VERY involved process, since they would have to do one huge balance pass across not only damage numbers but also resource generation, mob and player health, some cooldowns, etc. That being said, I still think it would be worth the time taken to adjust all of this math to put balance in a healthier state compared to what they are currently doing, which is attempting to balance every aspect of the game around these two boons and making drastic, heavy handed changes that seem to have little to no foresight on how they actually affect the overall game outside of studio testing.

As described above, we've all had plenty of time to mull about the notorious June balance patch and I thought I'd get the community opinion on something. The big topic - have alacrity and quickness become such an issue for the balancing team that they should be removed from the game? This'll sound like heresy to a lot of people I'm sure, but hear me out. It truly feels like with the egregious changes in this most recent patch that quickness and alacrity have gotten so far out of hand that Anet themselves don't honestly know how to adequately balance around them. There is a constant juggling act of "we want to make this class feel individualistic to play, but we also have to make sure that we somehow shoehorn both of these boons into one of the classes specs so that it can keep up with the other classes." To make matters worse, Anet feels like they always have to force these applications to happen in a completely unique way for each class, and they're running out of ideas for it. I think it's pretty clear to everyone that it isn't optimal whatsoever to have these two completely 100% required boons be tied to important or situational class mechanics. Alacrity on Druid CA or Scourge barriers and quickness on Herald energy upkeep or Scrapper leap and blast finishers *specifically* (to name just a few examples, shoutout to Mesmer specs for having a foot in both camps) among many others, have overcomplicated things to the point that applying these two boons has now come before making the classes feel fun and rewarding to play. I've seen people argue that removing quickness and alacrity will homogenize the game and "make all the classes feel like they just do the same thing," without seeming to realize that this is... kind of already how the game is. Anet has taken a direction that every class has access to group quickness and alacrity in one shape or form. Generally speaking, I'm of a firm mind that they are an utter balancing nightmare for Anet, and if removing them entirely means the team doesn't feel the need to unexpectedly gut traits and skills across the board then I would rather do without them. They can still make group content fun and engaging to play without the crutch of these two boons holding their design space back. But these are just my thoughts. What are everyone else's opinions on quickness and alacrity right now?

I see at most 2 people bringing up numbers with Scourge, and everyone else is talking about shade because they completely gutted it. They went against the entire design philosophy in this patch of "reducing spammy builds" by forcing Scourge to constantly spam shade AND barrier skills. All the people I've seen upset about it are offering reasonable solutions, bumping back up shade times and putting alacrity on sand savant (which was always supposed to be the support GM trait *from the beginning*). From your other comments, you seem to be under the impression that Scourge players just want all the changes to be reverted and the class to not be touched again at all. That's not what anyone's saying. People want the changes reverted. Because right now the class feels terrible to play. AND THEN, they want different, better implementations to be put up on the drawing board.

Look, I understand that you have your preferences on what you would like the new weapons to be. It's completely fine for everyone to have their own tastes for different build flavors and how they would like their characters to look when playing certain builds. What I don't get, however, is calling these weapon selections bad *when we know actually 0 information about the skills that will be on them.* How are we gonna say "they should use THIS weapon for this class instead because it opens up all of these possibilities" when we don't even know what the current possibilities are? Why does a guardian need to have warhorn specifically in order to get alacrity? At the end of the day, your post can only realistically be interpreted as a complaint about *aesthetic* reasons for not liking the weapon choices. It makes 0 sense to bring up any sort of mechanical or design changes for these weapons until we actually know what the new weapon skills are gonna be.

Lol personally I hope you get banned for trolling this much.

My friend, if it wasn't already obvious by the plethora of replies you've gotten (on the Anet forums no less, which is usually full of GW2 bashers), the majority of your assumptions are unfounded. Does the game have issues? Yes. Obviously. We all preach about them on a regular basis, because there is no such thing as a perfect game. We all want changes for the better, sometimes we get them and sometimes we don't. However, does that mean that this game is going in the dumpster because you have listed a bunch of grievances that *you* as a specific player have with it? No. That's not how this works. The game isn't "dying" just because it's falling out of your favor. It has a consistently growing population, and it utterly baffles me how people like you can come out and say things like "Anet isn't invested in this game anymore" literal DAYS after an announcement that we are getting an expansion with pages upon pages of features in less than two months. You can have your opinion on how the game is going, but everyone has seen enough of this nonsensical doomposting. People like you have been doing it for literally the past 8 years, and surprise! Game still isn't dead.

Maybe if this was WoW, but it's not. One of the core ideals of GW2 when it was first conceptualized was "horizontal progression," IE no gear treadmill. They've broken that rule a couple of times, like with ascended gear and more recently jade bot cores, but they have NEVER done something so wild as devaluing legendary items, some of the most expensive things in the game to make and (for many) one of the biggest long-term goals for the player base. You can't get away with doing that in this community, it's a huge part of the reason why a lot of GW2 players stray AWAY from mainstream MMORPGs.

If you're going to ask something of me, make at least somewhat of an attempt to do that same thing yourself. I have spent roughly 0% of my time here throwing grade school insults at you while you took up the majority of your last reply to do so. You seem to be under the impression that I'm either here to gain something, or just to pick at your angry nerve until you burst, neither of which is accurate. I'm here to provoke thought, because Anet forums are typically a place devoid of it. I don't think you're dumb, I just think some of the things you've said have been misplaced. Your original comment blamed Anet's systems for matching Aurora Glade with higher pop servers during the alliances beta, when the actual issue was that you didn't properly understand how the alliances function (AKA, your server had nothing to do with it). It seems like you understood my point with coding and game updates, and I'm glad at least we can be on the same page about that. Understand that the only reason I brought that up is because you were one of the hundreds of other posts that have brought up the "just fix it" arguments, and I would prefer *more* people understood that this isn't a reasonable request. Happy to continue this back and forth so long as you don't continue down this rabbit hole of posting entirely unhinged angry replies. I'm happy to be civil if you are.

Lol you go completely unhinged in your reply and claim that I'M projecting. Not trolling either. Again, your criticism is NOT constructive when it consists of "why don't you just fix all these random things that I personally have a problem with already? All these other games do these things better than you." I'm not putting any words in your mouth, but you have repeatedly insinuated that it should be easy for ArenaNet to fix the laundry list of problems you've noted in this post, and that simply isn't how game development works. Fixing one problem in a line of code can often create 3 more somewhere else, it takes a LOT of time and testing to get it right without breaking the rest of the game. And for the record, how exactly are either of these 2 passages you "standing up for them?"

Soooo you started off with one complaint, which honestly is a bit unfounded and plays more into the fact that you simply misunderstood the way that the alliance beta actually worked (as others have said, your server had nothing to do with it), and now it has devolved into multiple dissonant personal issues you have with the game. It sounds like WvW problems are far from your only reason for wanting to leave. Many of the things you've brought up are not just things Anet can snap their fingers and magically "fix" to make them perfectly tailored just for you. If you truly understood programming the way you think you do, you would realize that for every one issue that needs fixing there are many hundreds of lines of coding to adjust, test, and implement properly without drastically affecting other parts of the game. Bottom line, if you prefer those other games you mentioned, go play them. There are plenty of things I also believe plenty of things need to get fixed or changed in this game, but you seem like one of those people who honestly believe Anet is actively doing nothing to address known issues, which is just a bogus take. Your criticism is no longer constructive.

Those are obviously things that anyone can do, but it's just tiptoeing around the primary complaint which is that it SHOULD be easier, in a game nicknamed "Fashion Wars," to inspect the cosmetics of another player. It's not a particularly hard thing to implement, and of course everyone is aware that they can either look to online forums for help or take the extreme long way of individually previewing all pieces of armor in the bank wardrobe until you find what you're looking for, but it can be easier than that and there isn't any harm in suggesting it.