Keegers.2573

So general response to everyone so i don't have to quote everything. Yes, I did just create a forums account.. I tend to stay away from games official forums because well *gestures*.. Everyone's bad posting reminds me why I stick to my dead SA forums. Again, I stated in the OP I've been playing since prophecies, and onward to today. It's not a lack of experience in end game. I completely understand the end game meta and how it works, I run the very same builds I'm advocating for removal of. I'm merely trying to bring a discussion about balance around alac/quickness and how I believe it is handicapping the game in terms of content. Those two boons are very overpowered in terms of how much group dps they increase across the board. The weird support meta is very obtuse to new players and unlike anything they've experienced in the openworld before getting to 10player content. I also think it would allow devs to create more balanced and challenging content in the future if they don't have such wild ranges of dps present. Two players could have the same gear but deal 5k dps and 40k dps, how can you balance content around this variability? Either the enrage checks will be too short for one player or way too easy for another. I view alac/quickness as the two boons that are currently producing the most variability. So, my solution is to stop doubling down on the system that has been controversial since HoT and fix combat before pushing the game on Steam. I also don't really think GW2 will fail on steam, I think it will get a small player bump, BUT it has a chance to grab a lot more attention.

Role compression has pushed a lot of classes out. Druid is pretty much worthless compared to mech, mech does everything a druid can but with alac. You do need some pure dps, but any profession that has the ability to quick/alac will always be more desired than a pure. And quick/alac builds also have the option to just dps so... why not play one with quick/alac. I'll admit my original statement was a bit of a hyperbole, but my point above stands.

"You play a class without alac or quickness?" "Good luck getting into one of the dps slots.. better just re-roll." New players who just leveled up to 80 and completed EoD experiencing the strike/raid meta are going to be in for a rude awakening if they rolled a subpar class. Most will probably just quit. Experienced players really need to put themselves in the shoes of newplayers. These systems aren't talked about through the standard leveling process, and DPS are a dime a dozen. If your class can't give alac/quickness, good luck finding a group. Plenty of players will quit when no one joins their LFG due to low achievement points or they can't get into because of no LI. OR Imagine a new player wanting to play ele because of the ranged mage archetype. Now at max they are basically told to "shove it" and stay in melee range only, how is this a good system? Players can't even play the style they want because of balance. Class balance is arguably one of the most important aspects of an MMORPG. RPG players like playing their preferred archetype.

I'm advocating for more build diversity with these changes. Giving players more freedom by removing overpowered boons of quickness/alac. Right now the current meta, especially with the decrease of these boons from 10 to 5 targets is oppressive for trying any other support builds. Why bring another healer when healing mech provides alac as well. Currently, there is a bottleneck in build diversity because a lot of these boons/buffs you would pass on result in a large dps difference. Lowering effectiveness of the different boons to 1-2% dps difference would go a long way into going back to "bring the player, not the class" Stats do play a part, but the "pesky" boons are a huge part of dps difference and are accounted for in a lot of the meta builds you say you are aware of. Stats will represent a dps difference, BUT that should be encouraged as a player choice. Do you want more DPS or more survivability? Majority of the players doing this content don't even pay attention to their stats, they just buy whatever the guide says. How is this an engaging system when players just blindly follow gear choices. What if we balanced combat around making players choose what's important for their build/current content they are attempting, return to a more creative and player choice driven build system. GW1 was great for this, the amount of skills, it really encouraged adapting to the situation. GW2 does not encourage this as much outside of a couple utility skill swaps. With Alac/quickness the way it is, it encourages maximum dps output and removes some of the players flexibility in choice. Edit: Before people say the meta will always favor DPS > survivability. Recall to the launch of GW2, yes there was 1mes+4warr zerk groups but there was also a lot of players just grouping together and tackling content in whatever build they wanted. It was doable, albeit slower, but players could tackle all the content in any build. Anet says the focus of this expansion will be on strikes. Unless they abandon this goal, it seems to me the problem will only get bigger. As of now, only a strike is needed for turtle, it's not a hard strike but its still something required for an expansion feature which means all of the players playing EoD will be forced to do it. If going by the advice of everyone here and creating our own lfg. These new players will most likely get all grouped together, now will this group of 10 players be able to succeed or not? Most likely they won't because of the obtuse support system that is not explained anywhere in the game. They never needed supports before but now they do? This is where the system breaks down for casual players. The entire EoD expansion is pushing strikes, but 10player content is not balanced for all skill levels at the moment. Lowering the skill floor by removing the alac/quickness support needs allows for more groups to have success using the same systems they learned in the open world. This is the start of the ladder, the bridge of open world players to 10player content.

You unironically are making my point. People will always be bad, but we can make them better through balancing. We need to lower the skill floor so that there isn't a big difference in dps of 7k vs your 40k.. That is a 470% difference in dps in a game with no real vertical progression... We can have challenging content in the open world, maybe instead of a instagib mechanic there is a mechanic that punishes the player with a 50% damage debuff. You can punish players by making their numbers smaller, but not as punishing as death (which will lead to them sitting on the ground the whole fight instead of rezzing). I'm not saying good players shouldn't be rewarded but right now the reward difference is insanely imbalanced between top end and low end. It makes it harder to design content for Anet as well, like you mentioned the Meta in itself is not that hard, but the majority of players can't do it. Making a game more accessible does not lower the skill ceiling.

Didn't say it was for all content difficulties, WoW however allows you to play through all the instanced content in a matchmaker and casuals never have to step foot into a normal raid or mythic dungeon if they don't want to. They are able to experience all the group content however, GW2 doesn't have a difficulty scale so there is a large amount of players who have never stepped foot in this content. There should be a ladder bridge to help players get comfortable with instanced content, since instanced content and open world play vastly different. This is GW2 not Dark souls, you can't just throw a difficulty curve at players who had a relatively easy time before that. Look at core players first complaints walking into HoT, the difficulty spikes in this game are way to high. Part of the difficulty spikes is the wild variability in builds. Anet needs to balance the exponential dps/build difference to something much smaller.

"Form your own group" is one of the worst arguments for group gatekeeping. Look at the WOW M+ community, any feedback about the elitism and toxicity is met with that. Try creating a new account with low achievement points and getting players to join your pug raid or joining a raid with no LI account. Forcing players to make friends and find guilds to help them learn is a community bandaid fix to a gameplay/design issue. Strikes are supposed to be pushed as the new mainstay content but no matter how hard Anet tries to force players they push away more players than ones that stick around. I guarantee the internal metrics show very little increase in repeated strike activity among players who weren't already doing them. "Everything is doable" only applies to a certain extent. There is huge difference in meta and non meta, obviously there are players that are in a mix of greens/blues trying this content. I'm not asking for those players to be able to clear everything, I'm wanting the players who have at least full exotics to be able to compete and do content without outside resources. MMORPG as a genre is very easy and made for all types of players. Why does GW2 try to claim to be a casual game but at it's end level have a weird arbitrary 10player content. Either they need to make strikes/raids doable by all players without meta support builds or they need to start addressing how to increase the base skill floor for all players. The easiest way to increase the skill floor is to remove quickness/alac and increase base dmg by a %. If they want to keep the support boons as is, they need to look into ways to balance top end vs low end disparities. GW2 is in a weird place trying to fit everyone under a single hat. WOW has 4 different raid difficulties for players of all skill levels, GW2 already has a CM in place, why can't they nerf or adjust combat so the non-cm content can be done by players with low skill level. Take a step away from your place of knowledge/experience and put yourself into the shoes of a new player or an open world player who has been running soldier gear. These players are the majority of players, and they will most likely just quit the game when they realize strikes are forced or they can't do raids... I'm trying to advocate for those players. The game will always be alive and well, but how many potential players will be ostracized by the weird support meta currently in the game. The game is advertised as one where you can use any build and there is no holy trinity... EXCEPT when you get to the real end game content and there is a weird hodgepodge of builds that synergize and boon supports that are necessary to use. This is unlike the rest of the game and it should be addressed. Catering to the raiders/hardcore group never ends well for MMORPGS *cough* Wildstar *cough*. (I really enjoyed W* 😞 ) I

I'm saying that quickness/alac are the main causes of dps disparity in players and they are also the main issue when trying to group with players for content. Everyone wants their alac/quickness boons because playing without it feels bad and content is balanced around having these boons. The entire endgame dps parse pretty much revolves around 2 boons. Mechanist healer does 10k dps on Mursaat Overseer while doing alac, 25 might, fury, protection, etc.. Remove alac and you still got a class that can pump heals and boons to compete with other supports. Alac/quickness is a gatekeeper boon that makes different support builds not work. Why would i bring another healer when I can bring a healer/alac and have an extra dps

Corrected, wasn't trying to lie about it... The 3 looked like an 8 on my phone screen.

Yeah? That's the main point of my original post? If they want to get it right, they need to fix the main combat issues that are ruining the endgame experience and alienating their core audience

GW2 Launched: Metacritic score of 90 with 69 critic reviews GW2 HoT: Metacritic score of 81 with 22 critic reviews GW2 PoF: Metacritic score of 83 with 13 critic reviews GW2 EoD: Metacritic score of 83 with 7 critic reviews. The player reviews mirror this in numbers declining but have GW2 launch as the highest at 8.0 over 3116 reviews. HoT/PoF are both 7.3 and EoD is an 8 with 73 reviews. It's safe to say if we had steam reviews many people would be commenting on the decline of gameplay. What made GW2 base game so much fun? It was a unique idea in a landscape of themepark MMO's, the original design manifesto promised content without the pitfalls of traditional MMOs. In HoT they brought raids and with it brought the pitfalls of other games by now bringing in healers and support builds. They practically made these builds required to complete content which is a complete 180 from the original game. How is sitting around looking for 2 or 3 support builds to round out your strike/raid team fun? How is being forced to play a meta fun? In some ways Anet has abandoned and double downed on flawed systems instead of going their own way. DRM's were a great addition (ignoring the complaints of hp sponges and being forced to grind them for achievements), they were scalable, they had a CM. Why did Anet abandon a good system with good bones that just needed refinement and go back to trying to hamfist 10player content with a stupid meta requirement of quickness/alac builds?

Or even just making alac/quickness personal only buffs would be a big shake up. Sigil of rage can be used, builds can be made around these burst windows. No one notices if regen is dropped for a second, but everyone notices when their number goes from green to white.. It's not a good system where 2 boons are the majority of focus of an entire group of people

Everyone seems to be focusing on the matchmaker aspect. I don't care if the game has matchmaking or not, but the quickness/alac requirements make it take longer to find groups in LFG. You can still have challenging content and specialized builds, but right now the baseline of requiring quickness/alac is ruining the experience. Also I don't find raids/fractals challenging content, I personally run the quickness/alac builds that I'm advocating for removing. I'm speaking mainly to the feedback i hear from new players and players I teach content to. These boons aren't needed in endgame content and they only serve to gatekeep certain classes from playing. I'm not advocating for removal of class/skill choices, I'm advocating for the inclusion of more variety of playstyles. Right now, Alac/quickness are requirements and playing without them feels bad. If they are removed, the meta will open up to allow more types of builds and allow players to work with who joins no matter the class instead of only allowing certain specs to join. Edit: Also LFG system just allows players to join.. there is no pending invites or queue system it is very much a pain to try and search for a specific role when anyone can just join.. Even GW1 had a pending invite system

With Anet's recent post talking about wanting to have the perfect Steam launch, it made me start thinking about the current issue holding GW2 back from larger success. The game claims to be solo/"casual" friendly game and in most regards it achieves that. Until we get into the aspect of late game raids/strikes/fractals and the current meta revolving around them. The current boon system is a detriment to the game and kills it for solo/casual players with how necessary quickness/alac is and the massive dps disparity it causes. DPS difference Look at the current EoD endgame meta and how much attention that has gotten. Optimal builds are pretty much required and groups are having to engage in gatekeeping behavior of manipulating map population to be able to do the event and succeed. There is a huge difference in dps between even the same spec/gearing of when you have quickness and alac vs when you are boonless. If you want to squish the difference between skill floor and ceiling looking at boon uptime and the basic requirements of these two boons is the main place to start. They need to outright remove these boons instead of just sprinkling in more classes to use them, because this just creates oppressive team comps. Look at the current mechanist build and how it is overshadowing all other supports. For a game that set out to get rid of the holy trinity, they proved why the trinity works. They made a support/boon system that is unintuitive and unfun to play, everything is obfuscated. Side note, if your class feels bad to play without these boons, it is a fault of the class design. No class should be dependent on external boons to feel fun and engaging. Roles and matchmaking Because of the boonmeta we can never have a matchmaking system in the game. I know Anet said they don't want one, but lets look for a moment at the other competing MMORPGS on steam and how they compare to GW2. I will focus on the main 3 of steam currently; Lost Ark, FFXIV, and ESO. All of these games use a matchmaker for the majority of their content, why would a casual player play GW2 endgame content when they could jump straight into the content in the other 3 games with minimal delay. The timewaste of creating and looking for groups that fit within the specific meta of GW2 is currently killing the in game LFG system. Most the players I know organize outside of the game in different discords as is, how is a new casual player supposed to break into these areas easily and experience the content. This will be a major quit point for the majority of new steam players. If I look back at the launch of GW2 before HoT, you were able to take 5 berserkers and get through most of the dungeons/fractals. If you tried to do that now in strikes/raids you would fail miserably, while the increase in build variation is nice, they have consequentially ruined a groups ability to just hotjoin and go. Look at Lost Ark, difficulty of content and current calls for nerfs aside, you can join the Abyssal Dungeons/Raids (hardest available content) in matchmaking and you can complete all of the content without a bard or paladin (support class). If you wanted to try running a strike or raid without your quickness/alac buffs you would be in for a bad time. I love Guild Wars, I've been playing since Prophecies launch, every expansion, every living story. I want this game to be a huge success, but the current Boon meta is holding the game back. We as a community need to stop pushing this elitist idea that having boons and the current support classes makes the game skilled. The fun of the game for solo/casual players is completing all the content of a game at their own pace of how/when they want to do it. Being gatekept out of raids/strikes will be the major quit point for the majority of new players. TLDR: Quickness/Alac are game ruining buffs and should be removed if Anet wants GW2 to succeed on Steam.