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Why are Black Lion Skin prices so static on the TP?
Ensign.2189 replied to Omnicron.2467's topic in Guild Wars 2 Discussion
New black lion skins inevitably return as uncommon direct drops from black lion chests. Black Lion Claim Tickets are also abundant enough that healthy inventories build up during their initial release, dampening any price rise. Back in the day the prices on skins appreciated as you got further from release as the supply dried up, and speculators accelerated this process expecting long run returns. However now the supply tends to persist longer, and as you get further from release the risk of the skins being reintroduced as uncommon drops increases. So the speculators stay away from a risky asset and the price actually starts to crash once you get a few release cycles removed. -
There are two major problems with WvW, one on the strategic level and the other on the tactical level. First, on the strategic level, the major problem with WvW is that there is a single dominant strategy, the map blob with light scouting. In other MMOs they have mechanics to force multiple points of conflict simultaneously. This does more than just force blobs to split up - simultaneous points of contention create potential for differentiation in fight vs rotation, but also gives a high level avenue for, say, engage vs siege as elements complement each other. There's a lot to unpack as to the causes of this and why it doesn't work well in GW2, but suffice to say that there being one clearly dominant strategy for almost the entire history of the game has dramatically restricted the meta. On the tactical level, the meta has never developed enough elements to form a quasi-stable and diverse meta. We have had engage, melee-train focused metas, and ranged, pirate ship focused metas, but never a third (let alone fourth or fifth) element necessary for there to be trade-offs in compositions and variations in tactics. It has always been either melee dominates ranged and the bigger and more organized group just runs over the other one (cue complaints about boon share dominating the meta and how mandatory guardians are), or ranged dominating melee and groups have a staring contest and poke each other out, even worse when there are objectives and choke points involved (cue complaints about scourges and the like). If there is no strategic diversity, and minimal tactical diversity, you are always going to have a stale meta of basically identical team compositions facing off against each other. It doesn't matter if you nuke Guardians and Scourges from orbit, the structure of the game at the moment has a meta with a single, pure state meta and it will inevitably find its way back to that. You need a mixed state, ideally multiple equilibria structure if you want to even have a chance of balance.
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Open Letter to ANet Regarding Latest Patch
Ensign.2189 replied to Saracen.2691's topic in Necromancer
It's really interesting how you can look at the top line numbers there and conclude that Scourge is trash DPS. Before you dig in you want to try and understand the effect of selection. Players are not randomly assigned characters to play, they choose their own builds, and stronger players will gravitate towards stronger classes. There's always an effect here that exacerbates differences, but you mostly want to check for the extreme cases where a class is only being played by a subset of specialists. The extreme case here is the condi Weaver. If you look at the leaderboards, on the fights where condition damage is preferable there are usually big stacks of Firebrands and Mirages, and occasionally a Weaver. That confirms that Weaver is not a widely played character that generally good players are swapping to, but the province of specialists. If a character is only played by specialists you of course expect it to perform better in the aggregate stats. So the comparison you have to make it so the Firebrand and the Mirage. Those are the gold standard for condi DPS in the current meta. What do you see there? You see that Mirage is fight dependent, but in a typical use case Firebrand and Mirage are near the top with Renegade, Scourge, Berserker, and Soulbeast in some order about 15% behind the leaders. That doesn't scream trash tier to me. Trash tier would be the poor condi Engineers and Daredevils that don't even show up on the charts. It pops up more when its particular tools (namely ranged AoE) are more relevant, but otherwise it's merely a generic, viable but unremarkable condition damage that is a bit behind the capabilities of the specialists. What's wrong with that? Does everything need to be a one dimensional DPS like Mirage and Firebrand or it's trash? -
Open Letter to ANet Regarding Latest Patch
Ensign.2189 replied to Saracen.2691's topic in Necromancer
Cool, now apply that same standard to how fast you can kill a golem! 15% was generous. Scourge overperforms vis-a-vis other condi classes in actual raid fights, despite much lower golem benchmarks. It turns out that an easy to play and durable character with a lot of incidental power makes a big difference in uncontrolled environments. Outside the silliness of the Largos Twins, 15% is about right for the gap between a condi Scourge and a Mirage or Firebrand. That puts it on par with condi soulbeast and condi berserker - builds that I suspect you would also consider unplayable trash? You mean raid speed clears. You don't mean fractals obviously. No one is going to be surprised to hear that condi specs are not particularly good against Arkk, but that's not a reason to say that Mirage is trash. That would also be conveniently overlooking how strong power Reaper is against Arkk. No, you mean raid speed clears. ...and you're right! Necromancers are not a top tier class for speed clearing raids! Now explain to the audience why speed clearing raids is the thing to judge balance by in this game, and not just another very niche self-constructed challenge that says nothing about...well, anything actually! -
Open Letter to ANet Regarding Latest Patch
Ensign.2189 replied to Saracen.2691's topic in Necromancer
It was, by a wide margin, the easiest class to solo hard content on, for instance Arkk CM. Chrono had a higher peak potential, but soloing on a chrono required near-perfect play, while merely very good play would get the job done on a Scourge. It had also been amongst the highest win rate specializations in sPvP for years and a backbone of the meta. It is also a wildly popular general PvE character owing to its ease of play and high general power level without party support. Other characters can respec to gain the kinds of solo power the Scourge had, but Scourge got near full raid output alongside all the self tools. Raiding with a big stack of Scourges was similarly known to be faceroll easy. But wait there's more...it was also, as you say, an oppressively powerful WvW zerg class. In fact, the only weaknesses a Scourge had were: 1v1 PvP. While it is the most devastating spec available in a team fight, Scourge doesn't have the defensive tools to fight the strongest dueling specs on its own. Raid speed runs. In the hands of an experienced player a Scourge's max DPS topped out about 15% behind the best options available. Anyone bemoaning how weak the Scourge was before the nerf is feeding you wheelbarrows full of yak dung. It has been at the top of the pack across game modes for years, and settling into the middle of the pack after some of the rough edges are cleaned up is not a bad thing by any stretch. -
Chrono in raid-like encounters where you can in theory avoid everything. Necro or Firebrand where you can't.
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Open Letter to ANet Regarding Latest Patch
Ensign.2189 replied to Saracen.2691's topic in Necromancer
The main 'problem' with necro is that they have so much baked in easily accessible power and utility. It's a general problem with how inflexible builds are in this game, but comes up in particular for necro. They just don't have design levers to make them narrow enough to justify the kinds of DPS output players desire. To that extent the scourge change is a good thing- their class mechanic being a lot weaker, especially with respect to massive AoE utility, gives some real room to dial it up a bit. I agree there is more that could be done to weaken the class in ways that would fit in more DPS, on the margins, but you really need big changes like the Scourge shade nerf to create some meaningful room. -
Open Letter to ANet Regarding Latest Patch
Ensign.2189 replied to Saracen.2691's topic in Necromancer
The problem with evaluating PvE balance of a class is that there is no algorithmic matchmaking. The necromancer's PvE problem is something like this: In PvE Bronze tier Necromancer is god.In PvE Silver tier Necromancer is outstanding.In PvE Gold tier Necromancer is great.In PvE Platinum tier Necromancer is mediocre.In PvE Legendary tier Necromancer is bad. If there were algorithmic matchmaking and skill ratings in PvE Necromancer would be rightly understood as being an overpowered class you can stack to win by a vast majority of the playerbase. However there is no matchmaking. So the game everyone is really playing is "let's pretend everyone is legendary tier", and that means kicking necros and talking about how terrible they are. Wanting to bring a necro to a raid is a clear signal that you are not a legendary tier player, so gtfo we are all pros here. If you ever drop out of top tier statics and go slumming in a Thursday night PUG with 3 healers it becomes very obvious very quickly just how hard Necros carry. They absolutely stomp when teaching new players a raid encounter for the first time. You might not care about that personally. I totally get you can't run a necromancer in your raid because it does like 10% less damage than a good class in a pure dps role, and that is frustrating. But the class needs to be balanced across use cases, not just your corner case. While it is unfortunate everything doesn't have its peak performance in your corner, that is the nature of needing to balance across skill levels and use cases. -
Runecrafter's Salvage-o-Matic concerns [Merged]
Ensign.2189 replied to ROMANG.1903's topic in Guild Wars 2 Discussion
When salvaging level 68+ rares, you have an X% chance to receive 1-3 ecto (equal chance of each). The other 1-X% of the time you receive 0-1 ecto (equal chance). With a rare kit, that is a 1/12 chance of 3 ecto, 1/12 of 2 ecto, and an 11/24 chance of 1 ecto, for an average of 0.875 ecto per rare. With the runecrafter kit, that is a 1/15 chance of 3 ecto, 1/15 of 2 ecto, and a 14/30 chance of 1 ecto, for an average of 0.80 ecto per rare. With a common kit, that is a 1/30 chance of 3 ecto, 1/30 chance of 2 ecto, and a 29/60 chance of 1 ecto, for an average of 0.65 ecto per rare. Hope that helps!