Ensign.2189
-
Posts
115 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Forums
Blogs
Events
Articles
Downloads
Gallery
Store
Posts posted by Ensign.2189
-
-
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.
-
Yes, it's pretty weak. Double tap it to use Burst of Strength and enjoy the free stack of might.
-
@"Agrippa Oculus.3726" said:Please stop it! You're really fueling people with wrong information: let's take a look at Cairn with REAL statistics this time: https://gw2raidar.com/global_stats/area-17194
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?
-
@Agrippa Oculus.3726 said:EDIT: sorry, my bad, I see you were referring to solo-ing Arkk CM: well, it's been done better by other classes already (just do a search), but let's assume you're on the right track here, and Scourge would be the absolute record holder in this very niched self-constructed (read: player-constructed) challenge, it still says nothing about ... well anything really!
Cool, now apply that same standard to how fast you can kill a golem!
Finally: numbers! Too bad they're incorrect, it's more or less 30% difference, or even worse.
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?
Well, clearly you only heard this from hearsay cause real numbers show something completely different: Necro's are absolutely on the bottom shelf in the PvE endgame
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!
-
@Saracen.2691 said:What was the only thing Scourge could do with a measure of superiority before the patch?
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.
-
@Agrippa Oculus.3726 said:The only reason why these beginner tier builds are widely known for Necro only, is simply because they don't have real higher tier builds (like you also acknowledged yourself).
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.
-
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.
-
CU can have a high TTK as is being built for mass world PvP and not high action small scale combat. GW2 necessarily has high lethality due to the nature of its action combat and the ease at which skilled players can avoid or mitigate damage.
This is exacerbated by the addition of healers to the game. The more sustain, especially targeted sustain in the game, the more burst it needs if people are going to die at all.
Even worse, GW2's featured PvP mode strongly rewards not dying. Whenever lethality has dipped too low in GW2 it has decayed quickly into static fights on point where the first one to cap or score a kill wins.
The game needs to be very lethal. Go watch a high skill PvP match and count just how many kills there are. This game is not very lethal when played well. So if you want a higher TTK on top of that, you are looking at truly massive changes to the game.
-
I thought it was clear that the trouble with S/D condi is how it triggers so many traits in rapid succession. Most of them have been nerfed in PvP already and are pretty unremarkable individually. They all trigger and land with each IS/dodge/IR combo, stacking to turn utility abilities into a burst combo. A burst combo that can be used every 5s or so, faster than most any cleanse can keep up with.
Point being there's no single point of failure here besides, like, pulling immobilize off of IS entirely, which is pretty much going nuclear to the weapon set. There's a bit more shaving that can reasonably be done, but they might need to wholesale re-design traits to break up the stack.
-
Unfortunately, as UNOwen said, as long as Shortbow 5 exists, any Thief will have the option to choose it to become mobile, so no weapon set can become as powerful as it needs to be in order to remain viable without the Shortbow's mobility. In other words, as long as the Shortbow remains a choice, there will be no other viable choice of purpose for the Thief other than to remain mobile.
Sure, but it's not about how to make one weapon set competitive, but how to make two in combination competitive.
Short bow exists because of how initiative works. Not just because how how it enables spammy skills like IA, but because it decreases the value of a second combat set; it isn't like you get a second set of cooldowns. If you did, taking short bow would be a pretty big liability.
Is there anything along those lines that would be reasonable?
-
Actually as long as SB5 exists there is a useful lever to make thief 1v1 or team fight reasonably - mechanics that make dual combat sets more meaningful on thief.
Sticking the mobility on F3 would mean rebalancing (nerfing) around having 2 combat sets but comparable combat capabilities to what you get now. Not good.
So the question is...what would weapon swapping, or a 2nd weapon set, need to do for you to drop short bow in spvp?
-
They are focused on the toxicity because they are human beings having a perfectly reasonable reaction to a wave of bad press that is hard not to take personally. It is really hard to read critical feedback, and the toxic comment mixed in there with it sets people over the edge.
We can talk professionality, blah blah, but this is all really emotional for everyone involved and we can let people be people.
They've been rebounding from a huge morale blow. That they have been able to stay on track, and even accomplish developing additional features above and beyond that, must feel like a huge win, and is something they are proud of. Their big announce probably felt like a victory cheer for their resiliency. That it was a huge flop was likely both surprising and demoralizing.
-
@Entlein.7412 said:Hey,I think that after Dagger Training got worse and worse this Trait needs some love. For example it would be a nice when it grants 80 power PER dagger equipped.
Sure, it isn't a very good trait right now. What would be a good thing for it to do besides just adding even more power onto a D/D build?
Also I do not understand why Revealed Training only gives 80/120 Power and not 120/120 like Staff master or Swindlers Equillibrium.What are your thoughts about that?
Probably because power thief is already a high performer in terms on power DPS and they wanted to limit the free power to a 2%, rather than a 3% bonus - DPS thief doesn't get a ton from that slot anyway.
I do agree it looks weird and the trait itself isn't that good, but where would you want to shave DPS from the thief kit to put another 40 power on RT? Is the place you chose a good place to shave for the game overall?
-
Yeah, it definitely needs something, but what would it need for you to run it over mug in PvP, and would that be healthy?
-
@Straegen.2938 said:Leeching Venoms, nerf (I didn't believe that was possible)
Leeching Venoms was actually an absurdly powerful trait, it just didn't fit well with Shadow Arts or anything else a thief wanted to do really.
-
...this change is a substantial buff for D/D condi Daredevil in PvP and a meaningful DPS buff in PvE.
-
@Crystal Black.8190 said:How does sword dagger apply conditions?
Potent Poison and Panic Strike put poison stacks on Infiltrator's Strike, then Uncatchable and Lotus Training apply more conditions on dodge.
-
As Turk mentioned staff 3 is your most used skill in a 1v1 by a wide margin. So much so that it defines the weapon IMO - you want to use staff 3 the way you would normally use a dodge, and dodge correspondingly turns into an offensive ability.
Staff 4 is an important skill for harassing other melee specs. You can't stand toe to toe with them, but poking with a blind before you engage is often enough to make advantageous trades. You'll also have extra initiative outside of vault spam situations and blind is a good way to spend it.
The skill you don't use much in pvp is staff 2. It has some use with steal now that steal-vault was nerfed, but otherwise it is a waste of initiative.
-
Mystic Coins are the only negative beta commodity with a large total value. While its price drifted upward with the demand to craft Exodium, the flood of materials from the event boxes has kept it high - price of everything else goes down, coins go up.
It is working as intended. Coin prices being so high indicates that drop rates in general are too high and need to be dialed back.
-
What do you even nerf in Acro at this point? Instant Reflexes is the only piece that is really obnoxious and even that had its ICD blasted.
Daggerstorm has a fat target on it though.
-
As much as you might want to lump game balance together you really have to break it out by mode, especially after the big structural changes that happened during the first sPvP seasons.
For instance sPvP balance is...not good in no spall part because there have been too many cooks in the kitchen. Besides the balance team you've had community people and programmers pushing their own changes, so it should be no surprise that it is an incoherent mess. When everyone is involved, no one is responsible, and it shows.
WvW has the opposite problem where there is only token attention, due in part to widespread disagreements about what the goals of WvW balance should even be and a status quo bias from the community.
PvE balance is actually pretty good. There's a mix of objectives between raids, fractals, and open world but those are weighed pretty well against each other and there's more variety in these metas than there has ever been. Granted, PvE balance is way easier than competitive balance, but their main mode is in pretty good shape.
-
@Auburner.6945 said:I mean, it falls on the balance team to come out with many polls before the patches drop, and discuss what would happen if such change occurred, while for the playerbase to look at how to fix the over/under-powered class rather than creating a beast or obliterating them.
I don't know that polls would be all that useful. The median respondent has pretty poor understanding of balance, and having them vote on changes wouldn't really tell you a whole lot.
Similarly asking the playerbase how to fix a balance issue isn't going to get you a whole lot. Outside of very simple numeric changes (which often aren't even easy to identify!) players generally have little sense of how balance changes fit affect interactions between characters and for into the game as a whole. Like players suggesting balance changes, there are often a couple valuable nuggets to work with if you sort through all the slag.
I do think A.Net would benefit from being more transparent earlier in the process. The place players are most useful is in catching when a change is going to miss the mark badly. That is the main benefit of a PBE - not that players can play on it, but that players can see changes very early on and keep you from going off the rails.
The devs should be more open with why the meta is as such and what should be done to fix , so the idea won't come as of 5 minds, but 5 + the players , but that's not a thing.
We would definitely benefit a lot from statements of vision for the different parts of the game. While I think they have done a good job of getting balance to a pretty good place for raids, when it comes to sPvP or especially WvW it is really unclear wtf they are trying to accomplish. sPvP in particular has been running in circles since they got skill splits, playing whack a mile with whatever people complain about a given season but not altering any fundamentals.
-
@Dirame.8521 said:If there is one thing I have come to find from playing MMOs all these years, it's that the players are the ones who don't know how to balance.
I agree with the top line conclusion but it glosses over a lot of nuance.
Players generally have a strong sense of what is strong and what is not. They are keenly aware of pain points and things that are overtuned. Players rarely complain about nothing; if you see players complaining there is invariably something there.
However, player suggestions about what to do about a balance problem are usually pretty bad. Few players dig deep into the issues driving an imbalance. They also tend to be pretty myopic and not see the broad interactions and tradeoffs between archetypes. Consequently their suggestions tend to be pretty scattershot and most are pretty bad.
That doesn't invalidate the root issues that they are trying to address though. If you look at a list of balance suggestions and drill down into the pain points they are trying to address there's usually a lot of good insight there, even if the suggestions are poor.
@"Auburner.6945" said:I have to disagree with that... partially. Riot Games, the creators of one of the most played games in the history stated in one of their interviews that the player base is fast to figure out what's meta and what's not the moment the patch notes are released, even faster than the balance team. Sure there will be "not right" balancing suggestions but those who know are way ahead of the balance team... and they are not a few... Also, if the devs know better and listened to the "not right" suggestions, then it isn't the player base to blame.
This is absolutely true, but the problem is that the players who are in the know about the impact of any particular change are not the same players from patch to patch or change to change. A balance team can in no way out-think a player base of thousands; collectively the players know a lot more than a few people working on balance!
The problem of course is how to distinguish feedback from those in the know from those who are clueless in real time. The majority are usually not right, after all, and bandwagons are formed by those who are persuasive, not necessarily those who are right.
Why are Black Lion Skin prices so static on the TP?
in Guild Wars 2 Discussion
Posted
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.