Yme.6145

I think even the psycological effect of having slightly lowers stats on a celestial than the equivalent minor stats on a 4-attribute piece would encourage people to specialise a bit more and thus open themselves to more counter-play.

Because it's fun and makes classes play different from each other?

Rock Paper Scissors is absolutely not a balanced game, in the sense that's applicable to GW2. If you play as Rock, you never have any chance against Paper. Paper is OP in that scenario. It's like if a raid boss in GW2 did a check on your armor class and instakilled anyone wearing light armor. Would people say it's a balanced design if another raid boss did the same to medium armor? You always balance against an objective. Something can be balanced against one objective and at the same time unbalanced against some other objective. Players' perception of the quality of balance will largely depend on the importance (to them) they place on each of the objectives (and there are A LOT of these).

This, hundred times. Big metas by this point are just busy-work - get in, tag the boss, get the chest / currency. There is very little excitement when you know it's just a pinata with a handful of mechanics. I feel like for big metas there needs to be a real chance of failure. Not failure in terms of not enough people turning up to do it, but failure of coordination, DPS, mechanics. One leftfield idea would be to have perma-death in some instanced metas so that you have to pay attention and not just semi-AFK autoattack and get loot at the end.

Well, scrappers did get a 125 power buff when at full stacks of Might which is nice.

I'm a bit confused by your example - if you didn't die to the 66% of the strike damage, why would you die to the %33 2 seconds later (+66% of the follow up strike damage)? Wouldn't that make the healer's job easier to keep you alive if it's a one-off spike damage or make no difference if you're not dodging / avoiding damage? Also, heal quickness scrapper is pretty rare in any case and DPS scrappers will always take Object in Motion so perhaps that's why you haven't seen it in instanced PVE. I would expect it to be more popular in WvW where it provided decent spike damage mitigation.

This change makes me pretty sad. They took away a unique feature of the class (not aware of any other class having a staggered damage reduction) and replaced it with a weaker version of regeneration. Were there complaints about DD being OP? It doesn't look like everything else in the game was balanced and the one thing left was scrapper's survivability against spike power damage.

What, no one mentioned the obnoxious poison effects of Untamed? That'd be the first on my list of visual reworks. The whole spec, in fact. We have a spec that is inspired by a forest with jade tech + spirit beasts and we get...poison and vines? I can maybe understand it if it released for HoT, but EoD? What makes it so frustrating is that it could've been so much better with each animal getting a spirit form / new skill or some other interaction that made sense in EoD terms as opposed to every pet getting the same effects that have no relation to the actual pet family.

Not going to say no to support scrapper buffs, but isn't the ICD affecting each condi cleanse proc, regardless of how many conditions were cleansed? So if you're cleansing 5 conditions with Fumigate from 5 targets, 5 targets will have 5 condis converted into boons? Or is ICD on the basis of a single condi => boon conversion?

The way I look at it is the main upside of Damage Dampener is that you can generate extra barrier in the 2 seconds you have until the staggered part of the strike damage hits you, meaning you can barrier-heal through it on a power build. With regeneration, you miss the benefits while at full health + barrier and it doesn't help against spike strike damage which is where a lot of the meta is. If you're worried about condi damage, you can always take Adaptive Armor. From the stream they sounded pretty nostalgic about the regen version of the trait so unlikely to change it before the 14th, I think.

Is the new trait going to be regenerating health? In that case, it's just plain nerf compared to the Damage Dampener which actually synergises with the spec in the sense that it's delivering benefits all the time, not just when you've blown through the barrier and are losing health. I'm confused why they said on the stream it was only "working some of the time". Is it to do with condition damage? A better way would've been to add some condition duration reduction so that both strike damage and condi damage are covered.

Sorry, should've made it clear that the turret-equivalent of Mechanical Genius would need to move to one of the core trait lines. Turrets haven't seen any changes (apart from the healing turret) since 2017 if wiki is to be believed - are you referring to PVP before 2017? Full rework would be welcome, but unlikely, and reusing an idea they've already spent resources on developing might have better chances. There is also a repair turret side-effect of the tool kit's autoattack so this could lean into the idea of fighting close to your turret nest.

Not sure if this idea has been floated before, but it seems to me that the stat share of Mechanical Genius is better suited to turrets rather than mech. Turrets are have very poor stat scaling and are a meme pick (except for Rifle for its toolbelt skill), they haven't had a balance pass since 2017 (according to Wiki), and their static placement makes it much easier to play around this trait (rather than the trait playing you). Each turret can have one stat that is most relevant to it, like condi damage for Flame Turret, and the cooldown can be increased. Of course, this leaves the issue of balancing the mechanist - personally, I think the only scenario where it's performing above and beyond is in the alacdps (maybe heal as well, but I don't play it as much). It's not uncommon in raid scenarios to see mechalac dps easily outdps-ing full DPS builds (average mech vs average dps - not your rotation zealots). One way to address it would be to stop other mech skills activate after the mech casts Crisis Zone and maybe increasing the barrier alac interval. Having 100% alac/quick uptime should require a decent investment in Concentration, not just a few token Diviner pieces. This will only affect LI playstyle when all mech skills are on autocast; if you have a delay of 10 seconds after casting Crisis Zone, you can still manually activate the skills in order that doesn't mess up the rotation, but having them on autocast will reduce the frequency with with high damage skills are autoused.