lodjur.1284

I mention resistance actually. If I were to mention a third boon, it would've been protection, but imo Stab/Resistance are unique in just how horrible the game feels to play without them. Soft and Hard CC are both extremely overtuned. Damage is extremely high in WvW, even with prot in toughenss gear, you can get chunked for 10k+ in single hits, and even 2-3 bursty people get you down in sub 2 sec. The fact that people run so much support, and still kill people, who often run a lot of support as well, just shows that damage overall is quite high. It went down in the february patch of course, but it's slowly been creeping upwards, Berserker stands out as a problematic class in this regard. No prot WvW would be an absolute 1-shot fest tbh. Superspeed is definitively an issue, but as you said not a boon. Mobility has been an issue since I started playing back in very early-HoT though, so nothing new. Alacrity is about 20% lower CDs, which is fine, it's one of the "strong" boons that require you to bring one of rather few classes to actually get (like quickness). I mean it depends on what you mean by support effects, I would say dedicated supports, currently do give up everything else but their support capabilities, which is good. When we're talking the passive support provided by builds not brought for support, but that just happen to splash out boons on their group anyway, I'd be inclined to agree, that is to say when the support options are what you'd generally run on a damage builds. Ultimately I would say wether Anet knows it or not, every single balance decision ends up revolving around the (imo) broken CC system in this game. They buff up stab to allow people to play, so they buff up boonrips to counter that, then that makes the game unplayable, so they backtrack, etc. The core problem is that you can get stunlocked for 10-15 seconds in this game, and that if you don't have resistance, you permanently have chill applied to you, basically preventing you from actually using any skills. I certainly wouldn't mind a tuning down of CC, boons and boonstrip, to the point where it doesn't just feel like spam. But it requires backtracking 10 years of design decisions and reworking a core mechanic, so I wouldn't say I am very hopeful of it happening. I would personally say the game is in it's most reasonable balance state since PoF (which was a huge turning point for gw2) Agreed, anything else and the game just becomes only about bringing more people (which I mean you can already win every single fight by doing). People who optimize their builds, plan their comp out, and coordinate their gameplay, should have a pretty large advantage over pugs showing up with "random" builds. SotO has some pretty big outliers overall, not sure how many of them necessarily affect comp groups all that much, but a balance patch that does more than rework 1 very weak relic, into a slightly weaker state, would be appreciated.

That really doesn't even remotely address the point I made. Nowhere did I say anything about it being impressive or not, nor does that group ever run with 8. But given that part of the OP apparently started the thread after seeing it, felt relevant to post about the group in question. Saying that largely outnumbered fights demand that the enemies be worse at the game and/or less organized than the group is also not exactly news to anyone, that seems painfully obvious? Boonball as a term even removes focus from the fact that it's just stability+resistance, the rest barely matters. In addition to that, without stab and resistance, the game is very close to unplayable, which gets really obvious when you fight these groups with pugs, you just get pull>immob>pull>pull>pull>stun>dead. The fact that the most organized groups have 2 players dedicated only to allowing them to play the game certainly highlights a pretty big issue, which is CC. The game has over the years had a constant Stability vs Boonstrip/CC arms race. If you compare to 5 years ago the stability sources are much much stronger, but so is the boon corrupt. That is what leads to very spammy gameplay where skills like Stand Your Ground barely feel relevant, cause it does stability once every 24 sec, when what you need to be doing is doing stab every few seconds, ideally multiple times, just in order to not be chainstunned to death

You can look at the videos from these guilds, in particular Srge got dps.reports and it becomes extremely clear, that calling it boonball is a misnomer, it's stab+resistance ball, with a few other boons that do something. They often run 1-2 people/party, just dedicated to these specific boons The core problem of this game, for the last 10 years, is CC, the boonspam that has been introduced was to counter it, because if it didn't exist, the game would be utterly unplayable. I mean it gets pretty obvious if you fight any of these groups as a pug, you get hit by 10 pulls in a row, and stunlocked to death. Game would just devolve entirely into who has the bigger numbers and who attacks first, which is already the case to an extent. Boon strips were then tuned up, compared to 10 years ago, or even like 5-6 years ago, there are much more. At this point, any boon skill on a long-ish cd, is basically useless, because you can just assume you'll get boonstripped a couple seconds after. The core issue I would say, is that as soon as stability is not on your bar (and to a degree resistance), you're no longer playing the game, in any engagement with more than like 3 enemies, you're just sitting and watching yourself get repeatedly stunned. Dealing with "boonball" would essentially require a rework of the game, to one where CC isn't the way that it is in gw2. Even then what should organized groups be playing? 5 solo roaming builds next to each other? A further armsrace between strip vs boonspam, all to either avoid CC, or spam CC isn't really fixing the core problem.

Thank you for adding karka potions! Much requested feature. Without gw2skills, the game would be in a much worse state.

OWP is kinda silly for anything outside of zerging. Staff makes it worse. Hunter's Call is another problematic skill with it.

It can hit between 5 and 9 times in total, up to 5 of those can be on the same target. It will tick until it has hit 5 times. But if the first tick hits 4 people and the second 5 for example. It's 9 total hits. It has a rather fast dmg frequency, in particular noticeable if you get stunned in the middle of it, in which case rip. Uncertain about the exact frequency but feels like roughly 3/sec. THIS I AM UNCERTAIN ABOUT. The coeff is 0.5. Which is quite high Probably should be limited to 1 hit/ target, perhaps with a total target cap higher than 5, I wouldn't mind uncapped. Also it should have a lower power coeff I reckon.

You can have it equipped underwater which solves that particular problem at least

Pre-nerfed for getting access to shield

Can we please get autorecharge of mantras in WvW (outside of combat)? Reverting to current version of mantras was horrible, if we're gonna have em, at least remove "oops forgot to charge my mantra when i moved map/respawned" Because that's all it is, something you can forget, it doesn’t add a decision, or any form of skill expression, or even a longer runback in most scenarios (and when it does it's extremely minor). It just feels like an annoyance for the sake of annoyance.

Still no fix

Given how resistance is the main counterplay to immobilize, this needs to be fixed ASAP

This trait is mandatory for anyone playing condi firebrand, can the whole Quickfire part get reworked entirely please? Preferably something that increases time generation, either passively (like loremaster) or actively (like some kinda proc, or making you get 2 pages instead of 1 when you use 3 skills from the same tome)

Renewed Justice always sucked, except on firebrand, where it either flat out did nothing, or felt very busted. It's due for a rework

It's related to when they made the pages start recharging only after you spent them For whatever reason f1 skill 4 doesn't start this recharging. If you use any other skill, then your recharge starts as normal. Extremely annoying.

Still no fix.

Still no fix?

Ye that seems to be it, def needs fixing asap. Some further testing seems to indicate it's a little more complicated than that. A firebrand tome's page-generation timer will now begin after the first time pages are consumed instead of always being active. Skill 4 in f1 doesn't seem to start the timer, if you've already activated the timer, you can safely enter, cast skill 4 and leave, without any issues. Hilariously enough, with Archivist of Whispers, you could lock yourself permanently on 0 pages with no way to activate the timer

I have noticed sometimes going 15+ seconds without gaining any pages midfight, entering a tome and using a skill seems to temporarily fix the issue. I am not sure how to reproduce it.

Still not fixed

Outnumbered fights is the only thing that's actually fun in the gamemode tho, I personally can't really see the appeal of being on the other side of it, but there's plenty of things I can't see the appeal in, that still doesn't bother me. Getting proper blobbed is not particularly fun, but the problem there really is just that blobs have a host of mechanics that favor them in a very arbitrary way. Offensive AoE caps being the biggest offender, with the CC system of the game being a close second.

8 days of gamebreaking bugs, nice.

There is way way way too much CC in this game. I have never played a game where it is normal for the fights you WIN to be spent hard CCed over 50% of the fight. Everyone I have tried to play the game, have said the same thing and had the same complaints, CC, those that quit all said that they were just tired of the amount of CC in the game, those that stayed still whine about it, me included apparently. I would say in any fight that is larger than 2v2, and to a degree even there is centered around CC-ing. You don't bring boonrip to remove any boon except for stab, because if someone doesn't have stab, you can easily stunlock them from 100 to 0, even if they have healers. I would say only 3 boons even matter in WvW, for all the talk about boonball, they really should just call it stab-ball. Those boons being Stability, Resistance (which is also to counter CC....) and Protection (because burst damage is insane atm), the rest I would say are mostly cover boons, in an attempt to protect stability specifically. As soon as stability drops in any fight larger than 2v2, you're not moving, you're just waiting. All the actual dangerous skills in WvW, that one feels the need to call out, are boonrips, Null field, Winds, Breach, Well of Corruption (if one by some miracle spots this one), if there was an option, I would easily opt to disable the animations for all other fields except for these 4 as comparatively, nothing really matters. To touch on the subject of immobilize, I would say what makes immobilize so dangerous, is that one needs to constantly move, specifically to avoid boonrips. I think it's an inherent flaw in the combat system, and would require some kind of diminishing return to be fixed, as improving stab doesn't do anything at the moment, given how busted boon rips are (or as most people I talk to call it, stab rips/corrupts). I think changing stability from a boon > buff, would be a large improvement, tho it would lead to it being harder to kill people, tho that can easily be compensated for by the removal of ressing utilities and also stability losing access to boon duration (due to being a buff). Defiance bars for everyone always, would be another solution I suppose, but would have the issue of homogenizing all CC. This arms race between adding ever more stab and ever more boonrip (unless you compare to like original scourge lol) has kinda lead to a situation, where even skills like Stand your Ground starts feeling bad, as just a single application of 5 stacks of stab, is generally removed within a second or two. Pushing us further towards pulsing stab being an absolute necessity. CC and by extension boonrip are simultaneously the strongest offensive and defensive tools.

5 days of dagger SPB everywhere doing 10k+ on every f1.

Still no fix

Ye, and it is consistently doing roughly twice the dmg it did last patch, so not just a tooltip error.