[The State of Chrono]

I'm just trying to figure out what Chrono's role is supposed to be. It's been infamously bad for years now. It doesn't give fury, might, really any boons, healing on it has been extremely sub par, no regen, it's alac was bad, it's quickness was decent with enough utilities, and it's damage is okay.

In WvW, it's been a strip/utility bot for a long time now because of this. I was really hoping these changes were going to give it a better spot, or at least give some options? But it seems like they only made it worse in WvW "in exchange" for some power in useless stuff. Anet has done this a lot. Pulling power from weaker classes in exchange for stuff that is not used anyway. Chrono certainly didn't need any nerfs at all, and these shield nerfs hurt the class a lot in WvW (from a fun perspective too).

The alac changes make sense, I think it's a good direction, except it requires people to take wells in the first place. In WvW none of the wells are useful, they don't do damage, have effects tied to the end of the well, and heal basically nothing (also on end). On top of that, you have to drop slots for other powerful mesmer utils. Alac builds in WvW are getting weaker and weaker which doesn't make sense. I thought they would give some more options for Chrono but that's not the case. If you want to give quickness on the other hand, you don't need any wells! That's so inconsistent. Your whole grand master trait has no synergy with any of the spec utilities. Now in WvW, your quickness build just got a shield nerf, and lost quickness and alac. It now gives swiftness... That boon is hard to come across. How useless is the well that strips 2 boons on last pulse. Standing still for 3 seconds in a well in WvW is grief and doesn't happen, so you wont use it. Not to mention null field is strictly better? If you cast it on an ally or on an enemy your splitting the value of the already weak ability. Superspeed on one ability after 3 seconds is super useful too lmao....

In PvE it's not even better. Chrono is really only played as quickness and tank. You can barely heal with it anymore, and even if you do make a heal alac chrono build, compare it to other healers and it's useless. You again, drop utils that are core reasons to play the class in the first place, provide worse healing than mech, and wayyyy less boon uptime. Why play chrono at that point? The quickness build is relatively unchanged, except a huge consistency part of the build was running the quickness well. Now that well gives super speed? A random and nearly useless buff in PvE. And the alac well, which would give a lot of build diversity, now strips boons. A useless well now, no damage, no boons, no strips in WvW because they can walk out and in pve your sword autos strip any meaningful enemy boons. There are quickness chrono builds with boon duration that use mirror images instead of the well, but now they just got a strict nerf as build diversity tightened up. Because quickness chrono was really strong, for sure.

I really hope there are a ton more changes in this patch, because this is nowhere near where chrono should be. Why don't they play to it's theme. Super speed, quickness, alac giving boon class. It can have a heal theme I guess, but no other class can give quickness and alac, and it certainly cant heal without regen or other boons. Or give it more super speed or something. These were fun things that made the class interesting, it's theme is stripped so bare now.

Also, why nerf fractal pot. I don't need vitality in that easy gamemode. And the top tier fractal players who this changes matter to, dont need build restrictions in an easy gamemode. Let them greed more precision, these chnages are not making these easy encounters harder thats for sure. Just limits build comp.

Note: all these comments are made prior to seeing the final notes. So lets keep this discussion about before then. But that's some copium if the final notes are big enough to fix chronos whole identity.

[The infinite many problems with the most recent design changes and philosophies revealed by Anet and Gw2 for EoD.]

2 minutes ago, Shenkopp.6317 said:

who cares what Anets "goals" are if they are wrong? the point of my post is to try to get them to realize that they are not thinking about the bigger picture. I think if you reread my post it's very clear how I explain why collateral damage groups is not a good decision and why the changes they are making do not promote a wider audience. Even by definition, they are not promoting a wider audience? isn't it speculation to say everything you just said as well? I love the optimism though. I personally could not convince myself that everything is shiny on the other side of the unknown. According to you though, anets making all the right decisions. Oh wait... you're speculating just as much as me

that wasn't even their goal, they comment on their goals in the article. "With Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons, we’re adjusting existing reward systems to make it clearer how they fit together, to ensure they’re exciting and have long-term appeal, and to give them a role in crafting legendary equipment." where do they say they are trying to reach a larger audience. 

[The infinite many problems with the most recent design changes and philosophies revealed by Anet and Gw2 for EoD.]

12 hours ago, Obtena.7952 said:

Too much speculation in the OP thread. The bottomline is that Anet is making the changes to promote more content to a wider audience, which is contrary to the premise of the OP. 

Yup, certain groups are collateral damaged, even if that damage appears to contradict Anet's goals ... but the things they are changing were already in contradiction to their goals to begin with ... so it was inevitable.

who cares what Anets "goals" are if they are wrong? the point of my post is to try to get them to realize that they are not thinking about the bigger picture. I think if you reread my post it's very clear how I explain why collateral damage groups is not a good decision and why the changes they are making do not promote a wider audience. Even by definition, they are not promoting a wider audience? isn't it speculation to say everything you just said as well? I love the optimism though. I personally could not convince myself that everything is shiny on the other side of the unknown. According to you though, anets making all the right decisions. Oh wait... you're speculating just as much as me

[The infinite many problems with the most recent design changes and philosophies revealed by Anet and Gw2 for EoD.]

8 hours ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

Using all bold neither helps highlight actually important points you are trying to make, nor does it promote visibility.

 

I skimed through your points, here are some which do not make sense:

 

1. WvW and 40 hours. Not a thing any longer, it's around 24 hours at most. I will agree that your point though stands, WvW rewards safe but less reward than some other content. Can't say I agree with the once again focus on skirmish tickets, there are mutliple rewards which could get improved to make this content more rewarding beyond skirmish tickets.

 

2. It's a free market. No, it is not in fact given that the main supplier and governor of any and all in-game wealth are the developers. They are taking actions before the limited free market which is built on top of the game design. As they do now. You are correct though, the market WILL react to those new conditions

 

3. Fractal and Fractal CM rewards were far beyond most content reward wise. Do I personaly like this change? No. Do I understand why they are undertaking it? Yes. The goal is to force players out of their comfort zones of only farming the easiest (and most rewarding) instanced content over and over in an attempt to promote multiple modes of instanced content.

 

4. Balance wise it seems that the developers want move away from the "bring as few supports as possible, but as many as you need" rather to a "bring XYZ supports to cover necessities, but have more free choice in which classes cover said support role". Time will tell how this works out. This is about more variety and options on those support slots, versus the rather strict bring these classes and fill up with dps.

 

Finally, the changes to clovers are intended to not let players double dip reward wise and load up 1 type of content with these rewards. Yes, it's been great to buy those 60 Mystic Clover per month at half price, then either craft a legendary and sell or keep for ones self at 160-180 gold less than the market value. 

 

Increasing the cost, spreading clover availability and limiting their acquisition will promote other content besides the daily fractal farm which many of us have gotten so used to. Literally an attempt to promote a more content diverse play style at the cost of one of the most rewarding content in game. Unfortunate, but actually balanced.

Cheers for the post, Sorry bout the bold. Was a mistake. 

1. I certainly would love to see this 24 hour data you got, I do hope that the pip changes helped like this. Either way we agree it takes to long

2. Fair. the goal is to have some sortof free market imitation. Unfortunately its poorly regulated for sure. In general the market moves very similarly in terms of supply and demand though.  

3. My point still stands. They were rewarding because you could do them daily. Of course people are gonna farm them daily and get the $$. There are titles and special loot boxes associated with them. Good/solid loot to promote player base. Unfortunately forcing players to play other content isn't going to make players happy, justifiably. If that is their goal, it seems counter intuitive because now, even if I choose to add strikes to my weekly list of things to do, I just lost my daily reason to log on and play longer than grabbing my login reward. With 4 new strikes we can be generous and say another 30 min of content. But the rewards are based weekly, I guess I will log on 3x a week for 3 different statics and be done. That will hurt ingame sales and player count guaranteed which is why my point is that it would be so much better to just make the strike rewards more appealing. People will play strikes if you make them better. Hell, they could make Green prophet shards exclusive like HoT metas. That would force players to play them. A huge critique of this game is the late game PvE and always has been. All late game PvE content should award more, we don't want people to stop playing this content even more.

4. Fair, balance is tough and was more of a forethought to my post, we will see how it works. It's just very scary that changes are being made that still dont address the problem: now instead of classes being required its boons being required (even more so). I guess that's a little more diverse yeah but is the diverse option of "what class should i pick for quickness" an interesting design philosophy? I think myself and a lot of others are worried thats the most stale part of Gw2 PvE. 

You got some good ideas, thanks for sharing!

[The infinite many problems with the most recent design changes and philosophies revealed by Anet and Gw2 for EoD.]

6 hours ago, ZeftheWicked.3076 said:

What an annoying post. OP makes all text black, and those of us using dark mode can't see a kitten without jumping through hoops.

Now onto the subject. The move by a-net is good, if a bit unbalanced. Spreading mystic coin and clover rewards to other pve modes is good. And with such spread fractal nerf is justified. We get less per one source but we're getting more sources - raids and new strikes.

What is not cool is old strikes. They should get such rewards too - in smaller amounts of course.
If they act as introduction to end game PvE content, they should do so in terms of rewards as well.
Let's say you can gain 2 mystic clover weekly from doing Icebrood Saga strikes.

this is my and many others exact point. If you want to make people play a game mode, you don't nerf others. You make that game mode have better loot. It's not even "power creep" because people have X amount of time to play the game. If I have 1 hour, its a question of do I wana do fractals or some Strikes. Right now I do an hour worth of strikes, I get a fraction of what I make otherwise (a third, even worse counting titles and encryptions). https://fast.farming-community.eu/instances/strike-missions. The profit per hour is good, but there isn't a good enough daily incentive to do them, so they get done by some people once a week. 

Either way the point still stands. Damaging content at least on this level is not good for the game and keeping players around. Nerfing other content might force some players to play strikes more, but they still aren't daily loot. Why would I log on daily now if a huge chunk of what made struggling through fractal CMs worth it is gone. I can log in 3x a week for some statics and be done. That will certainly hurt the average player base.

[The infinite many problems with the most recent design changes and philosophies revealed by Anet and Gw2 for EoD.]

3 hours ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

 

Diversity is always a good thing...in fact it is the only thing that actually exists. The Issue is that A-net doesn't know how to cultivate actual diversity. It's not hard to understand why...Diversity and how it actually works is not yet fully understood. I've written hundreds of comments and spent years studying how it works in an academic manner...it's completely counter intuitive to how people think about the world and how balance/diversity are connected.

 

Honestly if you just read my post history...you will get an idea of the level of depth that this topic goes. PVP has been the poster child of this cmc nerf everything philosophy and it's being carried over now into PVE. Because things went so great over there!

 

Honestly if you have hopes...just crush them now. A-net has no idea what diversity is...or how it works...and every-time they mention it just ASSUME they do not know, until it's shown to otherwise be the case. 

nice post. Thanks for the link

[The infinite many problems with the most recent design changes and philosophies revealed by Anet and Gw2 for EoD.]

1 hour ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

Instanced content in general are crap.

 

The only reason strikles are good, is because they are too short, so u finished them before sleep of boredom.

 

Fractals is the best instanced content because the format, mechanics and structure.

True, I feel like time invested is a huge factor in players making the decision to do content. How many times have I clicked around in some city map for 30 min with no idea on what I wana do because of that haha

[The infinite many problems with the most recent design changes and philosophies revealed by Anet and Gw2 for EoD.]

8 hours ago, Freya.9075 said:

Fyi I couldn’t read it properly since the text is black and I’m on iPhone with black background. Did you copy paste it or something? Might want to change it somehow if you want phone users to be able to read properly too. 

Good shout. was me and my buddies writing out a slew of thoughts. Should be better to read ( I hope).

[The infinite many problems with the most recent design changes and philosophies revealed by Anet and Gw2 for EoD.]

Priorities: Using logic and common sense, the main goals of the company are to make money. This is done through player population and ingame purchases. More players, more purchases.

TLDR: Make all game modes good, don’t nerf any of them. Nerf boon uptime in general to promote actual player decision. Promote player retention by giving incentives like dailies and lowering time sinks.

Anet is contradicting themselves in many ways by PvE manipulation and hurting the way players play the game. People will continue to play games that they have a reason to. The best proven ways are through daily content (hence why daily rewards are a thing), battle passes (or loot), and PvP/competition. Anet has clearly dropped the ball incredibly when it comes to PvP, and here is why they are doing it to PvE as well.

Removing mystic coins from CMs makes players play the game less. People have less reason to log on and play daily with much worse rewards, and player count also drops as the portion of players who only play the game for CMs stop playing. Removing coins from CMs does not increase player count in any way, and does not sell more loot.

Scenario 1: I log on daily to do CM’s and T4’s to convert my 300 of my daily fractal relics (a huge majority of the relics I get a day) into 2 clovers. Over 1 week, that's 14 mystic clovers, saving me 28 coins. In fact, if I generously give myself 1 mystic coin a CM, thats 3 mystic coins for 21 a week. I net almost 50 mystic coins in profit a week of savings from doing fractals and get 14 clovers. With the proposed changes, I get 10 mystic clovers, saving me 10 mystic coins, netting 4 less clovers and 39 less mystic coin value a week. NOTE: CMs + T4s seem to take 1 hr on average, thats 7 hours a week. Kindof a lot of playtime.

As you can see from scenario 1, the logic for not playing fractals is quite apparent. I would argue a lot of players will stop playing fractals and stop playing the game for this reason. So why would Anet want to intentionally hurt their player base?

Because New content. New content sells their expansion and gets them money. New content is also a way to hopefully attract new players and returning players to play their game again. So how does removing loot from CMs make players play strikes more? There is no daily loot from strikes. You get 10 mystic coins a week. If you play all the late game PvE content a week, thats well, 10 mystic coins a week…. Who cares about the additional mystic clover recipes, I can only buy 5 clovers a week if I count coins from playable content. Cool! Now you can spend your magnetite shards on clovers, oh wait, you make 39 less coins a week, so just kidding you cannot use that recipe.

I would argue there are far too few and soon to be even less ways to get mystic coins, that will only increase the price. Especially as demand rises with EoD. Funny enough, Anet mentions being careful about mystic coin prices. Oh but they just injected millions through return toos, and were totally okay with coin prices rising +1g when hackers affected the market. Infact, mystic coins hovered around 1g for a while as Gen 2 legendaries were being released. If anet truely is careful about balancing mystic coins in the market, then clearly they planned for mystic coins to be roughly 1 gold in gen 2 recipes. Which makes sense because they would be roughly the same cost as gen 1s. Look how that worked out! And now they plan to cause them to rise even more! Clearly mystic coin prices are not that relevant to the “economy” because they contradict that statement with actions they do all the time.

Now you can make less coins, and by extension less clovers, and therefore less gold a week. Oh now you also have less content to play, because the majority of your gold comes from just logging in weekly to do some strikes. Explain to me how this decision makes sense, and promotes the priorities of the company in any way. People want gold, now with EoD, late game PvE makes you even less. The problem was never mystic clovers, ask any veteran. Coins can be sold, clovers cant, liquid gold is always better than account bound. So why are they removing ways to make liquid gold, and adding ways to convert stuff to mystic clovers. I can convert mystic clovers at any time through the forge. OH yeah, now doing this conversion only saves you 1 coin as well, so you’re using more coins on average too. More demand, and less supply means coins are going up! That means it will be even harder to convert liquid gold to coins!

Hopefully you are seeing the long list of holes that all point to this being a bad decision. In general, Anet is going to get players to stop playing their game. OH BUT fractal gold is so much better than strike gold and raid gold! !!! people play fractals all the time but not strikes and raids!! If we release more strikes people won't play them!!!! YES TRUE.because fractals have a DAILY REASON to keep playing the gamemode. I will log on to play my daily content and get my daily gold because its efficient and no one has infinite time. I don't play strikes because the daily loot is garbage! Garbage. I don't do world bosses, I don't do dungeons, I don't do 95% of the content in this game because the loot is garbage. If you want players to play content, you give them an incentive to play.

The last thing you want to do is remove the reward from the end game. Hell, sitting in drizzlewood is profitable, because it generates clovers, and now it will be even better because coins will go up! Why lower the loot from any game mode? It would only lower the player base and thus go AGAINST the companies priorities. If anything, every game mode and every meta and every boss should all be driven to give similar loot tables. To have similar gold per hour, to have similar time investments, to have similar daily advantages. That's how you promote good healthy content. If you want strikes to be played, give them daily content, why are coins gated weekly? Makes no sense. Reward players for playing the game, thats how you get and keep players.

If I have to play 15-25 hours a week of WvW to get 300 skirmish tokens, I better be getting hella gold from that. If I play 20 hours a week of WvW I get like 60 tokens because the majority of the tokens are on the back of the skirmish chests. That's the best example of BAD loot systems. This does not reward players for playing the game, it promotes unhealthy amounts of gaming, and disincentives players to return daily. If I can only play 10 hours a week, that makes getting 1000 skirmish tokens for armor take months. Not including the poor gold per hour.

I understand there’s some hidden “economy” that “matters” to Anet, but it's a free market. Let the prices pick themselves, give the players liquid gold and let play time decide what's worth it and what's not. Supply vs demand, gold per hour, basic concepts. Why step in to lower one game mode's gold per hour, and not touch any of the other ones? In PvE diversity is your friend, you want as many game modes to play and as much content to play and for it to be fair to keep your game being played by as many people as possible. Player count = more money. Fortnite is a free game and Epic made a lot of money because of player count. If you want players to buy gems and expansions or whatever, then get and keep more players, that's the best way to do it.

Part 2: Since class balance also relates to player count.

PvE class balance. Here is an example of where diversity isn’t always a good thing. I don’t understand what the point of changing specs and target caps are. I think Anet is completely missing the ball. Here’s why.

"Generally, this’ll mean that for each subgroup in a squad for strikes or raids, you’ll want a healer, a source of quickness, and a source of alacrity, though we expect expert theory crafters to find ways to combine some of these roles!" - Anet

Here is a clear fundamental misunderstanding of the game's balance and what is wrong with the game. I ask, what theory crafting is going on here? The problem was always how boons lead to undiverse team comps. Well now, you still have 2 healers, 2 quicks, and now you have 2 alacs too. That's even less diverse, that sounds like 1 less dps class (the most flexible class). OH BUT NOW you can play ele quickness and necro quickness! Woo! How is that any different? How is that theory crafting? Picking a different class isn’t theory crafting, it's brainless. If you want to promote good build craft, you make a universal change to boons. You don't make them available to more specs. Who cares that warriors bring banners, who cares that firebrand has quickness. The problem is that boons are broken and sought after, and no matter what class brings the boons, they are going to be meta. Crono, Engi, Ele, Necro, Firebrand, quickness is still quickness, and it's broken. What makes warrior more of a banner slave than firebrand a quickness slave? Renegade an alac slave? The group needs what it needs as far as i’m concerned 6 people in every team comp are all boon slaves. If the group needs a power dps, then the warrior can play power warrior. The problem isn't that warriors are the only class that provide banner boons, it's that your boons are permanently up, and so powerful that people get upset if you don't have them. If you want to build diversity and theorycrafting, you make boon uptime low as hell, make players decide when and how to bring ig. quickness into specific situations. That's good player decisions. That's interesting gameplay that makes communities challenge themselves. That's content that can be balanced around groups with no boons. Then CMs for players who can find unique ways to combat situations with the boons. Player decisions shouldn’t be, which class do I play quickness on. What kind of decision is that? It should be how can I provide DPS here, Heals here, Quick here, Vigor here, etc. etc. How can I clear this boss effectively? 

[New Stat - Armor Pen]

I doubt they will change the elite specs from where they are outside of numbers.
Respectfully I would rather talk about ideas about improvements to the game rather than be complacent. What's the point of conversing here if you'd rather just say "its fine" over and over. 

[New Stat - Armor Pen]

thanks for the idea, though respectfully thats not how the game works. Vuln is balanced around being applied to anyone, not just tanks. You cannot just "take vuln" many classes don't have ways of applying it or are only availible on select bad utilities that waste a slot. Also what happens when they press 1 button and cleanse the condi you put on them? it's not like power classes have many condi to flood them with anyway. In practice vuln doesn't work ever, and doesn't even help enough anyway.  I agree maybe a stat isn't the best way, a debuff thats not a condi or something that increases burst to these tanks is a good idea

 

[New Stat - Armor Pen]

I've thought a lot about how else to fix it. Each spec revealed seems to not change the meta at all. 
Because power is vastly weaker right now it only makes sense to do something about it. If you think about nerfing everything else it makes less sense, and seems like a much more complicated thing. Nerfing boons, nerfing condi, nerfing class specifics. Whatever it is balance is always a lesser of two evils. In this case, im suggesting adding a stat to berserker or a mechanic or whatever it may be, some way to deal with these tank/condi classes. They have added concentration and expertise but nothing to help power builds. They still have stat combos fully focused on damage. I remember someone mentioning bruiser stat lines such as toughness and vitality and adding more stat combos with power but they would never work. It's just prolonging death like cavs does because you dont have the sustain and boon time that cele has. Also, your "spending points" doesn't work in this situation because like diviners' or even cele, each stat is not worth the same in terms of value but they are worth the same points. If you take 20 power away for 20 AP, it could correlate to as much as 300 power on targets with toughness. Another variable doesn't matter because something needs to be done about power, its 1 variable always, "how to balance power". But I totally agree, if anet wants the meta to be tank then thats just how it's gonna be, only it seems very weird considering tank/condi are objectively the least interesting and interactive ways to play the game.

[New Stat - Armor Pen]

The more boons they throw into classes makes balancing pvp ridiculously hard. Cele/tanks can have perma boon uptime, cant really be killed, and can still deal good damage to squishy people. Classes like mesmer and thief have so many class specific nerfs that they aren't useful at all in WvW. You can't run full zerk or even marauders anymore because you have to dedicate 3 stats to deal damage while condi and tank get so many benefits from just a few stats, they can be so flexible. 

I think  a really good solution is another stat armor pen. It can be added to zerk combos to help them deal with tanks. Toughness, vitality, protection, blinds, weakness, aegis, barrier, are all spammed with ease now and it makes tank classes the best by a lot. The new specs seem to spam boons more and we haven't seen any strip specs yet. If they implicate an armor piercing mechanic, these tanks can be dealt with and full glass builds/playstyle can become viable like it once was. Tank classes currently have no counterplay and are too forgiving, the only way to fight them is to go tank yourself and at that point noone will die. It takes a hour of roaming in WvW or 2 pvp games to see this in action.