Schnuschnu.9857

I actually think a new race could be added realistically. Just not in the way most imagine it: Just as an option to play existing things. It wouldn't fit and would be way to much work for Anet. If they would add for example the tengu they would have no access to any previous story lines (no new voice acting for this, a huge burden) but instead have their own new storyline. Not a full blown 4 season 2 expansion spanning storyline, more like the other races (lvl 1-30 story line) and than lead up to becoming a trusted partner of the commander (they would have to make "the commander", but that is doable). Going forward the commander would get his close tengu ally (as npc) and as a tengu you would get the commander as an npc so that you don't get the problem with "not the commander is doing stuff" lorewise. No need to change voicelines whatsoever, no voicing old stories, players would just have to accept that they are not the commander. Playing tengu would be more of a bit of a perspective change. Animation and armors remain but could actually be doable and aren't as huge of a financial burden as paying voice actors for basically doing the whole story again I imagine.

Something story focused. I don't think the expansion has to deal with the commander and driving our plot forward. This could actually be a really good opportunity to do so many different exciting things. Playable mission lines to get other perspectives: Nightmare court, the other pale tree, norn spirit stories like ensuring the retreat of the norn, zojja update, inquest storyline, tengu (what happend in the domain of the wind) or even exploring some parts of the novels (I mean the characters exist in the universe, so why not). If we can make the whole world more whole storywise that could really add something. I don't think another commander story with even more e-specs to balance is what is really healthy for the game.

Honestly, great news. But I'm still on the edge how I feel about this game. I played for ~7years and now me and my friends kind of fell out of love with the game (no real balance/power creep, no big new content etc). This announcement in combination with recent balancing gives me hope and I will at least keep an eye on the game. Now we need the alliance system and the future might actually look promising.

None. I just showed you that your complaints are no issues because I offered a solution to all of them. So tell me, what problems are left? None. You just need some practise with the class, nothing more. I too have classes I struggle to play efficently, doesn't mean that they are too weak etc.

Thieves have really high evasion uptime and methods of dealing damge while evading or inbuild evades in damage skills. If Shadow Refuge is your main stealth skill you are doing something wrong. You can easily combo some smoke fields for enormous stealth uptime or steal to stealth, blinding powder etc. And that should never change. An offensive ability that works regardless if the enemy counters it or not (like dodging) would be horribly unbalanced. You can Shadow Shot to land backstabs since the projectile does no damage and therefore you don't get revealed. Also you blind the enemy eliminating any chance of imidiate counter play. You should only need short invisibility durations to set up what you need to. I don't want to be rude, but you are likely not really good with thief and demand changes because you don't use or don't even know about possibilities to deal with the problems you have. Everything you struggle with has solutions. You should ask for advice, don't demand change just because you haven't mastered a class.

Well, if you go... can I have your stuff?

Thank you very much for finally addressing this pressing issue. I want this game to be great but after 7 years of what feels like neglect for the competitive modes I am actually considered quiting. The power levels are absolutely insane it's simply not fun to play but this post gives me at least a bit of hope. You wanted feedback, so here is some: Boons should be what there were originally designed for: temporal enhancements. Most boons today can have 100% uptime or at least too close to permanent. I think boons should never achieve this (at least not with 1 character and many classes can provide such things, stacking will always enable higher boon uptimes). It takes away the tactical aspects of the competitive modes. Why should you time anything when protection is nearly always up or you just push with tons of stability making CC meaningless. More boon strip isn't the answer, that is something we should know by now. If boons are temporal enhancements again you can adjust boon strip accordingly. Damage, now that is a tricky topic but I say look at the base health. Do we really need skills (often on short cooldowns) hitting for 10k when base health is not even 20k for any class? I don't think so. Sure equipment can make a huge difference but in WvW you can easily have 50 players using such skills all at once, what difference does equipment make than? Not that much. You just get insta deleted which is no fun and in the case of a new player that one might never get back into the game mode. I think damage has to be more evenly distributed among skills. No "I press skill number 3 and hit for 10k dmg". Burst should still be possible, it is even very important to not let bunker builds run rampant. But achieving high damage should be more complex than pressing 2 buttons and incidentally deleting 2 people which you haven't even targeted in the first place. This alone could raise TTK a bit.

Why don't you use your new tech for damage scaling based on range? They closer the enemy is to the center of the shade they more damage they get and the longer the conditions last. This means precise shade placement is important and enables counter play by positioning. It would preserve the functionality of the trait while tweaking it a bit for WvW. It could actually be implemented to a degree in PvE as well as mobs don't tend to move as much so the problem should be manageable for players.

It is a mode designed for server (well not anymore) battles, so zerg fights are a central point. Sure roles for smaller groups exit but they often require at least some form of setup and communication from the involved players, a role easily taken by smaller guild groups. Sure solo roaming or small scale exists but it was never the focus imo. Also WvW will have to balance for one thing or else we get what we have: unfocused balance and balancing a mode with the potential for huge zerg fights around small scale is not really an option. But well, that's not really the focus of this discussion.

The problem with this is the fact that it would need development time and extensive testing with uncertain results. Nothing that will happen 7 years in. That's why my proposal is basically just number tweaks shoved into one debuff. It's easy to do and can get data on a different perspective thus possibly bringing this direction of balance as an option on Anet's radar.

What you say is true but since damage is halved it should take double the time to get bursted. The overall pace wouldn't be touched but individual spikes of damage would be halved as the health pool stays the same so you have double the time to react to a burst. It may not that much more time but it should prevent the event of just being instantly deleted. Sure you just can't heal up but you can position better, utilize cleans, use movement skills to get out of the damage or other active defenses. Therefore TTK should rise as people can react and don't get simply deleted. This is why I say just test it. We all can make prediction how this can or can't affect players but in the end there is an human element which none of us can reliably predict (how do players react and does their behavior changes if at all). There is nothing to lose as my proposal is so easy to implement. You either get a good result and useful data or you had an event which didn't change anything without any effort. The boon duration nerf should make it harder to achieve things like 100% resistance or protection uptime (it will be possible but you need more resources to achieve this). The CC duration nerf means you have to plan when to use it so it has maximum effect. Coupled with the damage and sustain nerf those timed bursts will dent your hp but you can react to them via actions (positioning, active defenses etc) instead of relying on passive boons or healing keeping you in the game. This version would involve the player much more imo but ultimately we would have to see. As I have said multiple times: It's an no effort event, it could simply be tested for like 2 days and after it we all know more and can further the balance discussion based on data we have and not based on speculation or expectations.

We will not get a full blown balance patch just to test things. This experiment could show what higher TTK would do to the game mode without really balancing anything as it just a number tweak. And let's be honest, most past balance patch were just number tweaks. It is also just a proposal for a short term event (like no downstate) to collect some data and not intended to be a permanent solution but we will never get higher balance towards higher TTK if Anet has no data on it and like I said I don't expect them to release a full blown test balance patch. So this is my low effort proposal to get data for higher TTK and if the community would even embrace it at this point or if it would even have a good impact on the game mode.You see people complaining about no fights or pirate ship being boring. To get people to fight you need higher TTK as just being blown up in mere milliseconds is no fun for any involved party. It could also improve the new player experience. If you make any mistake in the current game you might get blown up in a matter of seconds or less. New players get killed a couple of times and will never again enter WvW while it bleeds players until it is dead. If new players can at least see what happend to them by having at least a minimal opportunity to fight back instead of being ganked in the blink of n eye some might be willing to learn (workes at least for me this way). And let's face it: WvW desperately needs new players and the community that still exists needs something to do and PvDoor won't cut it for much longer for the majority of the player base but at least the potential of some actually interesting fights which last longer than 5 seconds for 3 minutes of circling around each other might at least keep some players entertained and in the interested in the mode. For the potential of longer fights you need higher TTK. The balance trend of the past years is the opposite: power creep. So Anet needs to see that a higher TTK can be beneficial for the mode and therefore they need data on higher TTK which my proposal could provide without spending much developing time or much effort.

What you propose is even more power creep. Please keep in mind that this is not a balance proposal. It is for an event (like no downstate) to observe the impact of higher TTK with low effort on the dev site to not eat up too many resources for something experimental with no guaranty for it to be positively received or yielding data which fall in line with expected results (raising TTK and lowering power creep).For the other please do not derail the thread with what you think is optimal balance as this is not directly about balance but about lengthening TTK and it's reception by the community. The devs have to know if the community would even like higher TTK to balance in this direction. They will certainly not release a full blown balance patch to test such things (anyone who played the game long enough knows that balance patches consisted often of number tweaks so I wouldn't expect more from an experiment which might yield data on higher TTK). Yes I do think higher TTK might be better but my opinion ultimately doesn't influence balance (as we as players have a limited perspective) but it might be beneficial for Anet to test for such a balance direction.

Yes, the idea would never solve this. But I wanted something which gets data on higher TTK (and lower power creep) while being easy to implement and I think my proposal is the very definition of easy to implement as it just reshuffles some numbers on effect already on the game. So it's low effort but provides an environment to test higher TTK and it's effects. It could easily be an 2 day (like a weekend ) event to gather some interesting data and giving the devs an idea if this could be an direction they might want to consider.

Disclaimer: THIS IS NOT INTENDED TO BE A PERMANENT BALANCE SOLUTION BUT AN EVENT (LIKE NO DOWNSTATE) TO COLLECT DATA ON HIGHER TTK. Why do I want this?Since Anet does some WvW events from time to time I think this would be a prime opportunity to test something: Reducing power creep and upping TTK. Everyone who played this game for some years knows that we had ridiculous power creep over the years (see for example constant rebalancing of the labyrinth for Halloween because each year we got more power creep). So why not use WvW as a test field for balance to battle power creep? I think we really don't need auto attacks and low cooldown skills hitting for a couple thousands of damage a swing when base health pools range from 11k-19k. We don't need 100% uptime on boons, conditions and ridiculous CC uptime. It should be a matter of using heals, damage, CC etc with appropriate timing and not just running around with everything at your disposal. We don't need insane burst combos downing people in under a second. It is no fun (like playing cheesy builds to win). At least in my opinion. Now on to my idea. The idea itselfAs an event implement a debuff in WvW which does the following things:-reduce all damage you get by 50% (power and condition)-reduce all healing and barrier you get by 50%-reduce the duration off all boons you get by 50%-reduce the duration of all CC (soft and hard) you receive by 50% What does this achieve?It ups the TTK (time to kill) significantly while making permanent uptime of boons harder to achieve. It discourages massive CC lock as you would to need to blow a lot more cooldowns to achieve the same result. Nobody likes getting caught with the tip of your feet in a CC field just to get blown to pieces in milliseconds. It should create actual battles not just one push or pirate ship scenarios. Timing your stuff would become way more important while making thing like base health pools matter (currently the up to 8k more health are like not even 1 sec more of survival in a worst case scenario). It prevents insane burst combos downing people in under a second. One problem I see is the amount of cleanses in the current game to combat the conditions flying around could make condition focused build obsolete during the event and strengthening bunker builds but Anet could always work from there .The main idea is for this event to provide data on how higher TTK affects the game and to collect some data if this could be a balance direction Anet wants to consider while being low effort to not waste resources. The implementationThis should be very easy to implement because we already have all those effects in game:-damage reduction via boons like prot etc-healing reduction is already available via poison effect-negative boon duration is possible as shown with the Improved Alacrity trait from chrono-negative CC duration is very much possible as it exists on runes and traitsSo all those effects are already in the game and just need to be tweaked to fit the numbers and put into one debuff. It's an very easy to implement event. I know this experiment wouldn't solve all problems but it might give an glance of the dimension of power creep we have and how the game could work with higher TTK. Maybe people like it, maybe people hate it but one never knows without trying and this would be a low effort experiment to gain for sure interesting data.