DeceiverX.8361

Thing is it doesn't really matter what this team does, because the primary reason people don't care is that the balance team's philosophies have failed the mode to the point that the combat itself isn't really any fun and is largely devoid of meaning outside of "big boon bar go brrr." Reality is, even if scoring is perfect and the systems underlying WvW were utterly flawless and could bring player satisfaction in the end result of a win or loss, the question needs to be asked: "Is the act of playing WvW itself any fun?" To most players, the answer is simply a flat "no." To most former players, it has entirely to do with profession design and balance, and a limited scope of others like how Warclaw and sentry buffs slashed efficacy at small group havoc. The PvP experience here is just weak because the builds and tactics alike state either "when it comes to scoring, play in a big group or play off-hours, otherwise it sucks to suck." There are no alternatives and every unique trait and effect that could possibly offset boon dependence has either been nerfed, deleted, or replaced with boons. People talk a big game about strips, but strips still play into the boonball meta, because there are no existing counters to strips; the best way to deal with them is just access to more boons. For boonball to go away, boons themselves need to be less powerful of a play strategy, and boonless builds need to be more present as viable alternatives to deal with strips. This means colossal nerfs to concentration or even its downright removal and a revert/rework on tons of traits that were changed in the name of PvE group support viability, and even bigger reworks in the realm of reduced CC and removal of tons of powercreep. And frankly, I sincerely doubt the skills/class/systems team or whatever they call themselves these days will deliver on that in the name of WvW. Until then, there's absolutely nothing bringing me back to the game, because the entire PvP combat experience in GW2 is just outright bad thanks to how the classes have been designed and balanced. It's not strictly their fault; it's just if their only answer is "that's not in our ability to change and rests on the skills team," who we never hear anything from except when new weapons/skills/traits are introduced with expansions, then frankly they might as well state outright they'll never be able to improve the experience. Because that communication would honestly do them more favors and let people quit with closure rather than wasting their time and flaming.

Yeah, and it was still just as good because the rest of the entire kit wasn't nerfed and rest of the game powercrept to hell. Reaper needs quickness now because the rest of the game is the same way and all of its shroud builds were gutted. Like literally half the prominent and powerful traits don't even exist anymore, and most of them aren't used. They could also just change the animation speeds and give actual useful GM options over RO. Doesn't help that largely, people are just bad at Reaper. These kinds of comments prove the point that boons being OP with some ridiculous access shouldn't be answers to "fixing" a class's performance.

It was and has been this way in high-tier smallscale since PoF dropped, because most of the aforementioned boon denial isn't effective in small-scale where groups move really fast and the overall uptime is lower. Most people just stopped playing that scene because running 3 supports and a reaper or soulbeast as a base comp was really, really boring. Which is why it honestly even isn't about boon denial at the end of the day. It's group boon uptime/concentration and Alacrity that's been so powercrept that just needs massive reductions to open up other things. Because running without boons just figuratively and literally aren't options. Builds without them suck. And incidental boons getting stripped means more power downtime overall when they're easier to strip and harder to re-apply, since they keep replacing profession mechanics with boons. If you don't build specifically for boons and get boon stripped or corrupted, you no longer have traits or a functional build, full stop. Application/Duration are the problems. Buffing boon denial is the band-aid, but it won't cause any fun meta changes since no matter what, it's still boon-centric and if they go overboard you end up with Pirate Ship metas where nobody can engage because stability is immediately removed.

Like bq said, most of the existing traits post-rework already behave on-stealth-gain/on-stealth-end. Forcing Reveal after the predetermined few seconds already works with these traits. It's just in most cases, sitting in stealth for multiple seconds has more value than weaving it. And if the thief has options in the build, they'll set up their casts perfectly to just barely exit stealth for a fraction of a second to gain full effects before dipping back in, similar to infinitely chaining CnD without becoming visible. This is why I don't believe a big rework is necessary; most of the existing mechanics already support stealth downtime existing. Beyond this is largely numbers tweaking and a handful of minor trait changes to make stealth more fair-feeling while still keeping most of the thief's playstyles intact. And the side effects of giving the thief periods of distinct downtime in stealth access enables non-stealth mechanics to be buffed wholesale, since all thief builds will be brought closer to parity in this regard.

Skills are pretty much already are balanced to 15 initiative (See: IArrow). If we want to really go back in time, most skills used to cost more because there were more traits which helped regenerate initiative. Even if some skills were raised, they'd be normalized across the lines, which is a good thing. Few people have problems with intermittent stealth. Otherwise ranger and mesmer would be constant targets of complaints for their access. People have a bigger issue with chained and sustained stealth. While the SA rework was a step in the right direction, there are still so many sources of stealth in the game that moments of counterplay aren't really well-defined and the thief can't be balanced well around them. Thief's stealth as a mechanic specifically isn't the culprit here so much as it is its access broad-spectrum. That's why all that's largely needed is a forced End-of-stealth Reveal and some minor tweaks elsewhere. What you described, especially through the introduction of so many new skills, is a wildly different scale of undertaking when account for the sheer number of art/animation labor involved. I think the reality of the matter is that ANet actively supports sustained stealth is the bigger problem, as it's frequently used in PvE with non-PvP/WvW players on other professions also actively encouraging its use for skips etc. So no matter what, people are going to be upset. Even as a thief I've complained about it for over ten years now, and it's not like that's actually been heeded, either. ANet doesn't seem to care one way or another.

Hard pass. This is a wildly convoluted solution seemingly just to answer "How can we make the thief not use stealth?" which isn't really inherently a problem, while also killing off a ton of thematic builds and wildly overloading MH Pistol lol. Plus a bunch of RNG. If you want to fix initiative and stealth, make preparedness baseline, have a fixed/unchangeable stealth duration, and force Revealed at the end of that cast to make stacking not possible. If you want Steal to be not so bloated, profession power needs to get diverted elsewhere as to interact within the scope of those respective trait line bonuses. If you want Steal to be thematically relevant, the bundles need to not suck.

Several of these statements are simply not true. Most champions are designed with multiple roles, purposes, and builds in mind, and are balanced based both on specific implementations but also on high-level constructs on their performances in relation to others which may possibly be in various game situations at various times and gold differences in the game with consideration towards how that impacts the overall capability to win the match in a team environment spanning a massive roster. There are a significant number of top/mid/support champions which are balanced for jungle, marksmen for bot/top, jungle for support/top/mid, support for top/jungle, and all the various combinations where possible. Off the top of my head, Karthus has been balanced for all five roles, and even if champions aren't designed for all five, they are usually designed for the possibility of multiple. And there aren't as many major roles in GW2, either. Runes and Items in League are just as big a part of the equation as the champion kits themselves, wherein champion kits have been reworked/scrapped repeatedly due to these overarching systems. The variables at play there are massive, because rune page combinations, item effects combinations, and scaling formulae across all champions sharing those choices are all considered collectively for nearly every change made in League. The margins are strictly tighter in League, and doing so requires an even finer combing and better understanding of the impacts to the game wherein there's a whole deeper level of pacing which GW2 does not need to worry about. Specs in GW2 are not balanced around their peak strength at the various levels based on how much in terms of resources are funneled into them across a wide span of skill capabilities of players. They are in League, and things have been created and scrapped based on inconsistencies or overabundance based on play rates at disparate MMRs. What you're describing is a *very* shallow understanding of the efforts which go into balancing champions for League. Riot often makes mistakes, but they're quick to correct course, having good analysis on where the problems lay at their source.

That's just coping. Last time things were good was nine years ago. At the rate things are headed, there will be a decent number of players who weren't even born before the last legitimately good game state in the Specializations patch pre-HoT.

This is comically false as someone who has played LoL and GW2 since their respective launches (and in LoL's case, beta). The number of interactions in LoL is an order of magnitude higher than GW2 due to the sheer number of champions and power curves at any given game state due to the innate volatility of gold/stats/champion scalings/neutral buffs/map control/role options/pick and ban priority/role swap options/summoner and item interactions which play a *far* bigger role in determining how a champion can be balanced and designed than the mere trait/skill/relic selections in GW2. GW2 balance, while way over the head of 99% of players in this community, is absolutely child's play compared to LoL in complexity. ANet is just comically bad at balancing for PvP interactions or simply does not care, full stop.

Reality is OP is correct, but there are no longer players in the competitive modes because it's been so bad for ten years that most of these communities have just outright quit, and the allowance of DPS meters and boss phase skips/power creep means metas are far too easy to establish and perfect. PvE in GW2 is just strictly too easy/bare-bones. And people who wanted to play builds which just suck simply don't play anymore, either. Feedback is going to be skewed in favor of people who still play.

Made changes

Problem is you can't counter boons by bloating strips and corrupts because it still keeps boon builds around and dominant since pretty much everything is still reliant on low-uptime boon skills with the constant removing of unique profession effects. Like consider stripping a thief of Fury when it has No Quarter slotted, or any effect that gets power from having said boon active. Now those traits are actively detrimental to run since they have extended downtime of negative value where another option could have been picked, instead. It's more valuable to just pick the ones which generate new boons. Further in the context of WvW, boon-denial metas end up discouraging engagements of large groups because repositioning within a fight is inherently riskier and more difficult to pull off. Large groups find themselves back in pirate ship metas where it becomes too dangerous to commit to anything because essentials like stability aren't reliably available. The whole system is just rotten to the core in the PvP context. No tuning around with numbers and trying to improve counters is gonna change that.

More that a thief built to actually kill things isn't catching a tapper spec, either (most people change builds to some kind of tank for this purpose), and even the glassiest, one-shottiest thief spec lacks the damage to drop it instantly as well, and then still immediately gets outran regardless with huge cooldowns to recover. My thief had 4k power and almost 270 crit damage and would maybe bring a proper bunker to 1/3 before it heals due to WvW damage nerfs on the assassination burst combos, nerfs to skill coefficients, and gutting of Assassin's Signet. Y'aint killing it unless is makes a misplay or you bring minimum of 2 people.

Attacking groups tend to be implicitly more organized than defending ones because the defending group is generally whoever is in the area to respond, versus preparing for the assault. If things flip really fast, there's no way to mount a planned defense.

As a Crit Strikes aficionado, full glass is significantly more usable in sPvP than WvW because incoming damage in WvW is much higher from significantly more durable builds, and there's much more terrain play available in sPvP for shadowsteps. It might still nab an unsuspecting player, but you will hit a brick wall against better opponents or those who see you coming. This will inevitably lead to a lot more frustration, especially if you ever give power D/D a try, but ride out the enjoyment while you can. Welcome to low stealth power builds and specifically power thief, though. There's a damned good reason people very much dislike overly defensive builds and condition builds in general; it brings gameplay to a lower common denominator across the board, as the heightened pace makes every second of combat feel utterly exhilarating. GW2 combat feels amazing at this speed.