LadyKitty.6120

Can you say any common build for which "might+fury=+100% damage" is true? And mind showing the math? 'Cause might alone is max. 40% (in extremely generous circumstances) and while fury can be over 50% alone compared to 5% base crit rate, for power DPS builds it's typically 20-25% due to diminishing returns. If you played something like Valkyrie Virtuoso, what you said might be true but otherwise...nope.

Kitty personally finds the weapon mastery thing good from balance perspective. Previously weak spec meant that they would've needed to buff the spec as whole or buff its elite spec weapon or if the spec had a strong e-spec weapon, they had to either nerf it to same level as other weapons or nerf the spec. (and they did quite many times take the poorer path) Now that the weaponmastery is a thing, they can level the weapons to more-or-less the same level based on combination of their damage output, mobility, support features and crowd control etc. and then they just need to balance the specs and traits based on their role, performance and raw numbers. At the end, if they do the things right (one can hope but pessimist rarely gets disappointed) and balance all the weapons properly while getting specs balanced between themselves, the amount of "viable" build options will increase exponentionally compared to current state of the game. Though it will probably take a while as there's some weapons they just haven't touched in ages. (warrior's and guardian's maces, mesmer scepter, thief's pistol dual wields...)

From another thread one week ago: "Open-world players can now obtain legendary armors, weapons, accessories and amulet while only being required to WvW a tiny bit. What's next? Open-world rings and backpiece to complete the collection? Do note that currently other game mode players (WvW, PvP, instanced PVE) can only farm a trinket, backpiece and armors in their preferred game mode and need to come outside their funzone for weapons and other trinkets." Guess Kitty's one away from the jackpot with her guesses. But more seriously, if we're going to make last 2 pieces available from easy PVE as well, it'd be nice to see a Legendary Insight sink (weapon stuffs or accessories) for peoples who've been raiding after obtaining full raid armors and ring. WvWers would also probably appreciate getting amulet, necklace, accessories and weapons from their gamemode. And no, Kitty wouldn't really profit from those personally as she's full legendary minus a few weapons as well.

Just to be clear: what do you guys consider average player? How is it measured? What are the parameters considered? And how do you practically balance with that as your main focus? Asking 'cause in these recent threads, none has given concrete answers, just mainly "we should balance/focus on average player". Opinion without suggestion isn't very constructive feedback. And just saying, anyone who even remotely cares about their build (which people should do or they're just making things harder by not knowing better) and killing stuff in any reasonable time, they likely already use somewhat similar builds as those "filthy raiding elitists", just with some self-buffing and open-world oriented changes. So the nerfs and buffs to high-end do affect low-end and viceversa.(Though people with mixmash builds would see bigger difference from getting it sorted than from balance team doing something.) Many times non-hardcore players even play almost same builds as hardcores but with easier rota for the ol' wisdom of "Keep it simpele." Kitty's pretty infamous for being like that (using good builds but not practising much so usually 80-85% of benchmark).

Seems like you forgot Freeze from that list. Jokes aside, how are people supposed to deal with Qadim 1.0's magma elementals, Slothasor's slublings, Gorseval's spirits and Samarog's Rigom after you've done the clean-up? (just for starters) In other words, those removals would be simply ignorant thing to do. So, no dev job for joo.

Let Kitty guess: it was almost a rhetorical question, quite pre-biased and somewhat questionable itself at that with the aim to point out the assumption that they'd balance based on minority within minority? ('cause to be clear: you can perform within 5% of benchmark with some practise and good understanding of the build yet still raid casually, some wings not even every week which sets the premise of the question as flawed) Did Kitty hit the bullseye? 9.5/10? Does she get a parrot sticker?

By your logic this far, if taking this public travel analogue to rune+relic, there's no difference that would narrow your preferred options to take into just one or two relevant ones. Walking is an option, taxi is an option, driving is an option. Even a route within the same system that has no passengers and is totally irrelevant to 100% of passengers is an equally important and relevant option to you if we go by your relic logic. Meanwhile for majority of people who live in 3 districts and go to another 3 for work, only the routes between those districts are relevant and the other routes might get some minor traffic due to some inviduals' circumstances or having some rare business there. Though since all routes are equally relevant permutations in your model, it also doesn't matter how comfy or efficient each route is. Everyone gets to same destination! (though if you're late due to taking slower route, you'd get shamed) Meanwhile, if we wanted to reduce congestion, we could either speed up the slower routes or add mobile working capabilities so people get some work done on the way and thus compensate for being late. Or the route might be just so comfy that you'll be 10% more productive than others. And ofc there's some other options like that walking and missing half the workday or taking the taxi and paying half the day's salary. Ofc one option is living in a nigh abandoned district that still has working connections but miserable quality of life. And no, leaving earlier to compensate for slower/longer route isn't an option in this case. Or are you expecting a boss to just happily sit and let you whack your missing damage in before others join in? Doesn't work like that in-game. But so, with those options, do you still think a system with 150 routes and most people using 9 of them is fine or should there be changes to make unpopular routes worth using and increase the quality of life and give benefits to populate the abandoned districts so passengers get spread more evenly across the routes? (in-game meaning changing and boosting the unpopular options and add new relevant ones to break the thief/monk/akeem/fractal hegemony)

Kitty did specifically mention Ankka (aka. boss of XJJ). Forgot about OLC, true, should've included that in the list of exceptions. Yes, most of EoD strike CMs are indeed harder than most of raids, that's no secret. And when it comes to Arkk CM, the main thing during burns that someone needs to stop DPSing for is anomaly and the bomb bubble (and still, at least 2 DPS can just burn the boss). And if the squad is even somewhat decent, anomaly-bomb only happens 3-4 times during the boss (100%, 70%, 40%, 30%). At 80% and 50% you can just burn to miniboss to despawn the anomaly. For pretty much all other mechanics you can just dance around the boss and look away for half a second if needed (if support isn't stabbing/blocking the eye for you). Orbs? Bubble. Push? Trivago.

Since lots of people have their own ideas about how to balance, let's play a little game to get some suggestions rolling. Please try to keep non-suggestion discussion to minimum in this thread to keep this thread focused on the game. Rules: For each buff (+), there needs to be a nerf (-). You can change skill for skill or trait for trait. If you change a trait for skills, you need to for ex. nerf 5 skills for 1 trait buff. The changes must be within the profession. So if you feel like Firebrand is too strong, you can nerf it and buff a Willbender (as example). Kitty can set an example to get this started. +Coalescence of Ruin: Increase damage multiplier from 1.75 to 2.0. -Phantom's Onslaught: Reduce damage multiplier from 1.6 to 1.4. +Body Blow: Increase bleeding stacks from 1 to 2. -King of Fires: Reduce burning stacks from 3 to 2.

Or what percentage of playerbase who raided has either quit (for variety of reasons) or only do a couple wings per week?

Most likely overall nerf for Vindi as well. Overall 8-9% buff for Power Vindicator as whole. The impacts of the balance patch on following skills (used to be 21.1% of total damage): Mist Swing -20.5% Mist Slash -17.4% Arcing Mists +4.9% Mist Unleashed -9.1% Leviathan Strength+Forerunner of Death buffs were +13.6% total buff so +13.6% to other components of Power Vindicator's rotation.

When it comes to guardian builds, they indeed haven't really taken other than most optimal weapons into consideration after hammer buffs. Especially scepter has been in horrifying spot for a while now. But Battle Scars nerf was kinda justified as combined with sword+sword, renegade and Dance of Death, it provided really strong self-heals without any major opportunity cost. If you used Icerazor's Ire, that was basically 8k self-heal+another 20 Battle Scars stacks as leftover (if you hit just one target, more if you hit multiple). In other words, you could use it to basically self-heal to full at relatively short CD. Combined with other vulnerability from swords, the self-sustain was really strong and for ex. in raids, Kitty was able to play really risky and greedy by just ignoring lots of damage since anything non-lethal would got healed soon anyway as long as there was stuff to hit. And since DoD healed through Battle Scars-effect, nerfing Battle Scars was in fact direct nerf to DoD, Thrill of Combat and Battle Scarred. And to be honest, generally speaking, if you ran something else than DoD which is basically revenant's equivalent of Invigorating Precision and such, the sustain rev had ofc didn't feel OP 'cause you weren't even tapping into the source of what made it OP to begin with. And that nerf was anyway in line with other damage-to-healing nerfs they did at same time.

^This. We had beta feedback threads where people specifically warned about balance problems that would happen if they didn't do a balance patch at SotO launch. Main issue that got initially addressed was air warhorn 4 on elementalist and there was some bugfixes and slight buffs and nerfs to a couple weapons but pretty much all the problems addressed in yesterday's hotfix were already known from beta testing. Dunno what's happened lately as the balance patch early this year was one of the best in ages but after that? Not so much. Though then again, when people gave suggestions this summer (including Kitty writing a super-long list of specific suggestions), they didn't have full picture as SotO was announced right around the time balance patch landed so guess that invalidated all the feedback at the time.

First of all, there isn't that many multiplayer encounters where boss moving becomes an issue once you know the boss and your build. Main cases would be Deimos, SH, Largos, maybe Sabir and Ankka. And maybe Li and dark Ai sideburn if most DPS are melee. Most of world bosses don't move during burns. Even Matt doesn't really force that much movement if people aren't all around the place as DPSers can simply spread around the boss and move slightly outside melee range when timed bombs pop (or stay on boss if there's 2-3 pure melee DPS). Otherwise, bosses are mostly DPS golems for experienced players or slow enough to follow/move around them. But if don't know the boss and/or your build, the build's DPS potential isn't the first thing you need to worry about. (though high DPS floor does help and that's why LI builds exist for those who dislike golem grind, infamously including Kitty herself) And in most of those "mechanist out-DPSed other specs"-cases it was either A. you could pierce for cleave a la Li or B. Mechanist had greater mastery over their build than non-mechanist had over theirs which was the usual case due to how easy it is to reach DPS ceiling on it and usually the boss being one of the aforementioned ones. At bosses where you didn't need to move much during burns, skilled players who'd do 38-40k at golem still out-DPSed mechanists by a good margin. Kitty got to experience that on mechanist end multiple times. Also, sustain isn't usually an issue unless there's absolutely no healers around or healer has the aforementioned issue. When it comes to solo gameplay, you mainly need to figure out how to boon yourself. Most classes (except ele) have at least one spec with "outgoing damage to healing"-trait that basically cheeses anything as long as you can do damage and then you mainly need to choose if you want to deal single-target damage from range or cleave in melee. (or sometimes both)

As Kitty's written before in other threads: it doesn't matter if pros are testing or not when it comes to the fact of some traits and skills being stronger or weaker than they should be. Those problems would still exist and benchmarks/high-end players' logs simply show how bad those problems are in-game. Benchmarkers and hardcore players often do math (with intricate spreadsheets including all the skill and trait infos) to figure out best combos and simply apply the results to in-game gameplay and see how close the maths are to how a human can perform. The numbers for damage calculations are available from wiki and the cast/animation durations for skills can be checked from logs (easy method) or by recording a video and checking the animation durations (hard, slightly unreliable method) so if you feel like a nerf or buff is unjustified, off to math you go and return with suggestions on changes to numbers as well as why and what might be possible side-effects. Also, the problem of some builds overperforming isn't exclusive to raids. They are also prevalent in fractals, strikes and even open-world when there's big blobs of people, like metas and world bosses. If there's even a few players present who care about having a decent build (which also makes rest of open-world trivial since you can just pull in and nuke the mobs to death and burst champs), the bosses melt like butter. And from Kitty's experience, there's always at least 1 in 10 random players at world bosses. And when it comes to condi engi, the core version got caught in the collateral damage as condi holo was indeed overperforming and condi mechanist was really strong for a button-spamming LI build which mainly used pistol+pistol.

And it obviously doesn't matter if they leave, they're being nasty gatekeepers who want to ruin everyone's fun with nerf demands! Game will be better without them! ...oh wait, they're the ones who do buildcrafting and guides. Stuff that not-so-skilled players get their builds from. But who cares if those are abandoned? /s

By your logic, we should also make rest of the legendaries tradeable and since some stuff like Old Lion's Arch lobby are tied behind really annoying achievement but is QoL, that stuff should also be purchasable, right? At least this is all what your suggestions seem to be about.

Open-world players can now obtain legendary armors, weapons, accessories and amulet while only being required to WvW a tiny bit. What's next? Open-world rings and backpiece to complete the collection? Do note that currently other game mode players (WvW, PvP, instanced PVE) can only farm a trinket, backpiece and armors in their preferred game mode and need to come outside their funzone for weapons and other trinkets. And if we got tradeable legendary armors, that would pretty much nullify the point of getting ascended gears (aside from free drops making precursors) if you're going to be anything more than a one-build-pony. And what would come next? Re-craftable legendary trinkets, runes, sigils and relic that could be traded as well? Well, at least the game would be swipeable then and people with too much money could just download the game, buy the gears, play their preferred gamemode for a while and uninstall when bored. Would also pretty much turn the game into having people in most popular/highest-profit areas and rest of the map getting abandoned for good aside from rare achievement, MP and HP farmers and legendary grinders (though making legendaries and doing metas would become at least twice as painful as there wouldn't be enough peoples doing the less-popular stuffs needed for legendary crafting). Might be some quick short-term profit but in longer term, the consequences could be dire for the game as whole.

Except that there are people who are currently benching 47k (not even actual benchmarkers, just people who practise the rotas) and doing almost 46k at bosses. Kitty's seen logs. If you know the mechs enough to basically include dealing them into the rotation (reps!) and how to greed hard, it's not even that hard to do almost golem damage during burns. At many bosses the endnumber for skilled DPSer is lower than their golem number simply due to forced downtime from boss going away or invulnerable. Power builds can use that time to reset their burst to even reach higher burn numbers than golem endnumber due to phase transition soon after burst is done. (thus no lower DPS time between bursts which lowers the DPS numbers for many power builds during long burns or when boss never goes invuln) And also, most DPS builds only need might, fury, quickness and alacrity and those are pretty guaranteed in most decent squads (since people specifically LFG those booners).

Some builds don't have a strong enough ranged alternative to be worth swapping to and some melee builds need to use melee weapons in both weapon sets. For those, ranged weapon isn't an option. Many melee builds also have increased mobility and some have built-in dodges and blocks that ranged builds don't have (for ex. rifle vs hammer mechanist) so in hands of a skilled player, they don't lose much DPS uptime and sometimes they even have more if they can for ex. evade-leap attack or use insta-cast block through the mechanic while ranged would need to dodge. (Deimos' pizza, for example) Even with spread mechanics, melee DPSers can often just dodge out and in to spread just enough or just stay on boss while ranged DPS and supports move. (common for ex. in Sunqua CM and Matt) Even Ankka's quaggans aren't a problem if their target notices them quick (they follow a random person) and knows how to deal with them. (there's 2 smart tactics depending on if you're melee or ranged) Though ofc there's some edge cases where none of that is possible for melee DPS. (Kanaxai as worst example) So, how would you determine how much full ranged build needs to be offset to not have too much advantage at fight with melee downtime but also not be too weak to become irrelevant for bosses you can full melee on?

Also, one thing to note: DPS numbers during burn phases. Considering that you mainly need offensive boons and vulnerability (+some other condis if trait requires) these days, the golem settings and DPS aren't even that unrealistic during burns (check the logs on wingman for some top runs and mediocre runs) To be clear: it's not even unusual for people to do as much at bosses during burns as they do at golem. Power builds can do even more if the burns are short enough to do their opener for big burst. With short phases or if boss cleanses condis whenever it goes invulnerable, condi builds do lose damage but if burns are over 30-45s, most condi builds have enough time to ramp to full DPS. And as an example, Kitty's recently seen a log of non-benchmarker scourge doing over 45k (end number) at MO (aka. golem boss) and she's personally often within 10% of what she does on golem at bosses during burns. If below that, usually due to mechanic that forces melee build away or due to doing some serious PMA stuff to make the run silkysmooth. Ofc many bosses have times when they can't be hit and add phases which obviously affects the final target (boss dps) number a lot. And also to note, big DPS just allow bosses to even be more of a DPS golem if they don't have time for any mechanics to happen. At VG, you can phase before 2nd green. At Gors, you can insta-CC. At MO, there won't be any soldiers. Cairn mightn't port around. At Xera, you don't need to clear sides and only need to move twice (if even that). Adina does only one pillar (so dodge out-in is enough), Ankka won't do big circles, Li doesn't number. And some bosses are golems from get-go. Though ofc, if you don't do big DPS and/or fail mechs, you indeed can't simply whack the boss to death as they become way more than just golems. Sorry about long ramble.

One could say that power creep benefits them more. For ex. If you previously used 7 good players (2 healers, 2 boon-DPS and 3 pure DPS) to meet the DPS checks when selling and you boost overall DPS by 25%, the seller squad can pretty much yeet a DPS without having to change their strats (and maybe use just one boon-DPS/healer with slightly more boon duration) and thus sell 4 spots instead of 3, increasing the income by 33%. So nerfing powercrept overall DPS by 20% (49k to 39,5k) would mean 25% profit loss for sellers in such case (4 buyers to 3 buyers). And 7 seller squad would be kinda overkill at many bosses these days since even chill but experienced squads can casually low-man quite a bunch of raid and strike bosses. Kitty's often done so.

Don't forget that there's old content to take into account, quantity-wise more and new content where range is a lot stronger than melee is mainly played by a minority within endgame community which is greatly a minority itself. So yeah, people who have multiple classes geared and care about doing as good DPS as they can would only play those ranged builds at few new bosses (CM99+100, EoD strike CMs, prolly Matt and also Adina if on pillar duty) and otherwise melee builds. Ofc if we go to open-world solo gameplay (you stack at most world bosses so there you balance for group), ranged builds would still be good since they can just kite to avoid taking major damage. But since in solo gameplay you probably would use different builds anyway (if you want to have best time dealing with mobs, champs and bosses) and since your damage wouldn't affect the success rate of other players, using open-world, esp. solo, performance as main measure to balance on wouldn't have much effect there but likely a massive negative impact on balance of any squad content where people care about DPS. This paragraph was in response to people who speak about using open-world for balance, to be clear.

Problem with nerfing ranged weapons to clearly perform lower than melee weapons is that nobody would use them in most of the instanced content. Best option would be to have ranged weapons do damage almost equal to melee builds from within 240 range and reduce it dynamically based on distance with max. range causing 25%-50% damage reduction. Though difficulty with that is probably implementing it to the skills, especially condi ones, in a reasonable time. (And dev time is money so would it be worth the cost?) DH does have a trait with similar function but that's a singular trait that applies to all skills and they'd need to add similar formula (+develop condi version) to every ranged skill.

Problem with removing alacrity now is that they've balanced the game around it. If you remove it, specs that use auto-attack in their rotation, are limited by weapon swap cooldown, use primarily count skills or don't have cooldown on their main damage skills won't be affected much while builds using tight rotations and big damage skills off-CD would suffer greatly unless they do MASSIVE balance rework while at it. (Lots of cooldown changes and condi stack/duration and power coefficient changes) And if we went that way, while at it, we could just as well get rid of perma-vulnerability, all shared offensive boons (or give them scarcely with very short duration so people would need to coordinate their burst) and shared stability. That would obviously destroy boon-DPS builds but at least it wouldn't really matter which healer you'd bring as long as you balance their healing output! 😸(Some other game went that route though it doesn't have traits nor weapon options which make GW2 the balancing nightmare it is.) As a buildcrafter who loves trying out new builds (in big part due to getting bored of one playstyle in a couple days) and the sheer potential for versatility that GW2's build system has, Kitty really opposes these ideas.