Master Ketsu.4569

ftfy.

The main takeaway is the S/F Cata will definitely still be busted, as the mechanics that allow it to be busted will still be in place. It will still have tons of stab and blocks and invluns and boonspam and projectile denial and mobility that normally is only supposed to exist on a melee tank spec, as a RANGED ASSASSIN spec. And will thus continue to overperform as any half decent Cata will still be able to endlessly kite and avoid damage while at the same time dealing tons of ranged AoE damage for free. People complain about how hard it is to kill a Spellbreaker or Vindicator, but imagine if those two specs had superspeed and could deal all their damage as ranged AoE and instant casts instead of having their damage locked to slow animation melee abilities OH WAIT we don't have to imagine this because it's already in the game and it's called s/f Cata and it is just as gamebreaking as what I just described sounds because that's literally what it is. The basic problem here is anet wants to nerf its numbers while leaving the mechanics in place, failing to understand that the only way to give a ranged assassin the same mechanics as a tank spec is to nerf its numbers to the ground to the point where it does zero damage and is thus no longer a ranged assassin. Anet will HAVE to give cata some kind of mechanical weakness, such as completely removing stability from the spec, or else this thing is going to be breaking the meta for at least a full year. When you see a spec winning the mAT with a fivestack, that is not a call for a soft numbers nerf. That is a sign that a spec is completely and unquestioningly broken and in need of serious hard mechanical adjustments.

You literally can do that kind of kiting on a node...

Just because it has been in the game for a long time doesn't make it good for the game. It just means Anet has refused to fix it for so long that players have developed Stockholm-Syndrome and so they make up dumb reasons for why it's good as a means of cope. Those of us who look at balance from a big-picture design perspective have been calling this one out for years. Freecam+superspeed+running away while casting skills has always been degenerate. It's one of the reasons why nade holo is still playable even after tons of nerfs, because running away with Holo2 superspeed then swapping to nades and throwing them behind you is an extremely effective strategy that comes with virtually no drawback. Anything that allows players to not have to choose between attacking and defending will always be ripe for exploitation as it promotes "low risk + high reward" gameplay.

Move over scepter cata, the new meta has arrived: Abusing unpatched crash exploits. Why be good at the game when you can just make 2~3 people on the other team dc?

Wait...people who don't understand that Swipe is better than Steal exist?

Funfact- Renegade has more dodge than vindicator.

The weird thing is it would make 100x more sense to nerf Balance in Discord.

>Buffing tempest when it's the best and most overplayed support spec in PvP >Slap on the wrist to the most broken spec ( Scepter Cata ) in over 5 years. >Nerfing skills that have obvious counterplay This balance patch is a clear miss and shows a severe lack of understanding of the meta and what is actually being playing in plat+ games and ATs. Did Anet not watch the mAT? Did you not see 5 Catas completely dominate? That isn't going to be fixed by 0.5 less power contrib on DT, especially when you nerfed non-meta specs even harder. Shameful display.

The change to true strike really shows how these balance decisions are made based on player performance at low gold and silver levels of skill. It's an extremely slow ability with very obvious counterplay that only hits like a truck if you are facetanking and spamming skills right in a vindicators face, while giving the player plenty of time to move out of the way. A player must make several very dumb mistakes in a row in a short amount of time to actually get hit by a fully charged true strike. But yeah man, lets nerf this interactive high counterplay ability while leaving "attack while running away with superspeed at same time" traits on a spec that saw 70% representation in the mAT finals alone. We have reached a level of scrub-pandering balance decisions previously thought impossible.

It is now crashing at the start of matches as well.

5 stack won EU mAT 2 stack +1 tempest won NA mAT This is 80% class representation at the highest level of play.

In fact, it's actually worse now.

Yep. Still not fixed.

Update - January 31, 2023 "Fixed a client crash that occurred when exiting PvP matches." a couple games later - crashed. Still not fixed.

I'm pretty sure now that it's caused by excess button presses at the end of the match. If I stow weapons and try to do absolutely nothing for the last 5 points, I don't crash. Wasn't crashing for a while but then got into a game where I just crashed on a 500-497 game while crutch holding a point forgetting to stow.

One thing missing from OP is the biggest problem caused by something reaching T4 OP, which is that the devs no longer have access to valid metrics in regards to other classes, making data for any future balance decisions unreliable. This is because upon reaching the status of "Broken" the entire meta will revolve around the broken spec. A T4 OP spec will be played every game, other classes must tweak their builds to have a way to deal with it. This means the Broken spec is indirectly affecting the balance of how other specs interact with each other independently of the Broken spec. Certain specs that would be viable are not viable simply because they instantly lose to the T4, so they see less play, and thus other specs that those specs might counter see more play even in situations where the T4 spec is not present. So class play stats, win stats, skill usage, average trait choice, and every other possible base metric the balance team may use to try and understand wtf is going on ends up becoming distorted around the T4. Cata is absolutely causing this problem. TL;DR of current Meta: You either play Cata, play something that doesn't instantly die to Cata, or you lose games. This is why it's critical to Emergency nerf a T4 rather than wait for the next large balance patch. Even though I main rev, I was glad when they emergency nerfed Vindicators endurance regen post 2 dodge buff, because I knew if they didn't the entire meta would start to shift around how busted it was. Unfortunately, this standard, for some inexplicable reason, is not applied to all classes. And so metas get ruined time and time again only to be followed up by balance patches that may correctly nerf the T4 spec but then incorrectly nerf/buff other classes.

Still not fixed.

I was hoping with the emergency nerf to Vindicator post 2-dodge change that this would be a new thing going forward to specs that are obviously and clearly busted. Oh well. Thanks for making this thread so I didn't have to. I was considering making something very similar and explaining why DT is in fact more of a "Straw that broke the camels back" issue and that the balance problems with ele right now are in fact much deeper. People complain about Holosmith, UT, Vind, and Spellbreaker, but all of these have a key weakness in that they can actually be avoided, outkited, and most of their damage requires them to be close to you. Take Vind for example: It does about 80% less damage if you simply freecam+about face out of the way of its damage rotation. But Scepter Cata? Cata can legit still use most of its damage skills at range while it freecam runs away from their target with near permanent superspeed uptime. And this right here is the main issue with the overall design. Scepter Cata never at any point has to put itself in any real danger or risk to be able to do its thing. And yet, it has just as much defensive utility and sustain as the specs that have to actually abide by this tradeoff. In fact, now that more people are aware of how busted and easy this playstyle is, you could probably completely revert DT and people would still play it and it would still be a very strong spec just because of how forgiving it is due to said lack of tradeoffs.

I'm using a 6700 XT 12GB. I looked through the crash dump and it appears the client is trying to load some lightning object at the end of the match and failing to find it, then crashing immediately after. Specifically the error logs say: 'LightningSetActionPoints: source action point 'purplestart' not found Texture missing mip chain: 0x00e689 -Then it crashes Changed my shader settings to high ( 6000 series AMD GPUs can easily handle high, I just prefer how the game looks on medium ), now it only crashes on matches my team loses instead of every single match. 3000 series Nvidia GPUs are comparable, so if they are also getting this crash bug then it's not a driver issue but some weird issue where the game is trying to load some asset that newer GPUs don't like.

Cata ( and to a lesser degree ele in general due to Earth Shield still being the most busted skill in the game ) is really the only spec that is overperforming in a bad-for-the-game way right now. Everything else you mentioned is strong, but has clear counterplay. Warrior- Limited to melee and has very huge animation tells. The defense line could use some minor nerfs, but the design behind what warrior is doing is not uninteractive in the slightest. This is often a learn-to-time-your-dodges-and-stunbreaks issue. There are only a handful of warriors that can play this to its maximum. And FC has never changed from being an ability that is countered by stow-weapons. Vindicator - Vind is designed so that it can either pool its energy into lots of attack or lots of defense. It cannot do both at the same time. The problem is people don't understand this so they blow all their cooldowns on a Vind that is kiting and swapping through Saint and staff. If you are one of those players, you have an L2P issue. There are also frames in between Vind dodges that allow for you to get hits in, so Vind is arguably a learn-to-time-your-skills issue. Holosmith SS combo is annoying due to being an unblockable+unaevadeable oneshot, but it only works if you don't have a stunbreak as SS itself does zero damage and is easy to see and avoid once it is already on the ground. Holo itself is also very susceptible to CC, so it's a high damage high CC spec that has the tradeoff of dying very fast to any sustained CC and pressure. Hopefully Anet will listen to reason and release a balance patch that shaves a few Cata skills down and reduces scepter dps, and not much else. It's these huge balance patches where they touch 10+ skills and traits on every spec that keeps ruining the meta.

What's your GPU?

Ever since the latest patch, my game now crashes at the end of every PvP match. Strangely, this crash occurs even with the -Dx9 shortcut flag, so something in the backend got seriously broken.

Dragon's tooth is not as OP as many say. It's a pretty standard damage skill with a long tell. It's everything else on scepter that DT adds to that is the problem. The problem is that it's "The straw that broke the camels back." Ele has been on the receiving end of random unnecessary buffs and power creep for the last year.

Only a small handful of skills could use a cast time nerf / increase. But it's true that lots of skills have utterly crap animations and that this hurts the game more than most people realize. GW1 had better counterplay than GW2 simply because it had a cast bar. Anet decided they would have all skills have better animations than GW1 than a cast bar, which is a great idea in theory but only works in practice if it's actually practiced.