Malus.2184

Between those two extremes is the category of 'average players,' and the objective reality is that average players even with good organization is utterly dependent on the RNG factor of that fight. This objectively makes the meta, according to any theory about activity structure, frustrating instead of challenging as the result can differ wildly even with the same performance shown by the players in the 'average' category. The belief behind your opinion is objectively wrong

This is the wrong conclusion. People will keep trying even if they fail if they feel that they have a chance to succeed. Due to the RNG, unless your performance is rated in the above average, then RNG decides whether you fail or succeed and that will feel either frustrating or utterly hollow. Only a child or someone in a child-like mental state like to win by default as they think that their own abilities led them to success as they simply know too little to recognize the context. The human mind have a better time dealing with a close failure that it had control over than it does with getting handed an easy win. The TLDR is that DE is frustrating instead of difficult as there are so many things that the players ultimately have no control over. Making success or failure utterly arbitrarily decided by the game unless your performance is so high that you can succeed despite the mechanics instead of because of them.

Some build works best by using Celestial Gear. An example is the Mechanist Condi Boon Support build that uses Celestial since it needs a little bit of everything.

I made this reply in a seperate thread. I think it bears repeating here

The DE fight is horrible and an average group even with good organization are dependent on the RNG to be with them to have a chance of success, The fight needs to be redesigned from the ground up. The physical models already exist and it would be massive undertaking to design a new set, so this suggestion will use assets that already exists. Narrative of the fight: Soo-Won has lost control to the Void and needs to be supressed in order to win control back. Practical layout of the fight: You fight Soo-Won, her being corrupted by Void is only shown by her having a shadowy hue and summoning the minions of the other dragons. It's also heavily RNG dependent on the order and appearence of her three RNG abilities. It's especially fatal of the Break Bar appears at either 61% and 41%, it did both times in a run I had, all damage is reduced to zero until the bar disappears. If broken it offers at most 5-sec on increased damage. The group lost 50-sec of increased damage. And the squad was by all account an average pug-group that had good organisation. General overview of my suggested changes inspired by the HT encounter. 1. She only uses her three abilities a maximum of two times each. At certain health tresholds she's unable to use the Defiance Bar one until the next phase with her attackable begins. 2. Her health is increased to counter that she'll no longer flit around the place. 3. If her tail appears while the Exposed effect is active the tail inherits whatever timer is left of it. 4. Killing a tail will shave off some of Soo-Won's health. Her health is increased to offset this. 5. The real meat of the RNG will come from what offensive ability of the six dragon energies she'll use. - Fist or tail slam. Both needs to have the tsunami effect since the tail slam is pretty much "whatever" right now. This would be the Soo-Won option. - Fire patches taken from Primordus as inspired by that sequence in HT only no big one and the smaller one appear underneath a random player. - Giant tendril in the middle from Mordremoth. Sends out a shockwave that if it hits yeets the player hit off the platform regardless of where they stand and inflicts huge damage. In that order so all that awaits people if they go down while in the air is a long fall. - Branded Strips ala Kralkatorik in HT. This could cover half the platform, similar to when Soo-Won moves. - Sky lasers ala Jormag in HT. - Zhaitan should have fields similar to those that target players randomly in HT that they then have to run away from the main group to drop. The damage on them should be so horrendous that if they're dropped in the group it's GG. This is a kind of random people can stomach as it represents something they can react to and do something about to avoid instead of the game going "kitten you!" and giving them RNG that will cause them to lose.This also compliments the narrative of the players needing to beat some sense into her before the final confrontation. The RNG that would be put in would be something where if a player falls prey to it they can work on becoming better at avoiding failing at that again. Right now, there's nothing any player can do other than pushing bigger DPS if she decides to move several times in a row and thus completely negate the mechanic by having a high DPS. And then people are succeeding despite the mechanics instead of because of them, and that's an extremely bad design situation to be in. As it is now you effectively needs to by highly above average in playing in order to offset the RNG instead of being able to use it to their advantage. This sets an artificial barrier of entry for the encounter that the average player feel they would be unable to pass. While this is only anecdotal several people in my guilds have said that after they got their eggs they've never set foot in the zone ever again. Aside from a few dedicated groups that are self-selecting as they only attract above average players Jade Sea is effectively dead content as it stands right now. No amount of reward increase could ever bring people back. What people ultimately want is a fair challenge instead of more bling, and right now DE can be extremely unfair due to the RNG that are outside the players' control. The rest of the fight can remain the way it is right now without any issues with RNG cropping up as those phases are, while they can be hard, ultimately fair. If players fails at them it's because of their abilities. They have an influence on those and can improve upon what they can do if they fail at them. In short, they have influence over the conditions that led to their failure. And that is a lot more important for people's desire to do the encounter than any increased reward. Even with it giving an Ancient Summoning Stone a lot of people are still "kitten this!" Again. This is anecdotal, it's just a sentiment I see a lot. It's also one that I feel myself and I fall into the category of above average players.

I already addressed that in a previous post and one example does nothing to counter the general trend even though you think it's the ultimate argument. There are to my knowledge two non-combo AoE stealths, Mesmer thing and Sneak Gyro. They're used ahead of the fight so usage of individual Stealth would have no effect on it other than trolling, and if you really want to do that then a mini does the job a lot better.

How so? Unless you actually put support down it's just a statement based on intuitive thinking.

Yes I can, as I find your argument rhetorically dishonest and would rather expose the dishonesty of it than giving it validity by arguing against in away that takes it serious. The las thing you said is an argument. How would you compensante Stealth under a Grace-period since you implicitly in that counter- argument means that Stealth would be unviable.

"I'm an exception therefore your argument is invalid." Are you an exception? Yes. Do the posters in this thread in average ascribe to this being about Thieves? Yes. Your posts are an outlier that helps to create the average.

I find it interesting how people automatically think that stealth = Thief. While Thieves and their Elite Specs use Stealth the most there are other builds thay can make excessively use of Stealth. The Ranger comes to mind. This is a suggestion about Stealth as a mechanic rather than the Specs who use it. Watchtower = stationary, you need to lure the Stealth user there. Guards at flags = stationary and you need to have it for it to work. I find this suggestion since it's completely useless since if you're jumped by a stealth user while taking the flaf it exerbates the issue since now you're fighting 2v1.. Target Painter Trap = https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Target_Painter_Trap, requires that you have enough badges in order to keep stocked. While it's unlikely that you're lacking currency to buy one it can happen. The flipside of this is if there's a Grace-period to using Stealth then the Target Painter effect could be changed to have no effect on Stealth at all, which would be fair.

Again, technically correct. This is the relevant portion of the entry. Reading that I see multiple ways to get around Revealed 1. Apply Condi damage. 2. Never break Stealth, which is far from difficult since since Stealth seldom lasts long. And letting it pass while attacking at the exact moment is doanle unlesss you have heavy ping. The hypothetical is that it prevent people from Stealth->attacking all the time. Practically it does no such thing as the asy way to circumvent this, untill you can plink them down, is to only do big attacks with a time between them and otherwise kite them. You're going by this hypothetically curbing the behaviour. Practically it can easily be circumvented. If a Reveal effect was placed on the player depending on the nominal duration of the Stealth, instead of an arbitrary one decided by the game mode that's easily circumventable, then it would make a practical difference as the ways to circumvent getting the Revealed effect would be gone. Basically, you get affected by Revealed by a non-guard in WvW, the reason is you. In a sPvP match the effect means more as organised teams are often on some sort of VC and can call for backup and they're forced to stay at one node due to how the scoring work. In WvW you seldom have a team or VC when roaming, and the score nodes themselves are fire-and-forget. There's no reason to stay other than to gank.

Yup, because ANet has never made changes based oin the hypothetical effect of something without considering the practical effect. I mean, just look at the Epichange and the initial change to Catalyst. Yes, because famously you can always pick your fights to be to your advantage only. Even in a barren field far away from any ort of assistance there are always things that can help engate the advantages of others. Yet, fopr some reason they're unable to do the same? Do you even do a mental walkthroughs of your arguments before you state them? I've found suggestions from 2013. None of them have approached the subject from this angl, I'm sure they exist though. And how would it ruin Stealth gameplay if there was a grace-period that had to pass before you could reenter Stealth again?

That's the reason the word 'relatively' is used. You're the one who says that I said they were useless in order to have an argument. Aside from group Stealths to close the distance and the Mesmer Wall to reposition I almost never see individual Stealth Skills used other than for duelist, roaming, and havoc. They do, that's accurate, and also quite useless since the one Stealthing has the advantage and can unload their burst on you without you being able to react. And about reaxtion time, it increases with age and iirc peaks around the age of 18. This si the reason e-sports, where reaction time makes the difference, is dominated by teams of younger players who often retire around the age of 22 because they've become too old to keep up. Nope, I never even expressed that it made you invincible, you were the one who said I did and while that makes to technically correct u der the terms you stated it makes you contectually wrong. All the oerson stealthing has to do is to walk out of range while they wait. This is the reason I mentioned that they needed just a minimum of tactical ability in order to use Stealth. Your explanation assumes that the Stealthed player just stands there doing nothing at all. I find it telling that you need to invent a straw person and use their hypothetical behaviour as an example instead of how they would act in a practical situation. AA chains also resets unless they have atarget and ranged attacks only works if the person are in the line from which they originate. Both things you conveniently "forget." And the Stealthed player can be anywhere, that's the point. In a game of tactics you do what the oppenent would never expect. So, while attackingfrom the back would be numerically advantageous for a Thief traited for it, the best option would be to do something else. And there are other Professions and Specs aside from Thief that uses Stealth without attacking in the back being the best option. - Ranger with long and Smokescale pet has a large amount of Stealth abilities if they forego traps. And if they're roaming traps are of little value unless they plan to demolish zergs. - Daredevil, has no need to attack from the back, they can also attack from the front or the sides. - Deadeye, attacks you from range and uses stealth constantly to get away from you once you close the gap. - Specter, see Deadeye. Again, technically correct and contextually wrong. Stealth is most often used to set up attacks and while you take no damage you're about to take a lot from the Stealthed player. That says more about the quality of the Thieves you'vebeen up against than it does about your quality as a player. Once you regularly encounter players who're no longer predictable you're going to have a really rough time. And the above are the ones who are being cited as a problem when it comes to high brackets/match ups.

Being able to Stealth back to back and at will is insanely good in small-scale stuff and relatively useless in large-scale fights. Stealth can never ever be balanced by going at abilities on individual Professions and Specs since at the end of the day they would still be able to chain them together when in mattered for them. I wrote about this when I previously posted about hypothetical and practical balance. ANet does far too much balance after what something would do hypothetically instead of what it does effectively. An example of this would be Stealth. Adjusting indivual CD and traits only affects the hypothetical effect, it does nothing to change the effective effect. The only thing that would be able to make a real dent in practical balance was if Stealth had a grace-period before another Stealth effect could affect the player. ANet could then work backwards from indidual Stealth abilities and such and decide if the grace-period for the particular Stealth effect should be smaller. Right now, fighting against an opponent in a small-scale fight who can pretty much turn invisible at will while they wait for their burst attack skills to be of CD since they have relatively small CDs is extremely frustrating. If they have 6 seconds left on the cooldown for a burst skill, they can stealth for 3 seconds, and then stealth for another 3 seconds instead of getting attaacked and now they have it back and will have the advantagous position since they attack from being invisible and there will be a mental lag before the defender can react. Meanwhile, you can do nothing except wait for the burst that you know will come. This is neither fun nor engaging gameplay for the ones on the recieving end. I've no doubt that it is for the person doing it though. If there was a grace-period on being able to reenter Stealth the usage of it would be a lot more tactical instead of the fire-forget-and easily win or flee it is now. Because that's the other side of the coin. If you do manage to get them in a bad spot, they can just reenter Stealth, flee, and then come back as you've most likely have had to spend your entire aresenal to get them there. There's really no need to be all that tactical in how to use Stealth besides when to use it. Right now, all that's needed to make Stealth work is the bare minimum of tactical ability. My suggestion to start from would be that this grace-periid is the duration of the Stealth effect +50% in it's 3-sec or less and +100% if it's more. This would be the nominal duration of the effect instead of the practical one used.

There is no RNG in Ba Sing Se Dragon's End. You just need to git gud /s

Accepted and there would be no work around in this case. The bonus damage was lost and as a reult the timer ran out. If we had failed on 1% what you said might had been applicable, however, we failed at 3-4%, and at that point, it's the lost additional damage that made the difference.

In this case, the reduced damage meant that it would have taken roughly the same amount of time. And even if we did that the practical effect still had been the same since the Break Bar mechanic used in the RNG and the additional damage from it is still wasted. She never starts after with the Break Bar intact. If you fail to break it in X time w´then it's gone. What you're expressing in what you're saying is that if the squad had above average skill then we could have mitigated it. There's a reason it's average instead of median. Please stop implying that others have no idea what to do since it essentially means you do apologia for bad game mechanics that should never had been implemented in the first place.

After the recent PvP/WvW balance adjustments I feel that balance is done based on the hypothetical effect rather than the practical effect. I'll use the Winds of Disenchament change as an example. Hypothetically speaking a 33% reduction in duration is huge. Practically it means that the ability is now nearly useless. A 5-sec Aegis now lasts 3, a 30-sec Might lasts 20-sec. Those are hypothetically speaking huge impacts. Practically speaking, the winner of two zergs going full blast at each other is decided within 20 seconds. Any remaining time is just mop-up. This means that practically reducing the 30-sec Might to 20 has no impact. As for Aegis, reducing a 5-sec to 3-sec is also practically useless since it's going to be remowed in 0.1 sec due to the insane amount of AoE flying around. The same is true for PvP. Reducing might by 33% only means that often enough it can just be applied again and reducing the duration of Aegis is again useless since it's going to be stripped within a short time anyway. The only Boons that a 33% reduction in duration has any effect on is Resilience, Vigor, Protection, and Regeneration. And from rare to fairly common they also exist on that scale. It's similar to reducing someone's ability to fly 1.000 metres above the ground to 75 metres above the ground. Hypothetically a huge reduction, however, if they live in a cave system where they max have 50 metres of head clearence then the reduction is useless since they'd never use the remaining 25 metres anyway. It's the same with balance changes. Rather than looking at the hypothetical effect of a change, or anything is general, look at the practical effect of it. For Winds of Disenchantment to reduce Boon by 33% practically speaking makes it useless, it would need to reduce boon duration by more than 50% in order to have any practical impact in both WvW and PvP And then make an exception that it only reduces the the above by 33%. Another example is the Necromancer Shrouds, hypothetically they work in a fun and interesting way, practically speaking they're a nightmare for balancing since it's essentially an ablative health bar that also serves as a resource, something that simultaniously makes it wildly OP and meh. In ane context of PvX an ablative health bar will always be superior to any defensive bugg imagined since they would only make it harder to kill a parsong while the ablative health bar means that they have to be killed twice. If anyone can do that amount of damage they'd be broken beyond belief in a PvP context. Shrouds would be a lot easier to balance if they practically absorbed X% of the damage (up to 50%) pr. hit instead of 100%. It would make their damage output more predictable as well as it could ensure that they were able to do their damage longer. As a result their other abilities could be scaled back since they would be predictable to have for longer instead of having wild burst since they can vanish at any time.

The RNG of this fight still needs to be looked at. With a squad of average players that I organised well we still failed solely because the average of two Break Bars both happened when she was at respectively 61% and 41% so we lost out on a lot of bonus damage time. To make it even more insulting she headed into a new phase almost immediately after we broke her Defiance bar, meaning that we had to spend time on Break Bars for nothing. I've no qualms with failing due to massive inability, that just means I have to improve, however, failing due to RNG is essentially failing because the game decided to make you fail "just because." It creates an incredibly bad experience and has retroactively tainted evey other meta event for me, and I actively avoid DE to avoid losing my enjoyment of the game since with the other meta events I know that failure is a result of low player ability. With DE you need high player ability to mitigate the RNG and that just feels really bad, and will create a lasting negative impact on new players. As ANet said in their statement, "you only get to launch on Steam once," and if this is what new players encounter they'll see it once and decide that their precious time is better spent somewhere else. My suggestion is that when Soo-Won reaches below certain health tresholds then Defiance is unable to be chosen as an RGN mechanic until after she's phased. I would also suggest as a minor thing that the interaction between Soo-Won and the tail is increased. Right it's mechanically essentially just an orb of Void Energy that's always opposite to her head that buffs her while it's alive. Make it so that killing it removes some health from Soo-Won so it works as a reward for killing it rather than a punishment for ignoring it. Also make the remaining time on Exposed affect the tail since if you get a tail while Exposed is up it's wasted since you have to kill the tail. I'm okay with her health being increased to compensate, just make thge two more interactable with each other since currently the mechanic makes no ludo-narrative sense.

Good point. I would suggest that the tail also gets affected by the remaining duration of her Exposed. Just so there's more interactivity between the two because right now it's mechanically an add completely seperate from her despite ludonarratively being a part of her.

Disable the Break Bars as an RNG choice when she's close to phasing due to health loss. You get around average on two Break Bars on a fight. If they both happen at 61% and 41% then it's worse than useless as it prevents her from changing phase and the DPS boon you get from doing the Break Bar correctly is lost. I just had a group that got utterly screwed over by the RNG of that. We got two Break Bars and they both were at respectively 61% and 41%, both literally happened there and we failed the meta because of it. You should only fail a meta because of your own playing ability. You should never fail it because the game decided so. That feels extremely bad and people get frustrated and stop doing it. Is this what you want new players to experience? And make it so that killing her tail makes her lose health. I'm okay with hear health being increased to compensate. It just makes no rational sense that hitting her tail, a quite prominent and physical part of her, has no effect on her at all.

Tried it out without using Crisis Zone, Barrier Burst, or Barrier Signet in my rotation, and it felt so much more intitive since I could take other traits/Skills as long as I had Mech Frame: Channeling Conduits for the Alac. I could use Crisis Zone as a reaction to bad things happening. Something that makes the functionality of all the defensive boons and condi removal so much clearer. The Alacrity is meant to keep up Alacrrity on your party as a Mecheal while you do other stuff to keep people alive.

Yup https://imgur.com/a/SgY8waA That's the character screen on a F2P account without any character's already created. On a settled accounmtit looks like it's supposed to.

Normally any use of another skill resest the auto attack chain, however, for Mechanist you can weave in one skill between strikes, as long as you use a mace, so their rotation looks something like this: 1 Skill 2 Skill 3 Skill or 1 CD allows it. Without breaking or resetting the auto attack chain. At first I thought that this was a bug or a design flaw that allowed this to happen and the more I think about it seems intentional because without an Alac Mechanist would be auto attack only, except when Crisis Zone, Barrier Burst, and Barrier Signet was running. One has a name that indicates that it should be used in response to something big happening, hence the name "Crisis Zone." The second is a major loss of DPS, and the third locks a Utility Skill slot since Shift Signet is already mandatory since it does so much. Crisis Zone also comes with several defensive Boons that makes little sense in the context of using it constantly. the Renegade version is calling in combat support while the Mechanist one aside from the Alacrity is defensive in nature. Mechealer would also be strongly affected by having a normal auto attack chain since it depends on the synergy between Compounding Chemicals and Medical Dispersion Field to pump out coinstant healing since Barrier and Regen alone are too little to cut it. So the role needs to be able to spam boons on itself to heal others. And when loked at timing-wise the auto attack chain and Energizing Slam syncs up really poorly when it comes to the cast time of the former and cooldown of the latter. Then there's the objective fact hat this is a large divertion of gameplay structure, however, there's already presedence for that in the form of the Specter and the Bladesworn. It seems that for every argument for I can come up with one against, so what do you lot think?