Why is minstrels gear still in the game?

[TrollingDemigod.3041]

A-net should just give players an option to manually pick 3 or 4 stats and combine them by themselves in whatever ratio they want 2-1-1 or 2-2-1-1 and also Celestial stats as an unique combination.
Then they could gather data on what combo is most used and analyze it and use for balancing stuff.

[Dawdler.8521]

1 hour ago, TrollingDemigod.3041 said:

Then they could gather data on what combo is most used and analyze it and use for balancing stuff.

Nerf it until when? People using no stats at all?

[Dagger.2035]

I don’t think removing Minstrels will change anything.  Coordinated groups will just replace the stat and still be just as effective as before.  Going all out on AOE damage can allow pugs to cloud and beat coordinated groups, but so many pugs run selfish snowflake builds which don’t contribute.  I’ve seen healing thieves, bunker rangers, condi mesmers, etc blame others for failed fights.

[Aeolus.3615]

Dont need to be removed just swap its  toughness for precision :P would bust some zerg sustain.

minstrell with full might is close to 2k power if i reccall, it would help players at least getting more offensive as a group, if they want more armor would have to get vindicators, jalis revs' and other classes, the game atm is way to much centred in 2 defensive classes and full defense stats.

Edited December 14, 2021 by Aeolus.3615

[Zephyrus.9680]

8 hours ago, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

I'm not sure what the actual numbers are, but I don't think it is 60-80%.  Most zergs I see break things into groups with these distinct formations:

Group 2 through x: Healbrand, Quick-Scrapper, Herald, Scourge, Extra Class

Group 1: Everyone who's unsorted or doesn't fit into a specific group.
In these groups, the only ones that might wear minstrel are either the Healbrand or the Scrapper.  Everyone else wears... whatever happens to work for their profession.  Usually it is Marauder, Berserker, Diviner, or Soldier, but you'll occasionally see Trailblazer, Dire, and Vipers in these zergs.  The reason why is pretty simple: the greater your offensive power, the easier and faster it is to get loot. My experience in DragonBrand isn't two immortal zergs fighting insomuch as it is one overpowering the other pretty quickly, usually from a strike of initiative or an ambush. 

A lot of people don't do the number, but the scales of damage can grow quite quickly.  For example, on my Marauder Staff Weaver that I use for zerging, if but one teammate is able to fill the small fury gap in my air line, I will be sitting at 9335 effective power when I go to cast Meteor Storm (2928 to start, 138% power damage modifiers, 231% scaled critical damage modifier).  That's before might stacks are involved.  Keeping most things the same, but swapping out to Minstrel Gear (and also Superior Sharpening Stone to Bountiful) will get me an effective power of 3240, which is a little more than a third of what Marauder can do.  What I would gain is enough boon duration to fill the small gap on my fury uptime (which is usually filled by an ally), healing power for the one healing skill I can use (Ether Renewal, which is 1408 health every 20 seconds), and a 38% reduction in damage.  It isn't worth the trade.  I'm better off doing 190% more damage than I am living 60% longer.  So long as I don't die in a rush, the healbrand and/or the heal scrapper are capable of getting me back to full very quickly.

 

That all said, you're coming head first into the boon dilemma that GW2 stumbled into.  The ability to double the length of boons causes a problem where a profession is either built around stacking boon duration, or it isn't.  If you make having boon duration necessary, then it means every profession is loaded with inefficient boons on their skills that ultimately amount to nothing.  If you make having boon duration unnecessary, then you get overly-buffed up boon balls.  Anet goes with the latter by default, since part of their design philosophy is for professions to be functional at base.  After all, every skill that purports to do something but doesn't work is badly designed.  

Your suggestions might have the opposite of the intended outcome.  I.E. if you cannot rely on stability as a form of defense, then you'll add more toughness gear to compensate, making the meta learn more and more towards bunkers.  The ability to self-buff to a meaningful degree is what permits players to  wear high-offense gear like Marauder or Berserker.  If you reduce all of their boons, you encourage people to wear minstrels to compensate for their losses.  

 

I don't understand why you're talking about ele as having 1 heal skill...  Only Tempest would wear minstrels and it has at least 5 heals and infinite 40% protection uptime on 5 targets. But even post-nerf tempest is almost never part of the comp we're talking about. And weaver never is. 

 

But incidentally, Tempest with minstrels can do things like tanking 10+ players for over half a minute or 5 players indefinitely. It's a little out of hand. The whole issue is sustain, not HP.

 

You're fundamentally misunderstanding how damage reduction is better than effective hp. Damage reduction is like effective HP + effective healing combined. And now lets say a set that greatly reduces damage also improves healing directly. It is increasing returns in a way that damage boosts don't work. From a sustain context, -50% damage + double healing is the same as 400% damage. HP is almost not relevant to sustain. This is why toughness almost universally has more value than vitality even on the low base HP classes. 

 

I also wasn't calling for reduced boon duration. I suggested 2 nerfed boons. Stab stacks and protection % specifically. 

 

Also I'm not sure how you conclude nerfing what's making it strong will actually make it stronger? So like swapping toughness and vitality as major/minor stats will actually lead to people having more toughness?? They literally cannot bring more than the gear allows.

 

Last, you correctly conclude players might have to compensate or change things up when the comp everyone was running stops being better than any other option. That's the whole point. Other viable options. Not everyone running the same comp. Will the DPS in their comp have to consider bringing more toughness to compensate? Good! Will they further consider changes when the modified DPS doesn't do what it used to do? Good! These kinds of considerations are what we would call healthy balance. Everyone running the same comp isn't. 

[Shiyo.3578]

18 hours ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

They also made firebrand and scrapper too good to replace. And that's what happens when the game is built entirely around spamming aoe damage, aoe stability, aoe healing, and aoe boons.

Concentration should be removed from WvW(was in spvp basically) and a flat * 0.5 to barrier/healing end multiplier should be applied while inside WvW.

Edited December 14, 2021 by Shiyo.3578

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

1 hour ago, Zephyrus.9680 said:

 

I don't understand why you're talking about ele as having 1 heal skill...  Only Tempest would wear minstrels and it has at least 5 heals and infinite 40% protection uptime on 5 targets. But even post-nerf tempest is almost never part of the comp we're talking about. And weaver never is. 

 

But incidentally, Tempest with minstrels can do things like tanking 10+ players for over half a minute or 5 players indefinitely. It's a little out of hand. The whole issue is sustain, not HP.

 

You're fundamentally misunderstanding how damage reduction is better than effective hp. Damage reduction is like effective HP + effective healing combined. And now lets say a set that greatly reduces damage also improves healing directly. It is increasing returns in a way that damage boosts don't work. From a sustain context, -50% damage + double healing is the same as 400% damage. HP is almost not relevant to sustain. This is why toughness almost universally has more value than vitality even on the low base HP classes. 

 

I also wasn't calling for reduced boon duration. I suggested 2 nerfed boons. Stab stacks and protection % specifically. 

 

Also I'm not sure how you conclude nerfing what's making it strong will actually make it stronger? So like swapping toughness and vitality as major/minor stats will actually lead to people having more toughness?? They literally cannot bring more than the gear allows.

 

Last, you correctly conclude players might have to compensate or change things up when the comp everyone was running stops being better than any other option. That's the whole point. Other viable options. Not everyone running the same comp. Will the DPS in their comp have to consider bringing more toughness to compensate? Good! Will they further consider changes when the modified DPS doesn't do what it used to do? Good! These kinds of considerations are what we would call healthy balance. Everyone running the same comp isn't. 

It's a 1:1 comparison.  I compared staff damage to staff damage using the same traits and tactics, because that makes the math easier to do.  Layering up more heals and defensive traits will drop incoming damage, but it will also significantly drop outgoing damage even further.  Without the large bonuses and additional dual skills, the damage that you'll do as a tempest will drop even further, making it impossible to secure kills even within a group.

You are demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding with how damage reduction and heals interact with each other.  You have to account for how many heals you have.  You cannot just say "double healing and half damage is 400% effective health."  You would need to have a base healing roughly equivalent to your own maximum HP in an arbitrary time frame before you added one drop of healing power in order for that to work out.  It is also a little known fact that healing power competes with ferocity for being the worst scaling stat in the game, especially after the February 2020 nerf.  After February, the Marshall set became almost non-functioning for roaming weaver, because that 1173 healing power is only good for buffing regeneration.  If you're bored one day, compare how much that 1173 healing power actually affects most active heals, and you'll see that it only increases how much you heal by 20-30%, give or take for each skill.  Also consider that heals are not guaranteed.  Healing skills can be interrupted, and reduced with poison.

The "opposite effect" really comes from the demands put upon the player.  You need to survive and ensure your hits no matter which profession you're running.  Taking away boons doesn't remove that need.  For example, spot damage reduction and selective CC immunity are what ensures that players can run near-glass builds with some degree of security.  The base boon duration for most of these is long enough to ensure that they perform their chosen function.  If these boons were less effective, were less common, or had lesss duration, then these boons wouldn't fulfill their own role.  This affects different strategies differently: a tank build can afford to take extra hits because it is more capable of surviving and healing off the damage.  A glass build, however, is less capable of taking extra hits, so the lack reduction in stability and protection will hurt the glass build even more.  The end result would be that players would stop playing glass cannon builds, and instead go more toward minstrel for its greater safety.

As a prime example of this, the February 2020 update made boon balls and tank builds even worse, because it reduced the strike damage output globally by a third.  Yes, healing power scaling was reduced, but base healing remained largely the same.  This killed build diversity, because many builds lost the ability to kill things reliably.  High damage output means a higher skill floor, so even in such an environment players were capable of engaging in prolonged fights, and even in short but otherwise fun fights.  Opportunity and ability were capable of carrying your build, but now with significantly reduced statistical efficiency in all offensive stats, you no longer have the opportunity for high-skilled play.  This pushed players out of the middle-ground builds, forcing them to either go full tank or full damage.

Your end conclusion is contradictory.  If the goal is to get less people to play minstrels, then discouraging offensive builds is literally the opposite of what you want to do.  

[subversiontwo.7501]

21 hours ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

Wvw balancing is just in a really bad spot with all the support now, you can't adjust any of it because players will just stack more, that's the solution to everything now, just stack more to cover more of the gaps and mistakes. They also made firebrand and scrapper too good to replace. And that's what happens when the game is built entirely around spamming aoe damage, aoe stability, aoe healing, and aoe boons.

 

18 hours ago, God.2708 said:

There's an interesting discussion to be had around the nature of what the mode should look like when played at full capacity and everyone trying to fulfill it's 'intent' (Controlling the most space/getting the most war score). I don't think anyone making topics like these is actually capable or interested in having that discussion.

You can't nerf boonballs out of existence. They exist because of what the mode itself expects. Not what any player or build produces, individually or together.

Well, that was my argument a couple of posts up. It isn't a matter of what it should look like it is a matter of what it does look like or what it always has looked like.

What separates the relatively good from the mediocre is that they do not just stack on tag, rotate skills or look at meters. They synch, coordinate and focus their efforts. They don't try to keep all boons off opponents at all times, they look to strip boons at specific times, in specific places, on specific opponents and synch efforts of control and damage up with oneanother to make things stick because they play to win the engagement not top some list.

That's the experience you gain from playing cooperatively with friends (in small groups, in guilds and then that transfers up to pickups). The issue is that the vast majority of players do not have that experience and the overall attention to WvW as a mode has torn down most structures where you could learn and progress that experience.

I could easily grab a screenshot from as old as 2013 of a 25v50 fight where the commander calls for a very specific boon-stripping execution. Calls for specific skills from specific classes on specific builds filling specific roles in the group. It is now 8 years later but players who have not yet experienced this still does not know about it. You don't learn that stuff from the outside looking in, complaining about who bests you and you do not learn that as a casual outlier that just got to join a tag. You could listen to a tired pickup commander taking the path of least resistance, you could even read/watch a guide for your specific class and still be largely oblivious about the tactics, roles and composition of your commander and squad.

A good thought experiment would be to ask: Why does the Scourge 'meta build' run axe and focus when they are largely single-target weapons? I think there may be a swath of people here who play that class, have copied that build and have tried to learn that build/role who wouldn't be able to answer that simple question. They play that build, but they do not really play that build. They've just unreflectedly copied it and do what they're told on it (or worse).

Then you can also see why people have propensities for complaining about "boonballs" (a very specific comp from early HoT using Chronomancers to inflate boons) or why they wouldn't know about vanilla stripping roles because most mediocre groups never bothered to remove boons in vanilla when they could just rely on opponents managing them poorly (though no offense to vanilla, I agree with people who consider the boons- and condition management of vanilla to be superior to today). The same goes for the other side of the argument because many meta-enthusiasts and gatekeepers are themselves often rather mediocre and do not look past stats and doing as told themselves: leaving nearly all calls to the commander alone.

Edited December 14, 2021 by subversiontwo.7501

[Xenesis.6389]

5 hours ago, subversiontwo.7501 said:

I could easily grab a screenshot from as old as 2013 of a 25v50 fight where the commander calls for a very specific boon-stripping execution.

 

Boon strip bombs have always existed and improved with scourge and spellbreaker bubble, until the complaints came in too many red rings, oh noes my 100% stability uptime is gone, and it was nerfed into almost uselessness. But the support from 2013 compared to 2021 is light years in difference, going from water blasting to just aoe spamming everything, with squads to keep everything in the "family" rather than overflowing to those outside your groups, there wasn't any massive recycling of conditions back to boons like purity of purpose other than well of power, not to mention the addition of barriers, resistance, resolution, superspeed.

 

Way more has been added to one side of the equation over the other. All this has done is push organized groups up another level with another layer of security(running meta builds and classes, voice, organize proper groups, tactics, already gave those groups an advantage), and the super organized map blobby groups up an additional level even over those other smaller organized groups just by stacking more support.

 

It's like pug zerg is category 1 hurricane, guild of 15-20 is category 2, guild of 25-30 boon ball is category 3, boon ball 30-40 is category 4, boon ball 40-50 is category 5, map blob boon ball of 50+ is a category 6, nothing can stop them, seek shelter in a different part of the world. Category 5 and 6 are now happening far more often than it use to and it's near impossible to beat without bringing your own perfect match. The 25 cannot touch the 50 unless it's a complete pug raid with a bunch of roamers in it.

Edited December 15, 2021 by Xenesis.6389

[Zephyrus.9680]

8 hours ago, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

You cannot just say "double healing and half damage is 400% effective health." 

400% health? You are making up a quote when I wrote damage, not health. If you don't understand the difference between damage and health then I guess everything I wrote went past you because the keyword is sustain. That is the ENTIRE issue. Once again, health isn't relevant to anything regarding minstrels or boon blobs. 

 

Then you go on to talk about healing power in a solo roamer context when it's a party stat; it affects 5+ players, not 1. You claim there's some kind of 1:1 comparison (in a solo roamer/self-healing context) when you were comparing minstrels vs marauder on weaver(???) as if that is meaningful to anything. Of course it is well known healing power isn't good 1v1, even 9 years ago when solo roaming was big. But tell a support player their most important stat actually isn't efficient to their own survival and they will laugh at you for thinking support was ever about solo play or personal survivability. Then they will laugh again as they heal all your solo damage by turning one skill on autocast.

 

Last, you think nerfing protection and stability is "discouraging offensive builds" and further that this is a contradiction when it isn't. It's already an odd conclusion to think nerfing boons would discourage offensive builds but that is completely beside the point. I could care less if some zerk/marauder players decide to mix some more defensive pieces because they are taking  (and dealing) more sustained damage. Isn't build diversity and tough choices good? 

 

You've been continually trying to compare offensive vs defensive sets like marauders vs minstrels, on weaver even, when that's not the issue. Remember I was arguing that removing minstrels from WvW might not be the best way to address the issue. That's like a nuclear option when when the real issue is infinite sustain on boon balls because boons are too powerful to the point of trapping the WvW meta. Not minstrels or boon duration per se but boon effects themselves. 

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

3 hours ago, Zephyrus.9680 said:

400% health? You are making up a quote when I wrote damage, not health. If you don't understand the difference between damage and health then I guess everything I wrote went past you because the keyword is sustain. That is the ENTIRE issue. Once again, health isn't relevant to anything regarding minstrels or boon blobs. 

 

Then you go on to talk about healing power in a solo roamer context when it's a party stat; it affects 5+ players, not 1. You claim there's some kind of 1:1 comparison (in a solo roamer/self-healing context) when you were comparing minstrels vs marauder on weaver(???) as if that is meaningful to anything. Of course it is well known healing power isn't good 1v1, even 9 years ago when solo roaming was big. But tell a support player their most important stat actually isn't efficient to their own survival and they will laugh at you for thinking support was ever about solo play or personal survivability. Then they will laugh again as they heal all your solo damage by turning one skill on autocast.

 

Last, you think nerfing protection and stability is "discouraging offensive builds" and further that this is a contradiction when it isn't. It's already an odd conclusion to think nerfing boons would discourage offensive builds but that is completely beside the point. I could care less if some zerk/marauder players decide to mix some more defensive pieces because they are taking  (and dealing) more sustained damage. Isn't build diversity and tough choices good? 

 

You've been continually trying to compare offensive vs defensive sets like marauders vs minstrels, on weaver even, when that's not the issue. Remember I was arguing that removing minstrels from WvW might not be the best way to address the issue. That's like a nuclear option when when the real issue is infinite sustain on boon balls because boons are too powerful to the point of trapping the WvW meta. Not minstrels or boon duration per se but boon effects themselves. 

You've used the terms "effective HP" and "Damage" interchangeably within the same context on the same paragraph.  Your insistence on now defying this term is strange, because it makes your argument utterly nonsensical.  Healing power and toughness don't translate over to damage... unless you establish the effective health x DPS product and operate under the assumption that both theoretical builds attempt to do damage to each other.  The irony is that this is the benefit of the doubt that I afforded you earlier when I started making comparisons between the two, but if you want me to rescind this benefit and declare your argument as incoherent, be my guest.

Increasing the number of players doesn't change the dynamics as much as you'd think.  Heals aren't the only thing that is shared within groups.  Damage is usually done in an AoE, and it also accumulates with the same linear growth that heals do when scaling up the number of player.  Regardless, the numbers do not lie: healing power is a terribly scaling stat, and your animosity doesn't change this.  My comparison of stats on weaver isn't there to make some pivotal argument for weavers, but to demonstrate the effects that each of the different stats has on the player character.  You can do these kinds of comparisons for nearly every profession.  I nearly did it on scrapper, but I didn't like how the damage modifiers were dependent on vulnerability scaling on the enemy.  Without some grounded foundations for our claims, everything just devolves into baseless hyperbole.  

You've merged two completely different sections.  The explanation on how reducing boon presence or effectiveness would drive people to ultimately use minstrel gear is, itself, not a contradiction.  I've already explained the logic behind this in great detail. The contradiction lies here in two different lines that you've said in this thread:

On 12/13/2021 at 4:32 PM, Zephyrus.9680 said:

I don't know how some people are missing that if everyone is running 40-60% of the exact same minstrel support in the same team comp, something is off with support and stat balance.

Line 2:

16 hours ago, Zephyrus.9680 said:

Last, you correctly conclude players might have to compensate or change things up when the comp everyone was running stops being better than any other option. That's the whole point. Other viable options. Not everyone running the same comp. Will the DPS in their comp have to consider bringing more toughness to compensate? Good! Will they further consider changes when the modified DPS doesn't do what it used to do? Good! These kinds of considerations are what we would call healthy balance. Everyone running the same comp isn't. 

By your own admission, I am correct that reducing the effectiveness of boons discourages offensive gear sets.  Also by your own admission it is bad that most people are running a purely defensive gear set.  Thus, you seek to reduce the number of minstrel sets while simultaneously incentivizing players to run minstrels.  I can tell what's going on here.  You're coming at this issue from a purely adversarial stance, as indicated by all of this other stuff you've been putting into your posts here:

3 hours ago, Zephyrus.9680 said:

You are making up a quote when I wrote damage, not health. If you don't understand the difference between damage and health then I guess everything I wrote went past you

 

3 hours ago, Zephyrus.9680 said:

Then you go on to talk about healing power in a solo roamer context when it's a party stat; it affects 5+ players, not 1. You claim there's some kind of 1:1 comparison (in a solo roamer/self-healing context) when you were comparing minstrels vs marauder on weaver(???) as if that is meaningful to anything. 

 

3 hours ago, Zephyrus.9680 said:

...they will laugh at you for thinking support was ever about solo play or personal survivability. Then they will laugh again as they heal all your solo damage by turning one skill on autocast.

 

3 hours ago, Zephyrus.9680 said:

You've been continually trying to compare offensive vs defensive sets like marauders vs minstrels, on weaver even...

 

3 hours ago, Zephyrus.9680 said:

Last, you think nerfing protection and stability is

 

16 hours ago, Zephyrus.9680 said:

You're fundamentally misunderstanding how damage reduction is better than effective hp.

Emphasis mine.  It is very clear that minstrel gear isn't the subject of your arguments anymore.  I am.  I'm not even the passive subject of  a sentence that receives the argument or exists as a hypothetical.  I am the subject itself.  Fighting me takes priority, because for some reason you took me bringing up the boon dilemma personally.  Thus, any coherent train of thought is lost, and now you've gone into baseless hyperbole.  

[Vallun.2071]

Minstrels allows supports to be tanks. Yes I know you can still be tanky as any other supportive stat set, but they have to trade some of their tankiness to make their party survive, or give up some of that support to be tankier. Either way it allows more counterplay to remove minstrels because you can either focus the support who gave up some survivability to keep their team alive (and will need better positioning to survive) or you can focus their DPS who aren't getting pocket healed so hard by a tank that can stand on top of them at all times.

Any argument you can make against this can pretty much be negated by the fact that whatever value you see in minstrels can still exist but in a healthier state with one of the more interactive stat types.

[subversiontwo.7501]

15 hours ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

But the support from 2013 compared to 2021 is light years in difference, going from water blasting to just aoe spamming everything, with squads to keep everything in the "family" rather than overflowing to those outside your groups, there wasn't any massive recycling of conditions back to boons like purity of purpose other than well of power, not to mention the addition of barriers, resistance, resolution, superspeed.

 

Way more has been added to one side of the equation over the other. All this has done is push organized groups up another level with another layer of security(running meta builds and classes, voice, organize proper groups, tactics, already gave those groups an advantage), and the super organized map blobby groups up an additional level even over those other smaller organized groups just by stacking more support.

So these things are exactly my contention to the issue:

I think people arguing these things either do not have the experience of vanilla at an organised level and/or they have very rose-tinted glasses when looking back on it. While it is true that elite specs can support more than core the same goes the other way around and the difference is likely much smaller than you try to make it out to be. You are overlooking things like the norm was to have two Guardians per party and they all ran condition-conversion (in fact, a notable point of this topic is that some of us are looking to avoid more support getting stacked, because nerfing support relative damage further will likely have that effect: my contention here is part of trying to get people to understand that nerfing support does not magically create a no-support situation or that vanilla was never a no-support situation). I am, believe or not, not a particular fan of Minstrel and for my own part tend to a cheat a bit throwing in offensive stats when I play support (because I can make up for it). I am just strongly against people who risks creating needs for more support by dreaming of some happy lala-land where they get to freecast, whether that make-believe paradise sits in their future or their past.

 

Quote

Category 5 and 6 are now happening far more often than it use to and it's near impossible to beat without bringing your own perfect match. The 25 cannot touch the 50 unless it's a complete pug raid with a bunch of roamers in it.

The same goes for the second qoute: There are issues with power-vacuum from guilds leaving or guilds spending far more time on EotM but like the above there is more granularity than you give it credit here. It isn't as bad as your overblown assumption. I think you've just not experienced it enough to see it. When it comes to fighting outmanned you always have the factor of being "better" than your opponent. It doesn't matter at what scale, the game isn't balanced for a smaller group of similar to ability to best a larger group of similar ability. Numbers are a factor and are meant to be a factor. However, there is far more difference in ability between different groups than you give credit here. There are guilds out there (as the paragraph you cited first said) that can take on multiple other guilds at once. A good group of 25 can most certainly take on even half-decent organised groups of 50 (like an average pickup meta) or multiple other decent groups of up to 25 each. And here's the kicker: That's good for the game since it means more possible matchups for content. The question is rather how many groups out there still play at a 25-man scale and are regarded as relatively good? They're likely so rare that most people may not experience them often enough.

I'm not saying that you're wrong in suggesting that zergs of 40 or blobs of 50 are more common (your category 5 and 6) but it has far more to do with guilds just not having been given development attention for a decade (server and map caps etc.) than it has to do with balance or the ability to create cross-scale content. We're simply seeing more players without guilds and more players per tag since that is how the game mode has been treated. That's part of the whole Alliance discussion because we need more guilds to fill content gaps and enter into a cross-scale target pool and we need more commanders because it can't go on having more and more players per tag, who do not let themselves be lead by the tag. I've argued for a while that people zerg and blob on the same builds because ambition is low. That is what makes server communities produce few new tags, no meta of their own and little reinvention in their overall leadership. We go through the motions.

Quote

Boon strip bombs have always existed and improved with scourge and spellbreaker bubble, until the complaints came in too many red rings, oh noes my 100% stability uptime is gone, and it was nerfed into almost uselessness.

I've pointed this out to a couple of other people, but these over the top statements are problematic: If you're unable argue from a position of honesty it is hard to have a discussion about these things. This has absolutely no root in anything, does not line up with typical behaviour that you can witness at any point simply playing the game and is not supported by any kind of number. I'm not a fan of Arc for example but you can see how things like cleanses and rips line up. That statement is as ridiculous as the guy who tried to argue that stacking "almost only" support is now the norm. I like that it isn't the norm and I don't think we should look to make it the norm by imbalancing the game out of inexperience or a limited perspective that can't reach past a scale of 5 (in a mode with a scale of ~1-75, that is already too dependent on pickups of few creating content for many).

Edited December 15, 2021 by subversiontwo.7501

[schloumou.3982]

5 hours ago, Vallun.2071 said:

Minstrels allows supports to be tanks. Yes I know you can still be tanky as any other supportive stat set, but they have to trade some of their tankiness to make their party survive, or give up some of that support to be tankier. Either way it allows more counterplay to remove minstrels because you can either focus the support who gave up some survivability to keep their team alive (and will need better positioning to survive) or you can focus their DPS who aren't getting pocket healed so hard by a tank that can stand on top of them at all times.

Any argument you can make against this can pretty much be negated by the fact that whatever value you see in minstrels can still exist but in a healthier state with one of the more interactive stat types.

Ye, the game was designed to function outside of holy trinity. But with raids they abandoned that philosophy and just added big group support to specs that allready had decent self sustain. So we ended up with heal/tank abominations that would get fixed in other games on day one. Not sure if minstrel remove will solve it.

Edited December 15, 2021 by schloumou.3982

[Xenesis.6389]

1 hour ago, subversiontwo.7501 said:

blah blah blah

 

I'm not going to argue circles with you, I've said my piece, if people support it or not it's whatever. I certainly wouldn't change your mind about it no matter what I say, just like you couldn't change a thief's mind about stealth. As much as people complain about stats, boons, support, even stealth, it's not going to change, because it's the gameplay the boon ballers, organized guilds, and anet want. So, enjoy your boon ball blobs killing content, cause you know, they never want to fight groups in their league, just the peasants and guilds they can run over multiple times for easy bags.

 

Quote

While it is true that elite specs can support more than core the same goes the other way around and the difference is likely much smaller than you try to make it out to be.

Who's being dishonest now...

Carry on boon baller.

[God.2708]

21 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

 

I'm not going to argue circles with you, I've said my piece, if people support it or not it's whatever. I certainly wouldn't change your mind about it no matter what I say, just like you couldn't change a thief's mind about stealth. As much as people complain about stats, boons, support, even stealth, it's not going to change, because it's the gameplay the boon ballers, organized guilds, and anet want. So, enjoy your boon ball blobs killing content, cause you know, they never want to fight groups in their league, just the peasants and guilds they can run over multiple times for easy bags.

 

Who's being dishonest now...

Carry on boon baller.

Whoosh

[subversiontwo.7501]

1 hour ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

because it's the gameplay the boon ballers, organized guilds, and anet want. So, enjoy your boon ball blobs killing content, cause you know, they never want to fight groups in their league, just the peasants and guilds they can run over multiple times for easy bags.

 

Carry on boon baller.

Well, thanks for making my point, I guess: That this was never about balance but rather that some people are mad about there being larger groups and better groups out there. Groups that organise, compose and execute better. Groups that with that also not only manage their boons better but also takes away boons better. Perhaps that does not appear to you if you do not play in a manner where you get to experience them taking those boons away?

The only question that remains is: If I am the aforementioned boon baller, are you then the aforementioned peasant?

[DeceiverX.8361]

Y'all arguing about the numbers and weird perceived efficacy of stacked damage negation, but the fact of the matter is this set is busted because GW2 PvP at its core wasn't designed with selfless support tanks in the first place.  Everything is supposed to already have enough selfish sustain to negate incoming burst without any defenses at all.

Nobody would care about minstrel builds if they couldn't sustain both themselves and  several other players at the same time, rather than picking one or another (see: sentinel/celestial vs cleric stats in the days of yore), and to be honest, they're more problematic in small-scale because in an outnumbered scenario there's literally no hope of ever strategically killing and outplaying the opposition when they just mash heals and have infinite sustain out of the incoming damage while having the support to kill you.  At least in zergs if you get dunked on by 30 people the stats don't really matter anymore beyond having the toughness and vitality to survive those few frames while you get healed by others and cast crucial defenses.

Edited December 16, 2021 by DeceiverX.8361

[Shiyo.3578]

17 hours ago, DeceiverX.8361 said:

and to be honest, they're more problematic in small-scale because in an outnumbered scenario there's literally no hope of ever strategically killing and outplaying the opposition when they just mash heals and have infinite sustain out of the incoming damage while having the support to kill you

1 minstrel healer is equal to three healers in WoW(a game well known for having overpowered healers). It's completely messed up.

Edited December 16, 2021 by Shiyo.3578

[Custodio.6134]

3 hours ago, Shiyo.3578 said:

1 minstrel healer is equal to three healers in WoW(a game well known for having overpowered healers). It's completely messed up.

sorry to bust your bubble, but regarding that: here´s my viewpoint from both, a long-time WoW Healdruid (before i started GW2 at release), and a Heal-Scrapper raiding in a WvW-guild. 

I think you have a kinda wrong perception of how healing works in both games/scenarios, and how effective this healing really is. Also there´s the differences on a foundation-level on how resource-mangement in both games (or respectively, WoW-raids and GW2-WvW-squads) work. Let me compare from my (to be fair: very old) memory: 

In a 25-man WoW-raid we usually had 6 healers, sometimes 5 (if you had expierienced healers and tanks). Compared to a usual GW2-WvW-squad with a size of 25, that´s 5 main-healers (scrappers) and 5 Main-Supporters (Firebrands) with the latter providing extremely limited healing. So the amount of healing needed kind of gets reflected by that distribution and judging by that, it´s pretty much the same, or even worse if you consider a Firebrand as healer (which is not the main task of a HFB in a WvW-Squad).

However: the extreme difference in a WvW-raid is the management of cooldowns 

In WoW, as a healer you were pretty much permanently able to provide not just a minimum, but a medium/semi-high healing-output (depending on class) over the full course of the encounter (several minutes) without running out of resources (respectively mana at that point). 
In GW2 however, there is just a basic amount of healing (most of it coming from scrapper med-kit 1 and 2) you can sustain on long term, with some burst-healing  that needs to be coordinated with the squad in order to be effective. Since GW2 doesn´t use a resource-based system for the most part, but a cooldown-based system, there´s not the problem of mana, but cooldown-management. You also must not forget, that healing in general is 50% less effective, just because you are in WvW. 

Another difference is the way how damage is applied to squads. Since most skills in GW2 are Area-based and damage gets distributed over multiple targets, sutained damage is pretty much non-effective here. The deadly damage is always the burst (usually rev-spike and Shade-/Well-Bomb). A target bursted lower than 50% health (which is easily done by revenants, even against full minstrel guards or full sentinel warriors) eats up high-cd skills (Firebrand F2 water-blasts or Scrapper Med-Kit water-blast) in order to heal them up fully. after that there´s a timeframe of at least 15 secs where you cannot counter-heal any burst-damage at all. 15 seconds here only consideres the scrapper´s cooldowns, you most likely additionally lose almost ALL of the heal from hfb´s due to the F2-cooldown of 50 (!) seconds. 

 

21 hours ago, DeceiverX.8361 said:

in an outnumbered scenario there's literally no hope of ever strategically killing and outplaying the opposition when they just mash heals and have infinite sustain out of the incoming damage while having the support to kill you. 

i guess you´ve never seen a very well coordinated guild  fighting against a pug-squad (even if coordinated). I have both, seen and played with guilds of ~25-30 players absolutely destroying 50+ pug-squads just due to the difference in skill, even without utilizing stealth engages. Actual player skill and proper class builds matter A LOT more than raw player numbers. 

[DeceiverX.8361]

3 hours ago, Custodio.6134 said:

i guess you´ve never seen a very well coordinated guild  fighting against a pug-squad (even if coordinated). I have both, seen and played with guilds of ~25-30 players absolutely destroying 50+ pug-squads just due to the difference in skill, even without utilizing stealth engages. Actual player skill and proper class builds matter A LOT more than raw player numbers. 

What you're saying doesn't actually support your point.  Pugs are notorious for never running support lol, and at 25+ people you're past the point of support mattering as much as target cap shenanigans.

I have played in that sub-ten-people versus 25 people category.   What you're saying is actually just downright wrong about comps when it comes to large disparities, and it's why I made this statement in the first place.

Those "skillgroups" are carried on the back of sustain like this.  Every single one.  You nearly all build sustain/AoE support and then pick off one person at a time with coordinated targeting and high-uptime negation, not raw damage and any real individual skill.  Roaming and havoc died because of a mixture of warclaw (no ability to control map presence), and the fact every single engagement below 10 people is an absolute snoozefest where sustain trumps all.  It becomes increasingly disparate the fewer players there are.

Which is why it begs the question:  Why does this stat combo exist?  It's unnecessary in large-scale (because there's enough target-capping and support overall to mitigate incoming damage), and totally breaks smaller-scale.

[schloumou.3982]

10 hours ago, Custodio.6134 said:

I have both, seen and played with guilds of ~25-30 players absolutely destroying 50+ pug-squads just due to the difference in skill, even without utilizing stealth engages. Actual player skill and proper class builds matter A LOT more than raw player numbers. 

I think its debatable how skillbased WvW is when most fights are desided by builds/compositions to the degree we have now. Heres a showcase of your skill. Some guys basically random dodging over the map, facerolling everything that has less support.

 

[Aeolus.3615]

16 hours ago, Shiyo.3578 said:

1 minstrel healer is equal to three healers in WoW(a game well known for having overpowered healers). It's completely messed up.

 

on some classes i can imagine that happen, before damage and heal nerf Ventari aoe heal could reach 16k*5targets.

yet minstrells is not the stats with more healing output, just more sustain while supporting witch is actually the issue here, massive sustain   as a group, toughness, vitality, healing power and good chunck of boon duration, easy way to adress it its swap toughness by something else for example precision, since its a zerg players have perma high might wich makes toons very close to 2k power

 

Make it.. this way classes that have high migh uptime and stacking can play it as well and be more offensive in a zerg group, this way m8 make players work more in group to keep might uptime eficiency and on the other side more focused boon removals.

It could make the game less dependant in "one set to rule them all"  as well, minstrells existed when power creep existed now that has been hamered down  so the only heavily focused on defensive support set need to be somewhat balanced, and maybe with a similiar change like this zergs wont be arround half bunker support and other half bunker condi with just some few with high base vit classes going for damage.

Note this way supports would get plenty of rewards as well since they complain of getting poor stuff, has a player that gets plenty of it playing a power support build maybe this could make players less passive and more offensive towards the rewards like some of us do while still playing support builds.

 

+102  Precision

+102  Healing Power

+56  Vitality

+56  Concentration

 

 

Edited December 17, 2021 by Aeolus.3615

[Svarty.8019]

On 12/11/2021 at 6:55 PM, Shiyo.3578 said:

ZERO offensive stats gear has no place in GW2 and goes against it's entire design and combat system. 

It has no use in PvE and currently just ruins WvW. You've deleted every tanky amulet from SPvP for a reason.

WvW zergs are just 99% minstrel supports with like 3 dps and it's extremely unfun to fight  AND play as.

Fix your game, delete minstrels and other pure defensive stat types like it.

Indeed. We need big government to come down and tell us that we can't have freedom to choose what stats we can have. I want Vitality, Toughness, Concentration instead of Minstrel's  - why can't I have that? Anet, where's my freedom?!!11

 

FREEDUMB! Murricka! 

 

 

 

In seriousness, though, as long as all teams have access to the same stats, whatever they be, then that's fine by me. 

[Zephyrus.9680]

On 12/15/2021 at 4:37 AM, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

You've used the terms "effective HP" and "Damage" interchangeably within the same context on the same paragraph.  Your insistence on now defying this term is strange, because it makes your argument utterly nonsensical.  Healing power and toughness don't translate over to damage... unless you establish the effective health x DPS product and operate under the assumption that both theoretical builds attempt to do damage to each other.  The irony is that this is the benefit of the doubt that I afforded you earlier when I started making comparisons between the two, but if you want me to rescind this benefit and declare your argument as incoherent, be my guest.

Increasing the number of players doesn't change the dynamics as much as you'd think.  Heals aren't the only thing that is shared within groups.  Damage is usually done in an AoE, and it also accumulates with the same linear growth that heals do when scaling up the number of player.  Regardless, the numbers do not lie: healing power is a terribly scaling stat, and your animosity doesn't change this.  My comparison of stats on weaver isn't there to make some pivotal argument for weavers, but to demonstrate the effects that each of the different stats has on the player character.  You can do these kinds of comparisons for nearly every profession.  I nearly did it on scrapper, but I didn't like how the damage modifiers were dependent on vulnerability scaling on the enemy.  Without some grounded foundations for our claims, everything just devolves into baseless hyperbole.  

You've merged two completely different sections.  The explanation on how reducing boon presence or effectiveness would drive people to ultimately use minstrel gear is, itself, not a contradiction.  I've already explained the logic behind this in great detail. The contradiction lies here in two different lines that you've said in this thread:

Line 2:

By your own admission, I am correct that reducing the effectiveness of boons discourages offensive gear sets.  Also by your own admission it is bad that most people are running a purely defensive gear set.  Thus, you seek to reduce the number of minstrel sets while simultaneously incentivizing players to run minstrels.  I can tell what's going on here.  You're coming at this issue from a purely adversarial stance, as indicated by all of this other stuff you've been putting into your posts here:

 

 

 

 

 

Emphasis mine.  It is very clear that minstrel gear isn't the subject of your arguments anymore.  I am.  I'm not even the passive subject of  a sentence that receives the argument or exists as a hypothetical.  I am the subject itself.  Fighting me takes priority, because for some reason you took me bringing up the boon dilemma personally.  Thus, any coherent train of thought is lost, and now you've gone into baseless hyperbole.  

 

I already replied to the topic in my first post. So you are absolutely right that I was directly responding to YOUR flawed reply to me about using minstrels (a support set) in a solo roaming context and on a DPS class, weaver, or that healing power isn't good (as a solo roamer). You are correct that you should not do that and I was explaining why since you didn't understand. 

 

It's completely silly to claim that nerfing protection + stability makes people more tanky, particularly when the topic is minstrels. They can't compensate with gear when they're already maximizing defense and sustain. Feel free to actually address that rather than pretending nerfing boons = more tanky meta and harder to kill things...?

 

Nerfing defensive boons = easier to kill things. It's that simple. 

 

But incidentally I would be happy with either nerfing boons OR nerfing the set as I already brought up multiple times (swap vit/toughness), OR even removing it, which I happen think would be unpopular. What's your actual position here?