punishing support classes with aweful loot

[RainerZufall.8306]

what is this loot system? why are supporters punished that hard, getting no more than half the loot as playing a dmg class? i really wonder why people continue playing support classes

[Boh.4568]

In a recent post about WvW restructuring, Anet has mentioned this issue, so it's definitely in their roadmap to balance rewards for support classes. You'll have to wait for after EoD launch tho.

[RainerZufall.8306]

4 minutes ago, Boh.4568 said:

In a recent post about WvW restructuring, Anet has mentioned this issue, so it's definitely in their roadmap to balance rewards for support classes. You'll have to wait for after EoD launch tho.

a guild mate told me Anet said this like 8years before, i´m not sure i should believe they will change it.
i don´t wanna blame anyone, but a ten year old game should have fixed such an essential problem shortly after release

 

Edited January 19, 2022 by RainerZufall.8306

[The Boz.2038]

WvW rewards suck in general.

Shortly after release, there were no "supports" in GW2, it was designed differently.

[BloodRavenz.6084]

54 minutes ago, RainerZufall.8306 said:

what is this loot system? why are supporters punished that hard, getting no more than half the loot as playing a dmg class? i really wonder why people continue playing support classes

oh noes you mean by playing a support Firebrand i'm not getting as many heavy loot bags as everyone else....

 

how unjust!  

 

bleh, talk to the people in your party.  Play support well enough you'd be surprised how many of them toss you some of the heavy loot bags they get at the end of the raid,  because lets be real here,  It's only heavy loot bags.

 

[Nyth.6714]

We share our loot bags with our support players in guild.
Some of the damage classes will give all the bags they collect to the guild to pass onto the support players after a run. We send 50 bags to each support player. I know they are 'only heavy loot bags' but still, some of our players only play during our WvW runs, so its nice to get extra materials. 
The rewards aren't great in WvW, so I am glad that I don't play that game mode for rewards 😂

[ArchonWing.9480]

Heavy Loot Bags are 2.6s each. That is 1.2 greens. Stop worrying about them. Especially when players are not guaranteed to drop them, and you're really just moaning over spikes. Players are also a pretty bad source of wxp since players that have already died a lot recently give little WxP.

The easiest solution is just to remove the minimum damage. Dolyaks already work like this. The system is outdated and made before dedicated supports came along. But it's never going to be fair either.

Loot shouldn't really come from tagging/drops, and almost all the new content in the game doesn't do this. Tagging only works to give you event credit and not to exponentially increase you rewards. It gives it to you in a chest. It'd probably be better for the game to have like a map/area kill meter and just reward all active players in proximity evenly.

I would be fine with removing drops entirely, but I understand some of you wouldn't like this. Mostly anything of value comes from the Skirmish Track anyways.

Frankly though groups should rotate their comps a bit and not make people play a single role for 20 years. It's pretty kitten in pve too.

Edited January 20, 2022 by ArchonWing.9480

[Cuks.8241]

While the bags are more of a meme than anything else, I did get lot's of ascended chests, 2 precursors (not worth much though) and a ton of ascended rings (worthless to me but might be useful for newer players) in WvW.

In any case supports should get loot on par with everyone else, without adjusting their gameplay just to get loot. The easiest solution would probably be that everyone in squad and within a certain perimeter is eligible for loot. I doubt this would lead to any leaching practices. WvW only solution though.

[joneirikb.7506]

Quote

moaning over spikes

WvW, summed into 3 words. That's all folks.

[Sylosi.6503]

There should be a fair system, so support players should indeed get the same bags and WXP as DPS.

And on the same basis of fairness on the rare occasions I still bother to play this dead game mode, if I kill a guy 1v1 worth 100 WXP, I should get 100 WXP and 1 bag. And if I am in a 50 man zerg and we 50 v 1 the same guy, then I should get 2 WXP and a 1 in 50 chance of getting that bag.

Edited January 27, 2022 by Sylosi.6503

[joneirikb.7506]

Quote

 

There should be a fair system, so support players should indeed get the same bags and WXP as DPS.

And on the same basis of fairness on the rare occasions I still bother to play this dead game mode, if I kill a guy 1v1 worth a 100 WXP, I should get 100 WXP and 1 bag. And if I am in a 50 man zerg and we 50 v 1 the same guy, then I should get 2 WXP and a 1 in 50 chance of getting that bag.

 

While I really do agree on the second part, that is something ANet will never do, they're way too invested in the philosophy that everyone gets everything, it's one of their core philosophies for the game, no matter how poorly it works for WvW.

[Hotride.2187]

You used to tag players with retaliation and got more bags than now (on fb during zerg fights).

Just another mass change that wasn't thought through.

[The Boz.2038]

I honestly don't know how this works in depth, but providing boons to allies passively as a Herald does give you loads of "tags", somehow.

[Dawdler.8521]

59 minutes ago, The Boz.2038 said:

I honestly don't know how this works in depth, but providing boons to allies passively as a Herald does give you loads of "tags", somehow.

Not so much depth to it. When you heal/boon support others their damage basicly count as your damage for tagging purposes, so instead of having to do like 25% hp damage to tag for loot, maybe its 0.1%.

Which is why the topic is quite hilarious. Supports are literally drowning in lootbags compared to roaming/small scaling on the simple fact that so many players are involved.

I dont zerg much today but I remember people going oh I have 50 lootbags, another well I got 100 and a third has 200 lootbags for the raid. 

Meanwhile I've been running around the map trying to defend camps and all I got for it is a broken bottle an angry skritt threw at me.

[Sahne.6950]

42 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Not so much depth to it. When you heal/boon support others their damage basicly count as your damage for tagging purposes, so instead of having to do like 25% hp damage to tag for loot, maybe its 0.1%.

Which is why the topic is quite hilarious. Supports are literally drowning in lootbags compared to roaming/small scaling on the simple fact that so many players are involved.

I dont zerg much today but I remember people going oh I have 50 lootbags, another well I got 100 and a third has 200 lootbags for the raid. 

Meanwhile I've been running around the map trying to defend camps and all I got for it is a broken bottle an angry skritt threw at me.

Yeah roamers are totally left out nowadays... It is sad when you are just playing as usual, rotating thru some camps / defending / scouting and you notice that you are not even sitting in Tier6 participation.... meanwhile some Footman that joined the zerg and just mindlessly holds 1 gets 20 times the loot....  you can flip keeps with your 2 mates and scout all you want... there is just no loot outside of zerging anymore... 

Who plays WvW for the rewards anyways? 😄

[The Boz.2038]

1 hour ago, Sahne.6950 said:

Who plays WvW for the rewards anyways?

You have a dozen hardcore WvWers per server, maybe, and 80% of the rest of the players are incidentals from other game modes that need a Gift of Battle. Once they get it, they are out. Everything they've "learned" is out with them, and they are replaced with more WvW first-timers that have "join zerg and flip stuff" as the obvious optimal play experience.

[Sahne.6950]

is it really that many? D:  SAAD

[Abjurer.9302]

I feel like Minstral players take the least amount of risk in the game.  When a group makes a mistake and wipes, it is often the Minstral Firebrands and Scrappers that are the last ones alive running away to regroup.

 

A better solution might be to add more prefixes so that some toughness or vitality can be exchanged for offensive stats.  Greater risk should mean greater rewards.

 

For roamers, a higher rarity loot bag could be given for stomping a player.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

2 hours ago, Abjurer.9302 said:

I feel like Minstral players take the least amount of risk in the game.  When a group makes a mistake and wipes, it is often the Minstral Firebrands and Scrappers that are the last ones alive running away to regroup.

 

A better solution might be to add more prefixes so that some toughness or vitality can be exchanged for offensive stats.  Greater risk should mean greater rewards.

 

For roamers, a higher rarity loot bag could be given for stomping a player.

Players don't take full support builds to "survive everything and run away with low risks", they do it so they can keep allies up until the last possible moment, and give the most significant chance of the battle turning back from the brink. Its purely altruistic, but posts like this always try to put a sinister spin on the effort. Its alot of what's wrong with the world this day, when healers are always viewed this way even in real life.

 

Ask everyone you know what builds they play, at least 2/3rds of the answers will be DPS, because "numbers are cool". I once saw some MMO survey that showed the majority of players always prefer DPS.

 

Besides, they already tried this in PvP and it had terrible results.

Edited January 28, 2022 by Hannelore.8153

[Abjurer.9302]

If you get max loot in a combined tank and healer build why would the average player want to take personal risk to play DPS?  They could play Minstrals so that they can stay in the fight longer and get more rewards.  The pendulum might swing too far the other way and make fights more stale.

 

It is also altruistic when a DPS player sacrifices personal survivability to generate downs for their team.

[subversiontwo.7501]

9 hours ago, Abjurer.9302 said:

I feel like Minstral players take the least amount of risk in the game.  When a group makes a mistake and wipes, it is often the Minstral Firebrands and Scrappers that are the last ones alive running away to regroup.

 

A better solution might be to add more prefixes so that some toughness or vitality can be exchanged for offensive stats.  Greater risk should mean greater rewards.

 

For roamers, a higher rarity loot bag could be given for stomping a player.

I think you don't understand how this stuff works, so let me give some help.

When players on damage roles die early or support lives long it mostly has to do with what they are tasked with and expected to do. It's often tied to whether they die before going into melee or not (as that is almost always preceded by ranged exchanges and opportunity calls) or positioning made. The need for tankier gear mainly rests upon being able to follow players into melee (and that in most cases support has far more support going out than comming in). It is perfectly possible to do some of the things we've seen suggested here on the forums, like removing Minstrel (and Nomad) stats and hoping players revert to Plaguedoctor, Zealot or early vanilla Soldier/Cleric stats. The problem is that people who make those suggestions do not understand what they are more or less likely to affect and how it pans as those suggestions are almost always made from the outside-looking-in. They're not very likely to make loot more accessible, boons less important, support- and stacking of classes less prevalent or create a more open "meta".

They are more likely to affect the melee-range balance and make groups adapt by being more demanding and less open. If a support takes more damage they in turn will need more support. If a support is to aquire more loot through damage then they would need to play more of a hybrid role, split more of their attention and balance their decisions with judgement between attack and defense. They would require weapons and abilities to reflect this and (not have to-) make choices in that. Many times a shift toward a middle like that means more and more players in a party of 5 will be expected to support. We already have that option with compositions that do play more of hybrid roles where most if not all players share in that responsibility (eg., compositions with Cele gear).

That is already an option and the reason we do not see much of it in large public squads has more to do with simplicity and helping (or carrying) other players. I think it is awesome that such compositions exist, but I think things would be rather dull once they became normative because they raise demand and what is expected of you and would eliminate specialist damage roles and the like. Making everyone share the responsibility but also burden of support, allowing far less variety and such hybrid stats (like Cele) are also already under as much fire from starry-eyed beginners as the pure support stats are.

The experienced players, with the connections and status to govern themselves more, already explore a number of different stats and less conventional roles when they join public content. I do that myself, cheat on stats or roles, but I can get away with it and I can adapt to content we face without it spelling disaster for party mates (and many times I have friends in party to negotiate it with). I think those are among the things most beginning players here on the forums have problems wrapping their heads around. Players are affected differently by things like meta and commanders do treat players differently. If you seem inexperienced and unsupported they will put training wheels on your bike and bikes with training wheels is the outward norm to not overwhelm players or cause conflicts.

As far as the topic as a whole goes, yes, of course, the distribution of loot and XP or other things in many vanilla systems are not balanced between support and damage roles. However, any forward-thinking approach would look to reward players better for what they do. If there is anything wrong with the existing systems it has more to do with that they are still somewhat of a cowardly compromise between the old and new rewards - and still favours certain types of behaviour a bit too much. There is still too much incentive to just play ranged AoE for rewards or that sheer loot and XP still makes up too much of the total reward output.

Edit. Then again, perhaps the game would be better-served if typical support classes gained better self-supportive balance to allow them to maintain roles on less demanding gear. However, that feels like a different, if still related, discussion and it points to a handful of other rather big and long-living balance questions that stem from compromises and dev caution in vanilla when they wanted to keep support roles in check (with varied success). I have a feeling that most people who complain about Minstrel stats are more interested in changing the roles of the classes on them than finding ways to maintain the roles on different stats. It is more so that I find naive.

Edited January 28, 2022 by subversiontwo.7501

[Abjurer.9302]

13 hours ago, subversiontwo.7501 said:

When players on damage roles die early or support lives long it mostly has to do with what they are tasked with and expected to do. It's often tied to whether they die before going into melee or not (as that is almost always preceded by ranged exchanges and opportunity calls) or positioning made. The need for tankier gear mainly rests upon being able to follow players into melee (and that in most cases support has far more support going out than comming in).

You failed to mention spike damage when discussing survivability.  With the extra toughness and vitality a bomb that instantly downs a DPS player only takes a Minstral player to around half health.  With all of the extra support skills to spam they also have an easier time surviving when caught in a bomb.

 

Experienced DPS players can avoid most damage with active defenses and positioning and need minimal support.  When deciding to join a group my main concerns are whether there are alot of CCs and if I want stability.

 

Edited January 29, 2022 by Abjurer.9302
Spelling

[subversiontwo.7501]

14 hours ago, Abjurer.9302 said:

You failed to mention spike damage when discussing survivability.  With the extra toughness and vitality a bomb that instantly downs a DPS player only takes a Minstral player to around half health.  With all of the extra support skills to spam they also have an easier time surviving when caught in a bomb.

Hmm, no I didn't fail to mention it. Instead it was rather my point that stats does not matter as much for support in spikes because their tasks and positioning when at range makes them less likely to eat spikes to begin with (forward conal support and less expectation to take initiatives toward opponents). It is essentially what I'm discussing in the first paragraph above. However, I can understand that it is a bit hard to follow because I keep it vague to save space as I knew the post would get long anyway.

Either way, the main thing I wanted to put forward was that as long as we have ranged exchanges then an argument about running Plaguedoctor or whatever is fair. The argument for keeping Minstrel is if we expect support to also carry themselves into melee and maintain a support role for other classes, on fewer spots, at those ranges. If you look at other typical classes or builds in those parties you can see that the more melee oriented spots (Breakers and Chronos) also run very tanky whereas the more hybrid oriented spots (Revs and Necros) tend to be carried and somewhat snowballed through melee or optionally also would get tanked to a certain degree (by using their generous stat totals). Alternatives to that would involve stacking more support or staying out of melee: neither good.

Essentially, the Revs and Scourges not only operates more of a balanced hybrid role with regard to ranges, compared to more melee-leaning roles on Breaker and Chrono, but if those classes play Mara rather than putting some tank on them, they more or less rely on the higher outgoing support on the Scrapper and Firebrand as well as shorter sustained time in melee. If you put Scrappers and Firebrands on tanks more similar to Revs and Scourges rather than Breakers and Chronos they simply can't sustain with the Breakers and Chronos as well as getting less incomming support than the Revs and Scourges. That would simply lead to renewed melee caution and pirate ships, because they can sustain at range but not in melee.

Ultimately it leads to marginalising the roles for Breakers and Chronos to an even less diverse meta. Again, the more viable melee roles that exist, the more the possibility of ranged roles will stand out and the more ranged roles stand out the more opportunities for havoc and focus roles will arise (as per the late vanilla meta). The only kink in that system is that ranged roles and havoc roles have always assumed separate leadership or a good degree of self-leadership that few players today display or hold. Compared to late vanilla the game today has fewer leaders and fewer self-reliant players in large scale.

That is a bit of a senstive argument, I get that, but plainly put: Much of the concerns about things like Eles, Rangers or Thieves in the large-scale meta comes down to that there are fewer players who are good enough or social enough to play that. On a server- or public level I've only seen the best servers stacked with veteran players still do these things at times or guilds with veteran players may do it on the side.

The big thing that players who argue for ranged classes and focused damage miss is that pirate ships (ranged meta) are less diverse, more stacked and give less opportunities to havoc (focus damage) than melee meta or balanced meta where melee is at least somewhat equal to range in calls made and positions taken. The current meta is, despite popular belief here, still more ranged than melee even if it can be described as somewhat balanced. There are very few actual melee damage roles in the meta or for spots in parties. That's why things like Chrono play on Minstrel.

Edited January 29, 2022 by subversiontwo.7501

[Abjurer.9302]

It seemed to me in your earlier post that you were trying to equate the Minstral player's toughness with the outgoing healing bonus to say survivability was the same for DPS and Minstral.  So you are in agreement that Minstral players take less risk?

 

5 hours ago, subversiontwo.7501 said:

whereas the more hybrid oriented spots (Revs and Necros) tend to be carried and somewhat snowballed through melee or optionally also would get tanked to a certain degree (by using their generous stat totals)

Revenant does not need to be tanked.  Whenever I push into melee I use Vengeful Hammers.  The -20% damage is equal to a good amount of toughness.

 

5 hours ago, subversiontwo.7501 said:

If you put Scrappers and Firebrands on tanks more similar to Revs and Scourges

That has never been suggested.   I even suggested creating nicer prefixes so that it is easy to shave a little off to get bags.  Why are you taking things to extremes?  If a Minstral player is going to go from 3443 toughness down to 3000 toughness there does not need to be a complete meta rework.

Edited January 29, 2022 by Abjurer.9302

[SweetPotato.7456]

If not mistaken, players have to tag (select them) an enemy, put some dmg on them to get the the reward,
support class is concentrating/supporting the players who does the above. 
so, why not,
loot is given base on what your skills hit and where it lands instead of who you tag, 
therefore by healing/supporting your squad, without tagging an enemy 
when ever you see numbers popping up on your screen you get loot base on those in relation to how many target it hits/heals/support. 

This way, who ever help in a fight gets the reward,
especially support class, or even when you aren't in a squad but you helped.

I know this can be done because when you are on a siege in a castle, 3million miles away (figure of speech)
if you hit enemy blob and then later they died, you get the loot bags on your feet right next to you.

Edited February 1, 2022 by SweetPotato.7456