"Bring the player, not the profession"-- but you REDUCED the boon cap from 10 to 5?

[Jski.6180]

4 hours ago, Nimon.7840 said:

 

I don't fully agree on that.

Alac and quickness aren't the only boons you want in a raid.

You want Regen, might, fury and protection as well. On some encounters it's really good to have swiftness... And so on.

 

Even after the nerfs druid will still be able to keep up fury might and swiftness for the group as well as applying a pretty good protection uptime. (On top of bringing 10 man spirits)

 

And that's just one example.

But yes I totally agree that some classes just need a hard change. Especially firebrand. As long as firebrand exists in its current form, no group will ever use a different quickness source. (Well, maybe on power bosses)

They are the class locked boons though you can still blast fire fields for might and you can run rune set for fury to an lesser amount protection too.

If you could blast a field for quickness and alacrity then it would be fine but you cant so there a real problem of haves and have nots on top of eod being weaker elite spec so the classes whom are getting the stronger boons now are getting them on weaker classes.

Sadly we are losing 10 target effect over all.

Right but you MUST bring a very set class for that quickness and with out that class your group cant work well. To the point where it seems you will even been less reward.

 

 

Bring the player with quickness not the class with stander boons.

[Katary.7096]

On 2/22/2022 at 6:29 AM, Hannelore.8153 said:

This was their original reason for making Strikes, but its since been abandoned. In the next expo, Strikes are to be more a merger of all instances: Story, dungeons, Fractals, raids, Strikes and DRMs, into a generic template for re-usable content that takes less time to develop and deploy with less problems overall.

I believe that your assessment is spot on, but it seems that at least some people at Arenanet see things differently.

"Even just nabbing the 10 coins a week from the Strike Vendor and, when needed, turning up to 5 of them a week into clovers (also with strike currency, for those who don't have access to raid or fractal currencies to use those trades too!) represents a form of discrete weekly legendary progress with a much lower difficulty barrier to access. And yes, we're hoping that once those players try Strikes out, they'll find that they love ten player cooperative content, and train up with their friends to try out harder things in the future, including strike CM's and raids!"

From Solar's post on reddit. (https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/ssg8zm/clearing_up_some_misconceptions_from_this_weekend/)

[Mell.4873]

On 2/21/2022 at 1:39 PM, Jski.6180 said:

Just make Quickness and alacrity self only. These 2 boons are so game changing to have or not to have that they are nearly elite skill in them self. By letting them be shier brakes cast time for balanced skills build on the ideal of long cast time or long cd. We are talking about that often only trait lines should be able to effect a classes cd and maybe even cast times. If the skill cant be used with out these boons then that class should give it self though boons before they use that skill. The class should NOT be able to give it to others just because it happens to need it form time to time.

That not the world we live in and the power creep of classes giving game defining effects are way out side of power creep. At best only ppl want to keep other classes from getting these boons in an real way because it threaten the viability of the classes whom already have theirs. Every class or at least ever class though there elite classes should be able to give quickness and alacrity as support on some level. If they are missing support over all then these classes should be able to give them self these boons.

Bring the players boons, not the class that missing the boons.

Thats like saying remove a Tanks and Healers from Wow because there is a best in slot version. Rather I would like to see the boons a requirements for group content be balanced around the requirement for alacrity and quickness. 

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

On 2/20/2022 at 4:39 PM, Jski.6180 said:

Just make Quickness and alacrity self only. These 2 boons are so game changing to have or not to have that they are nearly elite skill in them self. By letting them be shier brakes cast time for balanced skills build on the ideal of long cast time or long cd. We are talking about that often only trait lines should be able to effect a classes cd and maybe even cast times. If the skill cant be used with out these boons then that class should give it self though boons before they use that skill. The class should NOT be able to give it to others just because it happens to need it form time to time.

That not the world we live in and the power creep of classes giving game defining effects are way out side of power creep. At best only ppl want to keep other classes from getting these boons in an real way because it threaten the viability of the classes whom already have theirs. Every class or at least ever class though there elite classes should be able to give quickness and alacrity as support on some level. If they are missing support over all then these classes should be able to give them self these boons.

Bring the players boons, not the class that missing the boons.

One of the things I do lament about this game is when Anet made quickness into a boon that could be shared.  Originally it was a private buff (albeit quite strong at 200% attack speed).  Making quickness into a permanent boon did three things to this game:

1.  It created a big disconnect between instanced PVE and the rest of the game.  Any skill that players develop playing their toons in other content doesn't transfer over to instanced PVE, because quickness fundamentally changes how the game is played.  Instead of having pace-measured attacks with visible beginning and ends, quickness makes the game a button masher, forcing players to act and think 50% faster in order to be competent.
2. It makes instanced PVE objectively harder to play.  I'm going to thrown down the disability card, and say that my hands and wrists hurt a lot.  There are times when I have to throw fights in WvW because resting my hands is preferable to dancing around an endless stalemate.  Having to press buttons and perform rotations faster means it is much easier to mess up, is more stressful, and is more painful.
3. Anet now has to balance instanced content around permanent quickness.  If Anet removed quickness and reduced the health of all relevant fractal and raid bosses by 30-40%, we wouldn't see much of a difference in performance or completion time.  You can even see this scaling with bounties, who are massive HP sponges compared to everything that came before PoF.

Pre-HoT I said the earth would tremble with the release of the Chronomancer, and I was right.  The introduction of permanent group quickness and alacrity (to a lesser extent) fundamentally changed the game, power-creeping all previous content and warping it to the new boon standards.  I'm just shouting at the wind here, since I don't expect Anet to put that cat back into its box anytime soon.

[Mell.4873]

All of this complaining really does nothing since the new elite specialization are designed with the boon sharing in mind. They would have to redesign so much of the game if the reverted back to non-boon share gameplay.

I think they see the trinity immerging from this as being a healthy alterative to tank, healer, dps. You in sense, healer + quickness, alacrity + interrupt/boonstrip, dps + might, something along those lines.

[Infusion.7149]

Quickness was never reduced fully from its original state when it was not a boon. Originally it was +100% speed which was reduced to +50% speed and this was before HoT. Of course depending on animations , on hit traits, and aftercast you can achieve 33% more DPS if not more (test this with a meta build and whack the golem with and without quickness). Really quickness should be reserved for burst windows and not just spammed but of course unless you have DPS specs do vastly more damage than a quickness source people will stack pchrono / power DH and their EOD successors. That is the balance dilemma Arenanet has right now, where unless quickness effectiveness is reduced heavily it will mean people stack any shared quickness you can obtain regardless because of how powerful it is. They'd need to do something ridiculous such as quickness only affecting used skills (F1 through -F5 , 2 through 0) omitting autoattack or something similar, which would heavily impact builds that have autoattacks as a significant portion of damage (i.e. staff daredevil) and also heal scrapper or staff tempest. The inverse, affecting only autoattacks, would be catastrophic for engineer and elementalist in general due to how many skills are used.

If you remove quickness outright then people that burst bosses in the 5s burst window with minimal skill usage gain heavily but the average player actually loses out : a removal of quickness would probably take lower priority than removal of exposed debuff probably as there is no competitive mode equivalent. (If you hard CC someone in PVP/WVW you don't suddenly do any more damage unless you have a trait that gives bonus damage against CC-ed targets.) Specs such as DH would win out since the cast time is negligible for traps (even more so for precast), damage symbols, and whirling wrath (see WVW). Something akin to power soulbeast with One Wolf Pack or condi weaver with weave self would lose greatly. As it is now, because Dual Wielding (+20% attack speed) on warrior doesn't stack with Berserk (+15% attack speed) nor quickness : removing quickness would be an improvement to warrior.

If you look at 25 might for example the improvement in power is around 30% for full berserker stats without utility/traits/food. Alacrity only improves skills that are cooldown reliant and was reduced twice, from 66% to 33% to 25%. Therefore the "passive" benefit on paper to quickness is similar for might. As alacrity is of little to no use to thieves for example it is far less strong than quickness ; a player that has no idea how to play a spec would still gain more from quickness as the time spent using non damaging skills is lowered. Ultimately it is when skills have a cast time and near negligible aftercast that quickness makes an enormous difference. So I'm of the opinion even if quickness could possibly use a shave down (to say +25% or +33% speed matching GW1) that the hidden aftercast differences on skills ought to be looked at first since that is something far less drastic and not intuitive.

It's worrisome that quickness providers could possibly provide 25 might without going full boon duration (that goes for catalyst as well) or heavy trait investment and less worrisome if that is solely on alacrity providers, DPS specs, and healers.

 

[Gorem.8104]

It is such a bad idea to "Bring the player not the profession" while then making it so that we bring 2 groups that are exactly the same. 

No matter what their needs to be a meta, if everyone can just do everything that sounds boring and all the classes will be samesame. Its fun theorycrafting and using different things for different outcomes. Its boring if all outcomes are the same. 

 

These recent updates have been terrible. Interesting marketing for EoD. 

[Obtena.7952]

1 hour ago, Gorem.8104 said:

It is such a bad idea to "Bring the player not the profession" while then making it so that we bring 2 groups that are exactly the same. 

No matter what their needs to be a meta, if everyone can just do everything that sounds boring and all the classes will be samesame. Its fun theorycrafting and using different things for different outcomes. Its boring if all outcomes are the same. 

 

Lucky for us, none of that is happening. 

The irony is that this game has always been about Bring the player, not the profession ... so it's rather comical that people think there is some new approach being taken here. Nope, no new approach ... just maintaining the one we have ALWAYS had in this game. 

Edited February 24, 2022 by Obtena.7952

[Zacchary.6183]

7 hours ago, Mell.4873 said:

Thats like saying remove a Tanks and Healers from Wow because there is a best in slot version. Rather I would like to see the boons a requirements for group content be balanced around the requirement for alacrity and quickness. 

They shouldn't have to be a requirement but players make it so.

[Jski.6180]

8 hours ago, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

One of the things I do lament about this game is when Anet made quickness into a boon that could be shared.  Originally it was a private buff (albeit quite strong at 200% attack speed).  Making quickness into a permanent boon did three things to this game:

1.  It created a big disconnect between instanced PVE and the rest of the game.  Any skill that players develop playing their toons in other content doesn't transfer over to instanced PVE, because quickness fundamentally changes how the game is played.  Instead of having pace-measured attacks with visible beginning and ends, quickness makes the game a button masher, forcing players to act and think 50% faster in order to be competent.
2. It makes instanced PVE objectively harder to play.  I'm going to thrown down the disability card, and say that my hands and wrists hurt a lot.  There are times when I have to throw fights in WvW because resting my hands is preferable to dancing around an endless stalemate.  Having to press buttons and perform rotations faster means it is much easier to mess up, is more stressful, and is more painful.
3. Anet now has to balance instanced content around permanent quickness.  If Anet removed quickness and reduced the health of all relevant fractal and raid bosses by 30-40%, we wouldn't see much of a difference in performance or completion time.  You can even see this scaling with bounties, who are massive HP sponges compared to everything that came before PoF.

Pre-HoT I said the earth would tremble with the release of the Chronomancer, and I was right.  The introduction of permanent group quickness and alacrity (to a lesser extent) fundamentally changed the game, power-creeping all previous content and warping it to the new boon standards.  I'm just shouting at the wind here, since I don't expect Anet to put that cat back into its box anytime soon.

Ya its a shame what ended up happening to quickness and it has a lot to do with the mess we are in now. Super speed the new quickness but in an broken way of being a boon but not having the counter that other boons have.

I do not see quickness or alacrity getting a real update so we must look at it from the point of view of if your class is not full dps (no support at all) you are worst off for not having quickness or alacrity support.

 

Bring the player with the benchmark not the profession with massively out dated boons.

[Arewn.2368]

On 2/22/2022 at 6:40 PM, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

There is no best DPS.  All of the bosses have different behaviors and abilities, which each require different things.  Aside from that, the variance in DPS between professions is far, far less than the variance of whether a group has quickness or not.

This is in no way contradictory to what I said. It'll either be the best overall dps spec. Either because of consistant performance across most bosses, or because of some unique combination of helpful utility they bring. Or the best spec for that boss.

In any case 10 man boons does not get rid of class stacking. It just changes what is being stacked.

And we're  not comaparing quickness vs no quickness. We're comparing the variance in application of quickness between professions. The variance between which only continues to shrink with EoD.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

2 hours ago, Arewn.2368 said:

This is in no way contradictory to what I said. It'll either be the best overall dps spec. Either because of consistant performance across most bosses, or because of some unique combination of helpful utility they bring. Or the best spec for that boss.

In any case 10 man boons does not get rid of class stacking. It just changes what is being stacked.

And we're  not comaparing quickness vs no quickness. We're comparing the variance in application of quickness between professions. The variance between which only continues to shrink with EoD.

It is very contradictory, because the whole point is that people won't stack the "best DPS."  I've been on two different statics, and have also pugged plenty of raids.  DPS recruitment is rarely more specific than "Power" or "Condi".  The only exception being Twin Largos, which has mesmer stacking.  You can look at the Raid Academy or the LFG right now and see that they don't ask for specific DPS.  In fractals, scourge stacking only lasts until Sunqua Peak is beaten, in which case players opt out into other professions

The only thing people are stingy on is the boon support.  This is because, in comparison, the difference in DPS between professions is far less than the difference between the absence or presence of boons, particularly quickness.  

[Sorra.1735]

I wanna see who will want to take a druid into a raid comp after this nerf as the only thing its useful atm is the 10man 25might and the not so great spirits that a soulbeast can take also. The healing is also not as great as the other healers so i can see that ppl will rather take a hfb as it will do everything that druid basically does but better and can spam stab and aegis. 

[Jski.6180]

Well dam i guess realty dose hate giving ele any effects that are class denfing i think they just hate the class over all too. 10 target nerf and not added effects. Its not like the shouts where giving out any thing of real class defning use like quickness or alacrity. Tempest is a dead pve class now. At best ele is a dead pve class beyond a brain dead generic dps class.

 

Bring a non ele player, dont bring the ele class.

Edited February 28, 2022 by Jski.6180

[Substance E.4852]

8 hours ago, Sorra.1735 said:

the not so great spirits that a soulbeast can take also

Which Anet will be ruining along with warrior banners in a future update

[HotDelirium.7984]

On 2/15/2022 at 12:32 PM, AlexndrTheGreat.8310 said:

As mentioned above, we’re getting a lot of new elite specs that can bring quickness and alacrity to raids. So post EoD we’d have:

Alacrity: Mesmer (Chrono, Mirage), Revenant (Renegade), Thief (Specter, Plasma when applicable), Engineer (Mechanist). (Maybe some Willbender shenanigans? Not sure).

Quickness: Mesmer (Chrono), Guardian (Firebrand), Engineer (Scrapper), Necro (Harbinger), Ele (Catalyst).

And with the announcement of spirits and banners being reworked to fit into the shared boon system, it’s extremely likely both Ranger and Warrior will get Alacrity and/or Quickness.

With that being the case, every class will be able to fulfill this boon role for either Alac or Quickness. Party comps would end up looking something like:

-Healer w/ Boon1 + DPS w/ Boon2 + 3 DPS

-Chronomancer with both boons (I think they can still maintain both by themselves? But they just do low damage) + Healer who doesn’t need to bring boons (something like current Druid, Tempest, Vindicator, maybe Scourge?) + 3 DPS

Just with more classes getting access to those important boons, party comps should be more varied than just some variation of: FB + Renegade, FB + Mirage, Scrapper + Renegade, Scrapper + Mirage, etc.

Firebrand and Renegade (and Scourge, but not as relevant to this specific topic) have also been confirmed to be getting nerfs for EoD so the other specs were getting will be much more appealing to play rather than FB and Renegade dominating those roles.

 

I mean, this is already what’s going on right now anyway. People already stack some classes / prefer them over others, this won’t be some surprise issue that would only now come up. As said above, Scourge, FB, and Renegade are all immensely OP at the moment and have been confirmed to be getting nerfed going into EoD, so bringing other classes for those roles will seem more appealing. Having roles that aren’t just restricted to a small handful of 3-4 specs isn’t that great either.

Catalyst's quickness had or now has a 15 sec cooldown between using jade orbs so that's certainly DOA.

[Gorem.8104]

So its gone through... 

 

Is the change a good thing? Why did we need open world to be nerfed this much? in a giant zerg against open world bosses what this feels like is just everyone will be getting less buffs on them. Sure their focus appears to  be their strikes for some reason but like what about other content Anet?

And also, won't this just cause 5 man mirror groups? As no one has 10 man targets anymore, just need a 5man meta and multiply that by 2. 

It just seems like such a dumb idea to be so focused on making classes too much the same. Bring the Profession, not the player. 

[Shiyo.3578]

"Bring the player not the class" is a design philosophy Blizzard started and figured out is a failure of game design and stopped doing it nearly a decade ago.

[Obtena.7952]

21 minutes ago, Shiyo.3578 said:

"Bring the player not the class" is a design philosophy Blizzard started and figured out is a failure of game design and stopped doing it nearly a decade ago.

In WoW , it's a failure. But GW2 is different from WoW in some very fundamental ways that make playing how people want work just fine. The only problems is when people interpret playing how they want as "everything I want to play has to be meta".

Edited March 1, 2022 by Obtena.7952

[Jski.6180]

Catalyses quickness duration was nearfed hard anet realty hates the ele class.

 

ONLY play with players who do not play ele, NEVER play with eles.

[zallesz.1650]

Wouldn't making ALL boons 10 man solve the issue? Then you only need 1 person per team to cover x boon. Let's say 2 or 3 people are needed for essential boons, 8-7 can be anything, no mirror comp problems. 

Or would that mean that the highest dps class will be stacked 8 times? Wouldn't the fact that we have 27 elite specs reduce the chances of that? Not EVERYONE will be playing I dunno, Power DH to get into raids, there is a lot more variety out there. 

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

1 hour ago, zallesz.1650 said:

Wouldn't making ALL boons 10 man solve the issue? Then you only need 1 person per team to cover x boon. Let's say 2 or 3 people are needed for essential boons, 8-7 can be anything, no mirror comp problems. 

Or would that mean that the highest dps class will be stacked 8 times? Wouldn't the fact that we have 27 elite specs reduce the chances of that? Not EVERYONE will be playing I dunno, Power DH to get into raids, there is a lot more variety out there. 

Thats what Anet did about 5-6 years ago and it did in fact improve diversity as you said. Not only because it made requirements for buffs less stringent, but it also made some builds actually useful (like Shout Heal Tempest)

but you see 3 years ago the “nerf this nerf that” and “power creep game” mentality creeped into the spvp balance philosophy and they are now taking that balance philosophy into PVE.

 

The game has been undergoing a kind of “standardization” over the past two years…many skills do the same damage…do the same boons…have the same durations…this standardization is the only way Anet understands how to balance classes (through homogenizing them until all the choice has been sucked out of it) and it has been killing the game ever since.

 

[Shiyo.3578]

3 hours ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

but you see 3 years ago the “nerf this nerf that” and “power creep game” mentality creeped into the spvp balance philosophy and they are now taking that balance philosophy into PVE.

This games difficulty was an utter joke before EoD. They made everyone god mode.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

33 minutes ago, Shiyo.3578 said:

This games difficulty was an utter joke before EoD. They made everyone god mode.

I don’t disagree. But also that’s not the whole story. 
 

balance implies that there is a balance in things…eat too much peanut butter and you get fat…drink too much soda and you get sick…run too long and you get tired…

 

You see the issue with all of the game ever since the beginning has been this lack of balance in skills. And tradeoffs are the key behind balancing strong beneficial mechanics…but tradeoffs are not magic. They require thought and procedure to implement good ones rather than ineffective ones.

 

the God mode of this game is caused by lack of tradeoffs, not that the mechanics (like 10 target) are useful.

Edited March 2, 2022 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Shiyo.3578]

1 hour ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

the God mode of this game is caused by lack of tradeoffs,

Yeah, just compare the new support specs to firebrand/renegade. Firebrand/renegade can be full support while still doing high DPS and essentially "hybrid" while the new specs, like machinist for example, has to give up tons of damage and take all it's support traits.

There's no consistency and they forget to fix things on older specs, so the games just..a disaster.