The real core problem of the Dragon's End meta is all about DPS

[ConceptualGamer.8102]

The problem is the DPS gap. No game can be balanced around this ridiculous DPS gap.

No game  should NEVER EVER alow players reach 100% critical chance and build critical damage to up to there is no more points.
If you can reach 100% critical chance so there is no critical chance, there is only a new standard damage.

If ANet capped critical chance at 50% and citical damage at 200% it would help a lot in drecreasing the gap between skilled and non skilled players and would immprove build variet, since then ppl could reach criticals cap via trait lines, sigil/runes or gear and food, allowing more space for investmment in survivability or utility and decreasing the dps gap between using viper/berserker and anything else.

[ConceptualGamer.8102]

As a compliment to the previous post...
 

Anything about balance in mmos revolves around Time To Kill

.
If you do 200k damage per second and a mob have 400k HP. You will kill the mob in 2 seconds.

Now, if you get "nerfed to the ground" to 2 dps and the mob now have 4 HP you gonna kill the mob in the same exact 2 seconds.

The reality in GW2 is as it's follows:

If a non meta casual player do 2 dps and a mob has 10HP, this mob will die in 5 seconds.

A skilled meta player does 10x more damage than the previous exemple (second ANet). Whitch means this player will kill the same 10 HP mob in 1 second.

The meta player could even kill a 20 HP mob in the same 1 second, while the non meta player would take 10 seconds to kill this mob. 

So now, get the picture that a mob that takes the meta player 5 seconds to kill needs to have 100HP. The non meta player will take 50 seconds to kill this same mob. Multiply this gap by 50 players and now you can see the DE nightmare balance hell (as anything "challenging" in this game).
 

The numbers means nothing more than time to kill. Anet has made a game that deceives it's players for decades that "they can play anything they want". Divided, intentionaly, the community into "casuals", that can kill anything with what they want in OW, and "hardcore" that need to play meta builds to do anything in instanced content, when in other games there are lots more of space for midcore players between these mindsets and skills.

It's a shame this game shows us we can be a cleric type staff guardian, but we can't play it couse it gives around 20k less dps that the meta sword/torch one with 0 survivability and boring "adds more X% damage when 'insert anything here'" traits. That any new stats they give us is just "garbage" couse berserk/viper exists.

This meta is just pushing over the dps disparity reality to a playerbase that has choosen to ignore it in favor of fun. But there is a point that giving up efficience in favour of fun is not fun anymore.

[Alcatraznc.3869]

On 3/14/2022 at 8:21 AM, Peterson.5172 said:

also, while dps can be a problem, some people have said you only need 7k dps per person (as a point of reference top end dps with all buffs hit 35-40k)

 

Assuming this is true, that means your average player is unable to do 7k dps with all the buffs. But that also means if they didnt had the buff they would be doing something like 20% less.

 

Am I the only one that is concerned here ? 7k isnt a big number, it's barely a small wall.

[Peterson.5172]

10 minutes ago, Alcatraznc.3869 said:

 

Assuming this is true, that means your average player is unable to do 7k dps with all the buffs. But that also means if they didnt had the buff they would be doing something like 20% less.

 

Am I the only one that is concerned here ? 7k isnt a big number, it's barely a small wall.

this is the problem created by "use whatever stats/build you want; freedom to play however you want; make your own build" type of thinking

while it's a nice concept, combined with 10 years of easy metas (do-able in anything), you get the 5k dps crowd

[AliamRationem.5172]

2 hours ago, Alcatraznc.3869 said:

 

Assuming this is true, that means your average player is unable to do 7k dps with all the buffs. But that also means if they didnt had the buff they would be doing something like 20% less.

 

Am I the only one that is concerned here ? 7k isnt a big number, it's barely a small wall.

Where did we pull the 7k number out of?  Please tell me it isn't just the estimated total health of the boss divided by the timer in seconds assuming a squad of 50 people.  I'd like to think the forums has better math skills than this, but I'm struggling to understand a useful context for this number we keep throwing around.  Help me out here, guys!

Edited March 15, 2022 by AliamRationem.5172

[Dawdler.8521]

1 hour ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

Where did we pull the 7k number out of?  Please tell me it isn't just the estimated total health of the boss divided by the timer in seconds assuming a squad of 50 people.  I'd like to think the forums has better math skills than this, but I'm struggling to understand a useful context for this number we keep throwing around.  Help me out here, guys!

You'd have add scaling to that context too. If the scaling floor is 10, then 8 people with 7k dps is going to be more effective than 15 with the same 7k dps. Do we even know the scaling math?

Edited March 15, 2022 by Dawdler.8521

[WolfWings.4086]

3 hours ago, Alcatraznc.3869 said:

 

Assuming this is true, that means your average player is unable to do 7k dps with all the buffs. But that also means if they didnt had the buff they would be doing something like 20% less.

 

Am I the only one that is concerned here ? 7k isnt a big number, it's barely a small wall.

Also the presumption that everyone touching the fight needs (or was even there in time to) do all the pre-stuff to get up to that full buff is another issue.

 

Folks show up over the duration, especially now folks are still just finishing the story and ending up dumped into DE whenever that happens, so a significant mix has anywhere down to zero buffs.

 

Reliance on that "must play X events before the big event" buff is another fatal flaw in the open-world DE meta, but also one I can't see translating well to instanced versions either short of a full 'raid complex' version of the entire DE so honestly that buff being anything except extra reward chests at the end is another fatal flaw of the DE meta design.

[Desh.7028]

2 hours ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

Please tell me it isn't just the estimated total health of the boss divided by the timer in seconds assuming a squad of 50 people.

 

That's exactly it. Her HP can be figured out easily through log review, just check how much damage was dealt in the first 20% and multiply by 5 and the timer is visible in game. It's not wrong by any means, just really useless without considering DPS uptime.

 

5 hours ago, ConceptualGamer.8102 said:

The problem is the DPS gap. No game can be balanced around this ridiculous DPS gap.

 

Every game is balanced around this. Trying to not leave those behind who simply don't know and those that don't care or can't while retaining those who are or were willing to learn. It's also not a casual/hardcore split per se ... it's much more "willing to improve" and "not" instead. I've met relatively hardcore players being shitlords unable to learn including just reading their own kitten tooltips in other games.

 

5 hours ago, ConceptualGamer.8102 said:

No game  should NEVER EVER alow players reach 100% critical chance and build critical damage to up to there is no more points.
If you can reach 100% critical chance so there is no critical chance, there is only a new standard damage.

 

It's weird, sure. But there are many games that do this for some classes (at least during high CD steroids) and there are games where 100% isn't the cap and you can get a "crit of a crit". In GW2 it's mainly a stat minigame to entice people interested in juggling gear but funnily enough the difference in efficacy is not that large since power, precision and ferocity scale off each other and lower power reduces the base damage (at a smaller degree) while optimized precision increases the overall result but only at a lower base damage to be multiplied by ferocity. It's also much more of a thing in fractal speed running than anywhere else, stats from agony is mega weird and a minigame in and of itself.

 

6 hours ago, ConceptualGamer.8102 said:

If ANet capped critical chance at 50% and citical damage at 200%

 

I know you didn't think very long about those numbers at all. 

 

5 hours ago, ConceptualGamer.8102 said:

It's a shame this game shows us we can be a cleric type staff guardian, but we can't play it couse it gives around 20k less dps that the meta sword/torch one with 0 survivability and boring "adds more X% damage when 'insert anything here'" traits. That any new stats they give us is just "garbage" couse berserk/viper exists.

 

What? You can. Heal Firebrand is a thing and carries staff and it's really good. DPS being class cannon or kitten is a result not of the stat and gear system but boons and the fact that it's the DPS role and this is the same in every MMO. Open world is also so tame that your class DPS is inherently great as well, while that Heal Firebrand with staff will always be welcome at meta events because it gives quickness and people can stand in the bad more often (like they'd do anyway, let's not kid ourselves here).

[AliamRationem.5172]

4 minutes ago, Desh.7028 said:

That's exactly it. Her HP can be figured out easily through log review, just check how much damage was dealt in the first 20% and multiply by 5 and the timer is visible in game. It's not wrong by any means, just really useless without considering DPS uptime.

It's sad that we have so many parrots repeating "7k! 7k! 7k!" while having no idea what they're talking about.  We're gonna need a lotta crackers...

[Desh.7028]

15 minutes ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

It's sad that we have so many parrots repeating "7k! 7k! 7k!" while having no idea what they're talking about.  We're gonna need a lotta crackers...

 

Knowing about the number and being able to do basic math is not the same thing. If the average player has no idea how boons work or how stat scales then the self proclaimed hardcore player still doesn't know how to properly factor in uptime for DPS in encounter scenarios.

GW2 never had progress raiding, not even "nightmarish" general raiding. The speed running crowd certainly know these things, at least the leadership but otherwise such concepts and log review after getting a few pulls and inevitable fails in is foreign to this game. Raids in general also were never tuned in a way where uptime being optimized through adjusted strategy is required to clear and the game generally allows moving while using abilities at full potential (with range being the only limiting factor). I've learned these concepts not in GW2 but WoW and SWToR mostly.

[GoldenPants.1870]

7 hours ago, ConceptualGamer.8102 said:

If ANet capped critical chance at 50% and citical damage at 200% it would help a lot in drecreasing the gap between skilled and non skilled players and would immprove build variet, since then ppl could reach criticals cap via trait lines, sigil/runes or gear and food, allowing more space for investmment in survivability or utility and decreasing the dps gap between using viper/berserker and anything else.

No, it would just ruins things. The fun part in GW2 is that you CAN decide what stats your gear has, and can build niche builds for a specific purpose because of these things. Limiting things never helps anyone.

[Firebeard.1746]

If what you're saying is true, then what they're asking is above and beyond what even raiding asks. At least raiding in this game is just 10 people. Now you're requiring 50 to all do the right thing at the right time with full boons/buffs AND AN EVENT THAT TAKES 2 HOURS. On ONE ATTEMPT. AT least raids are 10 minutes and you can reset at will. 

DPS is 50% just presence of boons and buffs + the right gear (almost any build with a strong auto attack gets close to 50% of its bench damage on autoattacks with the right boons and class buffs present). That's a colossal amount of effort organizing that many people with just the right builds (and getting specialized gear for some raid builds can take newer players quite a bit of time, it's gotten better, but it's still not trivial). And then you're adding the incentive for full ascended food and enhancements. And you're asking these people to commit 2 hours on every attempt. That's just ludicrous. And it's really dumb in the context that people like to play chiller builds in OW. I can't stress enough how annoying and weird it is the amount of build diversity this game allows for them to put an explicit check on you running very specific gear and trait builds in raids that most people wouldn't naturally run in literally any other environemnt. I enjoy high end PVE sure, but I don't like it being forced on me in OW. I go to do OW content to be chill. And then you're telling me that I need to find 49 other people running all the right builds who have done the event enough that they know what they're doing on top of that just to pass? I just can't even fathom why they thought this was a good idea. 

And I'm not knocking the build diversity at all. it's something that makes this game fun and legendaries actually worth it. They should be embraicing build diversity, not discouraging it. 

Edited March 15, 2022 by Firebeard.1746

[Cuks.8241]

I didnt do the math and I heard different numbers but from good sources. I'm just repeating what I heard that 7 k is approximation for the phases you can hit Soo Won in the nose. Or something similar. The dps over whole course of the fight is lower. Keep in mind you also have a really nice dps buff from pre events, so this come to about 5k normalised to usual conditions during phases when you can hit her. 

This actually makes sense if you run Arc during open world metas like Dragon Stand and see the dps average player does. The semi organised (semi as in organised but not raid party composition) usually get very close to beating it, consistently under 10 %. If 7k was requirement over the whole fight on the platform normal groups would probably wipe at 50%+ (number from my behind, but you get the point).

There is one big issue with this fight many dont talk about. It's a complete visual mess. I dont want the fight to be nerfed but the visual mess is horrible. You have 50-60 players on a small platform with their minis and all the shiny stuf, a bunch of adds with their telegraphs and boss telegraphs. And the cherry on the top are the whirlpools in the last phases. At that point usually everything goes kitten and I can't blame just players because at some point you can't see anything.

Visual mess in general is imo the largest problem in this game for any competitive mode. And the UI doesnt help (and no, I dont want addons, just let me move and and resize important stuff on the UI).

[Exatherion.3075]

I totally agree with the visual mess. The meta is for this part very poorly designed. The player blob completly obstructs the sight if as it scatters in the area due to trying to see anything.

This meta wasn't designed with the common player in mind. Lets face it: Only a smaller percentage of players was able to do the deep etc. in GW1. This meta is kinda similar, as it makes the content exclusives.

Please look at what is happening in the lfg... There are people like this "come to Arborstone if you have 10% of map buffs then I will invite you into my sacred instance!". This is not the game I want to play, it creates a lot bad blood between players.

Sorry but this is not the kind of game I used to play and pay for. Keep the exclusives stuff for strike missions and similar content. It is bad enough that there wasnt a "hard" and "easy" mode for raids, fractals and strike missions.... This game is successfull due to its player friendliness. If you think that you need to lock the win in open world behind, then players won't be happy with it and the loot from metas is anyway a joke except for some(Why there is a that big gap in revenue is another question). It won't be the kind of meta you try any time soon after having one win. But lets face it: The EoD isn't that long out and stuff needs to be balanced.

[ConceptualGamer.8102]

 

Quote

No, it would just ruins things. The fun part in GW2 is that you CAN decide what stats your gear has, and can build niche builds for a specific purpose because of these things. Limiting things never helps anyone.

It's called "false choices" and there is no fun in choosing about being accepted in grouop content or not based in wich build you want to play (assuming your supposition that the fun in GW2 is building a different character). People don't realise, even after 10 years, how it the does exact opposite. It has been limiting GW2 builds too much more  the way it is. The builds are very restrictive and berserker gear is the only power gear to go since the release of this game. If GW2 introduced gear that does even more survivability losses for more damage gain, people would make this the new meta

 

My following post argues that whitch matter when u are balancing the game is about time to kill, the fancy number means the same thing no matter you are seing big 500k damage or 4 damage in your screen.

 

 

Edited March 15, 2022 by ConceptualGamer.8102

[ConceptualGamer.8102]

6 hours ago, Desh.7028 said:

Every game is balanced around this. Trying to not leave those behind who simply don't know and those that don't care or can't while retaining those who are or were willing to learn. It's also not a casual/hardcore split per se ... it's much more "willing to improve" and "not" instead. I've met relatively hardcore players being shitlords unable to learn including just reading their own kitten tooltips in other games.

No it's not. Most of tha games (and belive me, i've been playing lots fo them in the past 20 years) don't allow 100% critical chance 100% of the time. Other more balance MMOs have the dps disparity between elite players and casuals ina marging of 2x the damage and not 10x. There is no way you can balance any timme to kill with that gargantuan margin.

 

 

6 hours ago, Desh.7028 said:

t's weird, sure. But there are many games that do this for some classes (at least during high CD steroids) and there are games where 100% isn't the cap and you can get a "crit of a crit". In GW2 it's mainly a stat minigame to entice people interested in juggling gear but funnily enough the difference in efficacy is not that large since power, precision and ferocity scale off each other and lower power reduces the base damage (at a smaller degree) while optimized precision increases the overall result but only at a lower base damage to be multiplied by ferocity. It's also much more of a thing in fractal speed running than anywhere else, stats from agony is mega weird and a minigame in and of itself.

100% crits in CD steroids is not the same as every single second of the fight. Again, GW2 have the most atrocious disparity between meta builds and ok builds I ever seen. And before Alacrity introduction (whitch was supposed to be only for cronomancer couse "time manipulation", til they realise ppl were always taking crono so they started to split it in other classes) the damage output of players and the disparity incresead a lot. Some older mildly harder content are bein obliterated in seconds nowadays.

 

 

6 hours ago, Desh.7028 said:

I know you didn't think very long about those numbers at all.

Maybe not. but the point is today we already have a critical cap and an arguably ferocity cap since we will use the most power/ferocity increments available to reach it. And to have this trinity escalating the most of it's potential requires a set of builds, gear and traits that limit players to the most boring and restrictive combination. If players could use fewer and diferent tools (gear, sigils, food, traits) to reach the damage caps, tehy could have some space for build variety for playstyle.

 

6 hours ago, Desh.7028 said:

What? You can. Heal Firebrand is a thing and carries staff and it's really good. DPS being class cannon or kitten is a result not of the stat and gear system but boons and the fact that it's the DPS role and this is the same in every MMO. Open world is also so tame that your class DPS is inherently great as well, while that Heal Firebrand with staff will always be welcome at meta events because it gives quickness and people can stand in the bad more often (like they'd do anyway, let's not kid ourselves here).

Here you missed the point. What i'm trying to say is that GW2 presents us with a variety of weapons and playstyles per classes but the player is not allowed to choose between all or even most of them couse the meta in PVE is about the choices that provides you more damage and the damage discrepancies between suboptimal choices and optimal choices is huge even both in the hands of skilled players.

In the end, this discution will probably taking us nowere. You like the game the way it is and it's fair. But now that ANet put the reality in the face of a broader community these old long time discussions are intensifing, even in popular streamers talks. I just shared my view in a game that I've played for 5 years as my only main mmo and left couse of these points and now, returning for the expansion ending the 10 year dragon story, I just see the reality is even worse than when I left 3 years ago.

I'd like to clarify that I don't have the right answers, It's always more complicated. And it's not a matter of just changing the classes numbers. What I think is that GW2 have some fundamental problems in its systems that prevents the game to reach it's potential. The combat controls are awesome, the skill animations are awesome, the movement, the idea behind the builds are great. Everything lost in mathematic madness that intead of promoting the dynamic action GW2 proposes, makes players brutalise all the content with insane DPS outputs that skips all interisting mechanics making bosses nothing more than Golem dummies.

Rest assured ANet will never do something like that. It's risky and ppl rage at every single thing they perceive as "nerf", even if they, in pratice, need less time to kill things with these changes.

[Desh.7028]

1 hour ago, ConceptualGamer.8102 said:

No it's not. Most of tha games (and belive me, i've been playing lots fo them in the past 20 years) don't allow 100% critical chance 100% of the time. Other more balance MMOs have the dps disparity between elite players and casuals ina marging of 2x the damage and not 10x. There is no way you can balance any timme to kill with that gargantuan margin.

 

This has nothing to do with critical chance whatsoever. GW2 is a game that is marketed as easier and without the horizontal item progression it gathers up certain types of players that will make the variance you're talking about even greater. The difference between LFR Joe and World First "this-is-my-actual-job" WoW players is possibly even greater than here.

 

1 hour ago, ConceptualGamer.8102 said:

arguably ferocity cap since we will use the most power/ferocity increments available to reach it

 

Interestingly enough the new Dragon stats changed that and now you can get more ferocity.

 

1 hour ago, ConceptualGamer.8102 said:

Here you missed the point.

 

The complaint was "I want Guardian with staff to be meta" and I gave you the answer: it is, even if taken down a peg with the heal skill nerf. If you want Guardian with staff to be meta DPS you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the game - the weapons and their skill sets are tools tailored to be part of specific builds. Everything and the kitchen sink thrown together is not a proper build and will obviously suck.

 

1 hour ago, ConceptualGamer.8102 said:

If players could use fewer and diferent tools (gear, sigils, food, traits) to reach the damage caps, tehy could have some space for build variety for playstyle.

 

Fewer tools leading to more variety? I truly don't understand the logic here.

Trait choices for instance are usually cookie cutter for this or that spec but swapping traits situationally is sort of the master class of a spec and quite a few but not all specs have this feature.

 

1 hour ago, ConceptualGamer.8102 said:

Everything lost in mathematic madness

 

Everything in this game and every other hotkey MMO ever is just mathematics with a pretty paint job. I don't even mean "it's a computer programm, obviously it all comes down to math" but how stats, skills, damage calculations, damage mitigations, timings, scheduling within a rotation ... all math.

 

1 hour ago, ConceptualGamer.8102 said:

makes players brutalise all the content with insane DPS outputs that skips all interisting mechanics making bosses nothing more than Golem dummies

 

The reason for this is not "evil math" in the slightest but it's very true. I think this is a result of the lack of the classic trifecta.

I remember being not very interested in the original dungeons and the Warrior stacking with backs to the wall Hundred Blading things to death and that was the gameplay with some additional trash skipping mechanics that would be seen as exploits in many other games. They walked themselves back on this a little bit with how toughness works and actual healers existing.

 

Alacrity and quickness as 100% uptime boons always had a weird taste. It's less basic boons that would've been better kept as a bonus on select specs and skills and very rarely AoE not a permanent raid party buff. The cat is out of the bag though, I doubt they would do the amount of rebalancing required to get it back in, those changes would be extensive to say the least.

 

But there is no subscription and your gear never gets outdated, which is a core reason why I'm still playing. If I don't like how things are, what content there is to do or how it's done I can leave and pick it back up later.

There's sadly a social tax on that though, you're not just leaving the game but also the "friends along the way" in many cases.

 

 

2 hours ago, Exatherion.3075 said:

Please look at what is happening in the lfg... There are people like this "come to Arborstone if you have 10% of map buffs then I will invite you into my sacred instance!". This is not the game I want to play, it creates a lot bad blood between players.

 

 

You have me choking on my water over here. This is amazing. I'm so sad this forum doesn't have a clown emoji because the fiesta in Dragon's End apparently isn't over just yet.

I don't even want to look now. 

[ConceptualGamer.8102]

2 hours ago, Desh.7028 said:

The complaint was "I want Guardian with staff to be meta" and I gave you the answer: it is, even if taken down a peg with the heal skill nerf. If you want Guardian with staff to be meta DPS you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the game - the weapons and their skill sets are tools tailored to be part of specific builds. Everything and the kitchen sink thrown together is not a proper build and will obviously suck

I just used a random pick up exemple of how a player could be interested in one archetype but disapointed to not be able to play it since for long GW2 PVE has always been leaning to full dps meta. Yes other games always try to get more dps out of every role couse the only way to win a fight is making the boss HP to 0 and time efficiency. But other roles and playstyles beyond dps have purpuse. GW2 doesn't demand the holy trinity, but presents you with gear, traits and weapons that missleads you to these "builds that suck" in pve. If they want to teach the players the fundaments about what is important they shouldn't be releasing more and more stats combos that "suck" (they could easily separate these for wvw inn the same whay they do to spvp).

 

2 hours ago, Desh.7028 said:

 

Fewer tools leading to more variety? I truly don't understand the logic here

What I meant was fewer tools necessary to reach the crits caps.  You could reach the caps with only berserker weapons and 2 trinkets and a mix of less specialyzed gears, or choose trait lines that gives more critical chance or use a sigil or food lefting more space to use the rest of your gear, or build or traits or foods for things like survavibility or utility.

lesser crit caps would demand less full investment in purely offensive gear and traits to maximize it. and would decrease the gap between a buld that even didn't reach the max crit cap.

There will aways be a diference between Joe and the World First, but WF usualy are 2 Joes, not 10. So when the developer is making a mathematic balancing aroud DPS and the judging time to kill to an encouter being fun, not a joke or a slog, it would be better to find a middle ground.

 

 

2 hours ago, Desh.7028 said:

There's sadly a social tax on that though, you're not just leaving the game but also the "friends along the way" in many cases.

Absolutly right. A decision I 've sadly made, leaving nice guild friends couse I couldn't stand the game statuses anymore.