Anet please do not release the balance patch.

[firedragon.8953]

First, I recommend who ever "balances" warrior actually plays warrior.

The description of the banner rework sounds cumbersome, not fun. The power (crit) buff trait put in the mostly condi line (arms) is laughable. I'll admit, I'm not really sure about the uptime with pulsing banner boons since I'm not smart enough to understand it well enough from the description, but the other changes do not instill confidence. This also doesn't address issues such as 300s cooldowns and 100B that the community has had issue with for YEARS! 

At this point I'd rather they delete banners, give a new type of "shout" (a war cry?) and let us effortlessly "spit" on our group for boons like firebrand.

I love this game, and I love the people I play with. But, this is just too tone-deaf for me to spend any more money on until I gain a bit more confidence in the competence of this studio when it comes to the more "gameplay mechanics" (not music, not art, not voice acting, etc.) aspects of their GAME.

 

Edited June 27, 2022 by firedragon.8953

[Galisaa.8304]

+1

[SamuelW.2685]

5 hours ago, firedragon.8953 said:

First, I recommend who ever "balances" warrior actually plays warrior.

It's confirmed the balance devs don't understand the inner workings of each class  or even play them and they have to wiki actions 

And I get it, no one person can understand everything about every class, that's why you have a team who maybe understands 3 or 4 classes fully, but man, just how small is the balance team anyway that they can't fully understand each class? It's LITERALLY THE TEAMS JOB TO UNDERSTAND THE CLASSES SO THEY KNOW HOW TO BALANCE THEM, it's unbelievable. 

Edited June 27, 2022 by SamuelW.2685

[nutri.1385]

It's not a bad idea to postpone the patch. It would give the devs some time to polish and redo the illogical/unreasonable changes. I can't imagine that it's a worse scenario than pushing those changes. Honestly, no need to rush with it. 

I've been always on Anet's side: through the shitstorm about the Dragon's End meta and beyond. But after the leaked conversation of the balance team member I can see that this topic is a lost cause. It is true, what the Community has been saying all along: some classes are just not loved enough by the devs. 

 

[crazyhusky.2985]

I don't use warrior much but I do know that the changes are bad.

You'd think tif they were swapping thief skills around they'd swap some warrior skills around so they can do more damage or to help warrior players out.

 

Here are a few triats that they should change and move

Swap "Furious Burst" from Arms lines to Discpline to " Destruction of the empowered. "

I have no idea why a Fury trait is in the condition line when it should be in a power based one.

With Furious burst in this traitline in the middle, it allows an offensive option for warriors not using Banners, allowing Warriors to get fury for better self fury uptime. Using Burst skills within their rotation.

Now that Destruction of the empowered is in the condition based traitline as a default trait, change the strike damage to "Deals more condition damage" but with a twist instead of the boons being the foe, Make it the warrior, so they do more condition damage the more boons they have, like Deadeye.

"Deal increased Condition damage for each unique boon on have." (+1% per boon)

This change will help out Condition warriors in group settings a lot more. As Condition warrior in general is on the lower end of the DPS charts end for condition themed builds.

[Hotride.2187]

7 hours ago, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

to play condition renegade you need to pay attention to

• Weapon swap cooldown
• Weapon skill cooldown
• Legend swap cooldown
• Energy levels
• Boon uptime
• Character animations

All while paying attention to the usual stuff you have to make note of in games (endurance, health, enemy attacks, enemy position).  Condition renegade isn't the only profession like this.

Sorry but you are describing a problem of high level of play instanced content. IMO what you should be asking is for a complicated build to have the capacity to pull higher numbers, so that there is a reason to master it. Not to simplify it. If there were only complicated builds, I can understand where you are coming from. But there are simple ones too, that are enough to clear content with. You should want to have more complex stuff to play (and be rewarded for that), for when you get bored by the low end builds. And you should want that every profession has an access to a simple and sufficient build. IMO no more than that, otherwise you go into the territory of, the game is too boring to play after you learn the simple stuff.

Also you frame the problem as if its a problem of new players just going through open world content. This is simply not true. I've melted every story instance on a 5k dps core war build. The problem for new players is that even that 5k dps cannot be reached if you try to make sense of the game yourself, with the limited gear option it gives you as you level up (and the lack of incentive to learn to dps). Where you can argue it becomes a problem for a new player is content like DE, which is literally 1 zone out of who knows how many (not trying to say its not a problem because its 1 zone, but to me its more of a weird exception cause the devs wanted to try something new).

[Salt Mode.3780]

Sorry to say they will never postpone a patch no matter how terrible it is. Even some of the major patches had backlash and they still continue to go through it. This won't be their first and most certainly won't be their last. 

Edited June 27, 2022 by Salt Mode.3780

[Amensama.8307]

I've been reading the Warrior-Changes and the discussions about it with great concern - this one will hit so hard. I could understand - even if the community gives thousands of red lights - they feel ballsy and release it, no matter what. But: a good company would watch closely and act accordingly if needed.

 

Like: "Yes, we goofed up last Patchday, here, next week we fix these numbers ASAP because Live-Data showed us, also, you were right, sorry."

 

This is the part which causes the most fear: it could happen that these "fixes" come trough and never get touched again for another 2 years, rendering banners useless. 

 

TBH - as I heard about Banner-Changes, I thought: Nice, finally, get rid of these stupid banners, I dont want to be forced to play a banner-slave if I want to play warrior at all. Or give them a mechanic, which makes them at least super-cool to use (like, for example, give the warrior three utility-banners and a new ulti-banner, which radiates all of the existing banner-buffs in one banner and is carriable on the back of the Warrior who casted it and radiates its buffs around the warrior (adjusted for PvE/PvP/WvW).

That would be a Charge-Leading Warrior. Not these super-static piles of stat-boosting clothpieces.

 

[peachyspace.1846]

Gw2 will lose players after this patch...

[Dante.1508]

4 hours ago, peachyspace.1846 said:

Gw2 will lose players after this patch...

Yes that is a definite..

[Kozumi.5816]

This is what happens when companies hire straight out of college cheap employee's who know nothing to design/balance their game. Hope the player loss is worth that cheaper dev pay!

[deadsyeren.9583]

I was kinda excited about it when I read the news post, sounded like oh hey they're adding things. Then the full notes come out and I am taking a break.

[Raizel.8175]

On 6/26/2022 at 7:07 PM, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

Guess I'll be the devils advocate here, but I've been a big proponent of making the game easier to play.  Ease of use directly ties into accessibility, both for players entering into the game and for players getting into high end content.  One of my biggest gripes for a long time about this game was that you don't spend most of your time fighting the encounter.  Instead, you're fighting the UI, because the most difficult part of doing anything in this game is the convoluted sequence of buttons that you need to press with split second timing in order to function at a basic level.  It takes days of practice against a defenseless golem just to learn how to play your profession, and most players will not have the knowledge, drive, or time to even accomplish this. 

Damage is how anything gets done in this game.  If the simple rotation damage done by players is too low to accomplish anything, then it means that players are set to the level of incompetency by design.  It is like handing the player a set of tools that are ineffective and cannot accomplish the tasks handed to them, while expecting the players to somehow derive this information from playing the game.  This is not good design, and it does have financial repercussions on this game.

Just compare this to a lot of other "hard games."  In the Soulsborne series, doing damage is really simple and the fight is more about engaging with the enemy  Similar thing with FPSes, where maximum damage is done with a left-click.  Take Cuphead, where you just hold down 1 or 2 buttons to do damage, and doing well is about learning how to avoid all the attacks.  GW2 is the only game that I've played where the greatest difficulty in performance isn't the encounters, but fighting the UI itself.  A game where most of your damage comes from 3 non-auto skills with everything else being allocated for defense and utility sounds like a much better system, and I cannot fault the devs for wanting to go in that direction.  

Mate...

...what? You serious?!

Aside from CMs and - maybe - a select few bosses, raids are first and foremost about mechanics and not DPS. The enrage timer is basically only there to have a fail condition in the first place. GW2 is an action combat game. Most (DPS) builds are quite skill spammy ~ simply getting the basics right already lets you achieve a very high percentage of that builds DPS potential. True, there are exceptions like most Elementalist DPS builds, but for the vast majority of DPS builds, getting the basics right is sufficient to get through content - especially W1 to W4.

[Trigarta.3841]

Hopefully they will at least acknowledge that they messed up, after the Patch went live. Then we could (should) see several weeks of fixes. If not, we have several months with this mess and have to hope that the next balance Patch is better.

[Gotejjeken.1267]

I feel bad for a lot of people that weren't around when balance had thought and meaning (pre-HoT and shortly after).  Since PoF it's been a huge mess, and one that seemingly isn't changing anytime soon.

As far as 'canceling' the patch; there's a lot of reasons they can't do that, and the foremost to me would be timelines.  They put man hours into these changes (for better or worse), and not putting them out means wasted time and money...never going to happen.  We'd have better luck iteration patches fixing things but those haven't happened in years and years.  

[Gotejjeken.1267]

On 6/26/2022 at 1:07 PM, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

Damage is how anything gets done in this game.  If the simple rotation damage done by players is too low to accomplish anything, then it means that players are set to the level of incompetency by design.  It is like handing the player a set of tools that are ineffective and cannot accomplish the tasks handed to them, while expecting the players to somehow derive this information from playing the game.  This is not good design, and it does have financial repercussions on this game.

Just compare this to a lot of other "hard games."  In the Soulsborne series, doing damage is really simple and the fight is more about engaging with the enemy  Similar thing with FPSes, where maximum damage is done with a left-click.  Take Cuphead, where you just hold down 1 or 2 buttons to do damage, and doing well is about learning how to avoid all the attacks.  GW2 is the only game that I've played where the greatest difficulty in performance isn't the encounters, but fighting the UI itself.  A game where most of your damage comes from 3 non-auto skills with everything else being allocated for defense and utility sounds like a much better system, and I cannot fault the devs for wanting to go in that direction.  

 

To me, GW2 isn't like the difficult games you mentioned.  Soulsbornes have a lot of different bosses that require precise timing or you either die, overlevel yourself, or bring a bunch of friends.  FPS and to an extend Cuphead are twitch type games--not a ton of twitch reflex used for GW2 (as you should be using keyboard for mostly everything).

To me, GW2 is more like the RTS of old, where you had to keep in mind rotations and strategy.  In GW2 you don't need an Excel sheet to figure out ~90% of things (i.e. outside of things like DPS rotations), but there should be some element of reward for having high skill.  Speaking of RTS, it's the reason they lost favor because newer C&C / Starcraft / etc. made things easier and more accessible...and you don't see them anymore today.  

Could apply same logic for fighting games too.  Look what riot there was from Street Fighter 4 to Street Fighter 5--change the mechanics randomly 'for the better' and your playerbase either revolts or just leaves.  

[chronometria.3708]

Was reading the latest blog post and they are going ahead with the patch - apparently adding some explainer text makes it ok. It doesnt - too long classes like warrior have been mistreated and their players hurt. It isnt acceptable to promise a class some improvements and then to smash the only viable role it has. 

 

Balance changes are about evening classes - not kicking poor performing classes down even further - how can that make sense to anyone?

[Hotride.2187]

2 hours ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

I feel bad for a lot of people that weren't around when balance had thought and meaning (pre-HoT and shortly after).  Since PoF it's been a huge mess, and one that seemingly isn't changing anytime soon.

Yeah playing core war and more importantly mirror dueling on it has made me think, this game used to be a lot more than it is now.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

13 hours ago, Hotride.2187 said:

Sorry but you are describing a problem of high level of play instanced content. IMO what you should be asking is for a complicated build to have the capacity to pull higher numbers, so that there is a reason to master it. Not to simplify it. If there were only complicated builds, I can understand where you are coming from. But there are simple ones too, that are enough to clear content with. You should want to have more complex stuff to play (and be rewarded for that), for when you get bored by the low end builds. And you should want that every profession has an access to a simple and sufficient build. IMO no more than that, otherwise you go into the territory of, the game is too boring to play after you learn the simple stuff.

Also you frame the problem as if its a problem of new players just going through open world content. This is simply not true. I've melted every story instance on a 5k dps core war build. The problem for new players is that even that 5k dps cannot be reached if you try to make sense of the game yourself, with the limited gear option it gives you as you level up (and the lack of incentive to learn to dps). Where you can argue it becomes a problem for a new player is content like DE, which is literally 1 zone out of who knows how many (not trying to say its not a problem because its 1 zone, but to me its more of a weird exception cause the devs wanted to try something new).

Balance changes trickle down.  The problems with performance are proportional, no matter what content you're in and how you engage with it.  If a profession has a punishing rotation that flatlines anytime a mistake is made, this means that most of the skills on that profession are undertuned.  DPS is an average, after all.  Any player who isn't using the front-loaded techniques or strategies is that much more kitten, whether they be experienced level 80 players or brand new starting players.  This performance directly affects accessibility and enjoyment, which then indirectly affects player retention.  Every time core gets nerfed because of an e-spec, it makes the game that much harder for newer players.  No matter how easy it may seem to you, there's going to be players who are struggling with playing this game.  I still see people die all the time to random overworld enemies.  Fractals/Strikes/Raids are just where this design flaw is most apparent.  

Putting simple alternatives that are still very effective is... the thing that this un-named dev is being maligned for doing.  Among other things, anyway.  There's a big issue with making the more complex rotations simply award more damage, and that comes from community reinforcement.  If Anet were to make the hardest rotations the most effective by proportion of their difficulty, this creates an issue where players wouldn't be able to get into group content without having to roll and gear up that profession.  To be frank, community reinforcement is the purpose for most of these balance decisions anyway.  Given the choice between rewarding complexity and the social pressure forcing everyone to play those builds, and not rewarding complexity while maintaining build diversity, the latter is preferable to the former.  I won't lie, this is one of those pandoras box issues.  Ideally the complexity in this game would be rewarded with versatility, utilities, defense, etc.  

[JTGuevara.9018]

23 hours ago, firedragon.8953 said:

First, I recommend who ever "balances" warrior actually plays warrior.

The description of the banner rework sounds cumbersome, not fun. The power (crit) buff trait put in the mostly condi line (arms) is laughable. I'll admit, I'm not really sure about the uptime with pulsing banner boons since I'm not smart enough to understand it well enough from the description, but the other changes do not instill confidence. This also doesn't address issues such as 300s cooldowns and 100B that the community has had issue with for YEARS! 

At this point I'd rather they delete banners, give a new type of "shout" (a war cry?) and let us effortlessly "spit" on our group for boons like firebrand.

I love this game, and I love the people I play with. But, this is just too tone-deaf for me to spend any more money on until I gain a bit more confidence in the competence of this studio when it comes to the more "gameplay mechanics" (not music, not art, not voice acting, etc.) aspects of their GAME.

 

The Arms line is hybrid, (power/condi) not fully condi. Warrior has NO full condi line to speak of. Berzerker is also hybrid. However, warrior was never a full condi-based profession, it was always power or niche healing support.

To me, the 5% fury is...meh whatever...

But yes on Hundred Blades. Hundred Blades only worked if your opponent was drunk or you set up that knockdown. And even with the knockdown, it might not even get to that last hit before the opponent dodges away!

[Newholiday.8103]

On 6/26/2022 at 1:18 AM, Guirssane.7082 said:

You don't balance a class by taking the difficulty of the class into account. 

Imagine buffing elem so they overperform because people are too bad to play it. That's a dumb design. If you do that, good players will just overperform with a class. 

To the people saying "you balance the game for 1% of the playerbase". Well yes you do, you don't balance a game by taking into account the casual people, that makes 0 sense. They already implemented a raid boost so people can have an easier time. 

I agree that the patch isn't great on many aspects but you guys have the wrong philosophy and ranting about things that makes no sense.

Fine, don't balance something just because it's harder to play.  But kitten, don't make it substantially worse than the easier options.

[firedragon.8953]

7 minutes ago, JTGuevara.9018 said:

The Arms line is hybrid, (power/condi) not fully condi. Warrior has NO full condi line to speak of.

Right... That's why I said "mostly condi." It is a mostly condi...

The extra 5% crit from fury is an issue because hitting crit cap plays a very important role for consistent adrenaline generation for power berserker who already has a pretty tight rotation. Power berserker will not take arms because...well they can't really afford to. This goes against what the devs stated saying something along the lines that access to precision will be made available in the most essential lines for power builds, or something like that.

To you it may not be a big deal, but what is the point of the decision from a design standpoint? Why was it a good choice besides the arms traitline descriptor stating it contained specs for crit chance and fury...? Have you ever used Arms in a high-end power DPS build? I dunno.... I'm not convinced, and I'd argue this kind of haphazard implementation plagues much of the warriors abilities and it is frustrating to see the trend continue.