Follow up to the June 28 Balance Update Preview

[Gilosean.3805]

6 hours ago, Albi.7250 said:

Okay maybe I misread your posts then. Lets me rephrase the question: What does fixating on one employee accomplish?

Like thanks to the leaks we know people who design classes have influence on balance of other specs. We know there is limited QA capacity which bottlenecks what can be in a patch. Changes are apparently made without much discussion. The lead designer can apparently make incredibly bias decision without oversight. There seems to be a general lack of hard numbers, professionalism and design philosophy in the Balancing department. Also how could they guy in question even become lead with so little experience.
 

 

I mean, we've been complaining about all of that for years,, and still are. We just finally have an admission in the dev's own words that this is how the department operates.  

 

ETA: And the thing that gets me is, balance impacts everything single fight a player is in. Do you know how many level 80 player I've had to walk through things like 'what do weapon prefixes mean' and 'am I doing enough damage to get event credit'?  People think casual players don't care about builds or balance, but they do, they care about getting event credit and having  fun in combat. The game just doesn't explain anything, so they  just don't know. They don't have a reference point. So we players end up having to walk them through it and deal with their anger and upset when it turns out they've screwed themselves over, because the game provides no build feedback whatsoever, because balance isn't a priority like encounter or map design.   

Player knowledge of and experience in combat is really important to the game, and it's upsetting that Anet feels fine just outsourcing this as unpaid work to veteran players because they care so little about this whole area that 1 dev can just buff his favorites endlessly. People have been saying this is happening for years, it's upsetting new players I try to help in game because it makes their experience unfun and veteran players because it's a lot of work for us, and it genuinely feels like Anet is alright with that. 

Edited June 29, 2022 by Gilosean.3805

[Charley.1489]

No one should threaten the devs.  But they do need to play the game and each game mode and long enough so they have a full grasp on how players play, for example wvw!    These updates are ridiculous - lets buff our favorite classes and screw the rest of the players/classes.

[Trigg.9402]

1. Grouch addresses those who were toxic but fails to address the unprofessional behavior of his own developer or those who actually made legitimate suggestions.

2. Grouch refuses to address why they have a person who only has one year of experience in GW2, 2k hours in FB, making balance changes to their personal biases.  

3. Streamers in the secret discord, who defended Anet’s lack of integrity by condemning the community for speaking out, did so to defend themselves for being found out. As they knew full well that a small group of people directing how the game should be played would outrage the community because these streamers and devs have their own personal agendas and bias and do not represent the community.

4. Funnily, those streamers’ suggestions were still ignored by the dev.

5. Writing the justification for the balance changes AFTER they released the balance patch shows that no thought went into the changes. It was not planned out and the balance team did what they personally wanted and it still got approved. Which can now be supported by the leaked conversations showing a dev making previous changes per his likes/dislikes.

6. Even after listening to the community’s voice, Grouch releases the patch and his reasoning for not delaying has more to do with so that they are not behind schedule rather than “systems already set in place”.

7. Release day: changes are as bad as the notes stated, senseless and poorly thought out with additional stealth nerfs.

8. Balance philosophy is to come out in a week, meaning the foundational values that GW2 have stood on for so long have changed. They are moving away from class identity, unique abilities and freedom to play however you like, towards standardization: where everyone is equal but not really.

9. In this patch, everyone is able to give quickness or alacrity but some classes will lose all ability to do literally anything else while they do, whereas some remain DPS bulldozers while pumping out multiple boons.

 

The core values of Gw2 are no longer what it used to be and its time to move on. The game director is standing by the way this balance patch came to fruition; how a balance team was able to make senseless changes without justification and still got it approved. He is standing by how an unqualified dev has been freely able to make previous changes to certain classes based on his personal biases. He is standing by this dev and his unprofessional and arrogant view and engagement with the players and community. He is standing by the new vision of how Gw2 should be played; the new balance philosophy of making every class equal but not really.

 

Gw2 will lose all the reasons that made it different from other MMOs. Gw2’s selling point was its unique class identities and ability to make whatever build you like to play however you like. With this gone, what’s going to be their buy-in for the fourth expansion when all the classes are the same? Because lets be honest, it was the elite specializations that kept players and gained new players. Without new unique elite specs and actual unique abilities, it’ll become another MMO with new maps, new pets, new skins and mounts, so nothing exciting really. And with how poor the marketing for this game is, it’ll suffer greatly. 

[ShionKreth.1542]

I think, if this is the result of having a 'dedicated profession balance team'... with wildly unpopular and objectively poor changes in one hand, and alleged conversations showing the devs balance based on personal preference and aren't familiar with other classes in the other hand (which just affirmed what we all suspected)... I can't see how we're supposed to have confidence in this new team. I hope this will end up being a wake up call, rather than a sign of how things are going to be from now on. 

[Einlanzer.1627]

On 6/27/2022 at 7:42 PM, Josh Davis.7865 said:

Hey folks - I've been in and out of meetings today, apologies for delay. Here's some responses to questions I've seen repeated a few times:

 

Q: Why aren't you holding the update?

This was discussed. The simple answer is that “holding the balance changes” is not feasible from a technical standpoint. We have a very sophisticated dev environment that gives us a lot of flexibility in areas like this, but we're well beyond that point. Now that the build is finalized and nearly ready for activation, unwinding the code and content changes in the June 28 balance update would be a significant and time-intensive effort that would likely result in a multi-week delay of not only the skills content, but also everything else in the release (new Challenge Mode, Core Updates, Mordremoth legendary, etc). Once all the right changes were stripped from the build, we’d need to QA those skills to verify they work as before, and we’d need to QA the rest of the release again to make sure that nothing was inadvertently broken in the process. We usually give QA 1-2 weeks to test a ‘finalized’ build, for reference. This would have a cascading impact on future releases (meaning things like LWS1E3 would also get pushed back).

I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but the least disruptive option is to push the release and address issues in future builds.

Q: There's nothing concrete in this post, what are you doing to fix this?

I get wordy sometimes. Here’s a bullet point list of next steps:

•  The skills and balance team is drafting ‘design notes’ for the June 28 release. We’ll publish these as soon as we can. I don’t expect that you’ll agree with all of it – especially from the conversation we’ve been monitoring – but we owe you the explanations.
• I’m going to own resolving the internal process issue that prevented us from including the design notes upfront.
•  In the coming months, we’re going to publish a blog post that details the balance philosophy for Guild Wars 2.
•  I recognize that the way feedback is collected for balance updates is far from ideal. We need to preview updates earlier so we’re never in this situation again, and we need to solve for how we go about getting balance feedback from qualified individuals. Eliminate the unofficial backchannels. I’m going to own finding the right solution for this.
•  We added a follow up balance update in the coming weeks to our schedule.

I'll note that the post this morning was done at 11:30a on a Monday. We moved quickly and we don't have all of the answers yet.

Q: Why aren't you posting the balance philosophy today? Doesn't it exist?

The philosophy driving profession design and balance has changed a few times over the years, even by the ‘original developers’ of the days of yore. Elite specializations weren’t a part of the game’s original vision, for example. I considered getting a version of this posted in response to this weekend’s discussions, but on further reflection, I came to the conclusion that Cameron Rich taking over as the Lead Systems Designer (which Skills/Balance ultimately falls under) is a great opportunity for us to revisit the discussion internally before making a public statement. Cam brings a lot of great perspective to this area from his experience as the Lead Encounters Designer for GW2. We also recently had Floyd Grubb join the WvW team - and we'd like to have him involved there as well.

 

Q: A balance team was just created after End of Dragons? Why wasn't there a balance team before?

I'd like to clarify my comment. Guild Wars 2 has had a balance team in the past, no doubt. For End of Dragons, our professions designers were asked to turn their full attention towards building elite specializations, which ultimately meant that live balance updates were few and far between. As we were building our dev plans for post-End of Dragons, I felt very strongly that we needed to staff a full-time balance team that supports the live game, even as we're building future expansion content. We're trying to get to a place where we can hit a consistent cadence with the updates, even as other work is in flight.

 

I really appreciate that you're trying and this is a good sign compared to the past, but, man, I'm an IT director and there's so much I can interpret from your words in these posts that raises my eyebrows.

First, It's apparent you have an overly bureaucratic process in place organizationally for managing these things. If I had to guess, I'd guess you had "agile teams" doing this work and yet you have trapped them with all kinds of process, project controls, separately-phased QA testing (I'm a radical believer that formal testing should be abolished - developers should QA each other's work and then users should provide real-time testing), and gatekeeping/distributed decision making , all of which absolutely destroy efficiency in getting things done expediently while ironically also sacrificing quality for arbitrary timelines.  Small squads working in an actual agile way and delivering updates continuously will always work 10,000% better in the software world. I never understood why balance patches were months and months apart< it's terrible for the game. Minor adjustments and hotfixes should literally be happening all the time, with reworks still happening more often than they do.  This is one of many reasons why you.neet.a.public.test.server.

Second, it's kind of amazing that you ever didn't have capacity to do consistent, live balance updates while also designing upcoming/future content. That literally seems like the most basic thing to need to be able to do in an MMO and it's a pretty major confession of the ineptitude of Anet's past management. Kudos to you for at least acknowledging that, but sheesh. 

Third, your customers and stakeholders are your players, and while it's easy to imagine that the amount of feedback you get is literally overwhelming, the solution to that is not to just ignore feedback and avoid involving them in the decisionmaking process, it's to find more efficient ways for involving them - mostly by encouraging the devs to casually interact with the community, so that when they do, it results in less explosive and more organic discussion and feedback collection. We almost never hear directly from devs working on balance in real time and, really, that might very well be the biggest problem as it just causes tension to build continuously, priming massive fallouts, and keeps devs out of touch with players, breeding lots of us vs them behavior which is toxic for both.  On the rare occasion that we do, it's usually in a needlessly authoritative "this is what we've decided" manner rather than being self-critical and discussion focused. 

Lastly, it's extremely important that the same core team work on balance across all professions, rather than assigning different people to work on different professions. That makes zero sense as they will fail to create enough of a shared knowledge base and all bring their own idiosyncracies into the process; therefore balance will always feel chaotic, inconsistent, and often nonsensical. There's obviously a reason why Ele has been in such poor shape for so long and keeps getting pushed into melee even though it uses light armor and lacks weapon swap, meaning it's uniquely range-locked (a mix of both is fine, but catalyst would have been infinitely cooler with a new conjured orb weapon that provided long range firepower instead of hammer).  Likewise, we've had numerous instances of things like undertuned #1 skills on various weapon profession/weapon combos (nothing destroys a weapon's usability more than a weak #1 because it sets a baseline tempo for sustained DPS - they either need to be standardized, or the concept of auto attacks should be removed altogether and replaced with stronger CD based skills) that have gone 8 years without even minor number tweaks.

Long story short - you (collectively) need to do a better job of being part of the community as opposed to just talking at the community, and recognizing that it's inappropriate for devs to assume they always know better than players.  Players are generally more passionate and they also sometimes have similar or even stronger skills than the average developer/designer. Most importantly, they are the paying customers. Yes, they'll have biases. Yes, some of them are myopic and will not give good/objective feedback, but that's just the nature of the beast. It's still a responsibility for you guys to engage with them.

At the end of the day, all of these things are chronic management problems at Anet, and it's something you guys should have in better shape at this point. 

Edited June 30, 2022 by Einlanzer.1627

[Ascency.3580]

2 hours ago, ShionKreth.1542 said:

I think, if this is the result of having a 'dedicated profession balance team'... with wildly unpopular and objectively poor changes in one hand, and alleged conversations showing the devs balance based on personal preference and aren't familiar with other classes in the other hand (which just affirmed what we all suspected)... I can't see how we're supposed to have confidence in this new team. I hope this will end up being a wake up call, rather than a sign of how things are going to be from now on. 

This is going to be a wake up call. Only question is is it going to be anet seeing how this vision of theirs is harmful to the game and how they meybe should verify how their emplyees go about doing their job, or us players realising theres no point in waiting 10 months to be treated to a kitten, buggy, biased mess that clearly had 0 toughts put into most of it. 

[Dante.1508]

On 6/29/2022 at 5:42 PM, Gilosean.3805 said:

 

Part of why this blew up is that there is a Discord that was supposed to be, and instead at least one of the developers treated it like a social clique instead of a job duty. They ignored feedback on classes they didn't like, bragged about how they buffed weapons and classes they liked so that no one would have a reason to play things they didn't like, were very unprofessional, etc. 

 

Many players for a long time have felt that the balance team played favorites. They've pointed at Guardian for ages, or Mechanist also now, vs how other classes are treated.  Lo and behold, this dev's favorite classes are Firebrand and Mechanist.  So, everyone's suspicions are confirmed, and the dev was pretty insulting, and there was a ton of feedback they ignored about how messed up other non-favored classes were going to get.  ArenaNet has burned up a ton of goodwill from many veteran players, and new players are picking up on the vibe and reconsidering playing the game. 

 

Frankly,  unless they really like Firebrand or Mechanist, at this point I think they ought to. This is not the first time a balance dev has played favorites and ANet backed them up to the hilt.  If anything is actually done to address the root causes (company culture allowing a shallow approach to balance and devs to play favorites, basically) I'll be pleasantly surprised, but in the meantime I took a break after HoT released and I may be taking one again.  I'm going to give it a couple weeks to see how things shake out.

I saw those responses i was just explaining if they had better developers willing to work with their communities and not be aholes to the customers paying their wages things might be a bit better off..

On 6/29/2022 at 4:04 AM, Brokenangel.1389 said:

I’m sure this:

 

 

is entirely intended, right Devs?

 

I mean that’s some QUALITY boon support at its finest, amirite?

Rangers the same amazing 6 seconds of quickness with 40 sec cooldown awwwww yeaaaaahhhh

Edited June 30, 2022 by Dante.1508

[Dante.1508]

18 hours ago, Yogurt Goblin.5934 said:

To anyone who "reacts" confused, why are you confused?

Your posts make no sense so people are confused?

[Ascency.3580]

well it seems anet is winning. still no answer regarding the patch being broken, biased, buggy, harmful and insulting, still no design notes that they didnt bother to compile since they announced it like 10 months ago, still no responce to the continued negative backlash around the patch and theyr practices. and the topic is fizzling out. see ya all in 3 months to see what amazing fixes they come up with next time. my bet is mech will get an offhand firebrand, and ele will get deleted cos it still has the audacity to exist in the character creation screen. glhf.

[Suyheuti.1732]

I have a feedback for engineer,

 

Thanks to you, Holosmith will not be used as power spec. Because it is more complicated than Power Mech and benchmarks are almost same, maybe better than Holosmith. Definately much more better than Power Scrapper. 

Now, mechanist does, Heal Alac Mech, Power Alac Mech, Condi Alac Mech, Power Mech, Condi Mech. Just Quickness Mech is missing to complete the puzzle. 

So why dont you give quickness to mechanist and erase Scrapper and Holosmith from the game. It would save time HP run for new engineers. 

[Zok.4956]

12 minutes ago, Ascency.3580 said:

well it seems anet is winning. still no answer regarding the patch being broken, biased, buggy, harmful and insulting,

There are no winners here. Only loosers. Players loose if they have less fun in the game and if they don't trust the company to make the game better and the company looses (money) because those players don't spend their money anymore for this game.

[Killthehealersffs.8940]

10 hours ago, Zok.4956 said:

There are no winners here. Only loosers. Players loose if they have less fun in the game and if they don't trust the company to make the game better and the company looses (money) because those players don't spend their money anymore for this game.

Well if the rest of 95% of the population is not affected i don't see the harm

(killing the boss in 52 sec with 10 eles that do 51k dps ,

ele from now on , can do Quickness than fury in WvW + PvP  ,

WvW +PvP  Guards got the old cheezy Solace Block (that got deleted like distortion ,because it invalidated boss attacks)

(hm new guy in WvW + different spells in the pvp areas..)

 

Those &nbsp;casual when they are targeted y abilities they do only do 5k , like in this posts

 

Thieves + War Banners should the ones to whine

(And nerf the Engi -auto attack in 7 days , after people get used to the fluidity of the rifle and instead start focusing on  knockback people off-the-pvp-bases...)

Edited June 30, 2022 by Killthehealersffs.8940

[Ascency.3580]

7 minutes ago, Killthehealersffs.8940 said:

Well if the rest of 95% of the population is not affected i don't see the harm

(killing the boss in 52 sec with 10 eles that do 51k dps ,

ele from now on , can do Quickness than fury in WvW + PvP  ,

 Guards got the old cheezy Solace Block (that got deleted like distortion ,because it invalidated boss attacks)

 

Thieves + War Banners should the ones to whine

(And nerf the Engi -auto attack in 7 days , after people get used to the fluidity of the rifle and instead start focusing on  knockback people off-the-pvp-bases...)

So u assume 95% of the playerbase does not actually play the game? kitten. The rest of the post i have difficulty understanding. Also i question anyone needing 7 days to get used to engi rifle fluidity since there is none, u press one button.

 

23 minutes ago, Zok.4956 said:

There are no winners here. Only loosers. Players loose if they have less fun in the game and if they don't trust the company to make the game better and the company looses (money) because those players don't spend their money anymore for this game.

Well ofc. But their policy to kitten on any kind of feedback is clearly deliberate thats why its their win since its not going to change.

[pallas.8150]

3 hours ago, Ascency.3580 said:

well it seems anet is winning. still no answer regarding the patch being broken, biased, buggy, harmful and insulting, still no design notes that they didnt bother to compile since they announced it like 10 months ago, still no responce to the continued negative backlash around the patch and theyr practices. and the topic is fizzling out. see ya all in 3 months to see what amazing fixes they come up with next time. my bet is mech will get an offhand firebrand, and ele will get deleted cos it still has the audacity to exist in the character creation screen. glhf.

FWIW they were most likely not expecting all of this to blow up like it did - I'm sure there's quite a bit of damage control going on behind the scenes how to address the multiple issues - give it another week or two, imo.

Edited June 30, 2022 by pallas.8150

[Catilena.8729]

1 minute ago, pallas.8150 said:

FWIW they were most likely not expecting all of this to blow up like it did - I'm sure there's quite a bit of damage control going on behind the scenes how to address the multiple issues - give it another week or two, imo.

They put out the preview on a Friday, when keys went on sale. They are stupid, but not that stupid. They know full well what this patch was gonna do, they just didn't care.

[Ascency.3580]

32 minutes ago, pallas.8150 said:

FWIW they were most likely not expecting all of this to blow up like it did - I'm sure there's quite a bit of damage control going on behind the scenes how to address the multiple issues - give it another week or two, imo.

see thats the point. they had 10 months to plan this out, execute, test and introduce to the game. its insulting that all they have to say at this point is "we didnt communicate well enough what our plan was" when its clear at this point there was no plan or someone dropped the ball real hard. the leaks just prove that this is in fact the case.

Edited June 30, 2022 by Ascency.3580

[Jski.6180]

Why cant anet just simply make ele conja weapons charge base for casting where they dont have to "lose" 1/2 of there conja wepon skill base of moving away from where you cast the wepon, picked up by error by another one of your team mates, or simply timed out due to bad timing of an fight. That alone would fix a LOT about the ele class. But for sure we need to see more defin rolls for each conaj wepon then "it do dmg" as well as adding in some level of def and even support (earth shield NEEDS to give aoe barrier maybe on the 5 skill). 

Frost bow should not have healing on it it should be a pure long rages 1,200 cc/dps wepon but there should be a full on heal skill conja wepon that has support and healing effects of water (i suggest an water maces).

These things would open up the ele class to have a conja wepon as a "back up" as the ele class is very much locked into a roll type ranged base off of there wepon and having no wepon swap they are not able to swich up that roll during a fight even though the class is know as the jack of all trads class.

[Patsoor.6425]

On 6/27/2022 at 8:21 PM, Josh Davis.7865 said:

To those that have chosen extreme toxicity, called for developers to be fired, or sent death threats–you're not welcome in our community.

I totally get that.
I just hope that you have the same opinion on you own team..
In a lot of company's if you talked like person x (lets not call names, you know who i'm talking about) you'd get the boot.
So no, I'm not calling him to be fired, That my friend... is something you should  do xD 

It's unfortunate that kitten got leaked..  but hey it's out there and it exploded, right in some ppl's faces.
Something with.. facing consequenses of your own actions?
Not gonna go in depth about what has been said about us, the community.
But we feel traited like we're just nobody. we happen to be nobody that keeps your game alive.

You always get credit for everything you do good and great.
I mean I'm still wild about EOD and everything involved.. you guys did a great job there imo.
The downside is, if you take credit, you gotta take the shitload of bagger thats comming to you now.
Why? bc it's something you(anet) created.
clearly a lot of ppl at anet have no clue about what is going on in the game.
Condi is meta on all classes.. & what do you do? nerf all powerclasses... :rolleyes:

Removing spotter/AP/banners.. i can understand that why you did that, it's stupid that you need to have a certain squadbuild to achieve max performance.
But the solution.. aint a solution..
What you should have done is making spotter/AP/banner all the same. so it doesn't matter if your group has spotter or AP, bc it's the same extra precision you'd get.
That at least ppl would have a reason to play their beloved classes.

Also giving quickness to some classes bc you took something away... while not even testing... these classes can not even maintain quickness uptime for 50% with 100% boonduration..
I'm also not gonna go in depth to all the wrong changes (and they are not even on my class) bc there's info enough to gather if you want to.

So for now, I will still log in daily, but won't do any content bc you messed it up bigtime this time.
At least one dev is happy about all the salt... 😕
sad

 

[Catilena.8729]

4 minutes ago, Jski.6180 said:

Why cant anet just simply make ele conja weapons charge base for casting where they dont have to "lose" 1/2 of there conja wepon skill base of moving away from where you cast the wepon, picked up by error by another one of your team mates, or simply timed out due to bad timing of an fight. That alone would fix a LOT about the ele class. But for sure we need to see more defin rolls for each conaj wepon then "it do dmg" as well as adding in some level of def and even support (earth shield NEEDS to give aoe barrier maybe on the 5 skill). 

Frost bow should not have healing on it it should be a pure long rages 1,200 cc/dps wepon but there should be a full on heal skill conja wepon that has support and healing effects of water (i suggest an water maces).

These things would open up the ele class to have a conja wepon as a "back up" as the ele class is very much locked into a roll type ranged base off of there wepon and having no wepon swap they are not able to swich up that roll during a fight even though the class is know as the jack of all trads class.

We're not allowed to be good, dear. Ele is a hard class to play, so obviously we need to be punished when we figure out how to do well with it.

[pallas.8150]

10 minutes ago, Ascency.3580 said:

see thats the point. they had 10 months to plan this out, execute, test and introduce to the game. its insulting that all they have to say at this point is "we didnt communicate well enough what our plan was" when its clear at this point there was no plan or someone dropped the ball real hard. the leaks just prove that this is in fact the case.

I'm not going to argue any of these points, honestly. I'll be one of the last people white knighting this company atm... I just know that course correcting will not be something we will see immediately in action aside from the PR speak we received.

[Mincsk.6028]

This "balance" patch feels like sabotage maybe? It doesn't seem logical at all.

[TempoRamen.9861]

Been maining ele for over 5+ years. I was a fool to keep my hopes up that this "profession update" will finally address our concerns. Not only did it not address them, it made us even worse. They throw us a Alac boon in an unideal trait that basically still makes us useless. WoW's balance is kitten too, but at the very least they have the courtesy to change the meta nearly every patch, to give some specs a time to shine.

I'm done with this game. I'll play when we get fixed, or not play at all.

Anet, if you fix Eles, I will dump my money into gems, 100%.

Edited June 30, 2022 by TempoRamen.9861

[Catilena.8729]

1 minute ago, TempoRamen.9861 said:

Been maining ele for over 5+ years. I was a fool to keep my hopes up that this "profession update" will finally address our concerns. Not only did it not address them, it made us even worse. They throw us a Alac boon in an unideal trait that basically still makes us useless. I'm done. I'll play when we get fixed, or not play at all.

 

Anet, if you fix Eles, I will dump my money into gems, 100%.

And on Catalyst, they took away our Quickness, and if we want it back it'll cost us 10% damage.

[Seremela the Elf Mage.1748]

32 minutes ago, Catilena.8729 said:

And on Catalyst, they took away our Quickness, and if we want it back it'll cost us 10% damage.

BuT tHe LaRgE hItBoX gOlEm BeNcHmArK #s!!!
BuT tHe PoTeNtIaL tO sTaCk 3 aNd CoVeR a SuB's QuIcK wItH nO bOoN dUrAtIoN iNvEsTmEnT UsInG sOme SuPeR sEcReT uNpUbLiShEd RoTaTiOn!!!

You know, things that only a TINY fraction of the playerbase will be able to do/have interest in. Let's balance around that...entirely off suggestions and fixation made by a non-anet employee. A stack-build in speed running community shouldn't be the basis of gutting a class for everyone if you ask me. Now when a large portion of the community starts using the strat, that would be the time to look at making adjustments. Meanwhile one of the raid teams I was on reported that on Tuesday there were "Mechs as far as the eye can see" in the Aerodrome 🤔 (Couldn't verify myself as I refuse to log in until Anet cleans up their act: starting with holding their employee accountable for their actions.)

[Xae.7204]

There are a some hard truths that need realizing here.

 

1. Quickness was a mistake. It is way too powerful for one buff. As long as quickness is in the game the design of all builds will seek to maximize it. It is the uber-strat. Just delete Quickness.

 

2. GW2's balance has been in a rough shape almost since release. Entire specs have been dominating the game for *years* on end and others have been useless for *years* on end.

 

3. ArenaNet is in denial about #2. A couple of 1-2% nerfs every 6 months are not going to dethrone 5year old meta builds. Nor will some 1-2% buffs suddenly make dead builds viable.