Boon Saturation: Why I hate Quickness and Alacrity

[Kalthea.4326]

In a world where all of the playable classes are able to bring just a bit of group support in the form of boons, and most groups ultimately just happen to provide all of the boons in the game passively, there seems to be one major underlying question:

 

Why do boons exist?

 

With the removal of unique buffs, we now have limited options to apply to different situations. Need defense? Protection and Resilience for 33% DR, and Aegis to block. Getting CC'd? Resolution and Stability (and Aegis). Need mobility? Swiftness and Vigor (Vigor could arguable also be defensive). So now, if you need to fine-tune the defenses, immunity or movement of a class, you have to adjust these boons. This seems like a balancing nightmare to me, personally.

 

But what about damage? There's obviously the damage increase from Might, capping at 750 extra Power and Condition Damage, alongside the 25% damage increase from Vilnerability on the target. Then there's now the PvE-Only Fury buff of 25%. And then there's the big 2, which I would argue are so rotation-defining, that they're almost required for a lot of builds to keep up. And even if they weren't, they're such a massive DPS increase that there is no reason to never have them on. Quickness provides all actions a speed increase of 33%, which is so useful that people literally use it to speed up how quickly they mine resource nodes. And on top of that, you have Alacrity, which reduced the recharge speed of all of your skills by 25% (this will allow you to cast that skill in 4/5ths of the original time it would have taken before), and is what I would argue, the crux of balance issues with Guild Wars 2. Why would you ever run without these two buffs up 100% of the time? It would just be a gigantic loss of dps for the entire group. And in other gamemodes, where you may not be able to provide these boons 100% of the time, their duration is often so miniscule that they're never worth using. To top that off, all content that has been designed since the introduction of alacrity has had to be balanced around it being up 100% of the time.

 

So why even bother having these both in the game anymore? If they're almost required to have up all of the time because content needs to be balanced around it, and it's almost expected of the group to have it up 100% of the time, then maybe the problem is those two boons?

 

Now, I don't want to be entirely aggressive with pointing these out, so here is a solution that I can think of off the top of my head:

 

●Change quickness to a 3 second buff cap, no stacking.

●Remove alacrity, and cut cooldowns to what alacrity would have provided.

 

And before you jump down my throat, let me explain. With a 3 second, non-stacking quickness buff, this would allow for what is known in other games as a "burst phase". When you break a bosses CC bar, you can get that damage buff, on top of providing that good feeling of boosting your team's damage by actually contributing to that damage phase directly. This would also remove the feeling of just hitting the buttons off-cooldown if you changes the buffs to have a longer cooldown, making it as important as it is. As for alacrity, this is just the worst boon in the game IMO, but I do enjoy being able to use my abilities on a shorter cooldown. I believe just removing the boon, and making it so that the cooldown reduction is just baseline would not only increase player fun with their classes, but would also server to help balance the game in general. After all, if you have to already balance content around it being up 100% of the time, then why not just make it a permanent fixture?

 

Lemme know what y'all think, please and thanks ❤️

Edited June 30, 2022 by Kalthea.4326

[Asum.4960]

I agree to the extend that if all boons are always up, they become pretty superficial. As I think the Boonmeta is well and truly established though, I think the best course of action from here is to make boon application more interesting gameplay wise. 

Passive boon procs, passive boon auras and single "boon button" presses is where I think Anet really went wrong with this implementation. 

 

If it was done via more interesting and active Trait interactions, skill combos etc., playing significantly differently than their DPS counterparts and from profession to profession, I don't think people would mind every profession having the ability to bring boons as much. 

 

Multiple professions getting the exact same copy pasta Traits of passively pulse AoE boon around you every couple seconds, or press button gain x boon, that's exceedingly boring and lazy.

 

2 hours ago, Kalthea.4326 said:

Change quickness to a 3 second buff cap, no stacking.

All I see this doing is people chaining Quickness granting skills to maximise uptime and getting upset at each other when someone is messing up their order.

Otherwise, 3 seconds really isn't enough to react much, especially considering CD's. These "burst phases" you envision would just end up being some sped up Auto Attacks at random, as well as annoying gameplay elements such as players cancel casting skills due to unreliable moments of Quickness, unless constantly staring at the buff bar. 

 

In theory I think medium duration boons at high CD's (like 8 seconds of Prot on a 40 second CD) to be used tactically in certain situations (and designing encounters around those applications with high pressure phases and such, think Stand your Ground before a CC heavy phase) would have been more interesting, especially for defensive boons. 

(For example, I think Firebrand brainlessly spamming out Protection and Resolution via Solace is imo objectively worse design and gameplay than skillfully timing Aegis to block specific attacks - the problem of which was the frequency due to too low and spammy Mantra CD's, not the effect)

For offensive boons though, players are always going to want to maximise uptimes and whatever can do that best is what's going to be used - so might as well give everything the ability to do so well and focus on making that interesting and fun gameplay wise to do.

 

2 hours ago, Kalthea.4326 said:

There's obviously the damage increase from Might, capping at 25%.

Also Might isn't a percentage Damage buff but rather a flat 30 Power & Condition Damage per Stack, you might be thinking of Vulnerability there.

 

 

Edited June 30, 2022 by Asum.4960

[nembool.5981]

I think, and hope, that this balance patch is designed to prepare the playing community for one thing: the mass duration nerf of ALL boons. Halving each and every boon duration, but giving all classes the ability to provide these boons, will ensure that more coordination occurs, as each squad has to have multiple players to cover part of the boon 100% uptime.

This might lead to diversity in squads and instance teams.

[TempoRamen.9861]

This is what confuses me. My hypothesis was always how GW2 was sold as a game that did not have the traditional MMO roles of healer, tank, and DPS. However after playing the game more, I realized they just translated those roles to boons. You HAVE to have quickness and alac, or else you are taking a SEVERE hit. That's not choice.

People have always told me "GW2 is great, everything is viable, you play what you find fun!" This is simply not the game for a long time.

Edited June 30, 2022 by TempoRamen.9861

[Rhokaz.1975]

Withiout quickness and alac every rotation feels cumbersome and if you try to pull a dagger out of glue. Eigther have this CD reduction everywhere and the speedup of spells cast. Or let it as is.

[KeoLegend.5132]

i agree with you and think quick/alac is completely kitten because it breaks the game instead of playing with numbers

[Kalthea.4326]

7 hours ago, Asum.4960 said:

I agree to the extend that if all boons are always up, they become pretty superficial. As I think the Boonmeta is well and truly established though, I think the best course of action from here is to make boon application more interesting gameplay wise. 

Passive boon procs, passive boon auras and single "boon button" presses is where I think Anet really went wrong with this implementation. 

 

If it was done via more interesting and active Trait interactions, skill combos etc., playing significantly differently than their DPS counterparts and from profession to profession, I don't think people would mind every profession having the ability to bring boons as much. 

 

Multiple professions getting the exact same copy pasta Traits of passively pulse AoE boon around you every couple seconds, or press button gain x boon, that's exceedingly boring and lazy.

 

All I see this doing is people chaining Quickness granting skills to maximise uptime and getting upset at each other when someone is messing up their order.

Otherwise, 3 seconds really isn't enough to react much, especially considering CD's. These "burst phases" you envision would just end up being some sped up Auto Attacks at random, as well as annoying gameplay elements such as players cancel casting skills due to unreliable moments of Quickness, unless constantly staring at the buff bar. 

 

In theory I think medium duration boons at high CD's (like 8 seconds of Prot on a 40 second CD) to be used tactically in certain situations (and designing encounters around those applications with high pressure phases and such, think Stand your Ground before a CC heavy phase) would have been more interesting, especially for defensive boons. 

(For example, I think Firebrand brainlessly spamming out Protection and Resolution via Solace is imo objectively worse design and gameplay than skillfully timing Aegis to block specific attacks - the problem of which was the frequency due to too low and spammy Mantra CD's, not the effect)

For offensive boons though, players are always going to want to maximise uptimes and whatever can do that best is what's going to be used - so might as well give everything the ability to do so well and focus on making that interesting and fun gameplay wise to do.

 

Also Might isn't a percentage Damage buff but rather a flat 30 Power & Condition Damage per Stack, you might be thinking of Vulnerability there.

 

 

My mistake on the might buff, aye. And as for my suggested quickness adjustment, I did say it was off the top of my head. There's plenty of room for tweaks, but I don't feel that burst phases would be a problem, as we already have those in the form of a broken defiance bar, which increases the damage a boss takes. My concept was to provide a timing reason for the quickness boon. Instead of just spamming it to always be faster, provide it with longer cooldowns and shorter duration to really emphasize how important of a boon it is. And sure, I can see it causing issues in rotations, but the idea would be to make it so it's not a required boon, but a bonus benefit on top of what we already have to increase the skill ceiling and offer gameplay that actually feels like it's affecting things and not just passively happening. If you can balance around not having the boon up 100% of the time, then that allows the burst phases to shine more, and would give a good sense of accomplishment through proper timing.

 

5 hours ago, nembool.5981 said:

I think, and hope, that this balance patch is designed to prepare the playing community for one thing: the mass duration nerf of ALL boons. Halving each and every boon duration, but giving all classes the ability to provide these boons, will ensure that more coordination occurs, as each squad has to have multiple players to cover part of the boon 100% uptime.

This might lead to diversity in squads and instance teams.

I honestly thing this might end up for the worse. If you have to have everyone bringing some form of boons anyway, then there still isn't much of a point in them existing since they're always going to be up, and this would just further emphasize stacking to ensure that people still keep the boons up 100%, which is already a problem.

 

3 hours ago, TempoRamen.9861 said:

This is what confuses me. My hypothesis was always how GW2 was sold as a game that did not have the traditional MMO roles of healer, tank, and DPS. However after playing the game more, I realized they just translated those roles to boons. You HAVE to have quickness and alac, or else you are taking a SEVERE hit. That's not choice.

People have always told me "GW2 is great, everything is viable, you play what you find fun!" This is simply not the game for a long time.

I would argue that there aren't any roles when everyone has all of the boons, as that just becomes the baseline of every class. In an individual setting, these boons may seem this way, providing guardians with more survivability due to aegis and protection uptime, but once everyone is stacked together, then there's no point in acting like one is tankier than the rest .

[Gotejjeken.1267]

Butterfly effect. 

Remove quick and alac, need to hit superspeed.  We'd be back to a slower game but still have all the defensive boons.

And might.  Which would be the next target for reducing or removing since it gives like what +750 power/condi at 25? So, they hit might. 

Then you have the same game, but slower, and nothing dies because the only thing left is defense.

That won't be good enough though as now we all run condi bunkers and someone goes after Trailblazer / expertise...and the big wheel at the anet offices keeps on turnin'...

[nembool.5981]

What about expanding boon rip on a huge scale? Bosses in raids and strikes rip boons on hits, and maybe all boons on critical hits?

[Xenesis.6389]

Skills have a hard number cooldowns for a reason especially in a game where most of the skills are instant or near instant cast time, and also in a lot of cases don't have a resource to spend to use(revs and thieves are the exceptions for example), it's the opposite of many other games that build all their skills around energy or mana.

The hard number cooldown was there to balance out those cost, you don't just spam your top damage skill over and over until you run out of mana (although it seems they are changing autos to take that part too lol rifle), you use the appropriate skills when needed, you see a break bar, you break it first with cc's then burst.

Now with quickness and especially alacrity they are destroying that balance. If anything they should have been limited in use not 100% uptime. But hey everyone wants to cast everything instantly with little to no cooldown, especially for the dps bean counters in pve, in pvp areas it's pretty destructive especially with the mass stacking (hey chain casting magnetic aura in groups will be great I'm sure!). And while they might be thinking more boon access means it's easier for players to raise their levels of play, they're also enforcing you have to play with certain boons 100% of the time now.

But hey, who cares about "balance" at this point, not even the devs do. Just abuse it till you lose it.

Edited June 30, 2022 by Xenesis.6389

[Shao.7236]

Nah, keep the boons. They're fun to have, what makes the meta so stale is the fact that you can have professions that can provide them to a team which is the most toxic way to narrow choices as a whole.

Quickness and Alacrity should be selfish boons exclusively as there is trade offs to be made in the first place for good durations which can affect DPS, unless you want to cap their output but that still leaves them available and their existence always make a objective difference anyway.

All the other boons such as Might, Fury and Swiftness are much more healthy to come up with if anyone no matter the profession had to generate some.

Protection, Resolution, Resistance and Stability are more niche, while they can provide certain advantages and ease of mind, they're not exclusively speeding up the game in ways that are objectively superior.

Edited June 30, 2022 by Shao.7236

[Xenesis.6389]

17 minutes ago, Shao.7236 said:

Protection, Resolution, Resistance and Stability are more niche, while they can provide certain advantages and ease of mind, they're not exclusively speeding up the game in ways that are objectively superior.

Niche in Pve.

In wvw they are worth way more.

[Shao.7236]

8 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

Niche in Pve.

In wvw they are worth way more.

No less accessible though and can be added with less constraits since the impact on gameplay is quite different vs Quickness and Alacrity. I would expect frontliners to be better at it. Guardian is obviously preferred, Revenant IMO has the tools to be supportive but Warrior could use some love in that space.

[Kalthea.4326]

40 minutes ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

Butterfly effect. 

Remove quick and alac, need to hit superspeed.  We'd be back to a slower game but still have all the defensive boons.

And might.  Which would be the next target for reducing or removing since it gives like what +750 power/condi at 25? So, they hit might. 

Then you have the same game, but slower, and nothing dies because the only thing left is defense.

That won't be good enough though as now we all run condi bunkers and someone goes after Trailblazer / expertise...and the big wheel at the anet offices keeps on turnin'...

You missed the part where I suggested to keep all of the cooldowns as if alacrity was always up to keep rotations going. And the idea is to stop them having to design the game around it always being up anyway by just making it baseline.

 

33 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

Skills have a hard number cooldowns for a reason especially in a game where most of the skills are instant or near instant cast time, and also in a lot of cases don't have a resource to spend to use(revs and thieves are the exceptions for example), it's the opposite of many other games that build all their skills around energy or mana.

The hard number cooldown was there to balance out those cost, you don't just spam your top damage skill over and over until you run out of mana (although it seems they are changing autos to take that part too lol rifle), you use the appropriate skills when needed, you see a break bar, you break it first with cc's then burst.

Now with quickness and especially alacrity they are destroying that balance. If anything they should have been limited in use not 100% uptime. But hey everyone wants to cast everything instantly with little to no cooldown, especially for the dps bean counters in pve, in pvp areas it's pretty destructive especially with the mass stacking (hey chain casting magnetic aura in groups will be great I'm sure!). And while they might be thinking more boon access means it's easier for players to raise their levels of play, they're also enforcing you have to play with certain boons 100% of the time now.

But hey, who cares about "balance" at this point, not even the devs do. Just abuse it till you lose it.

Unsure what you're trying to say with the cooldowns thing because most damage builds will only bring a second weapon set for one or two abilities because those do the most damage, then they'll immediately swap back. So, yes, they already do cast their highest damaging abilities. Just so happens that they also have other abilities to cast as well. But yeah, ultimately looks like they're raising the skill floor.

 

35 minutes ago, Shao.7236 said:

Nah, keep the boons. They're fun to have, what makes the meta so stale is the fact that you can have professions that can provide them to a team which is the most toxic way to narrow choices as a whole.

Quickness and Alacrity should be selfish boons exclusively as there is trade offs to be made in the first place for good durations which can affect DPS, unless you want to cap their output but that still leaves them available and their existence always make a objective difference anyway.

All the other boons such as Might, Fury and Swiftness are much more healthy to come up with if anyone no matter the profession had to generate some.

Protection, Resolution, Resistance and Stability are more niche, while they can provide certain advantages and ease of mind, they're not exclusively speeding up the game in ways that are objectively superior.

I wasn't advocating the removal of all boons, just alacrity. It's objectively the worst boon in the game because if it's not up 100% of the time, it's near useless, and if it is up 100% of the time, then why have it be a boon? It forces the devs to design around it being up 100% anyway, so it might as well just be baseline.

[Xenesis.6389]

24 minutes ago, Kalthea.4326 said:

Unsure what you're trying to say with the cooldowns thing because most damage builds will only bring a second weapon set for one or two abilities because those do the most damage, then they'll immediately swap back. So, yes, they already do cast their highest damaging abilities. Just so happens that they also have other abilities to cast as well. But yeah, ultimately looks like they're raising the skill floor.

And yet there's also a hard 10s cooldown on weapon swaps. The point is gw2 was built around the player not spamming skills and they have higher cooldowns to control this, unlike other games where you have more unlimited use of most skills but controlled by their resource/cast times to cast and sometimes cooldowns as well if they are more powerful skills like cc's and stun breaks.

Alacrity is breaking that barrier, to the point it will start to allow players to chain cast certain things. I don't think this will be healthy in the long run, but I know everyone in pve will be, long as it's deader faster.

[Shao.7236]

@Kalthea.4326By design Quickness and Alacrity have such an impact that there's hardly anyway to balance them.

 

Calling Alacrity useless if not 100% uptime is a bit overdoing it. Lowering cooldowns no matter is incredibly strong and taking away the mechanics removes a layer of fun while decreasing CD's is really unfun to fathom for whomever would have to do it and the latter of effects.. If Alacrity was used less as a DPS boost and more to increase utility rather, the boon would be much less linear in it's purpose.

 

Quickness on the other hand has scaling going for it. Doing long casts with it has more of an impact compared smaller ones which you'd think that be the best way to use it hence why in small bursts it makes sense.

[Labjax.2465]

5 hours ago, TempoRamen.9861 said:

This is what confuses me. My hypothesis was always how GW2 was sold as a game that did not have the traditional MMO roles of healer, tank, and DPS. However after playing the game more, I realized they just translated those roles to boons. You HAVE to have quickness and alac, or else you are taking a SEVERE hit. That's not choice.

People have always told me "GW2 is great, everything is viable, you play what you find fun!" This is simply not the game for a long time.

I think part of what's misleading here is some people say "play what you find fun" and are thinking of open world events/metas that you do as part of a group, and in that regard, they're kind of right (though some of those events still need some higher optimization players to carry them). But if you go at all beyond grouped open world, into soloing semi-difficult open world content, instanced PvE content, WvW organized zerg (not just pug low expectations), or PvP, that notion goes down the drain super fast and people's expectations of the weight you pull skyrockets comparatively.

You go from an environment where, in some situations (cache keepers, for example) it's actually better if you're not putting out huge DPS, to a number of environments where not playing the meta (or close to it) can get you rejected or thought of as deadweight. It's a shock of a difference and incidentally, I suspect that's part of why a lot of people who enjoy open world PvE don't do instanced PvE in this game and are left scratching their head, if not angry, if they do attempt it and are confronted with the strict requirements that a lot of people put up. Add to that how convoluted it can be as an inexperienced player to get to the place of being equipped to play a meta spec, even if you want to; figuring out how to get the gear, from where, and unlocking the elite spec.

[coro.3176]

In my experience, pug strike groups spend about twice as much time doing "zomg who has alac, who's quick?? brb swapping toons" compared to the time saved by having those boons.

Edited June 30, 2022 by coro.3176

[Kalthea.4326]

39 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

And yet there's also a hard 10s cooldown on weapon swaps. The point is gw2 was built around the player not spamming skills and they have higher cooldowns to control this, unlike other games where you have more unlimited use of most skills but controlled by their resource/cast times to cast and sometimes cooldowns as well if they are more powerful skills like cc's and stun breaks.

Alacrity is breaking that barrier, to the point it will start to allow players to chain cast certain things. I don't think this will be healthy in the long run, but I know everyone in pve will be, long as it's deader faster.

On warrior, you can cut that weapon swap timer in half with a talent, and it is considered essential to almost every build, if not all of them. And whether or not the game was designed around spamming skills doesn't matter because that's what happens anyway. If you want to balance, than you have to balance using the idea that everything is going to be up 100% of the time, and that's why alacrity is an issue.

 

41 minutes ago, Shao.7236 said:

@Kalthea.4326By design Quickness and Alacrity have such an impact that there's hardly anyway to balance them.

 

Calling Alacrity useless if not 100% uptime is a bit overdoing it. Lowering cooldowns no matter is incredibly strong and taking away the mechanics removes a layer of fun while decreasing CD's is really unfun to fathom for whomever would have to do it and the latter of effects.. If Alacrity was used less as a DPS boost and more to increase utility rather, the boon would be much less linear in it's purpose.

 

Quickness on the other hand has scaling going for it. Doing long casts with it has more of an impact compared smaller ones which you'd think that be the best way to use it hence why in small bursts it makes sense.

Okay, not entirely useless, but also not a focus. You wouldn't build around low amounts of alacrity very often, and if you do, then you may as well invest in 100% uptime to keep its effectiveness. But yes, quickness is also a problem. Both of these boons are a huge problem for the game's balance, and the only reason I'm not saying to remove quickness is simply because of boon corruption, which I'd honestly just rather do away with and balance classes individually.

[Saharo.5381]

14 hours ago, Asum.4960 said:

Passive boon procs, passive boon auras and single "boon button" presses is where I think Anet really went wrong with this implementation. 

 

If it was done via more interesting and active Trait interactions, skill combos etc., playing significantly differently than their DPS counterparts and from profession to profession, I don't think people would mind every profession having the ability to bring boons as much. 

Exactly, you can see this crap on Mech. Alac provision is 3 buttons you mindlessly press off CD, and one grants stab/aegis lmfao. Compare that to the management staff Mirage has to do to even attempt 100% uptime.

Builds don't even get punished for clicking your dang Signet at the wrong time, suddenly everyone is retaining passives. Enabling that ability on Mech and changing for other classes is when I knew Anet threw any semblance of wanting remotely skilled players out the window.

Edited July 1, 2022 by Saharo Gravewind.5120

[Cindaria.6379]

The worst idea was to give boons to the half of your raidgroup. If the boons could hit 10 people instead of 5, people could concentrate more on mechanics or have more flexibility in rotation.

The difficulty increase in raids is not only the uptime of boons or the rotation, its also the mechanics. If you are REQUIRED to keep boons up to win, people loose motivation in group content.

[Fwog.9387]

I wish they would do away with boons entirely in favor of temporary buffs akin to that of soul beast and its stance skills and then very scarcely give them out to every class in the game. 

Rather than constantly be buffed up, they just balance the game around always being a certain power level and maybe during a segment of the fight you could pop something to gain a very brief power up. Rather than dedicating entire roles to buffs. 

[cyberzombie.7348]

On 6/30/2022 at 10:02 AM, TempoRamen.9861 said:

This is what confuses me. My hypothesis was always how GW2 was sold as a game that did not have the traditional MMO roles of healer, tank, and DPS

During the vanilla portion of the game that was the case. All of that started to be thrown out the window during 2015 with the introduction of tempest, druids, heralds and also raids.

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

They need to revert back to how boons were when the game first came out. Short term non-permanent buffs. Things like quickness should only exist on elite skills like time warp, and alacrity is just stupid no matter how you get it. The game was so much more fun when "healers" or "tanks" were basically just builds that brought protection and regen. 25 might was only really possible through blasting might, mandatory 100% crit wasnt possible. The only boon that was relatively easy to upkeep without thinking was swiftness, but even then you had to make sure your build had it.