Quickness/Alacrity and the sunken cost fallacy of removing them

[LyraOrpheo.8450]

I think there is a fundamental issue that's affecting both build diversity and balance design beyond how overtuned alac mech and quickbrand are. The design team has decided to further buy into the Boon Wars by making it 5 target so you'd have more people address the artificial roles of who is in charge of maintaining quickness and alacrity (which ideally would've been completely different classes that provides something else on top but in most cases its a second firebrand and/or a second mechanist), which I imagine is now giving the balance team headaches when you give the capacity to other classes (alac tempest, quick herald, etc) to perform these roles and they are still not cutting it, even if Mech and Firebrand were to be balanced down. 

 

I don't think it's too late to rollback on the "everyone get quickness/alac" Boon Wars strategy, to which I would cite the sunken cost fallacy and the plan continuation bias.

 

I believe these boons should have been personal, and they should've been tied to the profession's idiosyncracy by buffing or nerfing where applicable any existing ones like Thief's lesser haste needing positioning or Reaper needing to stay in Shroud for Quickness. Any trait that would provide quickness should come with draw backs too where you do more attacks but also you have to in some way forgo +damage % modifiers so a build should capitalize in getting in more crits (a whole other issue, crit capping shouldn't be a thing IMO) or provide certain skills or utility to proc certain effects so with quickness you get more hits in per second (like hybrid or condi builds, or just for the feeling of speed) in order to compete in damage with other builds that have access to less to no quickness but pack more damage.

 

Similarly with Alacrity, the trade off should be that perhaps you do a bit less burst damage or damage over time by having to forgo damage modifying traits, but you have increased use of utility as their cooldowns go down.

 

Anyone sharing any of these boons (if at all) should've been at extremely low duration, if anything at all to help your allies extend their own personal quickness/alacrity a bit more, or to give those who chose to forgo it a small window. But it should only still be that even for those that chose quickness, a window.

Edited July 7, 2022 by LyraOrpheo.8450

[Kalthea.4326]

In a previous post, I had mentioned that I believe quickness should be toned down and alacrity should be removed entirely because of how terrible they make designing classes and encounters. Why even bother having them in the game at all if you're just going to have to build around them anyway?

Though I do agree that making classes work in an isolated environment would work out better in the long run.

Edited July 7, 2022 by Kalthea.4326

[draxynnic.3719]

Quickness, on its own, is roughly as strong as having a full Might stack or a full Vulnerability stack on the boss. It's just that it's all landing at once, while Might and Vulnerability are more able to be distributed across multiple sources.

The end result of this proposal would be to turn endgame PvE from being quick+alac+3dps to being heal+4dps. Mileages may vary on whether that's better or not, but that's essentially what you're asking for.