On Boons, Balance and Diversity

[GWstinkt.6094]

6 hours ago, Angesombre.4630 said:

He has to keep his buffs active and for that it reduces his energy regeneration if he activates too much it can be negative, so he can't consume his skills as they want.

I don't play revenant, but from what I understand, quickness was a bit poorly implemented on him. That's not really a reason to ditch the entire boon meta though. Just a design issue with revenant.

6 hours ago, Angesombre.4630 said:

I had forgotten about it, but I saw it again in a recent post. GW2 wanted to get out of the tank, dps, heal trinity. So they made all professions have their own personal heal. With the arrival of raids and druids mainly the heal has come back a good, as well as an evil. If we go in the direction you say we return to a different trinity because it would be more heal, boon, tank. Yes there will be almost always a tank even if it's different from other games and so a heal to bring back the health faster for those who can't bring it back enough. So there will still be DPS for the rest

Correct. GW2 tried to break the MMO trinity and give more autonomy to every player.

This resulted in no roles at all. With how content and professions worked in core GW2, a dedicated healer was not really needed and building tank did not help your party, because GW2 has no aggro pulling mechanics. Instead we had a meta if people just stacking DPS.

With HOT they started introducing dedicated boon specs, a dedicated healer spec and content that required you to play a healer. The tank role still didn't and still doesn't really exist apart from a few special roles in some raids.

They chose this direction back in HOT to give players more diversity to play. They are still working on it by allowing more and more specs to fill all 3 major roles we currently have.

I don't understand why so many people on the forum are keen on returning to the dos stacking days.

[Karagee.6830]

 

12 hours ago, GWstinkt.6094 said:

So removing alacrity is a moral decision now? 😄

We already have boons that boost damage, defenses and crit chance. Banners, spirits and stat traits don't fit in the boon table at all.
Should they just have made "Might 2", "Fury 2" and "Protection 2" instead of deleting them? 😄

Yeah, it is a design choice. Alacrity and Quickness are strong, unique buffs that change how combat feels. Having them around offers us something unique and valuable. The existence of the very powerful, yet somewhat limited boons is the main reason we have a dedicated boon role. It creates build diversity. The stuff they removed was literal stat buffs. It was very strong having them, but not very interesting or fun.

Whats so great about having these stat boons that they should have been kept around? And what's so terrible about quick and alac that they must go? I rarely see people provide reasons other than they don't like it.

It's blatantly obvious they fail their own stated logic: we remove things so you can use the same gear no matter the scenario...but only for things we want you to.

Yeah it's not written anywhere that you need to have only one boon affecting one side of the gameplay. Removing things that have been there for years and worked just fine with no bugs is a choice. The banner offensive buff did not apply the same way might did and you also have other boons which are applied in different way some requires to build stacks and have a range and some are either all or nothing. It's not written anywhere that you can't have 2 buffs or boons affecting the same part of the gameplay. We had this, literally for years. Whether you buy into the argument that there should be only one boon per 'type' or not, it's a design choice, not something written in stone.

The only thing they achieve with REMOVING stuff is that you have more specialisations competing for the same spots, which is why (besides also terrible balancing) this patch produced a garbage build representation, as concentrated as it's ever been depite the fact that we now have an all-time high 27 elite specialisations.

And now there is no way out of this. Even if they hire some genius to balance the game, the odds are greatly stacked against them, because balancing would need to be so good, that it would offset the loss of diversity from the removal of stuff from the game.

Edited August 8, 2022 by Karagee.6830

[Mell.4873]

On 8/6/2022 at 9:46 PM, GWstinkt.6094 said:

This post is going to be about some of the ideas and complaints that the forum in particular seems to keep bringing up about the current meta, access to boons and profession balance, diversity and uniqueness. Here are some of the complaints I have read quite frequently:

• Access to boons is too high and 100% boon uptime is bad. Boons force us to play boon specs instead of whatever we want. Access to boons should be greatly reduced or removed entirely.
• Professions are becoming too similar which hurts diversity. There should be more unique boons and effects that only limited professions have access to.
• Spec X is OP because look at how many people are playing it. X must be nerfed hard to make room for other specs!

Reduce or remove access to boons

Wouldn't removing boons make every profession the same, like what we had at launch. I mean one of the reasons Warrior were so dominant at launch is because they had the best survivability. 

Honestly what they need is more trinity that way its more the team cohesion that is a factor in clearing content. I mean the only reason people like HB over other supports is because they have most access to unique boons. If everyone can contribute it would diminish the need to have 1-2 HB in end game content. If anything I want to see more unique boons, stances are a great one to try and standardise.

59 minutes ago, GWstinkt.6094 said:

I don't understand why so many people on the forum are keen on returning to the dos stacking days.

Exactly, no idea why people would want this. I mean love the recent Chronomancer changes since now I can properly fill a Quickness or Alacrity slot. Maybe not in a raid but in most other content they do fine.

Edited August 8, 2022 by Mell.4873

[Karagee.6830]

24 minutes ago, Mell.4873 said:

Wouldn't removing boons make every profession the same, like what we had at launch. I mean one of the reasons Warrior were so dominant at launch is because they had the best survivability. 

Honestly what they need is more trinity that way its more the team cohesion that is a factor in clearing content. I mean the only reason people like HB over other supports is because they have most access to unique boons. If everyone can contribute it would diminish the need to have 1-2 HB in end game content. If anything I want to see more unique boons, stances are a great one to try and standardise.

If there are no boons or every class can get all boons with minimal effort, then it comes down to whoever has the best combination of damage, sustain and mobility. And some build will be on top. And people will stack that build into infinity and beyond.

The only way that comes to mind to ensure wide class representation is to restrict the number of boons each build has access to and restrict even further those they can select via traits and provide to the party.  This would help in other game modes as well.

Edited August 8, 2022 by Karagee.6830

[Mell.4873]

30 minutes ago, Karagee.6830 said:

If there are no boons or every class can get all boons with minimal effort, then it comes down to whoever has the best combination of damage, sustain and mobility. And some build will be on top. And people will stack that build into infinity and beyond.

The only way that comes to mind to ensure wide class representation is to restrict the number of boons each build has access to and restrict even further those they can select via traits and provide to the party.  This would help in other game modes as well.

That sounds like what we currently have, there are no unique class boons and every class can provide one of the two main boons (Quickness or Alacrity) some professions can even provide both.

Edited August 8, 2022 by Mell.4873

[Karagee.6830]

1 minute ago, Mell.4873 said:

That sounds like what we currently have, there are no unique class boons and every class can provide one of the two main boons (Quickness or Alacrity) some professions can even provide both.

Not really what I was trying to say. First, nobody should be able to provide quickness and alacrity or either of them and defensive boons. It's just easier to eliminate both or greatly nerf their effectiveness as a matter of facr. Second, you have to remove access to boons where there is overabundance (FB and mech). You shouldn't have access to everything or close to everything. Third, irrespective of what your class has access to, you should also not be able to provide more than 2 or 3 boons to your party (ie you can have aegis and stab, but someone else who also has access to them must take protection and resistance for example). This should be done via trait choices.

[Mell.4873]

3 minutes ago, Karagee.6830 said:

Nobody should be able to provide quickness and alacrity or either of them and defensive boons. 

Yeah I can agree with all this.

[GWstinkt.6094]

2 hours ago, Karagee.6830 said:

The only way that comes to mind to ensure wide class representation is to restrict the number of boons each build has access to and restrict even further those they can select via traits and provide to the party.  This would help in other game modes as well.

How would this create more class representation. 

[mungozen.2379]

19 hours ago, GWstinkt.6094 said:

Yeah, it is a design choice. Alacrity and Quickness are strong, unique buffs that change how combat feels. Having them around offers us something unique and valuable. The existence of the very powerful, yet somewhat limited boons is the main reason we have a dedicated boon role. It creates build diversity. The stuff they removed was literal stat buffs. It was very strong having them, but not very interesting or fun.

Whats so great about having these stat boons that they should have been kept around? And what's so terrible about quick and alac that they must go? I rarely see people provide reasons other than they don't like it.

The way Quickness and Alacrity have been modified in this game over time has removed unique builds that focused on providing self buffed Quick and Alacrity, to every build expecting to have it in PvE from multiple sources.  I can go get an get Jade Bot Offensive Boons and always have Quick and Alacrity up in OW, if I am in a Raid/Strike/Fractal, I expect to always have Alacrity and Quickness up, and I get these without ever having to spec into it or consider build choices around having it or not.

What this does is makes the game faster for everyone.  But that doesn't make the game more interesting whatsoever.  If in PvE I am simply going to anticipate always receiving Alacrity and Quickness, why not remove the buff and simply change all the skills to have a faster CD and a faster cast time?  Alacrity and Quickness do not stack in intensity, they are either on or off, and when they are always on, for all professions and all players, you have removed the uniqueness and interesting build design associated with it.

For a moment consider two Mesmer builds.  Condi Virt and Power Chrono.

Condi Virt is built around 100% Crit, and utilizes Fury 24/7 to hit that.  However, Fury is only one building block in hitting Crit cap, and your armor, runes, sigils etc can help build towards that Crit Cap.  Fury, in this case, is a part of the total package to get to 100% Crit and enable this build.

Chrono has a trait Improved Alacrity, which previously you could create builds that self buffed 100% Improved Alacrity uptime using primarily Shield, Well of Precog and Shatters.  This gave players a lot of diversity in builds since they could choose any GM trait and still have faster CDs.  Today, a Chrono must invest in being a specific Support build, take the Alacrity GM trait, take multiple Wells and struggle between being a low DPS support build or maintaining 100% Improved Alacrity uptime.  The build diversity for using Improved Alacrity with Self Buffed Alac seems to have become fairly narrow.

As Alacrity is either On or Off, your build doesn't function at a % lower efficiency like if Fury falls off, instead it becomes 25% slower!  That can change your rotations and flow in combat.  That can make some builds unplayable.  By having PvE Alac and Quickness available 24/7 players expect these buffs to always be present and has reduced build diversity as a result.

 

Personally, when I do play OW, I do use the Jade Bot Offensive and Defensive boosts as they are really very overpowered and trivialize the game further than it already was.  I find this game unfortunately far too easy given the current access to boons like Alac and Quick but I will take advantage of this bad design anyway.  

[GWstinkt.6094]

39 minutes ago, Mungo Zen.9364 said:

What this does is makes the game faster for everyone.  But that doesn't make the game more interesting whatsoever.  If in PvE I am simply going to anticipate always receiving Alacrity and Quickness, why not remove the buff and simply change all the skills to have a faster CD and a faster cast time?  Alacrity and Quickness do not stack in intensity, they are either on or off, and when they are always on, for all professions and all players, you have removed the uniqueness and interesting build design associated with it.

If I go into group content, I'm simply expecting to receive healing and have high up time on might and fury. So why not remove all boons and healing?
Because while providing these things has become the meta and build our groups around them, we still have to actively pursue them. Providing these things are builds and roles that actively optimize towards these goals. It's a layer of game mechanics that we the players can interact with. Of course the community finds ways to optimize these things and of course we expect ideal conditions from our party compositions. But that doesn't mean we should just get rid of all mechanics that the community has figured out how to use them because they have now become common.
 

39 minutes ago, Mungo Zen.9364 said:

Personally, when I do play OW, I do use the Jade Bot Offensive and Defensive boosts as they are really very overpowered and trivialize the game further than it already was.  I find this game unfortunately far too easy given the current access to boons like Alac and Quick but I will take advantage of this bad design anyway.  

GW2 has always been a very easy game once you've figured out the combat system and builds. Even if alacrity and quickness were removed entirely, OW would not pose a challenge to any experienced player. That's just not the type of game and content that OW GW2 has to offer.

 

39 minutes ago, Mungo Zen.9364 said:

The build diversity for using Improved Alacrity with Self Buffed Alac seems to have become fairly narrow.

Yeah. We've lost a small number of self buffing builds in favor of a large number of group supporting builds. Some chrono players may be sad to lose their alac privilege but im sure many others are happy that they can now opt into boon support builds on their favorite profession as well.

Edited August 8, 2022 by GWstinkt.6094

[mungozen.2379]

17 minutes ago, GWstinkt.6094 said:

So why not remove all boons and healing?

That is a great question.  However not all boons are created equally. 
 

I don’t find binary boons to be interesting to build around. Alacrity and Quickness are binary as they are either on or off. That is simply the way the mechanic was implemented in GW2.  These two boons affect your actual gameplay and APM which other boons do not. 
 

Might and Fury are examples of linear buffs, they scale with other sources of Power and Crit.  You get incremental gains with each source of these stats be it boons, armor, food etc.  These boons increase your power without impacting your gameplay or APM  

Healing and Barrier are applied incrementally and their impact doesn’t affect gameplay beyond keeping a player alive. 
 

Boons in general in this game have become so easy to get that I think you could get rid of most of them and still have fundamentally the same game.  I’d prefer to have tactical use of boons rather than always on boons. 

[itspomf.9523]

3 hours ago, Mungo Zen.9364 said:

Boons in general in this game have become so easy to get that I think you could get rid of most of them and still have fundamentally the same game.  I’d prefer to have tactical use of boons rather than always on boons. 

This.

I like that Might, Fury, and Protection are a thing.  It's nice that Regeneration makes healing-over-time more simplified.  What I want is for these boons to feel like a nice special bonus, not a mandate.

[Karagee.6830]

18 hours ago, GWstinkt.6094 said:

How would this create more class representation. 

Exactly the same way unique buffs ensured some classes had a place in raids. If every class has access to everything, it's only logical the overtuned class will be stacked and the rest nonexistent. Just like the current situation. Now it's mechanist, tomorrow it will be scourge or something else.

Think about this: if hfb had no quickness and resistance and had to choose between aegis and protection: would it have more or less representation if all support builds were is a similar place with restrictions? What about ham without access to alacrity and stability? It would force parties to make sure you bring classes that have access to boons that can cover for these holes. And also would force parties to choose what they really want from the support healers and/or force someone else to do mechanics (e.g. provide stab, aegis or resistance when needed).

Because these is the other consequence of this balance philosophy: the more you compress roles, the smaller the number of people who can carry a group

Edited August 9, 2022 by Karagee.6830

[Opopanax.1803]

On 8/6/2022 at 7:05 PM, draxynnic.3719 said:

Pretty much in full agreement with the OP here.

The irony is that a lot of what people are asking for, we've seen. ArenaNet tried reducing uptime back in the chrono monopoly days. It just pushed up the skill floor to fill what was still an essential role, or pushed groups to take another one.

You could reduce doubling up by a debuff in addition to the boon.

 

ie, Cast Alacrity skill (20 sec CD)... Gain Alacrity Boon for 10 seconds and Anti-Alacrity Debuff for 20 seconds.  Anti-Alacrity prevents re-application of Alacrity for 20 seconds.  

 

Why wouldnt this work?

Edited August 8, 2022 by Opopanax.1803

[mungozen.2379]

31 minutes ago, Opopanax.1803 said:

You could reduce doubling up by a debuff in addition to the boon.

 

ie, Cast Alacrity skill (20 sec CD)... Gain alacrtiy for 10 seconds and anti-alacrity for 20 seconds.  Anti-alacrity prevents re-application of Alacrity for 20 seconds.  

 

Why wouldnt this work?

I like this idea, I think the 10 second window matches up with the Exposed mechanic nicely, although I wouldn’t mind if it was as long as 20 seconds to really let players get deep into their rotations. I’d put the CD at 30-40 seconds as well to keep the ebb and flow of combat.  This would help push players towards maximizing when they use these Alac/Quick skills and popping other long cooldowns like Elite skills

[Opopanax.1803]

5 minutes ago, Mungo Zen.9364 said:

I like this idea, I think the 10 second window matches up with the Exposed mechanic nicely, although I wouldn’t mind if it was as long as 20 seconds to really let players get deep into their rotations. I’d put the CD at 30-40 seconds as well to keep the ebb and flow of combat.  This would help push players towards maximizing when they use these Alac/Quick skills and popping other long cooldowns like Elite skills

Good thoughts.

[Logos.3042]

1 hour ago, Opopanax.1803 said:

You could reduce doubling up by a debuff in addition to the boon.

 

ie, Cast Alacrity skill (20 sec CD)... Gain Alacrity Boon for 10 seconds and Anti-Alacrity Debuff for 20 seconds.  Anti-Alacrity prevents re-application of Alacrity for 20 seconds.  

 

Why wouldnt this work?

Maybe you could do a “count down” icon after alacrity expires but before the debug is up to keep the UI cleaner. Have the alacrity boon grey out and put a circular red clock timer on it counting down until the reapplication is up.

[eXruina.4956]

On 8/6/2022 at 5:46 PM, GWstinkt.6094 said:

This post is going to be about some of the ideas and complaints that the forum in particular seems to keep bringing up about the current meta, access to boons and profession balance, diversity and uniqueness. Here are some of the complaints I have read quite frequently:

• Access to boons is too high and 100% boon uptime is bad. Boons force us to play boon specs instead of whatever we want. Access to boons should be greatly reduced or removed entirely.
• Professions are becoming too similar which hurts diversity. There should be more unique boons and effects that only limited professions have access to.
• Spec X is OP because look at how many people are playing it. X must be nerfed hard to make room for other specs!

 

Reduce or remove access to boons

I cannot imagine the people calling for this have actively played instanced PvE content. Reducing or removing a lot of boon access will not lead to more player choice or build diversity.

Case 1: Reduce boon uptime on things like alacrity and quickness to burst windows
Let's pretend access to quickness for example was reduced across the board, so that a player actively building towards providing quickness could at best provide 20% uptime on the boon. This would make groups think more carefully about when and how to use their quickness, rather than just keeping it up 100% of the time right?

Wrong. PvE players will always look for advantages to make clears faster, easier and more reliable. When a community of players plays the same content and looks for these advantages, a meta emerges. If access to very powerful buffs like quickness was limited to short windows per player, then groups will gain a massive advantage from having multiple players run boon builds.
If changes like this were made, boon providing builds would strictly outclass any pure dps build, as the benefit of providing your entire group with another chunk of boon uptime would far outweigh any personal dps anyone could provide. In such a world an all firebrand squad might actually be the objectively best and fastest way to clear any content 😄

Case 2: Remove (some) boons entirely

If the existence of powerful boons "forces" us to play boon providing builds then we should just get rid of them. Then everyone can play what they want.
Except we can already do that. A group of 5 players requires two players to provide quickness and alacrity. Generally one of those two players will also provide healing. This leaves 3 slots in the group open for any kind of pure dps build. A group has actually more slots for non boon builds than boon ones.

Removing boons from the picture would simply replace that one boon-dps slot with a pure dps one. We would lose out on a number of builds that use different gear, weapons and utility to provide boons, while gaining nothing. I assume this change is mostly called for by players who refuse to interact with the boon system much and end up feeling left out. I can assure you that taking aways boons from the rest of us would not make the game any better for you 😛

 

Professions losing their identity. Give us back unique access to certain boons and other effects to make things more diverse again

We don't even have to argue on this point, because we have had this exact thing for long stretches of time and we know where it leads us.
Unique buffs and effects limit profession and group diversity and player freedom. Back when Chronomancer had the only good access to group quickness, every group was forced to play a Chronomancer. Unique banner buffs literally gave us a role called "Banner Slave".

Putting a strong group buff onto a single profession or spec means that

• someone in the group has to play this spec
• players of this profession or spec are highly incentivised if not forced to play this exact role

Not only does this reduce the number of builds played on those professions and specs, it also reduces the number of builds that others can play. Every unique role like Banner Slave takes up a player slot in group play, leaving you with one less player who can simply play whatever build they like. If we had 5 unique, old banner like roles in the game, entire groups might become made of those exact roles rather than being filled by whatever players feel like playing.

 

Spec X is OP! I see it everywhere

There is certainly some truth to this. Strong specs will be played more than weak ones. If one spec is played by 20% of players, while another is played by 2%, thats a good reason to see if maybe one offers too much while the other offers too little. But I also see the sentiment that certain specs should be buffed and others nerfed strongly until we see a somewhat even representation of them in the game or that certain specs are clearly OP because they are played a lot more than others.

The reality is that even if every single spec was as equally good and viable as they can get, we would still see some specs dominate certain game modes, while others would barely see any play for many reasons:

Role: Not every spec does the same thing. Some specs are generally good in a lot of situations while others are more niche and excel in certain tasks but are meager in others. For that reason alone many specs would only see situational use while some would be present almost everywhere because they are generalists.
Difficulty: Some specs are more difficult to play effectively than others. That's great because every player gets to pick specs that fit their level of play, but player skill is not evenly distributed. Certain smaller groups will gravitate towards the more challenging specs while the broader community will always favor specs that are more simple and reliable.
Theme and Style: Professions and Specs are significantly different in how they look, feel and play, even when they end up bringing the same boons, healing and dps. Certain themes and styles will simply be more popular than others. It might not be the main reason people pick their profession on, but it for sure makes a difference. The human female meta might be more powerful and obvious, but there's for sure a comparible thing going on with specs.

To summarize, I'm not saying specs like Firebrand or Mechanist don't bring too much to the table and might need 1-2 things stripped away from them to make more room for other specs. I just want to point out that even if FB and Mech were mediocre performers, they would likely still see a lot of play, because their design and ease of use makes them desirable for a large group of players.

well said, hope it actually gets through to them. 🙏

[Borked.6824]

On 8/7/2022 at 7:50 AM, draxynnic.3719 said:

Ranger spirits and warrior banners, however, offered unique buffs that stacked with everything except another ranger or warrior using the same spirits or banners respectively. So they each created their own role that they had a monopoly over.

I don't think people are against monopolies.  As long as people accept the fact that complete balance is impossible, expecting certain classes to fit niche and often monoplized roles is acceptable.  It's the flavor of diversity people expect and keep people engaged and hopped up on dopamine.  The problem is more just making sure that every class has at least one role where they can shine.  Giving every class grey areas of everything though?  Like we have now?  That's just asking for people to get benched with every bit of empiracal evidence to support it.  Homogeneity is bad.  It's written in the laws of the universe.

[JTGuevara.9018]

On 8/8/2022 at 4:34 AM, GWstinkt.6094 said:

I don't play revenant, but from what I understand, quickness was a bit poorly implemented on him. That's not really a reason to ditch the entire boon meta though. Just a design issue with revenant.

Correct. GW2 tried to break the MMO trinity and give more autonomy to every player.

This resulted in no roles at all. With how content and professions worked in core GW2, a dedicated healer was not really needed and building tank did not help your party, because GW2 has no aggro pulling mechanics. Instead we had a meta if people just stacking DPS.

With HOT they started introducing dedicated boon specs, a dedicated healer spec and content that required you to play a healer. The tank role still didn't and still doesn't really exist apart from a few special roles in some raids.

They chose this direction back in HOT to give players more diversity to play. They are still working on it by allowing more and more specs to fill all 3 major roles we currently have.

I don't understand why so many people on the forum are keen on returning to the dos stacking days.

The ironic thing is, the "no roles" concept ended up taking players' autonomy away. Because each profession wasn't inherently associated with a primary role, but instead with a specific function, that concept just ended up degrading into which professions can perform that function the best. In that way, players are limited in what they can choose. (Thus enforcing a "meta")

gw2 started off with the pseudo-trinity of: dps/control/support.

A warrior was not really a warrior, but a "dps" who can "control" and sorta-kinda "support". (Never mind the fact that other classes could do those better! ) I remember the "stack on the boss" dungeon days, those sucked. How people thought this thought-less game play was ok is a mystery. Anet reneged on their previous philosophy by adding support specs later on(HoT).

So, all that's really missing is now a full-on tank spec along with some aggro-controls for the game. Which brings the next question: "Ok, you now have all the conventional trinity functions: dps, heal, tank, so why not just scrap this specialization thing altogether as it stands and just bring back class roles?" Oh right!...that would prove to Anet that they failed to reinvent the wheel and that this is what should've been done in the first place!

[GWstinkt.6094]

13 minutes ago, JTGuevara.9018 said:

So, all that's really missing is now a full-on tank spec along with some aggro-controls for the game. Which brings the next question: "Ok, you now have all the conventional trinity functions: dps, heal, tank, so why not just scrap this specialization thing altogether as it stands and just bring back class roles?" Oh right!...that would prove to Anet that they failed to reinvent the wheel and that this is what should've been done in the first place!

I don't think they failed. The system GW uses offers a lot of freedom to us still. Every single profession can spec into various amounts of durability, damage, healing, support and control as they like. Some do certain things better than others, but overall there are still plenty options.

The meta is another issue. In multiplayer games with enough players, metas form naturally. People just figure out the fastest, easiest, most reliable way to solve problems and inform each other until everyone is aware of the optimal solution. The roles we currently have: damage, boons, healing are nice because they can be mixed and matched pretty well and they can be filled in different ways.

Most classes and builds are not strictly one thing but cover certain essentials while bringing some of their own goodies as well.

It is a bit of a shame that durability plays almost no role in PvE. There isn't much incentive to build tanky and little things for a tanky player to do. Personally i think i prefer the idea of a tanky support over an aggro tank. For example heal scourge who never dies and never lets his team die, carrying be being the immortal support rather than by distracting enemies. Sadly we don't have too much of that right now and there usually isn't a great reason to play like this, at least not once a certain skill level is reached, as dying can be avoided pretty reliably.

[draxynnic.3719]

16 hours ago, Borked.6824 said:

I don't think people are against monopolies.  As long as people accept the fact that complete balance is impossible, expecting certain classes to fit niche and often monoplized roles is acceptable.  It's the flavor of diversity people expect and keep people engaged and hopped up on dopamine.  The problem is more just making sure that every class has at least one role where they can shine.  Giving every class grey areas of everything though?  Like we have now?  That's just asking for people to get benched with every bit of empiracal evidence to support it.  Homogeneity is bad.  It's written in the laws of the universe.

People complained about being forced to have chronomancers and druids at the time... especially for fractals, where that really squeezed out being able to play other professions. People had been complaining about firebrigade for years by the time EoD launched. People are complaining about mechabrand now, but at least now that's just the most reliable comp rather than the only viable one.

Even if you theoretically gave every profession something that you'd really want to have one for, you'd end up with an optimal raid squad being one of each and one left over, and everyone playing that profession would be expected to play the build that does that (does the entire mesmer community really want to go back into chronojail?) - you'd end up with less diversity rather than more. And fractals would end up being the five most important.

All of the games with different roles that I can think of have multiple classes/characters/etc that can fill those roles, unless there are substantially less classes than GW2 has. Distinctions come about through how they do it, and what secondary capabilities they have.

[Syvaris Laskaris.5247]

15 hours ago, JTGuevara.9018 said:

The ironic thing is, the "no roles" concept ended up taking players' autonomy away. Because each profession wasn't inherently associated with a primary role, but instead with a specific function, that concept just ended up degrading into which professions can perform that function the best. In that way, players are limited in what they can choose. (Thus enforcing a "meta")

gw2 started off with the pseudo-trinity of: dps/control/support.

A warrior was not really a warrior, but a "dps" who can "control" and sorta-kinda "support". (Never mind the fact that other classes could do those better! ) I remember the "stack on the boss" dungeon days, those sucked. How people thought this thought-less game play was ok is a mystery. Anet reneged on their previous philosophy by adding support specs later on(HoT).

So, all that's really missing is now a full-on tank spec along with some aggro-controls for the game. Which brings the next question: "Ok, you now have all the conventional trinity functions: dps, heal, tank, so why not just scrap this specialization thing altogether as it stands and just bring back class roles?" Oh right!...that would prove to Anet that they failed to reinvent the wheel and that this is what should've been done in the first place!

All they have really managed to do is turn everyone into a Paladin and the better your Profession is at being a Paladin the more meta you are (funnily enough GW2's actually Paladin stand-in has been choking Profession diversity in every game-mode except PvP which it had to be forced out of). Who would have thought that being decent to good at everything and then being able to gear toward one role would just create a mess.

Edited August 11, 2022 by TheSeraphim.7413

[Sunchaser.9854]

The funny thing is that, didn't boons start out as a modification of like wow buffs? Each class used to like give a buff like +2% crit, +2% intellect, +2% haste. Innervate for 40% mana regeneration etc. It would just be a 1 hour duration you cast over people in 2 seconds after the design of classic pally was a useless tank, a useless dps. And not much of a healer. But dang could they spam powerful 5-10 minute long buffs all day they would be brought into raids just to cast buffs on everyone all Fay during a raid of 40 people in molten core. 

 

WoW buffs weren't meant to become whatever this ultra clusterdeathball of gw2's smashed people was, it was more like you'd pass someone over in open world and you'd give them 2% crit and vice aversa. Even the worst dps spec in wow was usually within 10% of the best spec in later wow expacs so the +2% intellect x 5/10-25/40+ players would make up any 10% individual  difference so they weren't make or break roles.

They were handy but didn't make or break a run if you brought half meta or not minus a few odd situations where blood dks healed themselves too well the healer became a dps. Etc. 

 

But it seems like gw2 leans way heavy into making everyone smash and zerg around a ball and reversed that. Where instead of books encouraging diversity, only a few classes can provide 100% uptime, so they're stacked like scrap while the highest dps for 98% of players will also have some of the lowest effort requirements of 97% of the dps specs.  So instead of the class diversity patch promoting diversity, it just makes it all a mechanist 9/10 blob. 

[Opopanax.1803]

Makes you wonder how many raids you could pull off with:

10 warriors

10 elementalists

10 thieves

etc etc.

 

This would really reveal the ability of classes to pull off group content by tools that they have alone.

I'm guessing that all Guardian and all Revenant raids would fair pretty well...