Regarding the August 23 balance preview....power creep is not good .

[Yaki.9563]

10 hours ago, chronometria.3708 said:

Its not powercreep when it means unused professions actually get to see play. By this point most classes had around 4 or so weapons at least that simply didnt see active play.

 

I mean, isnt this the first time guardian hammer has actually seen a buff? 

Yet they didn't fix the reason that it's not used. Hammer auto attack chain actually does better than average dps. The problem is the slow cast time on the last part of the chain. That didn't get adjusted at all and it's going to remain as slow as ever.

[Endaris.1452]

I think it is important to note that OP has no intention to criticize the improvements to weapons that were clearly underperforming. Buffing Longbow on Warrior, Hammer on Rev, Guard and Warrior or Staff on Ele seems a-okay, bringing them up a bit so that they become actual options is a good thing - especially when these changes are geared towards bringing more utility to a weapon instead of damage or making it more usable for both damage types rather than straight up boosting numbers through the roof.

What is effectively powercreeping is buffing numbers of skills and weapons that were already doing well:

Buffs to sword on weaver and guardian, buffs to damage increasing traits like Big Boomer on engineer, buffs to condition durations on specter. These are all weapons, skills and traits that were already best in slot for their respective class.

When I started to get into endgame content, the highest benchmarks were 33-34k. Right now these are benchmarks for alacrity supports. The direction anet is showing with these changes is clearly towards power creeps. Just a question of how long until you can kill any regular Risen in Orr with a single autoattack.

[AliamRationem.5172]

6 minutes ago, Endaris.1452 said:

I think it is important to note that OP has no intention to criticize the improvements to weapons that were clearly underperforming. Buffing Longbow on Warrior, Hammer on Rev, Guard and Warrior or Staff on Ele seems a-okay, bringing them up a bit so that they become actual options is a good thing - especially when these changes are geared towards bringing more utility to a weapon instead of damage or making it more usable for both damage types rather than straight up boosting numbers through the roof.

What is effectively powercreeping is buffing numbers of skills and weapons that were already doing well:

Buffs to sword on weaver and guardian, buffs to damage increasing traits like Big Boomer on engineer, buffs to condition durations on specter. These are all weapons, skills and traits that were already best in slot for their respective class.

When I started to get into endgame content, the highest benchmarks were 33-34k. Right now these are benchmarks for alacrity supports. The direction anet is showing with these changes is clearly towards power creeps. Just a question of how long until you can kill any regular Risen in Orr with a single autoattack.

Sword on power weaver may be "BiS", but it's not "doing well".  If we're being honest, it sucks.  It's a selfish melee DPS that benchmarks lower than some support hybrids.  It needed some love.  So does condi sword, for that matter.

[Endaris.1452]

2 minutes ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

Sword on power weaver may be "BiS", but it's not "doing well".  If we're being honest, it sucks.  It's a selfish melee DPS that benchmarks lower than some support hybrids.  It needed some love.  So does condi sword, for that matter.

I think you're not getting my point.

This is not about weaver currently being weaker than other specs (yeah, might be) but about Anet just raising the damage for powercreep. What is happening right now is anet giving us back everything they took from us in coordinated gameplay (banners and other class specific buffs) as baseline.

To prevent powercreep, anet should instead nerf numbers on better performing specs.

[Falson.5284]

Einsof do you have a single post or comment that isn't complaining about how the game is too easy? Why are you even still here? Or do you just play forum warrior nowadays?

[solemace.8427]

yum yum yum, I love blind outrage that revolves around gatekeeping a game. You like good games and good games are hard games but you like this game so this game must be a good game and good games are hard games so GW2 must be a hard game because you like GW2 and there for GW2 is a good game and good games are hard so GW2 must have been at some point a hard game round and round until you figure out that you're just protective of any change made to your precious game.  

[Razadune.9260]

1 hour ago, Endaris.1452 said:

I think you're not getting my point.

This is not about weaver currently being weaker than other specs (yeah, might be) but about Anet just raising the damage for powercreep. What is happening right now is anet giving us back everything they took from us in coordinated gameplay (banners and other class specific buffs) as baseline.

To prevent powercreep, anet should instead nerf numbers on better performing specs.

     

You were just talking two posts ago about buffing underperforming weapons being fine and now you're talking about nerfing other classes to bring them down to those weapons.   

    

I'm not sure what the difference between buffing staff for elementalist, that you said was fine, and buffing sword for weaver are any different. If staff is buffed to make it useful and sword isn't, then you just create a reverse scenario where nobody takes sword...and if you don't buff the spec, then nobody takes weaver either way.    

      

As for the powercreep, everyone can agree that Mechanist is overperforming right now; but the fact is that even with it being the way it is today, the game's encounters and events are all still working more or less the same and we're doing things more or less the same as we were before the June patch.   

     

We're just doing it with way more jade bots running around, because people think that's more fun than playing the weaker specs. So, making the other specs as fun as Mechanist seems like a lot better way to go than just making everyone playing a Mechanist not want to play anymore. I think we could all agree that way more people seem happy with this approach than they did with nerfing Catalyst back in March or whenever that was.

[Endaris.1452]

2 minutes ago, tclark.8956 said:

You were just talking two posts ago about buffing underperforming weapons being fine and now you're talking about nerfing other classes to bring them down to those weapons.   

Even with those buffs, staff would still be weaker than an unbuffed sword. Very very sure of that.

And yes, mechanist needs nerfs and a lot more of them than it got in the patch. That's exactly what I meant - bringing overperforming specs down to the weaver level.

Edited August 14, 2022 by Endaris.1452

[Astralporing.1957]

18 hours ago, Ashantara.8731 said:

I'm confused. Take Dragonhunter or Power Berserker for instance: they are already dealing extremely high damage.

Yeah. So good that Snowcrows refused to include any Dragonhunter and Power Berserker builds in their benchmarks and current build lists.

I think that your opinion of what constitutes "extremely high damage" may not be universally shared.

Edited August 14, 2022 by Astralporing.1957

[LSD.4673]

12 hours ago, solemace.8427 said:

yum yum yum, I love blind outrage that revolves around gatekeeping a game. You like good games and good games are hard games but you like this game so this game must be a good game and good games are hard games so GW2 must be a hard game because you like GW2 and there for GW2 is a good game and good games are hard so GW2 must have been at some point a hard game round and round until you figure out that you're just protective of any change made to your precious game.  

Why do people throw around the word "gatekeeping" when it's wholly irrelevant?

[Ashantara.8731]

5 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Yeah. So good that Snowcrows refused to include any Dragonhunter and Power Berserker builds in their benchmarks and current build lists.

I think that your opinion of what constitutes "extremely high damage" may not be universally shared.

Snow Crows is min-maxing, optimizing. You can still deal very high damage as a Power Dragonhunter during Raids, but there are many builds these days that are ranged and therefore better suited for sustaining the same level of damage at all times.

[Jin Seinochi.2347]

On 8/12/2022 at 9:50 PM, Sunchaser.9854 said:

The balance changes were done to help underperforming weapons aka previous 'traps', while GW2 has a high skill ceiling. Outside of mechanists autoattacking to 28k and pressing 4 lit buttons on cd to 35k for 1200 range self regeneration + teleportation signet + barriers + self might + pet immunity to cc, etc.

Most of the intended changes with this patch was to buff the underperforming specs as Mechanists were often taking 7-9 spots of 10 in raids while being stacked, providing most boons, as well as other alacity options struggling to output just spec situational 50-100% alacity while the mechanists also did 25 stacks of might + fury + 100% alacity uptime. 

The patch's main buffs were to buff underperforming specs or classes who can often have a 2% benchmark edge on paper, often eaten up by the requirements to hit the "pianist snowcrow rotations anyone should hit", often involve stuff like say. memorized 34 part step rotations repeating every 20 seconds, with a memorized 14 part opener with 75 -> 0 energy management while having to periodically cancel and enable a dynamic rotation to deal with energy consumption and 14-20 sec alacity cast loops or not, while also needing to stutter mallyx pulses 1 s apart to trigger torment but not eat, while other classes also had autoattack chain series they had to take series to not interupt, Etc. While another class could argue they could both do the same dps.

Their rotation order was just pressing 4 buttons that lit up in order, or whenever they felt like it while passively regenerating as much hp as half a healer while barriering and not needing to move with the usual mechanics melee was assumed to move towards (like switching adds, vs tab 1200 range targeting), or moving (teleportation signet), or having health while afking be a dangerous concern (melee cleave) vs self regen signets and a 40k hp tank, etc. 

The patch is mostly buffs to the underperforming weapons or specs on classes that could lose 10-40% of their dps on practice vs paper to dots clipping, rotation and movement loss, 1 part in a 34 part rotation losing the 2% dps edge to -3% or being taxed 10-40% of your dps on misperformed rotation / mallyx pulses, etc. And some of the buffed weapons seemed previously terrible dps even if fun before tbh.

It's not a buff to the overperforming, it's a buff to the underperforming specs to help class diversity when people announced, "Don't nerf mech, make every class better to compete with them so everyone can eventually afk raid content too. I want to afk raid content and make the game simpler. Who wants to play a pianist and get carpal tunnel for the same (Or often 98% effectively less Average joe) rewards?" 

Unfortunately despite their minor efforts in most of the buffs in that patch, I still fear that mechanist will keep their 7+ slots in raids. There's absolutely no reason not to if nothing can match the combination of lacking effort required and reward. If I gotta know how to play piano on another class to get sub par numbers then why would anyone switch? A lot of those weapon buffs don't even address the real issues with why they don't get chosen. 

 

It's bad enough that my fellow raid warriors feel bad even showing up with their class because they're either holding the group back in progression content, or they're getting kicked because they're not a mechanist. It doesn't happen everywhere, but I've seen it enough times. 

 

While it remains to be seen since it isn't out and all that, I won't hold my breath. 

[Jin Seinochi.2347]

7 hours ago, Ashantara.8731 said:

Snow Crows is min-maxing, optimizing. You can still deal very high damage as a Power Dragonhunter during Raids, but there are many builds these days that are ranged and therefore better suited for sustaining the same level of damage at all times.

Warrior is only even really acceptable in fractals right now with its power berserker spec because it does burst and burst is good there but in raid sustain is important and they're screwed pretty hard on that right now. It will take more than tinkering with their weapon coefficients to sort that out without pulling a mechanist 2.0. 

 

Their "fix" for rifle won't make anyone want to bring it more than axe/axe and axe/mace anyways, the skills themselves lack. And if you nerf axe/axe to create viability then that's how you completely destroy Power Beserker. They were only hanging on by a banner and those got killed. 

Edited August 15, 2022 by Jin Seinochi.2347
Spelling of a word

[TexZero.7910]

18 hours ago, Jin Seinochi.2347 said:

Warrior is only even really acceptable in fractals right now with its power berserker spec because it does burst and burst is good there but in raid sustain is important and they're screwed pretty hard on that right now. It will take more than tinkering with their weapon coefficients to sort that out without pulling a mechanist 2.0.

I disagree with this.
Right now BladeSworn is more than capable at at least one raid encounter in Keep Construct given it has plenty of time to build up and burst. With the added damage output from it's mechanic they actually make the meters look broken as they almost triple the output of other specs.

Edited August 15, 2022 by TexZero.7910

[Kodokuna Akuma.9570]

On 8/13/2022 at 6:45 PM, Einsof.1457 said:

Better for anet to put the work in now than when raids are on solo farm status, then. 

No one is going to be soloing raids with staff neco of all things...

They culled some of the outperforming qualities of certain specs like mech and firebrand to vary degrees and helped bring up so viable options to be used instead of / along side of these specs.

They also buffed garbage weapons that were severly underperforming to levels where they wont feel like complete trash to use and some might find viable use with the right build.

None of this patch was bad.

[anbujackson.9564]

I think its funny. People have this weird fixation that dps builds should deal around 40k dps. Thats just so wrong on so many levels.

After removing unique buffs they had a change to tune it down to 35k instead of bringing everything to that same level again. 

People apparently forget that the supporters also deal higher dps now and boons are flying around even more so.

Just compare it to 2 chronos and 2 healers. 4 people dealing low dps. Now you got two hybrid dps and two healers and one hybrid dps does as much damage as the chronos and healers did together.

How easy does content have to be? I mean there are people legit saying its fine so everyone can do the content. Right. I guess facetanking and ignoring mechanics while killing the boss with absurdly high dps is the norm nowadays.

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

On 8/12/2022 at 7:45 PM, Einsof.1457 said:

If you're going to make almost everyone hit harder across the board, you should also buff enemies to maintain dare I say....balance. these sweeping power creep updates are making the game more and more dull to play. 99.9% of content is too easy already. 

Its too late for that. If you dont like how power creep has changed combat then its time to find a new game.

[Einsof.1457]

25 minutes ago, Paradoxoglanis.1904 said:

Its too late for that. If you dont like how power creep has changed combat then its time to find a new game.

Oh so if you whine about the game being too hard, that's totally cool. But whining about too easy and you are shown the door. Nice. 

[Kuma.1503]

On 8/13/2022 at 6:47 AM, Astralporing.1957 said:

Old school Anet was all about "we feel guardian is in a good place, so no changes to it this patch", "necro is a selfish profession, so won't get any boon capability" "necro has shroud, so can't do good damage", "ranger has a pet, so its weapons must be weaker by 20% on average compared to other classes, but we won't buff pets to be actually useful, because that would be OP" "you say weapon X is so bad noone is using it anymore, and averyone feels forced to use weapon Y. We heard you, and so this patch we will nerf weapon Y into the ground", and "oh, that build is actually used by players in harder content, so we decided to nerf it".

Did you mean this kind of old school Anet?

You forgot the random ele nerf disguised as a rework/buff. Just cuz. 

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

1 hour ago, Einsof.1457 said:

Oh so if you whine about the game being too hard, that's totally cool. But whining about too easy and you are shown the door. Nice. 

Pretty much every hardcore player quit years ago, so sadly yeah that is the case.

[Kastagir.2146]

Wow it just took them 5 years to make these changes. But it's just a start because they don't go far enough. People have been complaning about this for 5 years.

Edited August 15, 2022 by wmtyrance.3571

[Gotejjeken.1267]

1 hour ago, Einsof.1457 said:

Oh so if you whine about the game being too hard, that's totally cool. But whining about too easy and you are shown the door. Nice. 

 

Basically yes, because people love path of no resistance.  

I think it's for this reason subsets of the community clamor for vanilla servers, because power creep inevitably ruins everything.  Obviously if GW2 were to do this we'd need a lot of the QoL improvements that have happened over the years, but I'd love a way to experience at least open world events / metas again how they were intended.  

[Ashgar.3024]

On 8/12/2022 at 8:28 PM, Einsof.1457 said:

if you dont think powercreep is real then you are either new or just not payint attention. 

Lol at the end of PoF the game was much more powercrept.

Only different is that only like 5 builds were dominating everything else.  Anet is just taking these 5 builds and spreading their strengths across other elites.

Edited August 15, 2022 by Ashgar.3024

[Ashgar.3024]

1 hour ago, Paradoxoglanis.1904 said:

Pretty much every hardcore player quit years ago, so sadly yeah that is the case.

Yeah, its called growing up and getting responsabilities 

Like it or not no studio will ever be able to afford designing a game to the satisfaction of a minority who demands said game to be their secondary (or even primary) job and their entire personality. 

Only game that got away with that was WoW in its early days cause it happened at a very specific time bubble of the internet that can never happen again. Its the video game equivalent of the Grunge movement from the '90s.

In the meantime Speed Running and community ran events are a good middle-ground. Get involved in those if you care that much about showing off your video game performances.

Edited August 15, 2022 by Ashgar.3024

[Zyreva.1078]

57 minutes ago, Ashgar.3024 said:

Lol at the end of PoF the game was much more powercrept.

The game was powercrept at the highest end of performance for quite a while, yes, but now the powercreep is dripping into every part of the game, even those parts that have always been very easy (which is the majority of the game). Which can create a multitude of problems - makes the game more boring, especially at entry levels, less feel of accomplishment, teaches nothing but bad habits, because combat mechanics become easier to ignore, and it kills immersion by removing any sense of danger and makes it feel like the world is filled with completely incompetent people that can't handle even the most harmless enemies without help.

It is why i despised open world and story content in ESO (and it is something that is criticised by many others there too). Too easy is not good.

Edited August 15, 2022 by UmbraNoctis.1907