Despite everything, we need fewer boons

[itspomf.9523]

Don't get me wrong:  the fact that boons exist is great, but they're just everywhere now.

There's no reason for weapons to be churning out might off auto-attacks or entire utility skill lines to spit out  alacrity and the like with zero investment more than "slotted the skill and used it off cooldown."  Half the beauty of boons and support builds in the early days of the game, even up to Heart of Thorns, was that boons were special.  They were the icing on our proverbial cake.  They granted you that extra edge in a big group fight and really made a difference if you had a good composition of players.

Now?  Now we have people saying they're mandatory for most content, and that's simply not healthy for the game.  Especially when it's well-known that they're an outsized portion of the artificially-inflated "benchmarks" that content had been balanced by for so long.

But I'm not saying we get rid of boons.  I'm not even saying we make them worse.  What I'd very much like the new balance team to do is to analyze the sheer prevalence of boons in the game, many of which were added to address issues in the raiding community, and reflect upon how we went from having specializations that had fairly discrete roles (such as offense, defense, support, or healing) and since turned the game into a question of who is bringing the new "holy trinity" of quickness, alacrity, and stability.

And I use that term intentionally, because those three boons alone feel like they've fundamentally altered the way the game works and how it's balanced for far too long.

(And no, while I explicitly mention raiding, I've nothing against the game mode -- it's simply the best example of where this mentality applies most prominently, even fiercely)

[Diktator.8927]

Agreed. Boons are nothing special at this point. They should be temporary buffs to help you in certain situations, not perma buffs. 

[Warscythes.9307]

You can't really go back at this point. People were able to maintain 100% quickness and alacrity since day 1 with chronomancers. If you reduce how often is applied, then people will simply take more boon duration or take more classes to grant those buffs until is not worth it. This need to be an entire systematic overhaul for literally every single class in the game and I don't see it happening and even if there is, is not going to happen any time soon.

[DeanBB.4268]

Guild Wars 2 Expansion 4: The Reset

[Xenesis.6389]

🙄

[Suyheuti.1732]

2 hours ago, Warscythes.9307 said:

You can't really go back at this point. People were able to maintain 100% quickness and alacrity since day 1 with chronomancers. If you reduce how often is applied, then people will simply take more boon duration or take more classes to grant those buffs until is not worth it. This need to be an entire systematic overhaul for literally every single class in the game and I don't see it happening and even if there is, is not going to happen any time soon.

I was against at alacrity and quickness were sharable boons since day 1 and from those times on, it was wrong. They are too strong to be shared. They should have been only personal boon since day 1.

[Zsoak.5409]

I would be really happy if Quickness and Alacrity would function as 'big cooldowns', where you could pop them at burst phases and you would really feel their impact for their duration.

Perma-keeping them is just plain bland and boring, resulting in artificial Quickness and Alac roles with the sole purpose of upkeeping these which I found really lazy and boring design.

Also everything is balanced around having these 24/7. At this point you could just slap these effects to all classes as baseline and it won't make a difference (besides eliminating these artificial roles).

[pallas.8150]

Agreed.

[Sansar.1302]

Almost all boons need to be personal only

[Brandon Uzumaki.1524]

Certain condis too, Slow, Cripple and Chilled come to mind, they are kinda the same, we could do with one universal condition that covers "slowing people", or at maximum 2.

Weakness is another one, we already have a lot of ways to mitigate power damage (specially compared to Conditions), and this one feels kinda redundant. Since it already reduces endurance regen, they could put the CD increase of chilled in place of the 50% less damage for example, and delete Chilled.

Edited September 15, 2022 by Brandon Uzumaki.1524

[Asum.4960]

Reading between the lines, I just want to note that this isn't necessarily raid mentality - Boons always have been king. 

The difference between OW builds and play that could maintain 25 Might (&Vuln) and perma Fury, (as well as potentially even Quickness for more offense, Prot for defense, etc.), and one that didn't concern themselves with boons and instead invested into other offensive and defensive measures, has always been absolutely massively in favour of the Professions and Builds with access to boons. 

 

All that has changed is that a) more people, after a lot of community effort to help out and inform struggling players, have caught on just how insanely powerful boons are and b) Anet is trying to make them massively more accessible to increase diversity of play and to help out less crafty and more casual players in closing the ridiculous performance gaps to more hardcore players (running builds doing up to tens times more damage), which always have been leveraging these boons in their builds, and played what limited options could supply them. 

 

That's why they are so prevalent now, for accessibility. 

Ofc nothing is free and all this came with a big cost in class identity among other things - but, frankly to anybody who knew what they were doing, boons always have been "mandatory", it's just more obvious how big of a part of performance they are now, and they are more accessible for more players to leverage that massive performance boost, without being shoehorned into very specific options.

 

Where I do think Anet greatly misstepped is in how they made boons more widely accessible, as you said too, in part with the mindlessly equip and spam every Utility skill of x category on CD, or also the generic passively pulse boons AoE every x seconds Traits - rather than thinking about more unique and creative ways, Trait and skill interactions and gameplay loops between different professions to achieve a somewhat parity in boon uptimes and spread, if investing into that. 

 

But boons have always been king, and honestly it's clearly been a nightmare for Anet to balance content between players who always recognized and leveraged that, and those that saw boons as just an icing here and there to their builds.

[prototypedragon.1406]

Just give everyone perma boons at all times that would fix stuff this is the anet way don't cha know? 👌😉

[Zekent.3652]

For pve: boons apart from quickness, might, fury and maybe alac, shouldn't get such a high uptime and presence.

For pvp: boons apart from swiftness, should not get such a high uptime and presence. Same goes for some condis.

[Mell.4873]

Honestly it adds flavour to the game.

Remember Supports are not really for boons only, some can provide other buffs or resurrects to help people. In some sense a support is the tank in our trinity, there primarily goal is be useful.

Every class applies boons differently and with the recent nerfs to Firebrand we have and will see more diversity in how they are applied. Spirit/Banner stacking is already a thing.

[vanfrano.1325]

Agreed.

[Borked.6824]

47 minutes ago, Mell.4873 said:

Every class applies boons differently and with the recent nerfs to Firebrand we have and will see more diversity in how they are applied. Spirit/Banner stacking is already a thing.

I'm not sure applying boons differently is an ok excuse to just give everyone boon generation.  It just ends up in boon vomit anyway, at the expense of classes vomitting boons more efficiently than others, making the inefficient vomiters sad and confused why they're not getting invited to groups. 

Doing it creatively and intrinsically to the profession is what's being asked here.  For the longest time, Warrior was one of the few classes that could dump out might reliably.  It was nice and exciting to be one back then, for that reason.

[ericpeggy.8206]

Problem is we can't avoid Trinity.

If we can't share Quickness and Alacrity, only DPS dominates benchmarks.

I think that will worse than now.

Maybe make all boons important and rare, like Quickness and Alacrity.

Then people can choose what they need on the basis of the situation.

[the krytan assassin.9235]

I dont mind the current uptime rate and cost of alac & quickness, since all groups will adept to lower durations by just adding more quick/alac support. Besides that, i prefer the faster action paced combat it provides. 

I personally dislike how might, Fury and vulnerability are currently applied. Its basically just a guaranteed 100% uptime on full stacks with 0 effort.

As Tempest i can maintain ~35 stacks of party wide might (50+with a couple of traits). On top of that most quickness providers have 25 stacks might aswell and alot of normal dps builds have like 5-10 stacks might aswell. Why would you ever want to have a 80+ stack might uptime? It basically means that your own might support is 100% useless since it will be covered by the rest of the group anyways. 

 

[prototypedragon.1406]

Bring back the ancient retaliation boon and make it affect condition damage along with the original power damage effect then all should be fine 👌

[Polar.8634]

5 minutes ago, prototypedragon.1406 said:

Bring back the ancient retaliation boon and make it affect condition damage along with the original power damage effect then all should be fine 👌

it ruins team fights the reason why it was deleted

[felix.2386]

yea, they need to do something like when boss is CC'ed, damage receive is increased.

and drastically decrease boon duration, so people hold on boons to these phases for full burst

[prototypedragon.1406]

 I take it that's the same reason why  cc damage was removed on weapons making some as useless as kitten. And making Hammers do less damage then those npcs people can sneeze on and they explode. Honestly doing away with all boons could probably be more beneficial, bring the weapon not the passives.

[prototypedragon.1406]

Sorry my bad this isn't about world versus world boons.

[prototypedragon.1406]

.

Edited September 16, 2022 by prototypedragon.1406

[Polar.8634]

make so with 100% bd any related class can maintain no more than 50% uptime of boon. or even 30%. so it will force to keep boons for burst phases. 

edit: for skills that share boons. self boon should not be nerfed too much.

Edited September 16, 2022 by Polar.8634