Despite everything, we need fewer boons

[Mell.4873]

6 hours ago, Borked.6824 said:

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.

Well what if no one wanted to play Warrior. I mean we faced this same problem with Banner or Spirit slaves. You had to play it since it had a unique boon. It is not fun if you get assigned that role and you cant even swap out those utilities, now you slot them if you want to boon support.

[Borked.6824]

57 minutes ago, Mell.4873 said:

Well what if no one wanted to play Warrior. I mean we faced this same problem with Banner or Spirit slaves. You had to play it since it had a unique boon. It is not fun if you get assigned that role and you cant even swap out those utilities, now you slot them if you want to boon support.

What a great problem to have!  Sounds like something solved with skill, organization, patience, and execution 😉

[Mell.4873]

16 minutes ago, Borked.6824 said:

What a great problem to have!  Sounds like something solved with skill, organization, patience, and execution 😉

It has been solved with boon standardization. Only the top 5% of people can multiclass enough to have this negatively effect the raid pool but most bring what they are good at and not what is optimal.

[Asum.4960]

4 hours ago, felix.2386 said:

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

 

4 hours ago, Polar.8634 said:

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.

 

All that achieves is that players will do the math if it's worth it to then just stack enough professions/builds with those boons to still get 100% uptime (and every build that isn't a boon hybrid or doesn't provides sufficient self-boons is basically dead), or if the investment is too great and it's more efficient to just avoid them all together, going full DPS for increased average damage at all times instead (and every boon hybrid build and boon share traits become dead). 

 

I agree that tactically using boons in specific moments in theory sounds like far more engaging gameplay (which is why perma Stability and Aegis and such should imo never exist, as those are kind of the only boons left which can still have that fun and skilled gameplay loop - even Prot is pretty much permanent these days, but we don't really have incoming burst damage phases much either anyway) - but unfortunately especially for offensive boons that just doesn't work out, as the game/content/boss encounters would have to be very specifically designed around those burst windows to encourage and enable that kind of gameplay - and Anet would kind of have to redesign and rebalance every boss and encounter in the game.

 

In practice that might also be far less engaging than one might think, to just hang around and lazily slow DPS, waiting for the designated burst window/Breakbar, pop boons and then just nuke the boss down, to then wait for the next designated burst window. It's probably a lot less dynamic in practice than it sounds on paper.

Additionally it would run directly counter to Anet's casual play friendly design direction again, and drastically increase the already still significant DPS differential again between players who now not only know the power of boons, but also when exactly to use them in play in each and every encounter - over those who don't.

[Kalthea.4326]

Boons aren't a good system, specifically because they're universal. There's no flavor to them (which makes classes feel lacking when compared to others), they're always up (meaning you have to balance the game around having them up 100% of the time), and the differences they make to gameplay should just be made baseline, because if a class can't function without having boons up all of the time (I'm not saying they cant), or is designed for endgame content around having those boons up all of the time, then all you're doing is hindering the rest of the game because you have some weird idea that boons need to stay in the game "because that's how it has always been".

 

Boons are awful for the design of encounters and classes in this game. Unique buffs, while a bit annoying here and there, are much better for balance, because you can tweak just that one buff. I'm not saying "bring back banner buffs!" Because I don't think unique buffs should have 100% uptime either. It's not fun gameplay, and it just becomes a routine.

Classes should be designed in isolation, without having to worry about all of the boons the game has to provide, and it's impossible to do that so long as the developers keep trying to tie together group boons across all classes.

Edited September 17, 2022 by Kalthea.4326

[itspomf.9523]

On 9/15/2022 at 10:02 PM, Asum.4960 said:

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.

But that's just what I mean:  if we continue to say that boons are "mandatory," and even recognize the outsized influence they have on potential in combat, it becomes clear that boons should not be ever-present, nor as widely available as they are.

The fact that Anet has added increasing access to boons is not to the health of the game, it's just widening the scope of the problem by reinforcing their dominance.

We didn't have nearly this level of power-creep and overperformance until after Heart of Thorns was changed to make Alacrity available to all, and worsened with Firebrand's party-access to Quickness, which completely reshaped the meta with Heart of Thorns.

So while I respect that you have a valid point that they've always been beneficial, everything you're saying just reinforces that boons have only ever created an unfortunate disparity in the game.

[Asum.4960]

2 hours ago, itspomf.9523 said:

But that's just what I mean:  if we continue to say that boons are "mandatory," and even recognize the outsized influence they have on potential in combat, it becomes clear that boons should not be ever-present, nor as widely available as they are.

The fact that Anet has added increasing access to boons is not to the health of the game, it's just widening the scope of the problem by reinforcing their dominance.

We didn't have nearly this level of power-creep and overperformance until after Heart of Thorns was changed to make Alacrity available to all, and worsened with Firebrand's party-access to Quickness, which completely reshaped the meta with Heart of Thorns.

So while I respect that you have a valid point that they've always been beneficial, everything you're saying just reinforces that boons have only ever created an unfortunate disparity in the game.

Likewise I fully understand where you are coming from - I'm just as much not a fan of the boon spam personally. 

That said, I do get why Anet is pushing into that direction at this point and I don't think that design direction is going to get reversed any time soon, quite the opposite. 

 

I just don't see them majorly reworking how boons work/are applied, completely rework all boonsharing specs and drastically rework and rebalance much of the game and encounter design around higher skill cap tactical/timed boon usage. Going the other way and embracing the boon spam and instead making it more accessible to close the gap between players, as well as increasing viable options for play via homogenization is simply the path of least resistance, usually taken. 

 

I suppose I've just reached the acceptance stage in the boon meta regard, because like it or not, that's where we are further heading. Imo the best we can still hope and argue for is for more engaging and distinct boon appliance on different specs, rather than generic passive boon Auras and spam all Utilities of X category - as well as keeping some few boons, such as Stability at least in the realm of tactical usage by rebelling against things like the thankfully by now changed perma Stability share of Mechanist. 

 

Quickness and Alacrity for example are imo group roles Anet actively tried to create to make group building more streamlined and diverse. They are not going to turn their backs on all that work now, and making boons like Might and Fury rare and bursty is also almost a sheer impossibility by now, considering the vast Trait and Skill reworks, as well as encounter rebalance, that would require.

[Kalthea.4326]

3 hours ago, Asum.4960 said:

Likewise I fully understand where you are coming from - I'm just as much not a fan of the boon spam personally. 

That said, I do get why Anet is pushing into that direction at this point and I don't think that design direction is going to get reversed any time soon, quite the opposite. 

 

I just don't see them majorly reworking how boons work/are applied, completely rework all boonsharing specs and drastically rework and rebalance much of the game and encounter design around higher skill cap tactical/timed boon usage. Going the other way and embracing the boon spam and instead making it more accessible to close the gap between players, as well as increasing viable options for play via homogenization is simply the path of least resistance, usually taken. 

 

I suppose I've just reached the acceptance stage in the boon meta regard, because like it or not, that's where we are further heading. Imo the best we can still hope and argue for is for more engaging and distinct boon appliance on different specs, rather than generic passive boon Auras and spam all Utilities of X category - as well as keeping some few boons, such as Stability at least in the realm of tactical usage by rebelling against things like the thankfully by now changed perma Stability share of Mechanist. 

 

Quickness and Alacrity for example are imo group roles Anet actively tried to create to make group building more streamlined and diverse. They are not going to turn their backs on all that work now, and making boons like Might and Fury rare and bursty is also almost a sheer impossibility by now, considering the vast Trait and Skill reworks, as well as encounter rebalance, that would require.

Again, you're better off taking the boons that people are going to try to keep up 100% of the time and just making them permanent changes for everyone. This would remove the need for specific builds, and actively allow people to bring whatever they want, as they keep claiming is what they want, yet they actively design against it by making all of these builds that have specific ways of activating their boons. You're forced to take a particular weapon, trait or skill to upkeep your boon of choice, thus removing your choice in the matter.

[Asum.4960]

1 hour ago, Kalthea.4326 said:

Again, you're better off taking the boons that people are going to try to keep up 100% of the time and just making them permanent changes for everyone. This would remove the need for specific builds, and actively allow people to bring whatever they want, as they keep claiming is what they want, yet they actively design against it by making all of these builds that have specific ways of activating their boons. You're forced to take a particular weapon, trait or skill to upkeep your boon of choice, thus removing your choice in the matter.

Like making essentially all boons, safe for Stability, Resistance and Aegis, baseline permanently active (but without the visuals) for everybody? 

That's seems incredibly counter productive if build diversity and stemming powercreep is in any shape or form what you are after. 

 

You'd still be "forced" to take specific options, with unprecedented homogeneity across the game, with most everybody just running the highest DPS weapon, Traits and Gear everywhere, invalidating a vast amount of stat sets, Traits and Weapons in the process, resulting in far less options to effectively play with. 

 

I don't understand how people imagine this "play however you want" thing taken to an extreme playing out - there is always going to be a best option, unless everything is the same (at which point there really is no choice anymore at all), which then becomes perceived as mandatory. 

The best way to combat that is to obfuscate the best in as many decently viable choices as possible (and then finely tuning them around now and then) so it never can quite settle in as oppressive meta. 

 

The more variety you take out in terms of diverse roles (and your suggestion would remove any build that essentially isn't pure Healer and Pure DPS from the PvE landscape), the faster "play how you want" disappears in a patch cycle, and the less it means when pretty much all you can be is a DPS. 

 

Propagating roles such as Heal Quickness, Heal Alacrity, DPS Quickness, DPS Alacrity (with their associated sets of ancillary boons) and pure DPS, has done loads to increase group/profession diversity in the game. 

One of the biggest factors right now still holding a lot of diversity back is the lack of parity in the Heal Boon support choices, which they are actively trying to fix, and correctly so I might add, by slowly spreading some more boons around (like improving Stability access). 

 

Like it or not, certain Boon combination supplying roles are the cornerstone for PvE to design and balance around in GW2 now. And while that hasn't exactly been executed flawlessly in terms of gameplay around boon application and while there are some issues in the Heal Boon support category especially still - it's been making the game more diverse (both in roles and specs to fill them) to reasonably pick to "play whatever you want" from than ever before. 

For all it's faults, there is merit in that. 

[Kalthea.4326]

51 minutes ago, Asum.4960 said:

Like making essentially all boons, safe for Stability, Resistance and Aegis, baseline permanently active (but without the visuals) for everybody? 

That's seems incredibly counter productive if build diversity and stemming powercreep is in any shape or form what you are after. 

 

You'd still be "forced" to take specific options, with unprecedented homogeneity across the game, with most everybody just running the highest DPS weapon, Traits and Gear everywhere, invalidating a vast amount of stat sets, Traits and Weapons in the process, resulting in far less options to effectively play with. 

 

I don't understand how people imagine this "play however you want" thing taken to an extreme playing out - there is always going to be a best option, unless everything is the same (at which point there really is no choice anymore at all), which then becomes perceived as mandatory. 

The best way to combat that is to obfuscate the best in as many decently viable choices as possible (and then finely tuning them around now and then) so it never can quite settle in as oppressive meta. 

 

The more variety you take out in terms of diverse roles (and your suggestion would remove any build that essentially isn't pure Healer and Pure DPS from the PvE landscape), the faster "play how you want" disappears in a patch cycle, and the less it means when pretty much all you can be is a DPS. 

 

Propagating roles such as Heal Quickness, Heal Alacrity, DPS Quickness, DPS Alacrity (with their associated sets of ancillary boons) and pure DPS, has done loads to increase group/profession diversity in the game. 

One of the biggest factors right now still holding a lot of diversity back is the lack of parity in the Heal Boon support choices, which they are actively trying to fix, and correctly so I might add, by slowly spreading some more boons around (like improving Stability access). 

 

Like it or not, certain Boon combination supplying roles are the cornerstone for PvE to design and balance around in GW2 now. And while that hasn't exactly been executed flawlessly in terms of gameplay around boon application and while there are some issues in the Heal Boon support category especially still - it's been making the game more diverse (both in roles and specs to fill them) to reasonably pick to "play whatever you want" from than ever before. 

For all it's faults, there is merit in that. 

My issue with the argument of "everyone would just be a dps" is that everyone is already a dps. On top of that, talking about less usage for armor when there are only a handful of sets that are already used anyway is silly. If you read my previous post before the one I replied to you with, I point out that providing unique buffs per class is a better way to balance the game, and designing classes in isolation, without having to worry about full uptime on boons or what have you, is a better of of designing a game around a buffing system. That way you're not just getting the "job type here", you're also bringing in unique buffs that any group would benefit from, because they never had them on their own. The other benefit of using this system is that you can tweak those buffs individually without having to change the entire boon that every class gives to compensate. As-is, the boons being universal are the problem. They give the same stats, all of the time. Period. My "make them baseline" suggestion is more of a "remove the boons that alter the gameplay so heavily that are always up in group content, because they're forcing development around them instead of around the classes and content". It's a juggling act enough for the classes and content, but having to tiptoe around 33% action speed and 25% cdr because they're always on is just going to hinder other aspects of the game.

Edited September 18, 2022 by Kalthea.4326
Autocorrect.

[Xenesis.6389]

Kinda funny they decided to hand out alacrity like candy... and now come back and tell us that cooldown reduction traits are too much so they're starting to take them out..... 🙄

 

[Asum.4960]

1 hour ago, Kalthea.4326 said:

My issue with the argument of "everyone would just be a dps" is that everyone is already a dps. On top of that, talking about less usage for armor when there are only a handful of sets that are already used anyway is silly. If you read my previous post before the one I replied to you with, I point out that providing unique buffs per class is a better way to balance the game, and designing classes in isolation, without having to worry about full uptime on boons or what have you, is a better of of designing a game around a buffing system. That way you're not just getting the "job type here", you're also bringing in unique buffs that any group would benefit from, because they never had them on their own. The other benefit of using this system is that you can tweak those buffs individually without having to change the entire boon that every class gives to compensate. As-is, the boons being universal are the problem. They give the same stats, all of the time. Period. My "make them baseline" suggestion is more of a "remove the boons that alter the gameplay so heavily that are always up in group content, because they're forcing development around them instead of around the classes and content". It's a juggling act enough for the classes and content, but having to tiptoe around 33% action speed and 25% cdr because they're always on is just going to hinder other aspects of the game.

I see, yea. I just checked back in through the notification/quote. 

I definitely get where you are coming from in that context, and I lament the loss of theme and class identity greatly as well. 

 

I do think though that this game direction is fairly set for the foreseeable future though, and beyond that, unique buffs aren't without their issues either. We've seen some of that in the past with some just being completely irrelevant (think Guardians Toughness share), while other's were pretty much mandatory (as with BS), even in cases where no one wanted to play it, it's just too much to miss out on not running that class just for the passive buffs. Then it's also about where to place those buffs, potentially making a Traitline mandatory. They can feel punishing for players who enjoy playing together, but enjoy the same profession, etc. - generic boons with widely spread access are just far more adaptable as system there.

 

Generally I don't think unique buffs, while a valid path to take, are a solution on their own either, as in that case each profession ends up just feeling like a bland vehicle for that one buff/trait. Nor do I think are generic boons the problem on their own. 

What I'd like to see is the greater context of the professions feeling more unique again - that means less generic x% increased damage/x% reduced CD Traits, gain x amount of stats Traits, share x boon in an AoE every x second traits, etc.

If professions had enough well designed unique Trait and Skill interactions, build variety and gameplay loops, I don't think the philosophy of building the game around generic boons would feel like much a problem - as they would sit as a universal and fluid system on top of a bedrock of innate uniqueness. 

What definitely feels bad though is layering generic boons on top of generic traits to be executed around generic animations.

 

So the boon system combined with more and more reused/bland passive Traits, animations and the trend of removing or overnerfing unique profession mechanics (be it Necro's Epidemic, Guardians Signet Share, and so on) - then it all starts to feel really samey and bland. 

 

While the boon system certainly contributes, maybe a bit too much of that increasing feeling of samey-ness is attributed to it. And spreading those boons around more has in turn come with great benefits in variety over the olden days. 

So calling for the abolishment of (even just certain) boons seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to me. 

Just like with unique buffs, they are a valid path to take - but Anet does imo need to put in some legwork to differentiate professions more in other ways, rather than continuously stripping out those unique quirks and features.

Edited September 18, 2022 by Asum.4960

[Kalthea.4326]

1 hour ago, Asum.4960 said:

I see, yea. I just checked back in through the notification/quote. 

I definitely get where you are coming from in that context, and I lament the loss of theme and class identity greatly as well. 

 

I do think though that this game direction is fairly set for the foreseeable future though, and beyond that, unique buffs aren't without their issues either. We've seen some of that in the past with some just being completely irrelevant (think Guardians Toughness share), while other's were pretty much mandatory (as with BS), even in cases where no one wanted to play it, it's just too much to miss out on not running that class just for the passive buffs. Then it's also about where to place those buffs, potentially making a Traitline mandatory. They can feel punishing for players who enjoy playing together, but enjoy the same profession, etc. - generic boons with widely spread access are just far more adaptable as system there.

 

Generally I don't think unique buffs, while a valid path to take, are a solution on their own either, as in that case each profession ends up just feeling like a bland vehicle for that one buff/trait. Nor do I think are generic boons the problem on their own. 

What I'd like to see is the greater context of the professions feeling more unique again - that means less generic x% increased damage/x% reduced CD Traits, gain x amount of stats Traits, share x boon in an AoE every x second traits, etc.

If professions had enough well designed unique Trait and Skill interactions, build variety and gameplay loops, I don't think the philosophy of building the game around generic boons would feel like much a problem - as they would sit as a universal and fluid system on top of a bedrock of innate uniqueness. 

What definitely feels bad though is layering generic boons on top of generic traits to be executed around generic animations.

 

So the boon system combined with more and more reused/bland passive Traits, animations and the trend of removing or overnerfing unique profession mechanics (be it Necro's Epidemic, Guardians Signet Share, and so on) - then it all starts to feel really samey and bland. 

 

While the boon system certainly contributes, maybe a bit too much of that increasing feeling of samey-ness is attributed to it. And spreading those boons around more has in turn come with great benefits in variety over the olden days. 

So calling for the abolishment of (even just certain) boons seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to me. 

Just like with unique buffs, they are a valid path to take - but Anet does imo need to put in some legwork to differentiate professions more in other ways, rather than continuously stripping out those unique quirks and features.

Yeah, and I can see your viewpoint as well. The biggest issue is that a lot of the stats that we use aren't utilized at all. Vitality and Toughness are the worst stats to have in group content, because you're giving up damage for them, and most healing will keep you alive, mitigate it severely, or block it completely, which leaves zero room for Toughness other than specific fights where you want a boss to target you, at which point it's "just get enough to have more than heavy armor classes and dump back I to damage". I would love to see increased class diversity utilizing the statistics system the game started with, allowing for people to create tankier builds that can hold their own, which is where building classes in isolation comes from. By having them built in isolation, you can control just how tanky you want them to be, or damaging, or what have you, and then design an encounter around mechanics first, and adjust numbers based on what you feel would be a better adjustment.

 

Also, unique buffs not being great was mostly due to them being plain old stat increases, and not feature adjustments. Think of Firebrand's early release, where they had a that (I forget the name) that gave everyone around them a buff that would cause their next few attacks to apply burning. This was a strong buff that  made group place very powerful, and allowed a well coordinated group to stack loads of burning on a target. It was nerfed over time to 1 stack, and I don't know where it sits now, but my point is that unique buffs don't need to be just plain stat changes.

[Gorem.8104]

Yeah, boons were better when you had to actually try for them, now you just start every fight with every boon in the game as any class. 

Removed a section of skill the game once required. I do miss when they were rarer 

[Zok.4956]

On 9/16/2022 at 3:19 PM, ericpeggy.8206 said:

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.

In their current form quickness and alacrity are just permanent DPS bufs and they even increase the "DPS dominates benchmarks".

The game would loose nothing if both were removed and the base dps would be increased at the same time.

 

[Borked.6824]

10 hours ago, Zok.4956 said:

In their current form quickness and alacrity are just permanent DPS bufs and they even increase the "DPS dominates benchmarks".

The game would loose nothing if both were removed and the base dps would be increased at the same time.

 

Reminds me of a recent discussion Venruki was having about retail WoW, where he basically equated that 90% of all current dps comes from sources that aren't of the class, and are borrowed power related (covenants and gear).  Classes are literally just husks to create the illusion of unique identity. This boon homogenization is gathering hints of that, and we really, really don't want to get to that point.  It's pathetic over there. 

Balance is one thing, but feeling like garbage about every angle of the game as a tradeoff is another.