Remove Mech's Trade-off too

[Dadnir.5038]

10 hours ago, itspomf.9523 said:

I wasn't going to log in and say anything, but now I have to ask:

Why do we keep insisting on using completely synthetic (and arbitrarily inflated) "benchmark" numbers as a basis for balance when even ANet themselves have realized how poorly conceived that notion is?

Because you can't give a reliable value to the "player personal skill level" as this is a concept that vary a lot based on the individual and isn't even stable. Thus you balance numbers around situations where the "player personal skill level" isn't relevant (and tweaking numbers is GW2 devs' thing).

[Lynx.9058]

6 hours ago, soul.9651 said:

Well this sounds good, but they should do that not only for mech, all Li builds should have wider skill gap if you wanna do more damage in this game. 

Also people shouldnt exaggerate, nerfing 3.7k from a current pmech wont change much how it feels to play, especially if its OW content or story for some people. However if they are planning more nerfs than this then it will be a different story for that.

Why?
Why must they have a wider skill gap?  Give me one good reason.

All I'm hearing is that you want to exclude a large portion of the player base from being in any way competitive, to preserver the ego of the scant few players who actually enjoy piano gameplay.

[soul.9651]

1 hour ago, Lynx.9058 said:

Why?
Why must they have a wider skill gap?  Give me one good reason.

All I'm hearing is that you want to exclude a large portion of the player base from being in any way competitive, to preserver the ego of the scant few players who actually enjoy piano gameplay.

Because its a horizontal progresion game, if you wanna get all rewards for free from every piece of high  end instanced content without putting any effort the game will become just dull and boring for a vast majority of people. Thanks to the mech gw2 is no progresion game rn. Like the majority of the community must suffer in expence so that a few people can enjoy their Li builds? 

Im also sick of seeing people who are forcing others to play pmechs at strike cms (lfg), and even at some fracts occasionaly... You play Li because its your choice but dont force others to play this.. 

And its funny how you talk about me wanting to"exlude a large portion of players" when in reality people are doing the opposite and excluding everything else but pmech or are forced to swap to pmech just because they cant keep up with the mech unless they play it themselfs.. and again this is more specific to strike cms where you will see 8/10 mech squads.... In raids situation isnt that much better aswell.

I wish you played 0.32% population spec to truly know how beeing excluded really feels..

Edited September 20, 2022 by soul.9651

[the krytan assassin.9235]

16 minutes ago, Lynx.9058 said:

Why?
Why must they have a wider skill gap?  Give me one good reason.

Because most gamers want to incentivize themselves to do harder content, to challenge and improve their gaming skills & knowledge and to be rewarded for their own hard work & expertise. 

Not every person should be able to deal the same amount of dps because of this very reason and frankly it also isn't needed for Endgame content. There are hardly any dps checks in raids and strikes, so whats the problem with doing less damage? You can't expect someone with budget tickets to get front row seats. 

[Eponet.4829]

17 hours ago, Ashen.2907 said:

I like the idea of returning the tool belt but only if, perhaps, the pet had its damage reduced to be comparable to a ranger's brown bear and had the mech function skills removed. At that point the mechanist would have a full range of F skills, plus a pet.

That's unfair. At least give it Jaguar damage.

[draxynnic.3719]

9 hours ago, Atmaweapon.7345 said:

Mechanists aren't topping benchmarks, they're just really high for a low intensity build. Nerfing Mech without bumping up Holo to 38-40k just nerfs Engis overall position in theoretical output compared to other professions.

Don't know why this post got so many confused reactions. It's accurate. Metanist isn't a benchmark-topper, what makes it strong is that it's very easy to consistently get most of that benchmark regardless of boss mechanics or personal skill. And I don't see any good reason holosmith shouldn't have competitive DPS if that could be achieved without buffing metanist back up.

[Nash.2681]

Gonna fix the title for you... wait a minute... there you go:  Remove Mechs Trade-off too.

You can thank me later.

[Ashen.2907]

3 hours ago, Eponet.4829 said:

That's unfair. At least give it Jaguar damage.

Not with its health pool.

[Kuma.1503]

1 hour ago, Ashen.2907 said:

Not with its health pool.

To be fair we only have one pet compare to the ranger's two, so if it dies we can't revive it without sacrificing our elite skill (rangers do that for free). 

Ranger also doesn't sac an entire traitline for their pet  (Even beastmastery has some great traits that buff the player), and is non-manditory. 

Their elite traitlines give a significant chunk of power to the player. Mechanist gives it almost solely to the pet. The closest we get to a player buff is "gain alac when you give yourself barrier", which you need the bot or sanctuary runes to fully make use of. 

To nerf it to brown bear level, we'd have to remove the pet traits and convert them into engineer traits, or turn the bot into a utility machine instead of a dps machine. 

Edited September 20, 2022 by Kuma.1503

[Endaris.1452]

I like the idea of returning toolbelt access because it brings it back to the roots of engineer.

Removing toolbelt skills strongly shoehorns mechanist into kits and signets due to other utilities getting a significant portion of their power removed with their toolbelts gone and engineer was never balanced around toolbelt removal, meaning that various engineer skills make exactly 0 sense with mechanist. This results in the espec being very shallow and giving it one of, if not THE lowest identification/synergy with its core spec.

That being said, I strongly disagree with the way you want to design that. It would simply be atrocious for competitive modes if engineer gets no other tradeoffs for the current mechs power.

If you wanted the mech to be a toolbelt transform you would need to give it innately lower uptime so that summoning the mech would be more akin to a powerup mode like photon forge. I'd be thinking along the lines of something like a legend swap where your toolbelt gets replaced by a full set of mech skills (F1 as ground targeted "go here", F2-F5 filled with the skills, including rocket punch), your utilities get replaced by full signets (or a different skill type revolving around empowering the mech for the moment, like copying your boons over) and you have some resource to spend with each signet having a resource cost + long cd so that you cannot use all of them and not use the same ones every single time unless you actually wait between your power plays. Mech then blows up in an AoE upon elite use and/or full resources spending, ending the tag team mode. F2-F5 skills should be aimable as ground-targetted AoEs where available. That way you could combo mech skills with weapon skills for pretty dope effects in (open world) PvE but you would have pronounced weaknesses in either mode. In that context, signets should naturally get removed and traits would have to get reworked as well, working on stuff like cooldown reduction for resummon on killing mobs, getting a stacking damage bonus for striking the same target as your mech to really make it feel impactful, etc.

Effectively making it a golem you spend a good deal of effort to control while it's up, introducing actual tag team mechanics and giving it more golemlike functionality, making it possible to use it for a long time in one stretch of time like now if not using active utility actives to spend resources and enabling player to enjoy a passive mech centered experience if that is what they want.

Edited September 21, 2022 by Endaris.1452

[Alcatraznc.3869]

I like people comparing Mechanist to Ranger pet when I can use Ranger's pet regardless of the skilltree I seclect the only difference being the effectiveness of the said pet.

 

You want Mechanist to be like Ranger pet ? Fine by me, but just like Ranger pet, allow the Mech to be used even when the player is not using the Mechanist trait. If you think what I'm asking is totally stupid then you should realize that your demand is as stupid as mine. 

 

Ok now that I've triggered 99% of the non engineer players and my post will receive only confused emote, I will say that I like the idea of giving back toolbelt skill when the pet leave the combat. It would actually give the player "half" the effect of core engineer skills (main skill)  when the mech is on field but if you want the other "half" effect of the skill (toolbelt skill) you will have to give up your mech. It would prevent shenanigans like grenade barrage under jade canon F1.

The only part where it may gets tricky is if you're using signet because they werent designed to be used with a toolbelt skill which means you'll basically have nothing in your toolbelt skill on that slot. But then again, if I see this as a tradeoff for using signet then honestly that's fine.

Edited September 21, 2022 by Alcatraznc.3869

[Alcatraznc.3869]

delete this I missclicked

Edited September 21, 2022 by Alcatraznc.3869

[draxynnic.3719]

2 hours ago, Alcatraznc.3869 said:

I like people comparing Mechanist to Ranger pet when I can use Ranger's pet regardless of the skilltree I seclect the only difference being the effectiveness of the said pet.

 

You selected the Ranger skilltree to get the ranger pet. It's less obvious when you can't compare it to an example of the same profession without the pet, to be sure, but ranger has absolutely made sacrifices to get that pet. Meanwhile, the performance of metanist against other engineer specialisations pretty clearly demonstrates that what it's given up isn't enough to make up for that superpowered pet. YMMV on whether that means that metanist needs to be nerfed, other engineer builds need to be buffed, or a mix of both, but suffice it to say that the performance indicators demonstrate that the metanist has received more than it's given up.

I could support giving back the toolbelt when the mech is not present for design reasons, but that should probably involve further weakening the pet (possibly its durability and sheer ability to ignore mechanics).

[Alcatraznc.3869]

9 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

You selected the Ranger skilltree to get the ranger pet. It's less obvious when you can't compare it to an example of the same profession without the pet, to be sure, but ranger has absolutely made sacrifices to get that pet.

 

No the Ranger does not give up anything to have access to that pet. Proof is, I can just create my character and at level 1 and I already have a pet with me. And why is that ? because it IS the gimmick of the class.

 

People comparing Ranger to a spec that requires you not only to give up 29 potential skill but also gives literally 0 buff to the engineer itself, are either being dishonest or straight up ignorant. A Mechanist without its pet is a worse core engineer and as far as I know, there is no other spec in the game that turns your spec into a worse version of your core class to such an extent if you do not use the gimmick. Even Virtuoso that lose access to their clones still gets some reworked shattered. What do Mechanist get ? Yes a strong pet with 9 customable skill and these 9 customable skill have to make up for the 29 skill loss that goes from :

-boons (elixir toss)

-heal (medkit)

-high burst of damage (grenade barrage)

-short CD spammable skill (rifle turret)

-high CC (bomb kit)

-breakstun (slick shoes, elixir gun)

-invisibility (elixir something)

-small CC (ramming)

-burst condi (flamethrower kit)

 

If the spec gets hard nerf to a point the tradeoff are not worth playing the spec then why even bother playing it in the first place ? Why would I play Mechanist and rely on a pet to deal the same amount of damage as my Holosmith in which not only I would have the same damage, but also I wouldnt suffer from a big tradeoff in case I go off photon forge because I still have my toolbelt skill. Anet put themself in this situation because they wanted to give more power to the Mech and a lot of player actually enjoy mechanist because of that. 

 

 

 

 

[draxynnic.3719]

2 minutes ago, Alcatraznc.3869 said:

 

No the Ranger does not give up anything to have access to that pet. Proof is, I can just create my character and at level 1 and I already have a pet with me. And why is that ? because it IS the gimmick of the class.

That's the thing. It IS the gimmick of ranger. Your opportunity cost is that you don't have necromancer shroud, attunements, kits (kits are the real gimmick of engineer, toolbelt is just a supporting mechanic), or any of the other gimmicks of other classes. Your opportunity cost is that the potential damage output of the ranger itself, outside of permamerged soulbeast builds (which are essentially the inverse of the metanist situation) is lower to account for the pet.

Now, compare to metanist? You lose the toolbelt, but you still have kits and you're still based on a profession who's personal damage output is balanced on the assumption that it's doing that DPS without a pet. If anything, it's given up LESS than ranger (the ranger just made the tradeoff at the profession selection screen rather than the traits screen), and yet the pet gets to be more powerful. I don't think that's fair. 

Now, ranger does have the pet swap so it's harder to deny it the pet altogether, but the mech is more durable than most pets (and those that even come close are on the lower end for DPS even by ranger pet standards) so that comparison comes out in the wash. You can complain about what you've given up, but the observed evidence is that metanist outperforms everything else, and specifically including other engineer elite specialisations (except quickness scrapper, and only because metanist can't do that) to such a degree that it's clear that metanist is getting far too much for what it gives up. Power holosmith, for instance, benches BELOW power metanist at the moment, while having a more complex rotation, a melee focus, less mobility, and being more susceptible to being disrupted by boss mechanics in general. The nerfs are well justified. Giving metanist toolbelt back when the mech is stowed could be justified sometime in the future, but only if the mech is nerfed even more than it would need to be if the lack of the toolbelt remained. 

While I agree with the general principle that no elite should be nerfed to the point where it's not worth playing, metanist is a long way from that. The fundamental problem right now is that metanist is so dominant that it makes other specialisations, including the aforementioned holosmith, not worth playing.

[anbujackson.9564]

Option 1 might be ok, if the deploy cooldown will increase. Otherwise you can just spam your toolbelt skills and deploy the golem again right after.

Option 2 is a nono and even more powercreep.

[Kuma.1503]

7 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

That's the thing. It IS the gimmick of ranger. Your opportunity cost is that you don't have necromancer shroud, attunements, kits (kits are the real gimmick of engineer, toolbelt is just a supporting mechanic), or any of the other gimmicks of other classes. Your opportunity cost is that the potential damage output of the ranger itself, outside of permamerged soulbeast builds (which are essentially the inverse of the metanist situation) is lower to account for the pet.

Now, compare to metanist? You lose the toolbelt, but you still have kits and you're still based on a profession who's personal damage output is balanced on the assumption that it's doing that DPS without a pet. If anything, it's given up LESS than ranger (the ranger just made the tradeoff at the profession selection screen rather than the traits screen), and yet the pet gets to be more powerful. I don't think that's fair. 

Now, ranger does have the pet swap so it's harder to deny it the pet altogether, but the mech is more durable than most pets (and those that even come close are on the lower end for DPS even by ranger pet standards) so that comparison comes out in the wash. You can complain about what you've given up, but the observed evidence is that metanist outperforms everything else, and specifically including other engineer elite specialisations (except quickness scrapper, and only because metanist can't do that) to such a degree that it's clear that metanist is getting far too much for what it gives up. Power holosmith, for instance, benches BELOW power metanist at the moment, while having a more complex rotation, a melee focus, less mobility, and being more susceptible to being disrupted by boss mechanics in general. The nerfs are well justified. Giving metanist toolbelt back when the mech is stowed could be justified sometime in the future, but only if the mech is nerfed even more than it would need to be if the lack of the toolbelt remained. 

While I agree with the general principle that no elite should be nerfed to the point where it's not worth playing, metanist is a long way from that. The fundamental problem right now is that metanist is so dominant that it makes other specialisations, including the aforementioned holosmith, not worth playing.

I agree with this to an extent, the logic around kits is flawed. 

Yes, our gimmick is kits, but we don't get these for free. This is balanced by the lack of weapon swap (something ranger has). We need to give up 1 utility slot to have what other professions get baseline. We also balance out the existance of kits by having the lowest amount of weapons in the game. Core engineer doesn't even have a proper power mainhand or offhand weapon. 

Power Holo has to run the atrocious off-hand pistol for maximum dps, and all it has is a condi skill and an immobilize. Many don't bother and just run shield instead. This is a major flaw in the proffession as a whole, and it's part of the reason why power builds have historically been so dependant on grenade kit. 

The kits themselves are also balanced around our toolbelts.  Big ol bomb lets us blast our bomb kit fields. Renewing mist solidifies Elixir gun as a good personal survivability kit because it gives us a stunbreak and an additional way to proc HGH. Incindiary ammo gives flamethrower better condi burst potential. Med kit's heal is literally it's toolbelt skill. 

In the end saying "you still have kits without toolbelt" doesn't tell the full story because the engineer has already made sacrifices at the character select screen to gain those kits. 

 

You're also missing the other half of the puzzle. The mechanist traitline itself. This traitline gives 90% of it's power to the mech. In order to bring the bot down to ranger pet level, a pure DPS mech would have to select traits that deal virtually zero damage each. Essentially, smiter's booning the entire traitline. We are making two large trade-offs to get a powerful bot. 

The numbers are too high currently, but that will be fixed come October. Depending on how much they're nerfed again in November, that will add space to give power back in ways that increase their mechanical complexity. My suggestion was to add toolbelt. 

[draxynnic.3719]

33 minutes ago, Kuma.1503 said:

I agree with this to an extent, the logic around kits is flawed. 

Yes, our gimmick is kits, but we don't get these for free. This is balanced by the lack of weapon swap (something ranger has). We need to give up 1 utility slot to have what other professions get baseline. We also balance out the existance of kits by having the lowest amount of weapons in the game. Core engineer doesn't even have a proper power mainhand or offhand weapon. 

Power Holo has to run the atrocious off-hand pistol for maximum dps, and all it has is a condi skill and an immobilize. Many don't bother and just run shield instead. This is a major flaw in the proffession as a whole, and it's part of the reason why power builds have historically been so dependant on grenade kit. 

The kits themselves are also balanced around our toolbelts.  Big ol bomb lets us blast our bomb kit fields. Renewing mist solidifies Elixir gun as a good personal survivability kit because it gives us a stunbreak and an additional way to proc HGH. Incindiary ammo gives flamethrower better condi burst potential. Med kit's heal is literally it's toolbelt skill. 

In the end saying "you still have kits without toolbelt" doesn't tell the full story because the engineer has already made sacrifices at the character select screen to gain those kits. 

I largely agree, but the point still remains that what is given up, even relative to scrapper and holosmith, clearly isn't matching what you've been getting in return. That's an observation that might need to be recalibrated after the next patch, but I don't think there's a reasonable argument against it at the moment. And if toolbelt is returned, that only shifts it even more in mechanist's favour, which will require shifting other things to the favour of the other specialisations if they're to compete. Essentially, the mech skills are the toolbelt.

(I'd also note that generally speaking, kit toolbelts are the weaker toolbelt skills because that's part of how other utilities are balanced against kits. Which is why the signets are more powerful than signets of other professions - something I actually approve of. It'd probably be fairer to say that engineer's main gimmick is having stronger utilities than other professions, and kits are part of that.)

The main thing I was objecting to here is the idea that mechanist deserves a strong pet and ranger doesn't. Ranger's entire identity is built around being the pet class. Druid and soulbeast downplay this a little, but it's still there, and soulbeast merging requires a bit of adjustment to keep a lot of ranger traits working (and even then, there's at least one or two that don't, but at least they're not minor traits). A lot of focus has been placed on what is given up to have the mech, but that does seem to be that it's an easier comparison to make than comparing ranger to every other profession in the game. However, ranger has still been balanced from the beginning to be a little bit weaker personally in order to offset the pet.

And I'm not saying this as a salty ranger main, because I'm not a ranger main to begin with.  

33 minutes ago, Kuma.1503 said:

 

You're also missing the other half of the puzzle. The mechanist traitline itself. This traitline gives 90% of it's power to the mech. In order to bring the bot down to ranger pet level, a pure DPS mech would have to select traits that deal virtually zero damage each. Essentially, smiter's booning the entire traitline. We are making two large trade-offs to get a powerful bot.

Okay, let's examine this in the context of my argument:

Mechanist gets to spend a traitline to get a really strong pet. Okay, sure. At the moment, the pet seems to be stronger than most other elite specialisations, but that's probably going to change, and it probably goes without saying that whatever comes out in the end should be something that's still worth spending an elite specialisation on.

But if we're allowing for mechanist to have a strong pet, why shouldn't rangers also have the opportunity to supercharge their pet to a similar degree by making a similar investment? Whether in the form of an entire traitline, or by choosing major traits that significantly boost the pet? (And that's without going into how many of the pets just aren't worth taking at the moment. There are always going to be some that are regarded as the best, but there are entire families that are just sad.)

33 minutes ago, Kuma.1503 said:

The numbers are too high currently, but that will be fixed come October. Depending on how much they're nerfed again in November, that will add space to give power back in ways that increase their mechanical complexity. My suggestion was to add toolbelt. 

If we get to a point where mechanist is looking a bit weak and needs the help, than sure. I think I've commented somewhere, probably in this thread, that having the toolbelt when the mech is absent could make for better design overall (especially if they can't make the mech function underwater, although they really SHOULD). I think having both bars at once would be overly cumbersome, though, and the priority really should be bringing it into line. 

Edited September 21, 2022 by draxynnic.3719

[Lynx.9058]

19 hours ago, Endaris.1452 said:

I like the idea of returning toolbelt access because it brings it back to the roots of engineer.

Removing toolbelt skills strongly shoehorns mechanist into kits and signets due to other utilities getting a significant portion of their power removed with their toolbelts gone and engineer was never balanced around toolbelt removal, meaning that various engineer skills make exactly 0 sense with mechanist. This results in the espec being very shallow and giving it one of, if not THE lowest identification/synergy with its core spec.

That being said, I strongly disagree with the way you want to design that. It would simply be atrocious for competitive modes if engineer gets no other tradeoffs for the current mechs power.

If you wanted the mech to be a toolbelt transform you would need to give it innately lower uptime so that summoning the mech would be more akin to a powerup mode like photon forge. I'd be thinking along the lines of something like a legend swap where your toolbelt gets replaced by a full set of mech skills (F1 as ground targeted "go here", F2-F5 filled with the skills, including rocket punch), your utilities get replaced by full signets (or a different skill type revolving around empowering the mech for the moment, like copying your boons over) and you have some resource to spend with each signet having a resource cost + long cd so that you cannot use all of them and not use the same ones every single time unless you actually wait between your power plays. Mech then blows up in an AoE upon elite use and/or full resources spending, ending the tag team mode. F2-F5 skills should be aimable as ground-targetted AoEs where available. That way you could combo mech skills with weapon skills for pretty dope effects in (open world) PvE but you would have pronounced weaknesses in either mode. In that context, signets should naturally get removed and traits would have to get reworked as well, working on stuff like cooldown reduction for resummon on killing mobs, getting a stacking damage bonus for striking the same target as your mech to really make it feel impactful, etc.

Effectively making it a golem you spend a good deal of effort to control while it's up, introducing actual tag team mechanics and giving it more golemlike functionality, making it possible to use it for a long time in one stretch of time like now if not using active utility actives to spend resources and enabling player to enjoy a passive mech centered experience if that is what they want.

No thank you, I didn't sign up for a temporary pet.

Mechanist is supposed to be about the mech.  The mech is supposed to be powerful.  It's a stark contrast to how ranger or necromancer work, where the pets are there as support for the player and the player does most of the work; with mechanist, the mechanist is the support and the golem is the focus.  That's what makes it unique, and it's fitting thematically.

The people upset about the current balance don't honestly care about mechanist, they'd put it in the trash can altogether if it meant bringing back their precious piano gameplay so they can flaunt their benchmarks like some kind of egotistical badge of honor.  Well, tell ya what, I don't give a kitten about their benchmarks or their ego or their piano gameplay.

[Ashen.2907]

17 hours ago, Alcatraznc.3869 said:

You want Mechanist to be like Ranger pet ? Fine by me, but just like Ranger pet, allow the Mech to be used even when the player is not using the Mechanist trait. If you think what I'm asking is totally stupid then you should realize that your demand is as stupid as mine. 

Mech is not a core class feature that the rest of the class is balanced around.

What demands? 

[pallas.8150]

Risk v Reward.

 

There really is no risk for playing a Mech as opposed to... well, almost really any other class.

 

Why are we even having this conoversation?

[Serephen.3420]

How about quick catas trade off which pretty much gutted it. I haven't seen a quick cata in months, heck cata in general is so rare now as well as ele in general 😕

[soul.9651]

10 hours ago, Lynx.9058 said:

The people upset about the current balance don't honestly care about mechanist, they'd put it in the trash can altogether if it meant bringing back their precious piano gameplay so they can flaunt their benchmarks like some kind of egotistical badge of honor.  Well, tell ya what, I don't give a kitten about their benchmarks or their ego or their piano gameplay.

Or you could look from the other perspective how mech players dont care about the rest of the specs existing as long as their mech is at the top. How people are forced to play mech even if they dont want to, how about that part? So whos ego is bigger at the end of the day?

[TexZero.7910]

2 hours ago, soul.9651 said:

Or you could look from the other perspective how mech players dont care about the rest of the specs existing as long as their mech is at the top. How people are forced to play mech even if they dont want to, how about that part? So whos ego is bigger at the end of the day?

Yeah. Not seen that happen.

Most mechanist players i know are pretty adamant about other specs needing to be buffed because most of them are in pretty awful states. That includes those that are already strong but take having a PHD in spidermonkey to effectively use in a real non-golem scenario.

 

But keep on witht hat nonsense about how mech players don't care about balance when engineer outside of Mechanist is a joke on the current benchmarks.

[Kuma.1503]

9 hours ago, soul.9651 said:

Or you could look from the other perspective how mech players dont care about the rest of the specs existing as long as their mech is at the top. How people are forced to play mech even if they dont want to, how about that part? So whos ego is bigger at the end of the day?

Generalizations get us nowhere. 

I could easily turn this around and say non-mech players don't care about whether Mech is playable or garbage so long as their preferred spec can beat it in DPS. 

In fact, there are no shortage of people who want mech to be unplayable, either because of AI, ego, jealously, or because a mech killed them in PvP that one time. 

Edited September 22, 2022 by Kuma.1503