Nerfing the Power Mechanist? Here's A Practical Reason Not Too.

[Chichimec.9364]

Quote

The goal of previewing these changes is to hear your feedback on these changes before they're released. We'll be following the conversation and making adjustments to our plans as needed.

Thanks,

Cal "cmc" Cohen
Skills and Balance Team Lead

I hope you are following the conversations about the coming balance patches, @doubletap.7238 because this comment is aimed at you and the other Anet game designers. Yesterday I ran through the beginning of LW S1E4 on a LI Rev and then ran it again on a Power Mechanist. The difference was startling and eye opening for me. As an old guy with a number of health issues that leave my physical and mental response times sluggishly slow, I learned early on to use LI builds if I wanted to keep an alt alive outside of core Tyria. So I started the latest story episode with the LI Rev who has been my main for years. In the opening battle, where you have to fight your way through trash mob after trash mob to get to the Nightmare Tower, my LI Rev was doing 2k - 3k dps. That fight was a long, tedious slugfest that seemed to go on forever. It was so tedious that I almost gave up on the story at that point. Then a thought occurred to me and I immediately redid that first chapter on my Power Mech. This time I was doing 8k - 20k and I cleared the way to the Tower in a fraction of the time it took with my LI Rev. That fight was not a long, tedious, seemingly endless battle. It was a crisp, hard fought, and engaging battle.

The difference between the LI Rev build  I normally play and the Power Mech build I've been playing since EoD dropped actually shocked me. I had no idea how bad the damage was on the LI builds until I got a Power Mech and started using ArcDps to monitor the results. Up until now, I often thought the GW2 stories were long, tedious, and boring. I hadn't realized that was because I had to use LI builds that took forever to fight the various battles. The Power Mech was a game changer for me and it enables me to do things I wouldn't have been able to before. My poor LI Rev probably wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes inside of the Nightmare Tower itself and I would have probably rage quit the story fairly quickly. With the Power Mech, I was able to solo my way through the Nightmare Tower, taking down the minor bosses along the way and the main boss at the end. It wasn't easy. The battles were hard fought, but with my Power Mech, I was able to do them.

I'm not the only player who loves the Power Mech and how it's changed the game for me. Are players like me worth keeping in the game though? @doubletap.7238@Josh Davis.7865 @Rubi Bayer.8493 that's a question for folks like you to decide. Let me just say that I have 1 main account and 4 alt accounts, including one on Steam. Figuring in only my main account, GW2 Efficiency ranks me in the low 6,000s. That's higher than 98% of the other accounts on their site. So when you are deciding whether players like me are worth keeping around, please look at the stats for my five accounts. At the amount of time I play this game every day. At the amount of rl money I've spent on these 5 accounts.

An aside to my fellow players - I know there are strong feelings for and against mechanists. However, this post is not aimed at discussing the pros and cons with other players. It is aimed directly at the game designers who say they are following the balance discussions here. So I'm not going to argue with, or even respond to, other players in this thread. That's not my purpose in posting this.

Edited September 19, 2022 by Chichimec.9364

[samsar.9152]

Power mechanist is lovely. It got me to play engineer again. :) I really hope they don't kill that elite specialization. 

[Mell.4873]

I think if they dropped the DPS by about 30% which would bring it inline with most other Classes. I think the simple fact the a Low Intensity Build can out DPS most top DPS builds in PvE (Open World) is very annoying.

People will say other Classes "can" out DPS them but its not the same when Mechanist has almost no rotation.

Edited September 20, 2022 by Mell.4873

[McWelp.1723]

Ive been playing mech more and more recently because the class is highly tolerant on lag (Im forced to use crappy mobile internet, so i've been having severe network issues).

 

Not playing the cookie cutter power mech. I play full turret support oriented Mech that tries to maximize survivability as much as it can. Something like this atm: [&DQMvJSY/Rj8oAQ0bjgEjAaMAowAiAY4BiQGJAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=]

 

Grouping it with my wifes heal druid and its just great for laggy environments. Hopefully they dont completely kill the class on this current whining meta.

[Shinja.3451]

All good, until you turn things around and end up with the game practically ripping you off and punishing you for playing x things and this is also directed at the developers and everyone who reads this, it's unacceptable that the balance is so bad right now that you feel that they punish you for playing with what you want and for example with the mech they leave you a walk, if anet tried to make "difficult" content she had to have thought before doing such stupidity (that leaving aside the pvp modes ), which makes clear a degree of incompetence, total disinterest and carelessness above all to its users, as I mention the post, I leave the rev and take the easiest, something that moreover is for expansion and you're screwed if you don't have said profession created, the treatment received by anet regarding professions and their users is not at all fair, that if you are unlucky and you like the worst profession, the game "punishes" you for it. (if there are very strong and aggressive words, but there is no other way to say it, my apologies)

[Lynx.9058]

I'm in much the same boat and I agree.  I'm tired of being forced into carpal tunnel and sore fingers just to make it by basic content.  Mechanist has been great for me from the start but since coming back from a break I'm absolutely loving the new rifle build for it.

 

I don't care about the meta, or benchmarks, or the elitist snobs who want everyone's gameplay to be based on their 1%.  I care about the other 99% of people enjoying the game.

[Mell.4873]

39 minutes ago, Lynx.9058 said:

I'm in much the same boat and I agree.  I'm tired of being forced into carpal tunnel and sore fingers just to make it by basic content.  Mechanist has been great for me from the start but since coming back from a break I'm absolutely loving the new rifle build for it.

 

I don't care about the meta, or benchmarks, or the elitist snobs who want everyone's gameplay to be based on their 1%.  I care about the other 99% of people enjoying the game.

I don't think that will change, again the main nerf especially after the following patch is to significantly lower the DPS of the Low Intensity side. It doesn't mean you can't play it especially when you are basicly be immune to damage (great pet + ranged weapon).

The reason Ranger can't replicate the result is due to the lack of good ranged options (one power weapon) and the pet has almost no health. 

Edited September 20, 2022 by Mell.4873

[Kal Durak.2830]

6 hours ago, Chichimec.9364 said:

Power Mech

Power Mech or Celestial Condi Mech... Which is what ANET delivers to you upon the lev 80 boost.  Then nerfed it recently...... 

[Kal Durak.2830]

6 hours ago, Chichimec.9364 said:

In the opening battle, where you have to fight your way through trash mob after trash mob to get to the Nightmare Tower, my LI Rev was doing 2k - 3k dps. That fight was a long, tedious slugfest that seemed to go on forever. It was so tedious that I almost gave up on the story at that point. Then a thought occurred to me and I immediately redid that first chapter on my Power Mech. This time I was doing 8k - 20k and I cleared the way to the Tower in a fraction of the time it took with my LI Rev.

2k-3k DPS per minute? Per Sec?  BTW I did the quest on my Power mech Power, Prec, Fer, Mech and it took longer than what I think and guess you are stating.

[Kal Durak.2830]

6 hours ago, Chichimec.9364 said:

Power Mech build I've been playing since EoD dropped actually shocked me.

I don't think it's a power mech again....

[soul.9651]

Dont exaggerate, even after nerfs if you are not a min maxer your mech for you will feel the same.

Dont worrie they are not deleting your pmech from the game, the Li build will still exist and will still be efficient for the content you do

[Antycypator.9874]

Only one small change to make Mech more interesting, but not a braindead feature:

> High damage output, but lower toughness and health pool (you draw agro)

> High toughness and health, but low damage (mech draw agro)

> Support.

 

What is the point of learning or even TRYING, if you see 6 mechs in your squad spamming 1 button, doing much better job than you? LI build should be purely for survival — cut some of your damage for more self-sustain.

Mech is basicaly: a TANK (almost unkillable), and DAMAGE DEALER in one. And you have a powerful ranged weapon (rifle).

Rifle burst grenade should be deleted or moved somewhere else — because it really sucks to gain benefits from whole Explosive traits WITHOUT USING GRENADES OR BOMBS in such an easy way.

[samsar.9152]

7 hours ago, soul.9651 said:

Dont exaggerate, even after nerfs if you are not a min maxer your mech for you will feel the same.

Dont worrie they are not deleting your pmech from the game, the Li build will still exist and will still be efficient for the content you do

As long as power rifle mechanist stays as easy to play and good dps (20k+ dps) in instanced group content and fractals, I don't care what they do. 

[soul.9651]

15 minutes ago, samsar.9152 said:

As long as power rifle mechanist stays as easy to play and good dps (20k+ dps) in instanced group content and fractals, I don't care what they do. 

It will. For them to make pmech absolutly irrelevant it should be 10k+ nerf from the current benchmark, meanwhile rn all they did was toned it down to 34-35k which is where ton of other power specs are anyway rn.. tbh its likely they will nerf it more or at least will keep their eyes on pmech how it will perform.

[Obtena.7952]

Anet is on to something with LI builds and mechanist here. It would be a shame for them to ignore it to adhere to some people's ideas of how an MMO should work. 

Edited September 20, 2022 by Obtena.7952

[AliamRationem.5172]

15 hours ago, Chichimec.9364 said:

I hope you are following the conversations about the coming balance patches, @doubletap.7238 because this comment is aimed at you and the other Anet game designers. Yesterday I ran through the beginning of LW S1E4 on a LI Rev and then ran it again on a Power Mechanist. The difference was startling and eye opening for me. As an old guy with a number of health issues that leave my physical and mental response times sluggishly slow, I learned early on to use LI builds if I wanted to keep an alt alive outside of core Tyria. So I started the latest story episode with the LI Rev who has been my main for years. In the opening battle, where you have to fight your way through trash mob after trash mob to get to the Nightmare Tower, my LI Rev was doing 2k - 3k dps. That fight was a long, tedious slugfest that seemed to go on forever. It was so tedious that I almost gave up on the story at that point. Then a thought occurred to me and I immediately redid that first chapter on my Power Mech. This time I was doing 8k - 20k and I cleared the way to the Tower in a fraction of the time it took with my LI Rev. That fight was not a long, tedious, seemingly endless battle. It was a crisp, hard fought, and engaging battle.

The difference between the LI Rev build  I normally play and the Power Mech build I've been playing since EoD dropped actually shocked me. I had no idea how bad the damage was on the LI builds until I got a Power Mech and started using ArcDps to monitor the results. Up until now, I often thought the GW2 stories were long, tedious, and boring. I hadn't realized that was because I had to use LI builds that took forever to fight the various battles. The Power Mech was a game changer for me and it enables me to do things I wouldn't have been able to before. My poor LI Rev probably wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes inside of the Nightmare Tower itself and I would have probably rage quit the story fairly quickly. With the Power Mech, I was able to solo my way through the Nightmare Tower, taking down the minor bosses along the way and the main boss at the end. It wasn't easy. The battles were hard fought, but with my Power Mech, I was able to do them.

I'm not the only player who loves the Power Mech and how it's changed the game for me. Are players like me worth keeping in the game though? @doubletap.7238@Josh Davis.7865 @Rubi Bayer.8493 that's a question for folks like you to decide. Let me just say that I have 1 main account and 4 alt accounts, including one on Steam. Figuring in only my main account, GW2 Efficiency ranks me in the low 6,000s. That's higher than 98% of the other accounts on their site. So when you are deciding whether players like me are worth keeping around, please look at the stats for my five accounts. At the amount of time I play this game every day. At the amount of rl money I've spent on these 5 accounts.

An aside to my fellow players - I know there are strong feelings for and against mechanists. However, this post is not aimed at discussing the pros and cons with other players. It is aimed directly at the game designers who say they are following the balance discussions here. So I'm not going to argue with, or even respond to, other players in this thread. That's not my purpose in posting this.

Sounds like a great reason to nerf it, actually.  It's clearly overtuned.  But the good news is, if you're doing 3-6x the damage of your other builds with mech, shaving <10% off the top isn't going to slow your roll much.

[draxynnic.3719]

It's a reasonable question. The problem is that metanist has been outperforming pretty much everything else in practice. The nerfs being applied to it probably aren't going to impact it too much in other content, but it'd make it a bit less dominant in instanced content.

An appropriate response for both groups is to nerf power metanist a little, and if practical to buff other LI builds to be able to achieve similar performance so that alternatives exist for the LI crowd.

[anbujackson.9564]

I am going to be brutally honest here. A game shouldnt be balanced around the "low performing" population, neither after the high performing. And I am getting really tired to see this argument. 

Mech gameplay is unchanged. Your dps will fall, thats it. If you think thats doomsday, then the problem is with you. You can still autoattack and walk around while the game plays itself. And trust me, I saw many people playing exactly like that (and yet they still cant dodge roll an AoE at least once).

If your health cant keep up, then you might want to play something else which is less "demanding". And gw2 open world (which is what you do mostly probably) isnt demanding at all.

And adressing the devs with your "Are we not worth it?" mentality isnt convincing me either. "Hey, I played this game so much, apparently even before mech released. But if you nerf this now, I will never have fun again! Do you want me and others to quit the game so much?" Seriously, because of some lower numbers? 

What exactly did you do before mech released? Just played but didnt have fun? That I cant imagine. 

But using arcdps numbers to defend mech is quite surprising for a casual player really. 

 

Edited September 20, 2022 by anbujackson.9564

[SentriX.3209]

2 hours ago, anbujackson.9564 said:

I am going to be brutally honest here. A game shouldnt be balanced around the "low performing" population, neither after the high performing. And I am getting really tired to see this argument. 

Mech gameplay is unchanged. Your dps will fall, thats it. If you think thats doomsday, then the problem is with you. You can still autoattack and walk around while the game plays itself. And trust me, I saw many people playing exactly like that (and yet they still cant dodge roll an AoE at least once).

If your health cant keep up, then you might want to play something else which is less "demanding". And gw2 open world (which is what you do mostly probably) isnt demanding at all.

And adressing the devs with your "Are we not worth it?" mentality isnt convincing me either. "Hey, I played this game so much, apparently even before mech released. But if you nerf this now, I will never have fun again! Do you want me and others to quit the game so much?" Seriously, because of some lower numbers? 

What exactly did you do before mech released? Just played but didnt have fun? That I cant imagine. 

But using arcdps numbers to defend mech is quite surprising for a casual player really. 

 

 

I gotta agree. Most people won't even feel the difference unless they're using ArcDps. It will still do amazing damage while being fully ranged and simple to play, not to mention having a stacked kit.

[Tails.9372]

15 hours ago, Mell.4873 said:

the main nerf especially after the following patch is to significantly lower the DPS of the Low Intensity side

No, the "main nerf" is to "passive damage" and nothing more. If they really wanted to predominantly hit the performance of the so called "AFK gameplay" then the AA should have been their target as that's where the actual difference in performance between the "AFK" and "actually hitting your other buttons" comes from but ofc. the outrage mob doesn't (nor cares to) understand how things actually relate to each other which is why no one was asking for it and since the nerf itself seems to be nothing more than "A-Net responding to outrage" this is what we are going to get.

If this was really about "toning down the performance of the more "passive gameplay" in favor of more active gameplay" then e.g. "the ferocity removal + a nerf to the rifle AA" would have been a more effective approach as this would lower the performance of the e-spec in a way that actually hits "passive gameplay" more.

Edited September 20, 2022 by Tails.9372

[A Hamster.2580]

The thing with balancing the game around the elderly and the disabled is that most of the player base will just gravitate towards whatever was meant for the elderly and the disabled. The afk rifle mechanist class is like the handicapped spot. Everyone will park in that spot because it is closer, more convenient, and there are no consequences for doing so unlike in real life. We all saw it happening for the past few months.

 

The other option would be to buff all the other classes instead of nerfing the mechanist, but that would just be a huge power creep across all content. The game being too easy will mean less player retention which I assume would be very bad for an MMO. If they even make the game too easy for even just a few months, everyone will use that opportunity to clear all the hardest content like raids and strike cms. By the time Anet tries to fix it, it would be too late. Those players will go to a different MMO where there is a goal to work towards.

 

My personal example is I used the afk rifle mechanist build to spam 111 my way to the completion of the legendary backpack Ad Infinitum from scratch. All the strike cm's were super easy for me and I even solo some of the easier fractals to complete part of the collection.

Edited September 21, 2022 by A Hamster.2580

[samsar.9152]

21 hours ago, anbujackson.9564 said:

I am going to be brutally honest here. A game shouldnt be balanced around the "low performing" population, neither after the high performing. And I am getting really tired to see this argument. 

Mech gameplay is unchanged. Your dps will fall, thats it. If you think thats doomsday, then the problem is with you. You can still autoattack and walk around while the game plays itself. And trust me, I saw many people playing exactly like that (and yet they still cant dodge roll an AoE at least once).

If your health cant keep up, then you might want to play something else which is less "demanding". And gw2 open world (which is what you do mostly probably) isnt demanding at all.

And adressing the devs with your "Are we not worth it?" mentality isnt convincing me either. "Hey, I played this game so much, apparently even before mech released. But if you nerf this now, I will never have fun again! Do you want me and others to quit the game so much?" Seriously, because of some lower numbers? 

What exactly did you do before mech released? Just played but didnt have fun? That I cant imagine. 

But using arcdps numbers to defend mech is quite surprising for a casual player really. 

 

What did I before EoD? Yes, was fun in openworld, but I had to use power reaper with the 20k dps to do raids, fractals and strike missions. I was also unable to do cm fractals, cm strike missions and cm raid bosses. It was not fun because I'm really not able to pull more than 19-20k dps to the golem and all were saying how bad reaper is in dps. Now that I have power mechanist I can at last say I can be good in somewhere and do decent amount of dps easily. No need to get carried with others dps.  I'm really not into to play "piano play" rotation builds. 

[Lynx.9058]

On 9/20/2022 at 9:07 AM, draxynnic.3719 said:

It's a reasonable question. The problem is that metanist has been outperforming pretty much everything else in practice. The nerfs being applied to it probably aren't going to impact it too much in other content, but it'd make it a bit less dominant in instanced content.

An appropriate response for both groups is to nerf power metanist a little, and if practical to buff other LI builds to be able to achieve similar performance so that alternatives exist for the LI crowd.

 

Maybe if you'd stop incessantly calling it "metanist" you wouldn't look like such a salty troll.

[ArjukKagrim.6049]

Even after this nerf power-mechanist remains really strong and overtuned in several ways (range, CC, blink without any drawbacks) and great for all content. Hopefully it is not too oppressive anymore that people playing other builds actually feel valuable againand do not ask themselves "why do I even play weaver when everything I can do is worse then what that mech-player can do".

[Kuma.1503]

I think it will survive the October 4th nerf and be in a healthy spot, but I am concerned that they will overcorrect come November.

If a pure dps is nerfed too much they become irrelevant in group content, and if they nerf the bot too much it will start to feel pretty garbage to play even in OW content since we give up so much for it.