Should Anet address the increasing amount of powercreep?

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

Making the game even harder for supports, especially full supports which are only 20% of the population in group content (and already hard to find compared to DPS), isn't the right answer. It may seem like an elegant solution to you, but not everyone enjoys playing DPS, and you shouldn't force it on them.

 

The last thing we need is to nerf boons and go back to the meta from game launch where there were an entirety of one (1) viable build for every class in the game. There's a very good reason this was left behind.

 

Supports simply won't be taken if they can't provide full boons. They're not taken for heals but for the boons, otherwise you would see classes like HealScourge and HealVindi taken in instanced content, and you don't. The only reason they're taken right now is that the boons they provide exceed the ~30% party DPS loss.

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

We are not at the point where we can address the powercreep. After the last big change with the balance-team, they have made a few drastic changes about balancing in general. Away from the tunnel-viewed focus on a few specs to feed the meta, towards the original design where every class & spec was viable.

The problem with this change is, that they basically have to undo/redo several years of class-design without messing up the balancing completely. That means they cannot just undo every past change and call it a day. A lot of specs have been weakened on purpose, some specs have been boosted beyond comprehension. Balancing the overpowered ones while boosting the weaker ones.

On the other hand, they have a certain idea about how combat-performance is general. In their concept, boon uptime is key and boon support plays a vital role in group-design. With a strong focus on offensive boons and good access to both Quickness and Alacrity.

Before they can start addressing the powercreep as a whole, they have to bring everybody to the same level of performance. This is where we are right now. Once all classes and specs meet a certain level of viability, they will take care of the powercreep imo. Doing it right now, would just overcomplicate the whole process.

There is also another positive side effect of the current powercreep development, the game is significantly easier. They really want to make instanced endgame group content a thing. Because it sells the game, attracts new players and binds them. With the old structures this was not possible. No matter how hard we tried, the community was just not capable of introducing new players into that content within an acceptable level. The requirements were astronomical and there was the bs with KPs that made it even harder to set foot into the content.

With the high powercreep, focus on LI builds and simplifying classes in general, this problem was addressed. Currently it is quite easy to get into instanced endgame group content. The community is quickly growing. Once all the professions are at a balanced state (regarding performance) and they start going for the powercreep-balancing, the community is hopefully big enough to survive.

[Cuks.8241]

I think the best solution is buffing selected bosses in raids and fracs where power creep hit the hardest. 

Also open world metas which might be even more important for overall appeal of the game. Dragon stand for example is suppose to be this epic, end of expansion fight. And it just gets killed in first burn phase. Matriarch gets burned in one exposed. 

[Antycypator.9874]

Just nerf Might and Vulnerability.

[anbujackson.9564]

One might say that its the increasing strength of (hybrid) supports. And thats true. Boon applications are getting easier, are more widespread and you do ridicoulus dps on top (remember how much dps a chrono+druid did?)

But I am going further: One thing I read a while ago was that dps was even more unbalanced in HoT and at the beginning of PoF (staff tempest and staff weaver). What those people apparently forgot was that those numbers depended on a lot of buffs. And by a lot I mean a lot. The meta mirror comp did exist for a reason. Just as a reminder: bufffood that increased your dps while moving (remember that?) Banners, ea/ap, spotter, grace of the lands and druid glyph, frost spirit and sun spirit and some minor other ones. 4-6 classes to buff the dps players. Also alacrity being hard to maintain for some people, back when it was not a boon.

So what does a dps nowadays need to reach 40+++k dps? Yep, just boons. Because everything else is now put into the class strength. In addition some of them are self sufficient or simply have a lot of utility (unlike ele back in the day). So yeah dps in general is powercrept A LOT. 

And when you add op support builds that do everything and extremely high dps that are only reliant on boons now while being way more versatile, then yeah... you get a very unbalanced game. Imo when they removed class specific buffs, they should have used that moment to keep the damage low and start working around that instead of listening to the crying players who want to kill everything in a few seconds. Its kind of lost now at this point.

Edited May 21, 2023 by anbujackson.9564

[the krytan assassin.9235]

I really dislike the free extra utility, boonsupport, self sustain, breakbar dmge, ease of use etc that the top performing builds usually come with. On top of that the old content definitely needs to get updated abit. Increase dmge/health on some of the bosses, create new cm's, make attacks actually hurt and disable mounts for some of the HoT meta events. Force ppl to do actual mechanics instead of target dummy practise. 

[Swagger.1459]

On 5/16/2023 at 8:42 PM, Jokuc.3478 said:

The last couple of years the damage for every build in the game has gone up significantly, the baseline of 30k for a dps class increased to 35k which later reached close to 40 and now we have many builds that do well over 40k dps. This makes encounters and mechanics in older content more trivial for every update, HoT story bosses and dungeon bosses die in a couple of hits and so called "challenge" mode fractal bosses such as Skorvald die so fast you won't even get to see all his mechanics even if the group performs horribly. 

I really wish anet would do something about this awful powercreep. I realize that it's not as easy as just nerfing the damage of everything in the game since newer content such as eod strikes are tuned for the current state of the game and anet would definitely not have the time to go back and tune all old content. But is there something that can be done about this? One of the main appeals gw2 has to people is that old content stay relevant because of the horizontal progression, but even though it stays relevant reward-wise, does it really stay relevant in terms of modern gameplay/fun?

People would probably get angry if their class was nerfed, even if every other class was nerfed with it but I say it's kind of necessary at this point, some numbers are getting ridiculous. Thoughts?

Nah. Anet doesn’t need to tee off the player base majority just to appease a few people.
 

Old content is still relevant. 

Move along to more productive suggestions. 

[Jobber.6348]

On 5/19/2023 at 9:43 AM, mandala.8507 said:

And maybe you could think of ways the devs could entirely reinvent the wheel to address these concerns, but at that point they're basically developing an entirely new gw2 combat system and burning down over 10 years of work that went into getting the system to where it is now.

...Which is why I think the "nerf boons" angle, while well-intentioned, is impractical and not as simple a remedy as people like to imagine it to be.

Alternatively, take a two pronged approach. While buffing old content, ensure there are mechanics that punish players who misplay by entirely stripping them of Boons. We already have encounters that strip or corrupt boons but if you make say, an old boss like Teq with a very avoidable wave attack strip boons, you will add more depth to an otherwise previously ignored mechanic. 

Another example: The look-away mechanic, domes or balls in Shattered Observatory. Maybe tweak mechanics to corrupt boons instead of high bursting targets. You will still punish and significantly hinder clears or even cause a wipe, but it won't be a "haha you restart the fight cos of 1 mistake" sort of deal. 

If you indirectly kill a team through an enrage due to their boons being stripped over and over and over, it will feel more fair and less harsh, so the players actually learn. I think this boss design philosophy can be applied many old bosses in the game. 

Edited May 22, 2023 by Yasai.3549

[mandala.8507]

1 hour ago, Yasai.3549 said:

Alternatively, take a two pronged approach. While buffing old content, ensure there are mechanics that punish players who misplay by entirely stripping them of Boons. We already have encounters that strip or corrupt boons but if you make say, an old boss like Teq with a very avoidable wave attack strip boons, you will add more depth to an otherwise previously ignored mechanic. 

Another example: The look-away mechanic, domes or balls in Shattered Observatory. Maybe tweak mechanics to corrupt boons instead of high bursting targets. You will still punish and significantly hinder clears or even cause a wipe, but it won't be a "haha you restart the fight cos of 1 mistake" sort of deal. 

If you indirectly kill a team through an enrage due to their boons being stripped over and over and over, it will feel more fair and less harsh, so the players actually learn. I think this boss design philosophy can be applied many old bosses in the game. 

This would just bottleneck build diversity on those fights for boon supports, since it would hard punish builds with slower ramp/long cd boon application while barely effecting builds that pulse out boons at regular intervals.

So things like banner warrior would be a liability on a boss that corrupts/strips boons because you'd be without quickness for 20+ seconds every time you got stripped, but it would barely even inconvenience something like a quick harb because they're pulsing quickness on such short intervals.

And from experience with the EoD hero points that sometimes spawn those boon corrupting elites, I can tell you I'm not even remotely a fan of enemies stripping and corrupting boons regularly in this game. There's no good counter for it and it's hilariously unfun imo.

[Serephen.3420]

On 5/19/2023 at 5:10 PM, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

Making the game even harder for supports, especially full supports which are only 20% of the population in group content (and already hard to find compared to DPS), isn't the right answer. It may seem like an elegant solution to you, but not everyone enjoys playing DPS, and you shouldn't force it on them.

 

The last thing we need is to nerf boons and go back to the meta from game launch where there were an entirety of one (1) viable build for every class in the game. There's a very good reason this was left behind.

 

Supports simply won't be taken if they can't provide full boons. They're not taken for heals but for the boons, otherwise you would see classes like HealScourge and HealVindi taken in instanced content, and you don't. The only reason they're taken right now is that the boons they provide exceed the ~30% party DPS loss.

Agreed, being too careless will lead us straight back to the mindless zerker dps COF p1 runs with little group play or responsibility and certainly no support roles.

As fun as it seemed through rose coloured glasses, the game has come a long way since then and while not perfect(always room for improvement)certainty for the overall better.

 

[LucianTheAngelic.7054]

On 5/18/2023 at 6:43 PM, mandala.8507 said:

Lots of people are making your same recommendation, so I'm just using your comment as a reference.

But there are a couple of things that makes nerfing boons a less satisfying fix than we might think:

1. Firstly, concentration is not capped for boon application currently, and so nerfing the uptime of boons would just shift the support builds into running higher concentration numbers. The boons would still be just as prevalent, but the supports would be having to make huge stat sacrifices to compensate for these nerfs. An example of a build that was like this for a long time was alacrity renegade. You needed a minimum of like 80% boon duration to provide permanent alacrity uptime, and so the dps output of the alac renegade builds was too low to be competitive. By nerfing boon uptimes, you just nerf the damage potential of support builds. The builds would just adjust to the new necessary concentration levels, and so all you really did was nerf the dps of boon supports by making them swap out some gear and maybe spec harder into general boon application traits that they hadn't needed before.
2. And this is a problem because, at some point, the tradeoff in dps for running a dedicated boon support over just running dps without the essential boons like quickness and alacrity starts to level out, and so we could end up right back where the game started with 5 dps players rampaging through the content in full berserker gear, providing boons where they can get away with it (and I know in raids and stuff it would more so look like a dedicated raw healer and the rest of the subgroup dps, but you get the idea).
3. On top of this, and perhaps most important to remember, is that intermittent alacrity and quickness uptime is very unsatisfying from a gameplay perspective. Having permanent uptime is essential for the standardization of buildcraft and rotations in the instanced content of gw2 currently. If taken away, the system falls apart and the knowledge required to truly understand how to play your build optimally skyrockets because boons are constantly fluctuating. This would make the game much harder than it is now to understand in terms of class mechanics and instanced content would have that much greater a barrier to entry.

And maybe you could think of ways the devs could entirely reinvent the wheel to address these concerns, but at that point they're basically developing an entirely new gw2 combat system and burning down over 10 years of work that went into getting the system to where it is now.

...Which is why I think the "nerf boons" angle, while well-intentioned, is impractical and not as simple a remedy as people like to imagine it to be.

This is absolutely the most reasonable approach. Boons are not the issue and stripping them away goes against everything Anet has done over the past 7 years since they introduced Chronomancer and "easy" quickness/alacrity. Moving everyone back to an unsatisfying gameplay loop with mostly slow casts and slower CD regen would be atrocious.

Personally as long as they leave 40kish the new maximum things will be fine. The issue is if they continue to increase it past that. The correct answer if they want to make things more difficult and force players to engage with certain skippable mechanics is simply to buff boss health as that has little impact on professions themselves

Edited May 23, 2023 by LucianTheAngelic.7054

[Xenesis.6389]

Welcome to the world of 100% quickness, alacrity, fury, might uptime on everyone.

Anet wanted to shove more players into 10 player content, raids and strikes.

In order to make this a smoother transition they needed to make sure even the potatoes were capable of doing enough damage for group invites.

Anet wanted to increase the base line of damage, so they used boon spam for it.

Even a WoW streamer came to gw2 raids recently and noticed the huge difference boons make for dps and how it allows you to skip mechanics cause you kill so much faster.

WvW already had it's damage nerf apocalypse done in feb 2020, but now dealing with hybrid cele boon spam builds.

PVE wanted more damage, you got more damage, can't complain about the after affects now. 🤷‍♂️

[Sobx.1758]

3 hours ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

PVE wanted more damage, you got more damage, can't complain about the after affects now. 🤷‍♂️

I doubt people asking for any buff "because why not" (yup, that's a direct quote) are the same people that were aware of the power creep and dislike it now 😉 

[Zhaid Zhem.6508]

Obviously damage got increased but it's also a lot, like a lot, easier to spam boons and upkeep them.

Just lower effects of boons ( like might granting +25 instead of 30, fury gets back to +20% or even lower).
And stop all the might/fury/quickness pulsar traits (besides big inegality between classes/e-specs). May be nerf "4 stats" sets like diviner... So actually support would have to gear for support, and not 75% berserker+scholar or 90% berserker+runes of pack.

Edited May 24, 2023 by Zhaid Zhem.6508