Let's discuss Quickness and Alacrity.

[voltaicbore.8012]

6 minutes ago, Greyrat.2378 said:

If the devs state that it feels bad to play without them, that should be indication that there is something wrong with your game and the way you design these encounters.
Making the boons almost mandatory to have is not the way to go tbh.

This is what is most disappointing - doubling down on those two boons is basically treating the symptom instead of the disease. "Man, I feel terrible without all these painkillers. Welp, let's just keep taking more painkillers, forever! No need to figure out what is actually causing the pain."

I believe the inclusion of quickness and alacrity in the game at all was a mistake. They are certainly very cool, but they are so fundamentally gameplay-changing that they were always destined to become the monsters they are today. In a way, I think the whole Fervent Force arc untamed is a miniaturized picture of the quick/alac story. Something so useful came to entirely dominate a PvE spec, so they had to get rid of it. Quick/alac are doing the same thing, just to the entirety instanced high-end PvE  and over a longer time frame.

[Flapjackson.1596]

22 minutes ago, voltaicbore.8012 said:

This is what is most disappointing - doubling down on those two boons is basically treating the symptom instead of the disease. "Man, I feel terrible without all these painkillers. Welp, let's just keep taking more painkillers, forever! No need to figure out what is actually causing the pain."

I believe the inclusion of quickness and alacrity in the game at all was a mistake. They are certainly very cool, but they are so fundamentally gameplay-changing that they were always destined to become the monsters they are today. In a way, I think the whole Fervent Force arc untamed is a miniaturized picture of the quick/alac story. Something so useful came to entirely dominate a PvE spec, so they had to get rid of it. Quick/alac are doing the same thing, just to the entirety instanced high-end PvE  and over a longer time frame.

This is what I see every time I see the devs discuss the need to make boons less obtrusive and less rigid. We continuously dance around the elephant in the room as they make boons less and less of an active presence you have to think about. 
 

Maybe the devs should answer the question: why do we do so much to make this system as unobtrusive as possible instead of ask ourselves is the system really worth the effort? If we keep making boons more foolproof then are we really working towards anything meaningful? Would the game not be better off without them?

[Nothing.8564]

Both Quickness and Alacrity are 100% bad game design when they can reach permanent uptime.

Fundamentally it is bad to change the tempo that players are playing under, this will never change.

To highlight this principle take an extreme such as Sword Weaver DPS. Attack speed AND cooldown reduction significantly alter the speed in which you the player have to perform under, AND the rhythm of your cooldowns which you have keep mental tabs on. The nature in which you're playing the game shifts dramatically under these two boons, which causes a huge problem for actually enjoying the game as a Weaver as now you're experience is split into two experiences: One with these boons, and one without. As weaver cannot provide either of these boons on their own, playing solo will now feel 'slow and sluggish'. This is fundamentally a bad experience to give players.

To those that remember quickness before it was a boon, its role was to execute a quick 'long cast' ability such as 100 blades, heartseeker spam, pistol whip, ranger longbow 2, ect ect. This felt great and rewarding as your access to Quickness was severely limited but you could make an attack which already felt great, feel even more satisfying. This doesn't adjust a players tempo but instead offered a high intensity burst that was short lived. This was when Quickness was a great game mechanic.

Alacrity is just bad design with no room for a balanced spot. Why? Circling back to the tempo aspect of game design, how are you going to balance a blanket cooldown reduction that doesn't dramatically shift the rhythm of your gameplay? Its going to feel great when you have it and awful when you dont, and as a player you'll have to become accustomed to these two modes of gameplay.

On a side note, I'm actually surprised to see so many voices of reason on the forums regarding these two boons being problematic, it gives me hope that a change might happen.

[Cuks.8241]

There is nothing positive these 2 boons bring to the game. Only a long list of bads and headaches for all.

If they want the combat to be more fluid this is fine, I agree, but boons are not the way to do it.  

[TheJmandude.1548]

2 hours ago, Yasai.3549 said:

Boons in this game is honestly bad for balance but that's not the point of this entire thread, it's the fact that Anet is choosing to flip the table just so that Profession can provided either one of the key boons.

That's a balance philosophy which no one understands which leads me to ask: should we just remove these two stupid boons/make them baseline because it's obvious the dev team has reached a conclusion that this is the only way that they can ensure that every Profession has an opportunity. There's so many ways to achieve profession play-rate balance in content but they chose the one path which will destroy so many unique builds and playstyles. All because of 2 stupid boons. 

Don't even get me started on the LAYERS of problems that homogenizing every Profession to be able to Quick/Alac bring. People will start cherry picking which classes has better uptime, better DPS, better this better that. This is a problem that will never end if the balance philosophy does not change. Same as how they had to utterly gut Chrono to de-meta it, this will be the future of Gw2 class balance. 

This is why I'm terrified the game will go the FFXIV route where all the jobs are different flavors of the same exact thing (mainly healers). It's clear as day these boons are not healthy for the game and they need to be removed ASAP so that the classes can shine in different ways.

[Vidit.7108]

If it was 2015 or 2016 I would have agreed with removing quick/alac from the game. The developers have gone the opposite direction though, we only have the game as it exists today. They aren't making new raids so I have to assume this also means they don't have the resources to essentially rebalance all of the existing encounters around removing quick/alac. They're struggling to balance the game because they have three people doing it now versus the entire encounter team from before. It also didn't help that they basically stopped balancing PvE for two years.
Going forward the better solution would be to design new elite specs that are designed to use quick or alac and not force them onto builds designed years and years ago without them. Not that I think that's going to happen since they're apparently doing yearly expacs now with no new especs. I don't think new/reworked runes is going to be a great solution either, it's once again another thing they don't seem to have the resources to do anymore. I don't think a quick fix is possible for undoing the last 7 or so years of game design. Just look at skill recharge traits, it seems like straightforward change that is taking them over a year to actually do.
I think what would be better with the game we have is if they did each of these classes one or two at a time and told us their big ideas for the future of the specs before they've committed to doing them. It's pretty clear based on the pattern since this team took over that our feedback on gameplay will be mostly ignored and we're only going to see #s changes. 

[Acheron.1580]

27 minutes ago, Vidit.7108 said:

If it was 2015 or 2016 I would have agreed with removing quick/alac from the game.

You mean, when Alacrity was first introduced?

[Helgaley.3619]

Honestly, I want them both removed. They aren't healthy for the game, the new support builds they're adding specifically to provide one or the other don't feel good to play, and if it doesn't feel good to play, obviously nobody is going to play it. 

Too many professions already have horrible playability, and trying to incorporate quickness and alacrity into every profession is just compounding on that problem. Like the upcoming alacrity change for bladesworn honestly sounds awful, and I don't even play warrior... 

[Batalix.2873]

Lol I was saying this over a year ago when there was still a chance to pull back from them.

It's too late. Alac is our soft-heal role, and Quick is our soft-tank role, with a few exceptions. And overall I think it is a reasonable direction to take things, even if I have many criticisms about the details of how they were implemented in this patch.

At this point, removing alac/quick would actually be worse for the game because there is so little else defining especs outside of boon support. Ever since the game pivoted away from Druidy espec design and leaned harder into "do everything DPS go" Firebrand design, all of the EoD especs are DPS+ design. Taking away a huge chunk of the "+" after the game has (a) leaned heavily on alac/quick as a defining feature of support without (b) adding additonal facets of support will just leave us with 27 ways to hit things.

I know the game is approaching convergence on FFXIV roles, but at this point removing boons would actually progress the game even faster to FFXIV, a game which systematically already removed so many things akin to alac/quickness from that game like elemental typing, random procs, DoT abilities, healer DPS abilities, and even crit chances.

Edited June 12, 2023 by Batalix.2873

[Acheron.1580]

7 hours ago, Batalix.2873 said:

Lol I was saying this over a year ago when there was still a chance to pull back from them.

It's too late. Alac is our soft-heal role, and Quick is our soft-tank role, with a few exceptions. And overall I think it is a reasonable direction to take things, even if I have many criticisms about the details of how they were implemented in this patch.

At this point, removing alac/quick would actually be worse for the game because there is so little else defining especs outside of support. Ever since the game pivoted away from Druidy espec design and leaned harder into "do everything DPS go" Firebrand design, all of the EoD especs are DPS+ design. Taking away a huge chunk of the "+" will just leave us with 27 ways to hit things.

I know the game is approaching convergence on FFXIV roles, but at this point removing boons would actually progress the game even faster to FFXIV, a game which systematically already removed so many things akin to alac/quickness from that game like elemental typing, random procs, DoT abilities, healer DPS abilities, and even crit chances.

I hate to agree that it's too late but it is also a point I was trying to get out earlier, though not very eloquently. It would be best (at least in my opinion) to junk these 2 stats, but there is so much backend work that would have to be done throughout the game that it isn't as simple a switch to flip as say getting rid of repairing at anvils. There are balancing issues, would require even more class balancing work, meta / strike / fractal balancing, equipment, runes, sigils. They made a monster and now it's too late to tame it. If they are steadfast in wanting these 2 buffs to be so defining to the core design of the game, at the very least they shouldn't do it at the sake of sacrificing character design and depth to achieve it.

If I got a vote though I'd rather they were gone. Healing can be engaging, tanking can be engaging, being a worse dps to keep buffs up or get yelled at by your group is not.

Edited June 12, 2023 by Acheron.1580

[Zok.4956]

11 minutes ago, Acheron.1580 said:

that it isn't as simple a switch to flip as say getting rid of repairing at anvils

It's never easy.

 

12 minutes ago, Acheron.1580 said:

They made a monster and now it's too late to tame it

It's never too late.

 

[Acheron.1580]

14 minutes ago, Acheron.1580 said:

It's never too late.

I'd like to hope so

Edited June 12, 2023 by Acheron.1580

[FrancisN.9276]

Can we make a poll, as to demonstrate the will of the mass? I will vote for the removal of these 2 boons from existence.

[Felices Bladewing.3914]

20 hours ago, rotten.9753 said:

I can't wait for complaints about that - that my burst damage depends on another player.

it is called group content for a reason, if people can't stand being part of a team, they should maybe search for other activities in the game tbh

[Astralporing.1957]

23 hours ago, Noodle Ant.1605 said:

i remember anet stating the whole issue with quick/alac is that not having them feels bad because they dramatically change how the game feels. its not like having 0 might/0 vuln/no fury - you just do less dmg/dont crit, but youre still going to press buttons exactly the same way as if you had might/vuln/fury. many players literally dont seem care about might/vuln so long as they have quick/alac first despite having similar output

The only logical solution to the abovementioned problem is to make those boons baseline then - because otherwise there will always be people without them. And after they'd do that they could work on adjusting skills on individual basis if they'd feel the end effect is too OP.

Edited June 12, 2023 by Astralporing.1957

[Flapjackson.1596]

1 hour ago, Felices Bladewing.3914 said:

it is called group content for a reason, if people can't stand being part of a team, they should maybe search for other activities in the game tbh

There is a massive difference in tolerance between something like Might, that affects your damage number, and Quick/Alac, that affects the timing of your rotation and your muscle memory. Those are not things that others should have control over. It is a mess to play around inconsistent attack speed and cooldowns.

[TheQuickFox.3826]

1. Remove quickness and alacrity as applicable boons.
2. Include the effects of these boons in the default activation and recharge of skills.
3. ???
4. Profit!

[Atomnium.1532]

I think the desire for those boons to be gone has been heard from the devs at this point, but I'm guessing even if the will to satisfy this community desire was there it would mean like dozens of traits would need to be entirely reworked, a big balance shift that would require massive number tuning all over the place and an amount of work that is unreasonable without impairing the other tasks that developers need to do for content release.

But considering we're at like the 12th thread about this in the profession forum with a somwhat consensus that Q and alac need to go, content creators already conceding that those buffs are not healthy for the game, new arrivals in the game like Preach pointing specifically to that point and saying that they don't like it.

The feedback is overwhelmingly clear.

I'm fairly confident that the devs actually know about the Quickness/Alac conversation but that even IF they would to finally consider it, it would be a pivotal change that would be addressed in an expansion where you can justify pouring more ressources into a core change to the combat like this one.

There is also the gamemode problem. If Quickness / alac speed was really baseline, what about sPvP ? Do we just have gw2 pvp move at +50% speed and move on without thinking of the consequences ? Even WvW.

And wouldnt that feel even worse than now if whenever you entered a pvp match or wvw you didnt have this speed ? It's not really a simple toggle, there are tons of tentacles to what Quickness and alac impact.

Edited June 12, 2023 by Atomnium.1532

[Astralporing.1957]

18 minutes ago, Atomnium.1532 said:

I think the desire for those boons to be gone has been heard from the devs at this point, but I'm guessing even if the will to satisfy this community desire was there it would mean like dozens of traits would need to be entirely reworked, a big balance shift that would require massive number tuning all over the place and an amount of work that is unreasonable without impairing the other tasks that developers need to do for content release.

Considering the negative impact those boons seem to have on class balance at the moment (see them completely gutting scourge due to it), i think we can safely say removing them would actually result in a less balance work overall.

18 minutes ago, Atomnium.1532 said:

There is also the gamemode problem. If Quickness / alac speed was really baseline, what about sPvP ? Do we just have gw2 pvp move at +50% speed and move on without thinking of the consequences ? Even WvW.

Why not? There's already some massive splits between how mechanics work in PvE and PvP modes, we can easily add skill speed and cooldowns on top of that.

18 minutes ago, Atomnium.1532 said:

And wouldnt that feel even worse than now if whenever you entered a pvp match or wvw you didnt have this speed ?

Most SPvP builds already do not have access to both those boons at a decent upkeep. Some do not have access to any of those boons at all. So, i'd not worry about it too much. WvW boonballs would get affected, but weakening those a bit would not necessarily be a bad thing, don't you think?

 

 

[Yasai.3549]

2 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

And after they'd do that they could work on adjusting skills on individual basis if they'd feel the end effect is too OP.

Which is ridiculous considering Anet currently balances their content around "Snowcrows Benchmark Boon setup"

(aka. 100% uptime of all Boons) 

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

Currently Quickness increases attack-speed by 50 % and Alacrity applies 25 % skill recharge rate. ANet and their balancing-team have modified all classes around the idea of having these two boons present all the time. Which means they feel slow and clunky when this is not the case.

When the boons were added to the game, they were only available for short times to enhance certain phases in encounters. Some people have also mentioned that making the boons baseline could solve the problem. I would suggest a mix of these two:

- Enhance baseline attack-speed by 40 % passively, without a boon.
- Quickness enhances attack-speed by 10 %.
- Modify baseline skill recharge rate by 20 % passively, without a boon.
- Alacrity modifies skill recharge rate by 5 %.

Now revert the boon-spam of these two buffs. Make it that a top-tier professional player group can maintain ~ 10 seconds of each buff maximum - every 60 seconds. That way the boons are degraded from being the bare minimum to being the icing on the cake. If you want to go for the maximum efficiency and the highest possible DPS, you have to use these boons and coordinate your sources properly.

And if that is not the case, your builds are still functional and the DPS loss is acceptable. The only real problem I see with this solution is to re-purpose the current Alacrity & Quickness suppliers.

This is my idea. Thanks for reading. Now you can start spamming confused emojis. 

[Acheron.1580]

I appreciate the "split the difference to make everyone happy" attempt but it doesn't resolve the problem that they are sacrificing class identity because these 2 buffs are the end all. And if the values are going to be so small the boons might as well just be gone. A real split the difference would be 50/50 but once again, the major problem isn't the effect of the boons but the fact that they have become the center of game design for combat.

[Astralporing.1957]

48 minutes ago, HnRkLnXqZ.1870 said:

Currently Quickness increases attack-speed by 50 % and Alacrity applies 25 % skill recharge rate. ANet and their balancing-team have modified all classes around the idea of having these two boons present all the time. Which means they feel slow and clunky when this is not the case.

When the boons were added to the game, they were only available for short times to enhance certain phases in encounters. Some people have also mentioned that making the boons baseline could solve the problem. I would suggest a mix of these two:

- Enhance baseline attack-speed by 40 % passively, without a boon.
- Quickness enhances attack-speed by 10 %.
- Modify baseline skill recharge rate by 20 % passively, without a boon.
- Alacrity modifies skill recharge rate by 5 %.

Now revert the boon-spam of these two buffs. Make it that a top-tier professional player group can maintain ~ 10 seconds of each buff maximum - every 60 seconds. That way the boons are degraded from being the bare minimum to being the icing on the cake. If you want to go for the maximum efficiency and the highest possible DPS, you have to use these boons and coordinate your sources properly.

And if that is not the case, your builds are still functional and the DPS loss is acceptable. The only real problem I see with this solution is to re-purpose the current Alacrity & Quickness suppliers.

This is my idea. Thanks for reading. Now you can start spamming confused emojis. 

Unfortunately, that'd be even worse than what we currently have. Remember, that the issue is that both quickness and alacrity affect rotation timing. That is why they are so important and why their lack is so visible - because without them (or with only partial coverage) the timing you have learned suddenly is off, and your rotation unravels. It might not have been such an issue in a game with a much slower pace, but in GW2 with its breakneck speed it's not so easy to adapt on the fly.

For the abovementioned reasons, any solution to the issue needs to result in players having guaranteed, stable cooldowns and skill activation times. Your suggestion fails at that.

[FrancisN.9276]

2 hours ago, Atomnium.1532 said:

I think the desire for those boons to be gone has been heard from the devs at this point, but I'm guessing even if the will to satisfy this community desire was there it would mean like dozens of traits would need to be entirely reworked, a big balance shift that would require massive number tuning all over the place and an amount of work that is unreasonable without impairing the other tasks that developers need to do for content release.

I am afraid the "too much work/coding/number adjusting" excuse cannot be justified when the problem was of their own making. If we screw up something, it is our responsibility to find ways to fix it instead of saying "fixing it demands a massive amount of work" and just moving ahead, building up bigger issues upon the original issue.

[Atomnium.1532]

18 minutes ago, FrancisN.9276 said:

I am afraid the "too much work/coding/number adjusting" excuse cannot be justified when the problem was of their own making. If we screw up something, it is our responsibility to find ways to fix it instead of saying "fixing it demands a massive amount of work" and just moving ahead, building up bigger issues upon the original issue.

Oh I'm not excusing or advocating for the devs decision to put such an emphasis on these boons and have the game revolve around them.

What I'm saying is that pivoting away from that design is not a simple toggle. Huge work has to be done afterward to rebalance around the absence of these as the core of certain specs. It would be a big shift, I believe as most here that it would be a net positive to remove them altogether/make them baseline and that numerical outliers can be dealt with after quickness alac would be baseline.

Remember that it took YEARS for Anet to make enough specs provide them so that we don't have to stack the 1-3 specs that provide it and have some degree of diversity, I'm not expecting undoing the years of design around it to be done in a monthly balance patch, that's what I'm saying. I absolutely believe that eventually, quickness and alac will change or be removed, but I don't think it's likely that it'll come soon™.