Boon Changes And What It Could Mean for Power Support Builds

[HonesltlyX.7164]

With the new patch coming up this Tuesday we will be getting some big changes to professions and how some applies boons. I have been going back and forth with a friend discussing these changes, speculating how things may shape up. One of things we talked about was gear stats. As professions will seem to rely more on rotations to apply boons rather than spam their utilities skills we may see more support builds add concentration to armor pieces to improve boon uptime.

The problem I see coming up with this sort of change is that condition support builds will come out on top. The reason is because condition support builds uses to the Ritualist gear while power support builds uses Diviners. Why would that be an issue? Well it goes a little deeper. Because condition damage only needs expertise to improve dps, condition gear allows for more room to play around with other stats such concentration without impacting it's damage. With Diviners we also have concentration but power builds still need precision cap and ferocity in order to be on par with it's DoT cousin. For this reason I believe we will see condition support builds become more favorable in group PvE content because they will have boon uptime while retaining more dps.

The only way I can see this issue fixed is to remove ferocity and add it's benefit to the precision stat. Removing ferocity as a gear stat will allow power builds to have more room to play around with other stats and I do not think that it would be harmful to add the slight crit damage benefit to precision when it is scaled properly. Ofcourse, this change shouldn't happen without some proper testing to make sure it's scaling will not break the game. We've been probably asking for this for a while.

What are your thoughts?

Edited June 25, 2023 by HonesltlyX.7164

[DanAlcedo.3281]

The logical solution:

Dont make the Duration of the boons on power builds Dog kitten, so you dont need a bajillion Diviner Pieces.

 

Your solution:

Change the game on a fundamental level.

[Ashen.2907]

There is a reason that the top stat set for condi dps builds is (usually) viper's. Condi dps builds will lose dps by having less (or no) power and precision. Proposing solutions to a problem that does not (yet)exist (and may never exist), and which lack sufficient final information upon which to make educated guesses, can be fun....but is not particularly useful.

Edited June 25, 2023 by Ashen.2907

[Katary.7096]

11 hours ago, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

The logical solution:

Dont make the Duration of the boons on power builds Dog kitten, so you dont need a bajillion Diviner Pieces.

 

Your solution:

Change the game on a fundamental level.

While I do agree with the general idea of your post, there are some exceptional cases where your "logical solution" does not help.

Let's look at Warrior as an example: With the next update Bladesworn will be able to provide alacrity. This is not a problem since Bladesworn is clearly a power based elite specialization, so simply giving it high enough alacrity duration by default works well here. But what do we do about Berserker? It will be able to give out quickness and it can be played as either power or condition damage effectively. So if it has high baseline quickness duration than both power and condition damage builds get the benefit.

[DanAlcedo.3281]

2 hours ago, Katary.7096 said:

While I do agree with the general idea of your post, there are some exceptional cases where your "logical solution" does not help.

Let's look at Warrior as an example: With the next update Bladesworn will be able to provide alacrity. This is not a problem since Bladesworn is clearly a power based elite specialization, so simply giving it high enough alacrity duration by default works well here. But what do we do about Berserker? It will be able to give out quickness and it can be played as either power or condition damage effectively. So if it has high baseline quickness duration than both power and condition damage builds get the benefit.

And your point is?

Berzerker(Power and condi) will need to reduce its dmg already when taking Group Quickness by trading Blood Reaction for Heat of the Soul. Its therefor not free.

A low Base Duration on Quickness only means you have to reduce your dmg even further by adding Boon Duration.

So a simple question. How much dps should a Quick Zerker do? Thats for Anet to decide.

 

 

 

Edited June 26, 2023 by DanAlcedo.3281

[Katary.7096]

9 hours ago, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

And your point is?

If you have a boon support and damage hybrid build that can be played as either power or condition damage then giving it high base duration on boons means you are buffing both the power and condition builds. So your proposed solution to give the power builds (and only the power builds) high enough duration by default so that they don't have to take lots of Diviner gear can be applied to condition builds and Ritualist gear as well. And then you don't get a relative gain in performance for the power build against the condition one, which is precisely what the OP is about. [Though I don't agree that something needs to be done about the situation, much less so that the devs should delete ferocity from the game.]
As a practical example: Right now power alacrity Renegade is weaker than condition alacrity Renegade. If we were to apply your "solution" to Renegade then we end up increasing the alacrity duration on "Orders from Above". Power alacrity Renegade needs fewer pieces of Diviner gear and as a result deals more damage while mainting alacrity. But condition alacrity Renegade needs fewer pieces of Ritualist gear and ends up dealing more damage as well. So the condition version is still better than the power version. That is my point. What you suggested, "Dont make the Duration of the boons on power builds Dog kitten, so you dont need a bajillion Diviner Pieces." works for any specialization which can only be played as a power damage build. But it doesn't work for those specializations which can go both ways, like Berserker, Renegade, Harbinger, etc.

10 hours ago, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

Berzerker(Power and condi) will need to reduce its dmg already when taking Group Quickness by trading Blood Reaction for Heat of the Soul. Its therefor not free.

This statement is correct, but it does not adress the relative performance difference between power and condition damage support hybrid builds, on account of the fact that power builds need 3 stats to maximize damage while condition builds only need two. Therefore the statement is irrelevant to this topic.

10 hours ago, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

A low Base Duration on Quickness only means you have to reduce your dmg even further by adding Boon Duration.

Once again, true but not relevant.

10 hours ago, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

So a simple question. How much dps should a Quick Zerker do? Thats for Anet to decide.

It is indeed.

[ZeftheWicked.3076]

Balls to the wall power builds are supposed to burst down and assassinate their targets before they can start fighting back.
Assassins are meant to be squishy and vulnerable if they fail to quickly murder their target.

Conditions by design are meant to be the sustained damage, not 2s of them and you're down. Now we know in some cases that balance was broken (*cough* burnguard *cough*), but in general the rule stands.
And as such condition damage leaves more leeways to build tanky. Part of game design.

That being said power builds aren't as screwed as supports as one might think. They just face more obvious choice that condi supports also get. More damage or more survival.

Diviner is zerker light - you're just as easy to kill. But you got stuff like Wanderer or Commander for much more survivable power suppport.

Condition builds also aren't without their flaws. Ritualist is a sweet gear set for condi supports but it has 0 power.
There's a reason why most meta builds on snowcrows benchmarks run Viper and not Ritualist. These "condi" builds are actually hybrid builds and only then do they catch up to pure power builds that have no problem topping the dps charts.

I'd risk saying that ritualist condi support drops off more dps than Diviner one, especially since diviner's concentration is so strong you can mix it with zerker/assassin pieces and still get concentration comparable (if not better) than full Ritualist.

[BadLuck.8456]

I absolutely understand your point and had the same thought while trying to ponder how they might fix willbender alacrity. The conclusion that I came to sadly was that there isn't a consistent design here. Some classes provide full boon uptime with full dps gear (harbinger for example) but the trait changes are what keeps the damage in check. Another class (renegade) only has one trait change that doesn't decrease damage enough on it's own and so now requires boon duration gear. They both benchmark in the low 30k dps.

So anet would need to decide how much damage boon dps builds should do. Whether they prefer traits or gear to be the source of damage loss, or if they are fine with this being different between builds. My personal opinion is that boon application also shouldn't be fight dependent like willbender is now where it can be top dps while providing full alac on a boss it can hit constantly or it can fail to provide full alacrity even with with full concentration and terrible dps if the fight has too many mechanics that prevent constant hits on the boss. Similarly expecting mirage to maintain 3 clones for alacrity is bad. I understood that stax mirage was bad but they should have been taking damage away from clones and adding it directly to condi mirage skills and taking the alac away from clones and adding it to alac mirage skills instead of this over reliance on clones existing for a large amount of time to do damage/apply alac.