June 27 Balance Follow-Ups

[ZEUStiger.3590]

Quote

A big pain point with alacrity willbender is its inability to provide alacrity during phase transitions or other times where it can’t strike an enemy.

Oh really? Is that only a pain point of alacrity willbender? Man, how unfortunate for them! I guess quickness chrono, alacrity chrono, alacrity mirage (all 3 require an attackable target to summon phantasms and for clones to not despawn), quickness berserker (requires an attackable target to hit with burst), quickness deadeye (requires an attackable target to steal from) are all doing just swell then.

[zealex.9410]

7 minutes ago, stormemperor.3745 said:

Doesn't change the fact that mirage is dead. Least you could do is at least know the name of axe ambush.

The change is good though.

 

2 minutes ago, DeeNzou.1580 said:

Based DH changes not need anything more piece and love!!!

Rework radiant fire tho

[YellowFlash.3914]

Why nerf Strength of shadows and larcenous torment? There's no reason for that, those traits are fine as is. The only thing that MAYBE (and that's maybe) makes sense is the alacrity base duration reduction on shadestep.
You mention:

21 minutes ago, Cal Cohen.2358 said:

alacrity build more in line without negatively affecting the damage builds

but those two trait change, will negatively affect the damage builds. Comon, condi specter wasn't even that insane before the patch.

Also, why can't we let deadeye quickness build be a very glass canon type of build?

Making both these builds really nice, just to instantly hammer them down, quite disappointing.

[Diruuo.6314]

I do not think these listed changes really capture what the issues with some of the specs are. 

For Herald and Druid in particular, the playability and flexibility has straight up gone down, to the point of breaking the specs. It's not merely about their ability to provide a necessary boon, it's about how they provide it.

To list concrete things - invisible timers are just... bad. They're not easy to track, and while I understand you'd want us to not have to track them, when you tie important effects to them, it's bound to happen. Yes, the reduction will make it more responsive, no, it's still not a good implementation. Herald already has enough over-time-ticking things, for a critical boon like this I don't think it's a good fit. The "invisible timer" problem was mitigated by Draconic Echo, but that has been removed as an option for boon support builds (despite making perfect sense as the boon support option in its original design).

Additionally, your original stated goal was to reduce the spamminess and improve flexibility for Herald builds, you've, very directly, negatively impacted both of these aspects of the build with the changes in the June patch. The build is significantly more energy constrained, and thus there's even less flexibility in how you play it. For base throughput, you also generally follow the same rotational priorities as you did prior to the change. So in practice - it's just as spammy, now it just has less energy to do anything useful. 

In a world where the DPS quickness build prefers the same two legends that were used before, and the utility legends are less useful - you've directly failed at your intended purpose of introducing flexibility to it. 

The situation is the same for druid. On paper, they have their utility skills free now, but in practice, they lost an even more important resource - celestial avatar. Now you need to constantly rotate in and out of Celestial avatar, bringing Druid back to the days of old where you had to do so for the damage buff. Except it's worse now, and the playstyle encourages a carpel-tunnel inducing level of spam of skills in Celestial Avatar. This also removes Celestial Avatar as a resource used for... well... healing or CC. If damage does not align with your alacrity application, then you simply waste all the healing because you had to provide buffs. 

These are fundamental, critical, usability and design issues, that the proposed numbers changes above will not fix. 

Thus, I find the response to the criticism and feedback underwhelming. These builds very plainly feel worse to play, and perform worse than they did prior to the June patch. They are also still very spammy, so their usability is either unchanged, or in the case of Druid - made significantly worse. 

I firmly believe the design issues introduced with the Patch are so fundamental and problematic, that the only reasonable option is to revert the changes, and get back to the drawing board. 

Edited June 29, 2023 by Diruuo.6314

[GingerMeTimbers.7045]

• Rejuvenating Tides and Natural Convergence need their might bumped up from 1 stack per pulse to 2 stacks per pulse.
• Alacrity base duration needs to be 1.5 seconds. 
• Astral Force needs more passive regeneration to make up for the fact that we aren't healing constantly-decaying spirits anymore for an artificial increase in the astral force regeneration even during downtime phases in certain fights or encounters.

These 3 changes would fix druid.

[Passerbye.6291]

6 hours ago, Cal Cohen.2358 said:

Alacrity Willbender 

A big pain point with alacrity willbender is its inability to provide alacrity during phase transitions or other times where it can’t strike an enemy. We’re hoping to mitigate this by updating Phoenix Protocol to grant some alacrity on the activation of resolve, which can also be shared via Battle Presence. We’ve also cleaned up some aftercasts and made general improvements to animations for a few key damage skills with the goal of making the overall gameplay feel a bit more fluid. 

Was this not a pain point for alac mirage and support chrono? Because chrono still needs a target to provide its boons and mirage will lose efficiency of its alacrity during downtime due to being unable to create clones.

Edited June 30, 2023 by Passerbye.6291

[TheThief.8475]

31 minutes ago, Cal Cohen.2358 said:

Specter 

Alacrity specter is another build that is overperforming in terms of damage. This is partially due to the base alacrity duration being long enough to require minimal investment into concentration, but also due to the lack of a significant damage tradeoff in the grandmaster trait slot. We’ll be tuning up Strength of Shadows while bringing down some of specter’s other damage sources to bring the alacrity build more in line without negatively affecting the damage builds. 

Lastly, we’re increasing the protection duration of Shadow Sap to ensure that healing-focused specter builds have a reliable source of group protection. 

• Shadestep: Reduced alacrity duration from 2 seconds to 1.25 seconds in PvE only. 
• Strength of Shadows: This trait no longer reduces incoming damage and no longer increases the duration of torment inflicted by Rot Wallow Venom, but instead increases torment damage by 25% in addition to converting vitality to expertise. 
• Larcenous Torment: This trait no longer increases torment damage, and instead steals health from an enemy when you apply torment to them. 
• Shadow Sap: Increased protection duration from 2.5 seconds to 4 seconds in PvE only. 

Can you also give full shroud before entering / on entering combat like you did with reaper in the past? So we can start giving alac when the fight starts and not many seconds later? Please

thanks

[Crit.5123]

Well....for DPS quickness bring the Hearld. That's all i see here.

No word on the mess that is now qScrapper. Is it easy to maintain quinckess uptime, sure it is. Is it fun and engaging to play it..hell no. "Ok i need to proc quickness....wait is there a field on the floor.....no...ok drop field, spam finishers in it" ...this was playtested and detemined it was fun??? Scrapper was in a PERFECT spot where it was, if you wanted to take an extra utility instead of a gyro all you had to do was increase boon duration a bit to compensate. You didnt need all gyros and you certainly did not need to spam them all off CD.

If you wanted to improve Scrapper start with Bulwalk gyro, people only ever take this for the toolbelt skill to apply stab, hit this at Mama or TL etc...ouch. Its basically a dead utility slot when you need to take stab. Give Bulwalk group Aegis or somthing and let it compete with qFB (PvE viewpoint only).

Edited July 8, 2023 by Crit.5123

[Vova.2640]

Grace of the Land: Increased alacrity duration from 0.75 seconds to 1 second in PvE only.
Desert Empowerment: Increased alacrity duration from 1 second to 1.5 seconds in PvE only.

id say make druid 1.5 sec and scourge 2sec... and make it in wvw also please.

also guard gs qol is good update

[Celeste.9135]

This is nowhere near good enough. These changes do not begin to adequately fix the mistakes you have made in the most recent patch. For scourge there is a simple fix that you seem too stubborn to consider despite much of the feedback begging you to. Revert the changes made to shade duration and PUT. ALACRITY. ON. SAND. SAVANT.

In regards to druid this does nothing to address the toxic elements of gameplay that have been introduced to it, particularly on relying on pet f2s in order to meet protection uptime. This not only means that Druid cannot reactively heal with CA as it must be used strictly for alacrity we also cannot reliably use our pet F2s either reactively or for planned mechanics without dropping another important boon.

Stop doubling down on your bad design and move onto actually fixing the problems you created to classes that functioned fine before the 27th.

Edited June 29, 2023 by Celeste.9135

[Tuna Bandit.3786]

Again from me too: Shade Duration?
Please make the mandatory F1 spam every time on cooldown go away. This is ridiculous. 
You wanted less spammy interactions, this is the exact opposite.

Please my dear hands beg you: Stop F1 spam and bring the Shade Duration back up 

[BonzaiPlatypus.7091]

34 minutes ago, Cal Cohen.2358 said:

Grace of the Land: Increased alacrity duration from 0.75 seconds to 1 second in PvE only. 

Please implement this immediately so this class isn't miserable to play for the next few weeks and then take advice from other people in this on what you should actually do to fix it.

[zealex.9410]

5 minutes ago, ZEUStiger.3590 said:

Oh really? Is that only a pain point of alacrity willbender? Man, how unfortunate for them! I guess quickness chrono, alacrity chrono, alacrity mirage (all 3 require an attackable target to summon phantasms and for clones to not despawn), quickness berserker (requires an attackable target to hit with burst), quickness deadeye (requires an attackable target to steal from) are all doing just swell then.

Not having quickness during downtime is not nearly as problematic.

[Caitmonster.9036]

Druid still feels terrible because you have to burn through your CA skills off cooldown- something you guys said you wanted to get away from - regardless of whether or not you need healing! This leaves the druid absolutely helpless if a big packet of damage is coming in that they may need to react to only to find out they burned through their Avatar to do their alacrity rotation recently. If a heal druid wants to provide alac, it is now not only sacrificing Lingering Light, but it is giving up a lot of its ability to be a reactive healer as well.

Please find some other way to grant alac without ruining CA. Bake it into the staff, link Alac to Regen application if you have to. Either that, or massively jack up the CA generation and make CA function like necromancer shroud where it can be activated over a certain % instead of only at 100%.

 

Scrapper feels clunky now. I honestly miss the gyro spam to provide my quickness and I'd learned to cope without having blast gyro available for CC or my medic gyro up for some healing. It was a relatively low intensity build that could provide a critical boon, which I'm all for when it comes to getting people involved in content they otherwise wouldn't. Now scrapper is a LOT more input intensive, hence the clunkiness. Again, I'm not feeling this change and I really hope this is re-addressed in the future. Linking it back to Superspeed would be just fine in my book.

 

Necro: Signets of Suffering has become a completely useless trait. I am disappointed they reverted signets back to no longer applying in shroud. Really wish you guys would walk back that change too while you're at it. :<

Edited June 30, 2023 by Caitmonster.9036

[Imperial.8471]

Scourge still has to drop shades every few seconds and still has to spam its VITAL barrier skills just to give a boon. And still has very poor heal beside its now wasted barrier skills

Druid still has to waste its healing mechanic, celestial avatar, to give that stupid boon. And when CA runs out, you still have BOTH cooldown and celestial energy to recharge, the latter being hard if your team is at full health which it likely is after spamming CA

Herald still has to upkeep -6 energy to give the other stupid boon, leaving it with none left for heals of attacks. Plus the old problem of being forced out of a legend at the wrong time but now made worse

No mentions of the quick Berserker and Scrapper.

Overall, no changes to the awful design choice of tying active boon generation to healing mechanics meant to be reactive

More than reading our feedback, it feels like they just finally decided to try the classes they changed and realized even harrier gear left them struggling with boon uptime so they just upped some numbers. With no further reflection on what was wrong

If I was playing willbender, I'd be worried the balance team is interested in my class. Who knows how much they'll lose for a scuffed alac generation...

[ReganDryke.4023]

So you're not going to address Druids and other specs being forced to use traditionally situational ability on cd to spam alacrity and forcing them to spam like hell and waste cds to upkeep alac/quickness?

This ain't it.

Just revert it all.

[vrauns.3215]

23 minutes ago, Dodo.3870 said:

I dont think any of these changes for scourge even begin to undo the mess that has been made of it in wvw by the balance update. 

The changes are fine, it shouldn't all be reverted back to what it was, even mightyteapot, a scourge main said it was too op and he said they should delete the thing from the game, was a joke of course, but ya, had to be nerfed, that's just a fact.

[Vova.2640]

also thanks for the update. keep the good communication coming.

[ZEUStiger.3590]

On 6/29/2023 at 11:55 PM, zealex.9410 said:

Not having quickness during downtime is not nearly as problematic.

Tell that to the fractal crowd that wants to abuse their precious boon prestacking.

Why is prestacking still allowed to exists? Horrible misuse of singularities, when their main purpose was to eliminate the downtime of waiting for cooldowns before engaging a boss.

Edited July 1, 2023 by ZEUStiger.3590
precasting -> prestacking, for more clarity

[Enmity.3465]

Spoiler

 

Bring back old scrapper and Remove Mechanical Genius, please !

[vrauns.3215]

21 minutes ago, The Cashew Cab.8491 said:

You're still keeping the Shade duration at 8 seconds? Are you actually serious right now?

 

Do you have any idea just how BAD Scourge feels to play with this change? It's absolutely miserable. It's gone from being my main to absolute torture to play to the point I can't even bear to touch it anymore.

 

You can't fix the bad play feel of the spec just by bringing the numbers up a bit, the Shade duration is a core facet of the spec and you've completely killed it.

 

The 8 second Shade duration makes Scourge feel WAY too spammy and annoying. Please, I am BEGGING you to consider how these decisions affect the playability of certain specs. Please get someone who ACTUALLY plays Scourge on your balance team.

 

Just. Tie. Alacrity. To Sand Savant. Limit Alacrity pulses to the Shade and the Shade ONLY.

 

Don't tie Alacrity generation to Barrier, just make it to where every pulse of a Shade skill generates Alacrity when traited into Sand Savant. Keep Shade duration at 20 seconds.

 

It is literally that easy. Please.

Mightyteapot plays scourge and he's knows what he's talking about, and he even said it had to be nerfed, you have to get over it dude.

[Apokriphos.7042]

Dear CMC, 

Thank you for providing this in advance of the balance patch correction. Most of the player feedback I have read specifically addresses three main complaints. Please take this into consideration as you tweak the upcoming patch.

1). Build variety is at an all time low due to most traits, skills and weapons being out of date to current meta standards. The new meta weapons will likely continue this issue.

This patches' changes focus on enabling more boon share amongst all classes, but **particularly** in qol adjustments to  elementalist and guardian. Many players feel that other classes QoL were neglected in this trait and skill update, necromancer specifically, of which many core weapon skills and traits have not been improved (addition of gap closers/evades/invuln/etc) in more then 5 years as power of other classes continue to rise. Due to this lapse and removal of scourge utility and signet in shroud, necromancer class build variety is at an all time low. The upcoming scourge corrections will do little to fix the spammy playstyle promoted with the latest scourge changes. Therefore, there is little choice or variety in competitive builds or playstyle, leading to stagnant and lackluster build diversity in all game modes. This will sap player interest in future investment in GW2 as they feel the build space is already solved.

2). Current balance patches buff boonball playstyle to the detriment of all else.

Casual WvW players feel left out of the latest changes, which significantly strengthen the large zerg boonball playstyle to the detriment of all other types of play in the game mode. 

Being forced into a boon ball and strictly following a meta to "win" is typically not an engaging or enjoyable experience for newer players. New players are enticed by individual skill animations, impact (they are the commander), and short but entertaining gameplay. If the game is continually balanced toward large organized fights only that require extended melee slogs before someone downs but isnt illusioned of life back fast enough, casual players will suffer and leave. Please increase aoe boon corruption instead of your current direction to provide some counterplay to this direction.

3). Please Beta test upcoming patches.

I am quite impressed by the ability for Anet to implement beta testing for class weapon access for the upcoming expansion. Could this also be done for future balance patches, so that bugs can be ironed out in advance of it going live? This would save a lot of headache for both you and us, the players.

Thank you for your time.

Edited June 29, 2023 by Apokriphos.7042

[teeth.3501]

Scourge still won't feel good to play because you fiddled with shade durations, literally doing an 180 on stated goal of "reducing spam gameplay" by making scourge rely on spam gameplay even harder. Please adjust this, it makes the spec not enjoyable to play and no amount of bandaid fixes like changes to shade-related traits will fix this. 

[vrauns.3215]

The scourge people are not providing anything useful in this thread besides "juice the numbers up",  "fix shade", really?

[Kassablanca.5821]

my flamethrower dps is pathethic compare to the berserker arc divider and why would anyone want to waste their time blast their skill to give out few boon?