Getting rid of quickness and alacrity

[rotten.9753]

3 hours ago, Raarsi.6798 said:

By removing those buffs, players can play options they want to for the fun factor and not what they have to because god forbid we go without our precious two buffs.  As long as they exist, I will continue to point to them, how strong they are, and use those as the prime example that balance devs at Anet are either incompetent or (I'd say more likely) hamstrung by someone higher up at Anet who is.

And I will continue to point to how much you overestimate those boons and underestimate others. The simplistic look at boons:

• Quickness - around 30% DPS increase
• Alacrity - around 20% DPS increase (although you get CD reduction for defensive and utility skills as well)
• 25 Might - around 27% DPS increase (non-trivial to calculate it for condition damage dealers), also some professions have traits that increase the bonus so e.g. for power Revenants, this is almost 40% DPS increase
• Fury - around 25% increase, depends on ferocity
• Regeneration - strong passive heal
• Vigor - doubles endurance regeneration
• Protection - 33% damage reduction
• Aegis - negate a single hit, doesn't matter how powerful it is
• Stability - ignore CC
• Swiftness - 133% movement speed

All of them are really strong, the one difference is that a single build cannot provide both Quickness and Alacrity at the same time. Another difference, the largest in my opinion, is that you can see the effects of both Quickness and Alacrity very easily, without checking your boons bar.

3 hours ago, Raarsi.6798 said:

However, I still stick to liking one idea brought up from a dev letter suggesting to remove alacrity and baking the cooldown reductions into all skills and then making quickness only affect the caster, which makes me wonder just what the hell happened at Anet when had that whiplash-inducing 180 into giving everyone those boons and somehow expecting every player to like it.  It blows my mind thinking that we could've potentially had a reasonable solution only to get sidelined by what seemed to have been some higher-up muppet at Anet clinging to them with the idiotic mindset that they're good gameplay.

Sure, remove Alacrity and make it baseline (some builds cannot function properly without Alacrity, e.g. Catalyst), but what would you get? A 4 DPS/1 Healer team composition? Is it really better than the 3 DPS/1 BoonDPS/1 BoonHealer we have right now? Removing quickness could actually lower the skill floor and make the game easier, since slower combat should theoretically be easier. ANet would also have to rebalance a lot of content, especially the most recent one, and I frankly doubt it's an easy job for a company that can't even fix recent bugs, e.g. both KO and HT are riddled with game-breaking or game-changing bugs, and the only bugs they fixed were the ones where the player could gain something from them.

 

[Raarsi.6798]

6 hours ago, rotten.9753 said:

All of them are really strong, the one difference is that a single build cannot provide both Quickness and Alacrity at the same time. Another difference, the largest in my opinion, is that you can see the effects of both Quickness and Alacrity very easily, without checking your boons bar.

All the more reason for them to be either removed or nerfed into near pointlessness because....

6 hours ago, rotten.9753 said:

Sure, remove Alacrity and make it baseline (some builds cannot function properly without Alacrity, e.g. Catalyst), but what would you get? A 4 DPS/1 Healer team composition? Is it really better than the 3 DPS/1 BoonDPS/1 BoonHealer we have right now?

....this actually would be a better option than to force players to play a spec just because it has such a make-or-break buff, especially given that as you say, you have specs so poorly designed that they cannot function properly on their own and need that buff just to be viable.  It's just reinforcing that Anet devs seem to have less and less idea of how to design if they're making specs that flawed.

6 hours ago, rotten.9753 said:

ANet would also have to rebalance a lot of content, especially the most recent one, and I frankly doubt it's an easy job for a company that can't even fix recent bugs, e.g. both KO and HT are riddled with game-breaking or game-changing bugs, and the only bugs they fixed were the ones where the player could gain something from them.

Fortunately, they wouldn't have to balance as much as you'd think since given the track record of the balance team, it looks like such fights that are designed with a higher necessity for being balanced like raid fights or open world bosses are likely designed to factor in 100% quickness and alacrity uptime anyway.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

As always, I will state the unpopular opinion that Alacrity is fine.  It only has value when sustained for long durations and in long engagements, adding almost nothing up-front and altering gameplay very little when present.  It is quickness that is overpowering and gameplay altering, rendering all learned timing useless when moving into high-end PVE.  Quickness makes the game harder to learn.

[DeceiverX.8361]

On 7/9/2023 at 7:15 AM, rotten.9753 said:

I feel like people are underestimating how much damage increase both Might and Fury bring and overestimating how much damage increase both Quickness and Alacrity. From the DPS perspective, Alacrity is around Fury when it comes to damage increase and Quickness is slightly higher than 25 Might stacks, it mostly depends on the build. I don't really see any complaining about those 2 other boons, yet you still build your team composition around them as well, it's usually just hidden behind "Heal" and sometimes "BoonDPS" positions that also bring a lot more boons.

I'm not going to disagree.  But it's all multiplicative in the end and makes the might/fury pattern the game was built on having originally spiral out of control a bit.  Quickness and Alacrity change the flow of how the game was intended to be played with the skills as they are were originally designed.  This is especially in respects to the competitive formats where animation durations are a big part of counterplay and gameplay balance as a whole.

Alacrity is also bigger than just a damage bonus by reduced skill cooldowns; it affects skills which provide groupwide boons for said might and quickness, too, effectively amplifying that problem as well.

In an ideal world, most sources of high-uptime might and fury would be self-applied and defensive boons could be shared as a supportive gameplay pattern, where then DPS players also need to be more cognizant of their own skills and how they amplify their damage and when.

 

Edited July 15, 2023 by DeceiverX.8361

[Divity.3049]

I would like if they make everything faster (in between quickness and no quickness atm) and remove quickness then OR they reduce the amount of speed quickness gives. Alacrity is fine.

[FrancisN.9276]

20 hours ago, rotten.9753 said:

And I will continue to point to how much you overestimate those boons and underestimate others. The simplistic look at boons:

• Quickness - around 30% DPS increase
• Alacrity - around 20% DPS increase (although you get CD reduction for defensive and utility skills as well)
• 25 Might - around 27% DPS increase (non-trivial to calculate it for condition damage dealers), also some professions have traits that increase the bonus so e.g. for power Revenants, this is almost 40% DPS increase
• Fury - around 25% increase, depends on ferocity
• Regeneration - strong passive heal
• Vigor - doubles endurance regeneration
• Protection - 33% damage reduction
• Aegis - negate a single hit, doesn't matter how powerful it is
• Stability - ignore CC
• Swiftness - 133% movement speed

All of them are really strong, the one difference is that a single build cannot provide both Quickness and Alacrity at the same time. Another difference, the largest in my opinion, is that you can see the effects of both Quickness and Alacrity very easily, without checking your boons bar.

Sure, remove Alacrity and make it baseline (some builds cannot function properly without Alacrity, e.g. Catalyst), but what would you get? A 4 DPS/1 Healer team composition? Is it really better than the 3 DPS/1 BoonDPS/1 BoonHealer we have right now? Removing quickness could actually lower the skill floor and make the game easier, since slower combat should theoretically be easier. ANet would also have to rebalance a lot of content, especially the most recent one, and I frankly doubt it's an easy job for a company that can't even fix recent bugs, e.g. both KO and HT are riddled with game-breaking or game-changing bugs, and the only bugs they fixed were the ones where the player could gain something from them.

 

Is there a single class that can output 25 might stacks on full uptime with a single button press? The best my profession can do is 5 might stacks for 10s on a 17s CD skill, so I guess it takes a couple sources to get 25 might stacks.

[rotten.9753]

1 hour ago, FrancisN.9276 said:

Is there a single class that can output 25 might stacks on full uptime with a single button press? The best my profession can do is 5 might stacks for 10s on a 17s CD skill, so I guess it takes a couple sources to get 25 might stacks.

Catalyst can provide 25 might stacks with just Jade Sphere cast in fire on cooldown, it takes 2 casts to max out might stacks and then you just upkeep it continuously.

On the other hand, there are builds that require multiple buttons to provide 100% uptime of either Quickness or Alacrity, e.g. Firebrand, Willbender, Druid, Untamed, Specter, Scrapper, Mechanist, Tempest, Chronomancer, Scourge, it's not like there is any rule but more than half doesn't need just 1 button like Renegade. However, what does it change if it's multiple buttons vs a single button? You have to sacrifice multiple traits and skills just to provide 25 might stacks, so it forces you to make even more compromise and you "can't play how you want". Healers are expected to provide 25 might stacks and ANet will buff multiple builds in 2 days just to do that.

[rotten.9753]

10 hours ago, DeceiverX.8361 said:

I'm not going to disagree.  But it's all multiplicative in the end and makes the might/fury pattern the game was built on having originally spiral out of control a bit.  Quickness and Alacrity change the flow of how the game was intended to be played with the skills as they are were originally designed.  This is especially in respects to the competitive formats where animation durations are a big part of counterplay and gameplay balance as a whole.

That's why we have a power creep in older content - because it wasn't designed with Quickness and Alacrity, however the new content is. Sure, core skills were definitely not designed with Alacrity, but at least PoF and EoD specs definitely were. A lot of Quickness/Alacrity builds in competitive formats does not work because the traits are split.

10 hours ago, DeceiverX.8361 said:

In an ideal world, most sources of high-uptime might and fury would be self-applied and defensive boons could be shared as a supportive gameplay pattern, where then DPS players also need to be more cognizant of their own skills and how they amplify their damage and when.

Sure, if ANet were to redesign everything from scratch, I would vote for that, however it never worked like that.

[Vortus.2801]

The best thing about Guild Wars 2 objectively is its combat, which is very deep thanks to the boons and the quickness and alacrity system, making it unique and versatile. Saying that you want it to be removed demonstrates that you have less than 100 hours of playtime or that Guild Wars 2 isn't your thing.

 

Go to play singleplayers.

Edited July 22, 2023 by Vortus.2801

[Leo G.4501]

8 hours ago, Vortus.2801 said:

The best thing about Guild Wars 2 objectively is its combat, which is very deep thanks to the boons and the quickness and alacrity system, making it unique and versatile. Saying that you want it to be removed demonstrates that you have less than 100 hours of playtime or that Guild Wars 2 isn't your thing.

 

Go to play singleplayers.

Some have played their 100 hours before alacrity was introduced and it was a less mess than it is now.

No one is saying completely remove boons but rather reign in a lot of what the current meta has run away with. If Quickness and Alacrity are to stick with the game, they should probably be mostly self-only with few exceptions OR just reduced effectiveness so it keeps things from going haywire. Further still, they really need to look at boons as a whole. This whole perma-boons schtick just because raids exist is whack.