Are Quick/Alac Boons or PROBLEMS?

[Batalix.2873]

51 minutes ago, DeceiverX.8361 said:

I mean yeah, development takes time.

The bigger issue is that fundamental problem of people settling for the "next best."

That's why the game is in the state it's in to begin with, just as you said.

Everyone just needs to stop accepting the low-hanging-fruit efforts of masking symptoms of underlying problems rather than fixing the problems to begin with.  If the game is bad, people shouldn't be playing, rather than begging like addicts to have scraps of happiness just to get by.

Because that's really what it is; a lot of people are addicts, settling for less and settling for inevitable failure just to feel a quick high before they're faced with the cold hard reality of the fact this game is turning bad to the core year over year.

I try to take this attitude for everything I consume. There are thousands of lifetimes of media, most of which prioritize cost-to-profit ratio and offering the consumer nothing of value beyond distraction and maybe a community if they are lucky. But despite decades of advertising telling us this is a thing we need or are entitled to, we are totally free to not engage. There will always be something else to do, more fructifying pastimes to pursue. And if you are really feeling the sunk cost, maybe that is a sign to move on to the next thing.

[Zephire.8049]

Honestly neither should have made it beyond the brainstorming "wouldn't it be cool if...?" phase of development. Quickness gets a tad more leeway here given what it was intentionally designed for, but by the time they made Alac they were aware of how people used/expected quickness and should have known tying such a powerful ability to one class and one class only would have made it an essential class overnight.

Just because something seems cool on paper doesn't mean it's good design or won't come back to bite you in the future—you have to think about the future and explore what would happen instead of sticking it in and figuring it out as you go. Especially in game design where feature creep and team changes are so common and have been for GW2's entire lifetime.

People are used to fights with both quickness and alac with encounters being designed around the assumption people will have those boons for a good chunk of it so it makes more sense to roll them into classes or globally (it would be a lot of work to rebalance previous encounters, especially all of EoD), but they need to be removed from the boon table. Class balance and design is now revolving around providing one of those boons where feel, choice, or class identity are now a distant second, third, and fourth. There's no clarity anymore, just "how do we get this class to provide alac/quickness?" and I have to assume that's not enjoyable to balance around as a job, not just play.