So, you ignored the feedback for Scourge and Druid

[Gotejjeken.1267]

On 7/18/2023 at 8:33 PM, Mauti.3520 said:

The OVERWHELMING feedback of the last year was how unfun and unrealiable spirts are and how bad it is having them tied to Alacrity... and they listened. But if the application moves from one skill it has to go somewhere else.

The feedback for spirits was always to make them invuln in some way--not to hardline alac output to a specific spec and certainly not to a spec mechanic.

On 7/18/2023 at 8:33 PM, Mauti.3520 said:

How is that supposed to work? Apparently Druids want to afk, never use any significant part of their entire kit pro-actively and only want to react once a green health bar drops or boss uses a specific mechanic. That's the impression I get from that feedback and it's not going to work if you wanna maintain boons.

<Heal Mech has entered the chat>

[rotten.9753]

2 hours ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

The feedback for spirits was always to make them invuln in some way--not to hardline alac output to a specific spec and certainly not to a spec mechanic.

It definitely was to remove alac from utility skills to stop being forced to take 3 of them and spam them on cooldown even if they do something else.

[Gotejjeken.1267]

1 hour ago, rotten.9753 said:

It definitely was to remove alac from utility skills to stop being forced to take 3 of them and spam them on cooldown even if they do something else.

I don't really remember anyone wanting alac off spirits nearly as much as wanting them invuln / not die so easily; regardless there is a unified front that moving alac to CA is the worst idea:

 

[rotten.9753]

6 minutes ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

I don't really remember anyone wanting alac off spirits nearly as much as wanting them invuln / not die so easily; regardless there is a unified front that moving alac to CA is the worst idea:

 

This forum isn't the only venue for discussions.

[Gotejjeken.1267]

7 minutes ago, rotten.9753 said:

This forum isn't the only venue for discussions.

I'm sure someone on some discord somewhere is fist pumping the removal of alac from spirits so they can bring--oh wait, you still bring spirits:

Heal Alacrity Druid Build | Guild Wars 2 | Snow Crows

You also still must spam CA skills with abandon to generate alacrity, so that issue wasn't resolve but got worse.

Anyway, feel free to bring other venues in with a counterpoint, as we all know anet reads Reddit more than here anyway.  I just don't personally feel like going over there as I lack a Fedora.

[Powerfat.7294]

Big scourge deeps feels good.

BUT.

Having to spam f2 every 3.6 secs makes me want to cut off my hand after about an hour of playing because of how painful it gets.

Having all shades expire every time there is a mechanic feels awful.

The massively reduced ability to cleave is also a feels bad.

The alac trait competing with the best grandmaster to take on a heal build makes it essentially non-viable due to how much of a downgrade it is.

 

For druid, I literally stopped playing it because I hated spamming spirits. Now it should just play the same as it did when gotl was a unique modifier, back when it was also the only healer that was being played in raids. You can be in ca almost 2/3 of the time, and you have staff and glyph heal for healing between ca uses. It does suck not being able to take the grandmaster heal trait though. I really wish they would stop doing that. They are not even consistent with it. They literally moved the herald quickness trait onto the heal herald grandmaster in the same patch.

[BadLuck.8456]

5 hours ago, Powerfat.7294 said:

It does suck not being able to take the grandmaster heal trait though. I really wish they would stop doing that. They are not even consistent with it. They literally moved the herald quickness trait onto the heal herald grandmaster in the same patch.

Underrated point here. Most of the best boon supports have this where the boon/heal trait competes with dps traits only. Keeping boon dps from doing full dps while providing a boon makes sense. Keeping healers from doing full healing while providing a boon doesn't. The meta already settled on role compression that healers must provide boons because there are very few places where that much healing is required. This is why you didn't see pre-alac tempest or heal scourge except in niche usage. But there are some and healers who can boon without sacrificing healing will become/stay the standard just because that rare (common for some groups) occurrence where someone bombs the groups and for 5 seconds that much healing IS needed.

Even the way some boon dps specs provide boons is tied to a supportive gesture. Herald has to be upkeeping which is usually supporting their team (shiro and malyx excluded). Druid has to be in CA which heals. Mech and scourge have to apply barriers. So it makes sense to tie the boon trait to the heal/support trait.

But then you look at scourge which had the heal(top) traits, the dps (mid) traits, and the boon corruption/survivability (bot traits). And they decided to take the heal Master and move it to the GM to compete? Why? Now GM has a dead trait (Sand Savant) because as a scourge you are either DPS and take the dps trait or you heal and take the heal trait. Then they turned Sandstorm Shroud into ANOTHER heal trait. So the whole corruption theme is pretty dead as well. Gaining a bit of LF and a small barrier for corrupting boons isn't enticing at all. Also to provide alac you need TWO heal traits, both Desert Empowerment and Sandstorm Shroud or you don't provide enough alac so DPS/Alac scourge is a non-starter.

So now the whole spec line is a much less coherent mess with 3 dead traits. I guess they wanted to remove the boon corruption because of WvW? I'm surprised scourge utils even convert a boon to torment anymore at this point.

 

I was really just hoping for some design follow-up on what they want scourge to do at this point. Obviously they want to lower its target cap, or make a large target cap a rare "burst" of utility. Do they want dps/alac scourge to be viable? Do they like the idea of a party cramming into a 180 radius shade to get barriers and alac? Do they like the idea of optimal scourge gameplay including ressumoning shades as the primary button that you hit? Do they like optimal dps scourge gameplay to include hitting Nefarious Favor every 3 seconds (If so I want the mech treatment where we can put it on autocast)?

Scourge isn't in a bad place on paper. I've even had fun playing heal alac scourge. But the design is really muddy right now and it FEELS bad, especially dps scourge.

[Gaeb.2837]

On 7/20/2023 at 12:06 PM, BadLuck.8456 said:

I was really just hoping for some design follow-up on what they want scourge to do at this point. Obviously they want to lower its target cap, or make a large target cap a rare "burst" of utility. Do they want dps/alac scourge to be viable? Do they like the idea of a party cramming into a 180 radius shade to get barriers and alac? Do they like the idea of optimal scourge gameplay including ressumoning shades as the primary button that you hit? Do they like optimal dps scourge gameplay to include hitting Nefarious Favor every 3 seconds (If so I want the mech treatment where we can put it on autocast)?

Scourge isn't in a bad place on paper. I've even had fun playing heal alac scourge. But the design is really muddy right now and it FEELS bad, especially dps scourge.

Yep. On paper this all works, and I've done heal-scourge, alac-dps, and dps-scourge in the new world... but to your point (echoed by many) it FEELS bad. Shade every 8s is a chore.  Can we do it? Sure. Does it feel like a massive and unwelcome gameplay change vs. pre-patch? Yep.

Before we had the luxury before of placing shades in clumps or at odd intervals because 20s duration >>> 8s charge. Old style was more relaxed, gave us flexibility to save charges for a phase change or movement, or spend them in a cluster to give us a long window to focus on other skills, etc etc. I get that Anet felt backed into a corner with the multiple shades -> too much alac, and I guess they decided multiple shades had to remain as scourge identity, which I do question (especially since the current design limits us to very few opportunities to have 3 shades down anyway!). Alternative option-wise, I'd be fine w/1 shade, with the same 20s duration/8s charge - it's a bit weird to be so strong AOE-wise and also have solid ST parse, and even tuned down to one shade the AOE potential would remain strong.

As you said, the design is muddy and FEELS bad. The new roles are all effective, but they're clunky and annoying to play.

Edited July 24, 2023 by Gaeb.2837

[Cuks.8241]

On 7/19/2023 at 2:33 AM, Mauti.3520 said:

But what on earth is CMC supposed to do with Druid in PvE?

Why couldn't they just do it like alacren or qfb. One button, dedicated, you press it, you give boon. You trade of a bit of stats and a utility slot for it so there is always a pure, boonless option thats stronger. Voila you have a fun spec. And it's easy to balance.

Instead of needing multiple spirits, you could only need one spirit for example. Instead of needing to spam all your facets on herald or upkeep till you're dry, why not just sacrifice 1 facet for it.

This is specifically for support healing specs where gameplay is or should be reactionary. For boon dps spec I think its fine if its something you need to incorporate into rotation. But still not to the extent where it completely starve you out of anything else that is fun on a spec.

[Lily.1935]

On 7/19/2023 at 6:35 PM, Gaeb.2837 said:

Yep, kind of frustrating. I see a lot of non-scourge players trying to say this isn't any different than before based on youtube videos of dummy parses, but a- They don't play scourge and b- Dummy parses aren't reflective of how raids, strikes, fractals, and open world events go (phases, movement, target changes, etc) ... they're dummy parses.

Scourge was my main build since PoF's release. I've since stopped playing necromancer entirely and barely touch GW2 as of late because it doesn't feel as good to play, it doesn't support the style of play I enjoy anymore. its so... Spreadsheet now. Its just "Does it look good on a spreadsheet" rather than "Does it feel good to play".

I've thought about swapping classes to Revenant or Engineer. I enjoy Herald but I don't enjoy the other elite specs on revenant specifically because of their legends so its a hard sell. I enjoy Engineer, mainly holosmith, condi and power both but they kinda ruined the play feel of my quickness scrapper and my mechanist too... So I feel pretty heavily burned by arena net right now.