Power Creep, The game is too easy [Merged]

[Gendalfs.7521]

1 hour ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

the game shouldn't be balanced around these "golem testers", that's very biased.

Agree and also should not be balanced around raid encounters.

[LadyKitty.6120]

1 hour ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

the game shouldn't be balanced around these "golem testers", that's very biased.

 

Just now, Gendalfs.7521 said:

Agree and also should not be balanced around raid encounters.

What it should be balanced around is numbers. The information for the damage math is available on wiki, though cast times need to be recorded either through damage meter and parser or some other tool that they should be using, and people have spreadsheets, some with trait and other interactions included into the calculations (though at times it seems like balance team is going by feel with some decisions) . And human error aside, golem testers are often testing how those maths turn out in practise. And not-so-surprisingly, those calculations usually aren't that far off from in-game numbers. Just depends on how close to perfect execution you get.

And to be clear, some buildcrafters (like Kitty) have actually done the maths before giving detailed suggestions and those have often resulted in improved balance when implemented with previously unused stuffs becoming viable options.

If you have any counter-arguments and suggestions on what they should base their balancing on instead, preferably including why, Kitty would like to read them.

[DarcShriek.5829]

Now that Sky scales can use updrafts, Dragonstand just became even easier.

[LadyKitty.6120]

Really had to make a separate thread after posting pretty much same comment in another thread? 🤔

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/137379-power-creep-the-game-is-too-easy/?do=findComment&comment=1989394

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

2 hours ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

The game shouldn't be balanced around these "golems testers" is very biased.

Their "uber DPS" runs over overcomplicated rotation's.

If Scourge's rotation is over complicated I'm not sure what one might consider simple.

It's around the level of Rifle Mech, which did ~34k DPS and got nerfed, because it was "too easy". Even funnier, Scourge was considered way too easy for what it could do before EoD, when with the same difficulty it did ~37k DPS, now it does 49k.

Edit: Should add Reaper, Condi Virt and DD to the list of ""overcomplicated rotation""

Edited September 11, 2023 by IAmNotMatthew.1058

[willow.8209]

4 hours ago, LadyKitty.6120 said:

The trick: Celestial gears from lvl80 boost (or something even worse), bad weapon combo, non-DPS utility skills and random mix of traits without any synergy. Very common thing to happen for players who haven't done any squad content and taught better (which is likely the majority of players given the open-world focused nature of the game) and probably the #1 cause of game feeling very needlessly difficult.

there's a big build difference playing in an organized group like raid, and playing open world

in open world you need to bring your own stun break, condi cleanse, heals and buffs--which leaves little to no room for DPS utility skills.

Edited September 11, 2023 by willow.8209
brain fog

[Ashen.2907]

My autoattack now does more damage than a rotation based dps build from 2013. Powercreep is real.

[Sobx.1758]

5 hours ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

The game shouldn't be balanced around these "golems testers" is very biased.

Their "uber DPS" runs over overcomplicated rotation's.

There pretty clearly is power creep and not every high dps build is including "overcomplicated rotations" nor is somehow completely unrealistic outside of golem situations. It will vary between the builds and numbers, but at this point trying to make the claim there's no power creep looks like a bad joke.

Edited September 11, 2023 by Sobx.1758

[Passerbye.6291]

Yeah, let's balance the game around people who fail to auto attack, let alone use any other skills. Surely this will make everything better.
I seriously try my best to be understanding of people's opinions, but then someone posts something like this.

"There is no powercreep" Reminds me of that one avatar the last airbender episode where there is clearly no war in Ba sing se.

You'd think people would stop arguing against objective truths and numbers, but nope.

I'll put this in my "I'm a single parent of 47, I paid full price for the game, therefore I shouldn't need to actually play the game to have everything" folder.

[Tachenon.5270]

Yesterday I was goofing around with my seldom-played Untamed norn dude, tracking down pets to charm, and I happened upon the champion karka hive defender event in Southsun. I figured what the heck and jumped in -- only to discover I was all the only player there! Woops. And then it dawned on me that, hey, my guy wasn't dying. He was actually whittling that champ down and he wasn't dying. Well, he did get downed once, but ultimately he triumphed. And I was all like, well doggies. How about that! And then later he was in Cantha and some elite aetherblade bandit handed him his champ-soloing behind in a picnic basket. Along with a box of barefoot pinot grigio. So, I guess the moral of this story is, one champ's power creep is another elite's uh, scruffy-looking nerf herder. Or something. Or maybe it works both ways. I dunno. Stupid aetherblades.

[Cyninja.2954]

5 hours ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

The game shouldn't be balanced around these "golems testers" is very biased.

Their "uber DPS" runs over overcomplicated rotation's.

Opinion =/= fact.

Food for thought: step back from the forum warrior attitude for a moment and take a look at the game as a whole (and step away from the me versus them approach).

Actually consider what happens to existing content as character power changes. There is already a ton of content which breaks (and broke at previous power levels). World bosses which are not only a shadow of their former self, but which completely break (good luck getting any achievements done Dragons' End which involve more than just bursting down Mordremoth in 10 seconds for example). The same goes for many other fights. Now I get it, maybe you have all this stuff done and done give a kitten that other players are unable to enjoy this content, and that certainly is a position to take even if a very toxic one.

Now feel free to play the blame game and make assumptions as to why specific players should not be listened to or might be the reason for certain changes, when this is much rather a discussion about health and longevity of content (and thus health and longevity of the game).

Power creep is not limited or only present at the damage golem. It is not something only "uber high end leet wannabe" players experience. It is present in EVERY aspect of the game.

[ugrakarma.9416]

12 minutes ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

Power creep is not limited or only present at the damage golem. It is not something only "uber high end leet wannabe" players experience. It is present in EVERY aspect of the game.

All power creep complainers are golem testers.

Also the so called power creep are conseuqence of their demands, specially celestial meta, "imortal builds".

Celestial Meta is result of massive nerfs over years, everything became so bland that the best stats is just distribute over everything.

i wonder where the idea to give make pistol availiable to scourge come from.....

Anet should learn from their mistakes.

Edited September 11, 2023 by ugrakarma.9416

[Sobx.1758]

9 minutes ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

All power creep complainers are golem testers.

Also the so called power creep are conseuqence of their demands, specially celestial meta, "imortal builds".

Celestial Meta is result of massive nerfs over years, everything became so bland that the best stats is just distribute over everything.

i wonder where the idea to give make pistol availiable to scourge come from.....

Anet should learn from their mistakes.

Pretty much all of this is wrong or mostly wrong because you're trying to generalize for no reason (like the first sentence you wrote here). Celestial meta isn't "because nerfs", but because of... celestial gear buffs.

I also wonder how you're trying to connect "all complainers are golem testers" with "power creep consequence = celestial meta". 🤔

[Manasa Devi.7958]

I did Vinewrath today. Hadn't done it in years but I was in Silverwastes for 100 mordrem kills and I stuck around. The 3 champions just melted in seconds. I've never ever used a dps test golem, yet the effects of powercreep was very obvious to me.

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

17 minutes ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

All power creep complainers are golem testers.

Also the so called power creep are conseuqence of their demands, specially celestial meta, "imortal builds".

Celestial Meta is result of massive nerfs over years, everything became so bland that the best stats is just distribute over everything.

i wonder where the idea to give make pistol availiable to scourge come from.....

Anet should learn from their mistakes.

Except Celestial is nowhere near meta in PvE

[Ashen.2907]

As much as I disagree with the false assertion that there is no power creep (again, my main's autoattack does more dps than a dedicated dps build with a rotation did in the past) I do believe that balance should not be based solely on golem benchmarks.....and it is not. 

[Cyninja.2954]

51 minutes ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

All power creep complainers are golem testers.

Are you sure about that? Seems to me the majority of complaints come from broken open world stuff.

When was the last time something which was not part of the latest expansion was threatening to your character?

How does it feel to 1-shot almost every enemy in core Tyria even on naked characters?

How many metas do not work any more or are over almost immediately? Sure that's great for the farmers but what do you think does this do with new players?

51 minutes ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

Also the so called power creep are conseuqence of their demands, specially celestial meta, "imortal builds".

You seem to be confusing things here or are vastly out of touch with this games build design.

There are no immortal builds for instanced content, which is where most of your "golem players" will be.

"Immortal builds" are found a lot more in story and open world content.

51 minutes ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

Celestial Meta is result of massive nerfs over years, everything became so bland that the best stats is just distribute over everything.

There is no celestial meta, at least not in instanced PvE content.

There are some overperforming WvW roaming builds which use celestial.

Large scale squad builds in WvW do not use celestial.

51 minutes ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

i wonder where the idea to give make pistol availiable to scourge come from.....

Anet should learn from their mistakes.

Not sure but I do recall a lot of more casual players demanding access to every elite spec weapon.

You seem critically uninformed and out of touch and some of your assumptions I couldn't even pinpoint or even begin to assume where you picked them up.

The reality here is: golem benchmarks are up and beyond mid to high tier 40k, low 50k with some outliers hitting 55k. That's the easy measurable part. This also affects low intensity builds which have grown to mid and top 30k by now (there was a popular LI build youtuber calling attention to this a few days back on reddit).

The increased damage is felt in every part of the game, most notably open world content because that content is now not only most simplistically designed (less mechanics if any, less phases if any, less damage etc) but also over a lot faster which leads to even less interactive gameplay.

Edited September 11, 2023 by Cyninja.2954

[Warscythes.9307]

29 minutes ago, Ashen.2907 said:

As much as I disagree with the false assertion that there is no power creep (again, my main's autoattack does more dps than a dedicated dps build with a rotation did in the past) I do believe that balance should not be based solely on golem benchmarks.....and it is not. 

People vastly misunderstood the point of golem benchmarks. Anybody who pays remote attention to how the game works should know what it is for.

Ideally we should have something like warcraft or ff14 logs where class performance is tracked via fight by fight basis. GW2 really doesn't have enough sample size for that, while there are sites that gather this data. I don't think there are enough people submitting logs for this to be anything more than general reference point.

All golem benchmark provides is a estimate on a grinded dps rotation on a immoveable golem with no mechanics. What people need to do is look at the numbers and understand how professions work, then form your own analysis.

For example Scourge. It currently does the highest dps in benchmark, it is extremely easy to play, just borderline above rifle mechs. It does not care about hitbox, barely depends on ground aoe, full ranged and is tanky. What this means is that translating the golem numbers to real fight number will be much easier because you will lose a lot less dps compared to other classes.

Then for example if we look at condi reaper, a very large amount of its damage is locked behind an ice field and spinning in it and get all the chiling bolts to proc and it is mostly melee. You can then form a very good estimated guess that condi reaper will lose a lot more damage than scourge in any real fights because of this. So if the golem benchmark for scourge performs much higher than condi reaper, then there is an obvious problem. Replace condi reaper with any melee class, or anyone that depends on ground aoe etc etc and you can see where the problem is.

So yes, while we shouldn't take a look at the benchmark and just say nerf the highest performer. We can make an educated assumption on what is an outlier based on previous performance and class analysis to provide feedback. There are very obvious example you can see, there just happens to be a lot of them right now due to the power creep.

Edited September 11, 2023 by Warscythes.9307

[Junkpile.7439]

Play fun builds like one shot core mesmer, one shot core guardian, life blast core necro, scepter dagger core ele.

[Mistwraithe.3106]

It seems indisputable that there has been some power creep over the years. Not as much as some have suggested perhaps, but a noticeable increase every few years.

I feel pretty strongly that the specializations should be kept reasonably in line with each other when other factors are taken into account. If a DPS build also provides a lot of boons, CC, sustain or other utility then it should have a bit less DPS than a glass cannon build which doesn't provide much other utility. Melee builds should provide a bit more DPS (they usually do), low intensity builds should provide slightly less DPS than high intensity (but only slightly IMO), big upfront burst builds should have slightly less long term DPS, etc. Tradeoffs should exist.

 

 

[LadyKitty.6120]

8 hours ago, Warscythes.9307 said:

People vastly misunderstood the point of golem benchmarks. Anybody who pays remote attention to how the game works should know what it is for.

Ideally we should have something like warcraft or ff14 logs where class performance is tracked via fight by fight basis. GW2 really doesn't have enough sample size for that, while there are sites that gather this data. I don't think there are enough people submitting logs for this to be anything more than general reference point.

All golem benchmark provides is a estimate on a grinded dps rotation on a immoveable golem with no mechanics. What people need to do is look at the numbers and understand how professions work, then form your own analysis.

For example Scourge. It currently does the highest dps in benchmark, it is extremely easy to play, just borderline above rifle mechs. It does not care about hitbox, barely depends on ground aoe, full ranged and is tanky. What this means is that translating the golem numbers to real fight number will be much easier because you will lose a lot less dps compared to other classes.

Then for example if we look at condi reaper, a very large amount of its damage is locked behind an ice field and spinning in it and get all the chiling bolts to proc and it is mostly melee. You can then form a very good estimated guess that condi reaper will lose a lot more damage than scourge in any real fights because of this. So if the golem benchmark for scourge performs much higher than condi reaper, then there is an obvious problem. Replace condi reaper with any melee class, or anyone that depends on ground aoe etc etc and you can see where the problem is.

So yes, while we shouldn't take a look at the benchmark and just say nerf the highest performer. We can make an educated assumption on what is an outlier based on previous performance and class analysis to provide feedback. There are very obvious example you can see, there just happens to be a lot of them right now due to the power creep.

But we do have quite a bunch of data, over 8 million logs since 2017. Just as some examples (good comparison point would be for ex. SotO launch vs July 2019 BP, selectable through drop-down menu):

MO (aka. DPS golem): https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/mo

Sabetha: https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/sab

Matthiass (a very mechanical boss): https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/matt

Those show top and average performances and you can also have it analyze 100 random logs of that era for each boss to get general idea of dps distribution. Fancy stats also have stuff like Balance Patch Impact available for spec's general performance in the era vs previous.

Though it is true that current balance has only lasted 3 weeks vs usual 3+ month between balance patches so sample size isn't that huge.

But the point is: people aren't shooting in the dark, those who are seriously invested in buildcrafting and balance do check various data before their suggestions. Educated opinions.

Edited September 12, 2023 by LadyKitty.6120

[Warscythes.9307]

16 minutes ago, LadyKitty.6120 said:

But we do have quite a bunch of data, over 8 million logs since 2017. Just as some examples (good comparison point would be for ex. SotO launch vs July 2019 BP, selectable through drop-down menu):

MO (aka. DPS golem): https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/mo

Sabetha: https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/sab

Matthiass (a very mechanical boss): https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/matt

Those show top and average performances and you can also have it analyze 100 random logs of that era for each boss to get general idea of dps distribution. Fancy stats also have stuff like Balance Patch Impact available for spec's general performance in the era vs previous.

Though it is true that current balance has only lasted 3 weeks vs usual 3+ month between balance patches so sample size isn't that huge.

But the point is: people aren't shooting in the dark, those who are seriously invested in buildcrafting and balance do check various data before their suggestions. Educated opinions.

I know wingman exist. I am also not convinced is something that stand to the likes of wowlogs which paints generally a much better picture. It has a much smaller smaller size per patch and has difficulty separate boon and heal from actual dps. That is why I am mentioned I am treating it more of a general reference point such as golem benchmark. Yes it helps. No is not something I'd treat it as the gold standard.

Edited September 12, 2023 by Warscythes.9307

[Ezrael.6859]

On 9/11/2023 at 1:43 PM, Caffynated.5713 said:

100% is an understatement. 8 years ago people were crying for nerfs because staff ele with frost bow pulled 10k DPS on large targets. 

Wow, Staff Ele with Frost Bow, now that's a time I've not heard about for a long time! 😃

Takes me back to the PvP days of - Bull's Charge > Frenzy > Hundred Blades > Eviscerate

[LadyKitty.6120]

25 minutes ago, Warscythes.9307 said:

I know wingman exist. I am also not convinced is something that stand to the likes of wowlogs which paints generally a much better picture. It has a much smaller smaller size per patch and has difficulty separate boon and heal from actual dps. That is why I am mentioned I am treating it more of a general reference point such as golem benchmark. Yes it helps. No is not something I'd treat it as the gold standard.

Actually, you can also apparently filter varying amounts of logs and currently there's 1022 MO logs from last 3 weeks. Kinda small sample size but then again, GW2 has probably the smallest instanced content scene among the big MMOs. And it does have a filter for support builds, which indeed not perfect but still significantly lowers the skew in numbers. (for ex. scourge goes from 29k to 36k average if you check that option. Btw 10k higher than what's been standard for Kitty's aka. "80-85% of bench" player's average performance on the boss before the power creep) And for further accuracy, it has cdps/pdps filter as well to separate better and worse performing versions of the spec.
So, not perfect but it's the best we players have for real situation-data. But ofc people don't use only that but also spreadsheets with the precise numbers of each skill when estimating when something's overtuned. Not to forget logs showing damage distributions between various conditions and power dps skills for further analysis. (though not precise power/condi damage distribution for condi skills since all condi damage is shown as damage from condi type)

Ofc devs might have further advanced tools but we players don't know about the depth they can see to.

[Stalwart.4036]

Don’t worry, any power creep is now being offset by people just shooting 2k fireballs off their skyscale for an entire encounter.