Why Balance Patches are Professional Raiders skills dedicated ?

[LadyKitty.6120]

3 hours ago, soulknight.9620 said:

Its not how balancing work. A trait or a skill may be overtuned to compensate for difficulty in applying it in practice. And it would be balanced to that extent. Benchmarkers are not testers, they are not doing community a favor in any way and the only thing they achieve with benchmarking is - measuring dps of a class against a dummy golem. Which has nothing to do with live encounters where you have to do mechanics, sustain yourself and do damage at the same time. A build that excels on a stationary dummy golem may fail hard in live encounters and vice versa a build that struggles to keep up with top dps spec on dummy golem can dish out more dps in live encounters. The two examples that comes into mind is pre buffed 32k dps scourge and pre buffed 32k dps power mechanist. Both of them dished out constant dps while providing decent utility and a lot of times they actually outperformed some of the 38-40k dps specs in real encounters. 

Thats why doing balance patches based on benchmarkers and "speedruners" stats is bad for the game. The majority of playerbase doesnt have the same "problems" that they have. And yet these patches affect every single one of us. 

First of all, there isn't that many multiplayer encounters where boss moving becomes an issue once you know the boss and your build. Main cases would be Deimos, SH, Largos, maybe Sabir and Ankka. And maybe Li and dark Ai sideburn if most DPS are melee. Most of world bosses don't move during burns. Even Matt doesn't really force that much movement if people aren't all around the place as DPSers can simply spread around the boss and move slightly outside melee range when timed bombs pop (or stay on boss if there's 2-3 pure melee DPS). Otherwise, bosses are mostly DPS golems for experienced players or slow enough to follow/move around them.

But if don't know the boss and/or your build, the build's DPS potential isn't the first thing you need to worry about. (though high DPS floor does help and that's why LI builds exist for those who dislike golem grind, infamously including Kitty herself) And in most of those "mechanist out-DPSed other specs"-cases it was either A. you could pierce for cleave a la Li or B. Mechanist had greater mastery over their build than non-mechanist had over theirs which was the usual case due to how easy it is to reach DPS ceiling on it and usually the boss being one of the aforementioned ones. At bosses where you didn't need to move much during burns, skilled players who'd do 38-40k at golem still out-DPSed mechanists by a good margin. Kitty got to experience that on mechanist end multiple times.

Also, sustain isn't usually an issue unless there's absolutely no healers around or healer has the aforementioned issue. When it comes to solo gameplay, you mainly need to figure out how to boon yourself. Most classes (except ele) have at least one spec with "outgoing damage to healing"-trait that basically cheeses anything as long as you can do damage and then you mainly need to choose if you want to deal single-target damage from range or cleave in melee. (or sometimes both)

[Echostorm.9143]

4 hours ago, Solanaar.3714 said:

 Lastly when you are a person that criticizes Anet looking at benchmarks (which you don't know that they do, you assume) and use these same benchmarks to decide a spec is unplayable you are both hypocritical and not a casual. Casuals don't have arcdps, don't know or care about if their engi pistol condi now ticks for 1.5 seconds less, they play what's fun to them. So don't speak for a group you don't belong to. You are allowed to complain, you have every right to and feedback, even the most emotionally charged one, can be useful but know who you are speaking for.

I'm not saying anet is good at balancing, but some of the things you people like to say wouldn't be said if you knew half of the variables that need to be accounted for in a balancing process.

Is your argument that nerfs don't affect casuals because they they don't have arcdps?  Also, who's speaking for casuals now dude?  It sounds like you're doing the same thing.

You seem to be claiming a lot of insider knowledge in that last line.  Are you a secret Anet employee?  Is this CmCs alt account?  

[eXistence.3876]

Great question! I agree. Let the professions shine!

[Obtena.7952]

25 minutes ago, Echostorm.9143 said:

Is your argument that nerfs don't affect casuals because they they don't have arcdps?  Also, who's speaking for casuals now dude?  It sounds like you're doing the same thing.

You seem to be claiming a lot of insider knowledge in that last line.  Are you a secret Anet employee?  Is this CmCs alt account?  

I think the argument being made here is that generally casuals don't care about changes to numbers, so Anet can make these balancing changes and, in large, the casual community isn't really bothered by them. What impacts casuals mostly is when the flavour of the things they play are changed to something different. 

For an example of an undesirable change, the whole Berserker fiasco, changing from version1 to version 2 and back to something like version 1. A positive example is when Scrapper was changed .. because we can be assured no player was using the first version of Scrapper because it had good numbers. 

But, to the thread itself, it's always going to make sense that Anet targets the overperformance build nerfs based on the content that they intentionally design to challenge players the most. It's absurd that a thread would even challenge that intent. 

Edited September 27, 2023 by Obtena.7952

[Gaiawolf.8261]

3 hours ago, Obtena.7952 said:

I think the argument being made here is that generally casuals don't care about changes to numbers, so Anet can make these balancing changes and, in large, the casual community isn't really bothered by them.

I'm not too sure about this. I'm a borderline casual player, and most of my friends are very much casual players. A good number of them have noticed changes to the effectiveness of their characters to the point they had to change builds. I admit my friends are a rather small sample size, but the complaints were nearly ubiquitous, purely based on numerical changes to coefficients, and we can't be the only ones.

Now I agree with you that numerical changes should be small enough to go mostly unnoticed by the average player, but Anet has a history of radical buffs and nerfs that even casual players tend to take noticed and experience frustrations. So this appears to be valid a complaint with the way Anet balances the game from beyond the elitist/forum/reddit communities. When casual players find a build they like (and they usually don't overperform when using it), they tend to stick with it, because they are not dedicated build crafters or meta followers. When a nerf hits them hard enough, which happens all too often from this balance team, they are generally lost until they find help. This is not okay.

Edited September 27, 2023 by Gaiawolf.8261

[Angesombre.4630]

The question is, on what basis does a build overperform? On what criteria? Buff, dps, tanking?

I know this is PvE, but in WvW I came across a scourge full barriere all the time, its life never went down, we were two on it alté and pure dps full barriere every time. I'm no expert but there are limits.

Edited September 27, 2023 by Angesombre.4630

[Jzaku.9765]

2 hours ago, Gaiawolf.8261 said:

I'm not too sure about this. I'm a borderline casual player, and most of my friends are very much casual players. A good number of them have noticed changes to the effectiveness of their characters to the point they had to change builds. I admit my friends are a rather small sample size, but the complaints were nearly ubiquitous, purely based on numerical changes to coefficients, and we can't be the only ones.

Now I agree with you that numerical changes should be small enough to go mostly unnoticed by the average player, but Anet has a history of radical buffs and nerfs that even casual players tend to take noticed and experience frustrations. So this appears to be valid a complaint with the way Anet balances the game from beyond the elitist/forum/reddit communities. When casual players find a build they like (and they usually don't overperform when using it), they tend to stick with it, because they are not dedicated build crafters or meta followers. When a nerf hits them hard enough, which happens all too often from this balance team, they are generally lost until they find help. This is not okay.

You are definitely right to feel this way. Even the most casual player can be (disproportionately) badly affected by these balance patches depending on how the adjustment is implemented. 

 

Even in this very patch, if you casually played a condi Berserker build and didn't properly utilize King of Fire's "detonate fire aura" effect, which is quite a big ask for a """casual""" to execute, you just got absolutely nuked by this patch. Or god forbid, you were using Eternal Champion instead because anet decided to put the QOL of being able to exit berserk on demand on a competing GM trait.

[Theros.1390]

6 hours ago, Obtena.7952 said:

But, to the thread itself, it's always going to make sense that Anet targets the overperformance build nerfs based on the content that they intentionally design to challenge players the most. It's absurd that a thread would even challenge that intent. 

What percentage of the playerbase do a full Raid run each week in your opinion ?

[Sobx.1758]

On 9/26/2023 at 9:11 PM, Stx.4857 said:

 

Ideally they would have compensated with buffs to underperforming dps like vindicator…. But alas. 

But alas what? They literally did, but people are too preoccupied with crying about any nerf they see to actually read and understand the patchnotes. 🤦‍♂️

On 9/26/2023 at 9:14 PM, Ravenwulfe.5360 said:

A pure DPS herald barely scratched 40k and that's with sweaty tryharding, and a quickness build was below that.

Yeah, the qherald was at 36-38k, which... still isn't where q or a dps builds should be. "It was below 40k" doesn't really make it in any way ok.

Edited September 27, 2023 by Sobx.1758

[Sobx.1758]

5 hours ago, Gaiawolf.8261 said:

I'm not too sure about this. I'm a borderline casual player, and most of my friends are very much casual players. A good number of them have noticed changes to the effectiveness of their characters to the point they had to change builds. I admit my friends are a rather small sample size, but the complaints were nearly ubiquitous, purely based on numerical changes to coefficients, and we can't be the only ones.

Ok, what content did they notice it in, what builds and what changes did they make?

 

On 9/26/2023 at 6:29 PM, Theros.1390 said:

All is in the title,

Please consider once for all that doing the perfect rotation and be able to reach the top DPS potential on a profession, is reachable by far less than 1% of the player base.

Please let the professionals shine, and let the casuals players do some decent damages in PvE.

So which content were you able to play but aren't able to after the patch? We can still do decent damage in pve without spamming "pro rotations". People here seem to love to conveniently keep closing their eyes whenever they get stronger, but when a nerf happens, all hell breaks loose and they totally are unable to deal damage all of a sudden. You didn't start playing this game last month, you were able to deal damage and still are.

Edited September 27, 2023 by Sobx.1758

[Cuks.8241]

On 9/26/2023 at 6:29 PM, Theros.1390 said:

All is in the title,

Please consider once for all that doing the perfect rotation and be able to reach the top DPS potential on a profession, is reachable by far less than 1% of the player base.

Please let the professionals shine, and let the casuals players do some decent damages in PvE.

 

Balancing based on the data from top end players and letting everyone do some decent dmg in PVE are 2 completely different things.

balancing based on data from close to perfect rotations and builds makes sense because there you have reproducible, objective data you can work with. What other data would you base your changes on? If something is overperforming or underperforming in perfect conditions, it has the potential to do it anywhere. 

Complex rotations and just bad builds are completely another story. I like in-depth build crafting. It's the core of rpgs for me. But maybe Anet could just offer some decent pre-sets. And some rotations are on the complex side and others are not. Most are very spammy though. I like fast and a bit of a spammy gameplay in pvp but in pve not really. I prefer if the difficulty in pve comes from well designed encounters and mechanics, not from the ability to mash buttons close to the carpal tunnel limit. And you really need to mash those buttons fast in pve rotations. I think that's probably the biggest problem. I have played many games and quite some mmos and I never had a big problem keeping the rotation and keeping up good dps. But oh man you need to mash those buttons in this game. And in between all the mashing you also have to be careful not to self interrupt. Maybe I am just getting old (I am). 

[Gaiawolf.8261]

1 hour ago, Sobx.1758 said:

Ok, what content did they notice it in, what builds and what changes did they make?

I don't remember them all, but 2 that I helped some friends out with recently were the burn nerf to FB (2s to 1s of burning on Virtue of Justice; a pretty decent portion of its DPS) and the nerf to Battle Scars for revenants (202 (0.1) reduced to 117 (0.006)). Ooof. These are heavy handed, purely numerical nerfs that dramatically hit any player using them. Now granted, some builds using these features probably needed nerfs, but overperforming builds are generally a combination of feature relationships rather than coming down to a single effect. There's no one nerf fits all in a game as complex as GW2, but in general, I favor small nerfs to contributing components that add up to bring a problematic build in line, rather than any nerf of these magnitudes that can stifle many, various builds.

In the case of the JoV nerf, the damage noticeably cut every single FB's damage, even those using many underperforming builds instead of just the few overperforming builds. All the overperforming builds used axe as the primary weapon, but what did Anet do? They applied a broad nerf to the entire spec, and then they buffed axe to compensate! WTF? Thus widening the the already frustrating gap for ppl using builds with any other weapon, instead of just targeting the over-tuned builds which used a single weapon, which was buffed. 

I'm not sure all the aspects of the Battle Scars nerf, because I didn't start looking heavily into the class until around the time of the nerf, but I had to help my friend who was running a Devastation rev to find a suitable build for the sustain he wanted. It was a very powerful effect, but not over-tuned the way he, and probably many others, were using it. It was only really a problem when using Battle Scarred, Thrill of Combat, and Dance of Death while stacking Vulnerability, none of which were nerfed. Small nerfs to each of these components could have kept the effect under control without gimping everyone that used it.

Edited September 27, 2023 by Gaiawolf.8261

[Jedrik.3109]

This thread is depressing in ways I can not even describe. 😞 

[LadyKitty.6120]

1 hour ago, Gaiawolf.8261 said:

I don't remember them all, but 2 that I helped some friends out with recently were the burn nerf to FB (2s to 1s of burning on Virtue of Justice; a pretty decent portion of its DPS) and the nerf to Battle Scars for revenants (202 (0.1) reduced to 117 (0.006)). Ooof. These are heavy handed, purely numerical nerfs that dramatically hit any player using them. Now granted, some builds using these features probably needed nerfs, but overperforming builds are generally a combination of feature relationships rather than coming down to a single effect. There's no one nerf fits all in a game as complex as GW2, but in general, I favor small nerfs to contributing components that add up to bring a problematic build in line, rather than any nerf of these magnitudes that can stifle many, various builds.

In the case of the JoV nerf, the damage noticeably cut every single FB's damage, even those using many underperforming builds instead of just the few overperforming builds. All the overperforming builds used axe as the primary weapon, but what did Anet do? They applied a broad nerf to the entire spec, and then they buffed axe to compensate! WTF? Thus widening the the already frustrating gap for ppl using builds with any other weapon, instead of just targeting the over-tuned builds which used a single weapon, which was buffed. 

I'm not sure all the aspects of the Battle Scars nerf, because I didn't start looking heavily into the class until around the time of the nerf, but I had to help my friend who was running a Devastation rev to find a suitable build for the sustain he wanted. It was a very powerful effect, but not over-tuned the way he, and probably many others, were using it. It was only really a problem when using Battle Scarred, Thrill of Combat, and Dance of Death while stacking Vulnerability, none of which were nerfed. Small nerfs to each of these components could have kept the effect under control without gimping everyone that used it.

When it comes to guardian builds, they indeed haven't really taken other than most optimal weapons into consideration after hammer buffs. Especially scepter has been in horrifying spot for a while now.

But Battle Scars nerf was kinda justified as combined with sword+sword, renegade and Dance of Death, it provided really strong self-heals without any major opportunity cost. If you used Icerazor's Ire, that was basically 8k self-heal+another 20 Battle Scars stacks as leftover (if you hit just one target, more if you hit multiple). In other words, you could use it to basically self-heal to full at relatively short CD. Combined with other vulnerability from swords, the self-sustain was really strong and for ex. in raids, Kitty was able to play really risky and greedy by just ignoring lots of damage since anything non-lethal would got healed soon anyway as long as there was stuff to hit. And since DoD healed through Battle Scars-effect, nerfing Battle Scars was in fact direct nerf to DoD, Thrill of Combat and Battle Scarred.

And to be honest, generally speaking, if you ran something else than DoD which is basically revenant's equivalent of Invigorating Precision and such, the sustain rev had ofc didn't feel OP 'cause you weren't even tapping into the source of what made it OP to begin with. And that nerf was anyway in line with other damage-to-healing nerfs they did at same time.

Edited September 28, 2023 by LadyKitty.6120

[rotten.9753]

15 hours ago, LadyKitty.6120 said:

First of all, there isn't that many multiplayer encounters where boss moving becomes an issue once you know the boss and your build. Main cases would be Deimos, SH, Largos, maybe Sabir and Ankka. And maybe Li and dark Ai sideburn if most DPS are melee. Most of world bosses don't move during burns. Even Matt doesn't really force that much movement if people aren't all around the place as DPSers can simply spread around the boss and move slightly outside melee range when timed bombs pop (or stay on boss if there's 2-3 pure melee DPS). Otherwise, bosses are mostly DPS golems for experienced players or slow enough to follow/move around them.

But if don't know the boss and/or your build, the build's DPS potential isn't the first thing you need to worry about. (though high DPS floor does help and that's why LI builds exist for those who dislike golem grind, infamously including Kitty herself) And in most of those "mechanist out-DPSed other specs"-cases it was either A. you could pierce for cleave a la Li or B. Mechanist had greater mastery over their build than non-mechanist had over theirs which was the usual case due to how easy it is to reach DPS ceiling on it and usually the boss being one of the aforementioned ones. At bosses where you didn't need to move much during burns, skilled players who'd do 38-40k at golem still out-DPSed mechanists by a good margin. Kitty got to experience that on mechanist end multiple times.

Also, sustain isn't usually an issue unless there's absolutely no healers around or healer has the aforementioned issue. When it comes to solo gameplay, you mainly need to figure out how to boon yourself. Most classes (except ele) have at least one spec with "outgoing damage to healing"-trait that basically cheeses anything as long as you can do damage and then you mainly need to choose if you want to deal single-target damage from range or cleave in melee. (or sometimes both)

You can also try playing slightly newer content than 8 years old deprecated raids, I'd like to see how good you can perform with melee only builds on encounters like XJJ and OLC. Come back when you can outdps any decent virtuoso, scourge or specter as a weaver.

[Gaiawolf.8261]

4 hours ago, LadyKitty.6120 said:

When it comes to guardian builds, they indeed haven't really taken other than most optimal weapons into consideration after hammer buffs. Especially scepter has been in horrifying spot for a while now.

But Battle Scars nerf was kinda justified as combined with sword+sword, renegade and Dance of Death, it provided really strong self-heals without any major opportunity cost. If you used Icerazor's Ire, that was basically 8k self-heal+another 20 Battle Scars stacks as leftover (if you hit just one target, more if you hit multiple). In other words, you could use it to basically self-heal to full at relatively short CD. Combined with other vulnerability from swords, the self-sustain was really strong and for ex. in raids, Kitty was able to play really risky and greedy by just ignoring lots of damage since anything non-lethal would got healed soon anyway as long as there was stuff to hit. And since DoD healed through Battle Scars-effect, nerfing Battle Scars was in fact direct nerf to DoD, Thrill of Combat and Battle Scarred.

And to be honest, generally speaking, if you ran something else than DoD which is basically revenant's equivalent of Invigorating Precision and such, the sustain rev had ofc didn't feel OP 'cause you weren't even tapping into the source of what made it OP to begin with. And that nerf was anyway in line with other damage-to-healing nerfs they did at same time.

Yeah, I love scepter on guard, and I found ways to get it to work, but's not where it should be. Shame. Hammer is another one, especially in competitive modes.

That's just it then. If it was the combo between renegade features and Battle Scars that overbalanced it, then there's your problem. The interaction, not necessarily the Battle Scars effect. They didn't need to punish everyone who wanted to use Battle Scars for their sustain just because renegades have skills that pump out 20 hits. Rather, increase the coefficient for Icerazor and bring it back down to Tyria with a reasonable number of hits, so it can't be abused with on hit effects. This is exactly the kind of interaction I'm talking about that could be tweaked instead of gutting an otherwise (mostly) balanced feature. My friend was a vindicator and tried to switch to renegade. He hated it, because he wanted to use his GS. I finally found a vindicator build that worked for him.

[Supernova Starr.2069]

In every game out there, every balance patch seems made to the 1% due them being able to playing classes like their design is intended. 

It's not developers fault most people fail to do the basic. 

PS: not trying to be rude. 

[Tammuz.7361]

On 9/26/2023 at 3:11 PM, Stx.4857 said:

Quickness Herald was doing 40k+ while providing permanent uptime on all important boons including defensive boons.  It was way too good.  
 

Ideally they would have compensated with buffs to underperforming dps like vindicator…. But alas. 

looks like they did buff vindicator, or tried to:

• Leviathan Strength: Increased damage bonus from 10% to 15% in PvE only.
• Forerunner of Death: Increased damage bonus from 15% to 25% in PvE only.

still waiting for ARCdps to get fixed to see if overall ended up being a buff or a nerf with the GS damage nerfs though...

[LadyKitty.6120]

25 minutes ago, Tammuz.7361 said:

looks like they did buff vindicator, or tried to:

• Leviathan Strength: Increased damage bonus from 10% to 15% in PvE only.
• Forerunner of Death: Increased damage bonus from 15% to 25% in PvE only.

still waiting for ARCdps to get fixed to see if overall ended up being a buff or a nerf with the GS damage nerfs though...

Most likely overall nerf for Vindi as well. Overall 8-9% buff for Power Vindicator as whole. The impacts of the balance patch on following skills (used to be 21.1% of total damage):
Mist Swing -20.5%
Mist Slash -17.4%
Arcing Mists +4.9%
Mist Unleashed -9.1%
Leviathan Strength+Forerunner of Death buffs were +13.6% total buff so +13.6% to other components of Power Vindicator's rotation.

Edited September 28, 2023 by LadyKitty.6120

[soul.9651]

8 hours ago, Theros.1390 said:

What percentage of the playerbase do a full Raid run each week in your opinion ?

Or another question: what percentage of playerbase dont do any raid runs anymore after they got all rewards they wanted from the raids (all lege gear)?

[LadyKitty.6120]

3 minutes ago, soul.9651 said:

Or another question: what percentage of playerbase dont do any raid runs anymore after they got all rewards they wanted from the raids (all lege gear)?

Or what percentage of playerbase who raided has either quit (for variety of reasons) or only do a couple wings per week?

[soulknight.9620]

2 hours ago, rotten.9753 said:

You can also try playing slightly newer content than 8 years old deprecated raids, I'd like to see how good you can perform with melee only builds on encounters like XJJ and OLC. Come back when you can outdps any decent virtuoso, scourge or specter as a weaver.

Not to mention fractal CMs like Arkk with some instabilities where there is literary "things" happening all around. Its pointless to prove to any of these "pro raiders" that harder content exists and that raids are not hard at all. 

1 hour ago, Supernova Starr.2069 said:

In every game out there, every balance patch seems made to the 1% due them being able to playing classes like their design is intended. 

It's not developers fault most people fail to do the basic. 

PS: not trying to be rude. 

As a matter of fact it IS developers fault. Their job is to design a class to be playable by the majority of the community and be fun at the same time. If devs have some unknown eldrich knowledge on how they want their class to be played they must tell the community otherwise the community has 0 chance of knowing that. 

The best we have now is class descriptions (which are outdated by 10 years now, just check ele description and laugh) and their design phylosophy which contradicts the resent changes. 

 

[soul.9651]

34 minutes ago, LadyKitty.6120 said:

Or what percentage of playerbase who raided has either quit (for variety of reasons) or only do a couple wings per week?

This is prob the highest one, especially quitting part

[Supernova Starr.2069]

28 minutes ago, soulknight.9620 said:

As a matter of fact it IS developers fault. Their job is to design a class to be playable by the majority of the community and be fun at the same time. If devs have some unknown eldrich knowledge on how they want their class to be played they must tell the community otherwise the community has 0 chance of knowing that. 

They can't develop classes both casuals and high-end players can play in a equal level. It's impossible.

There's a thing called floor and ceiling skill which is how you play a class, within it's designed. Gw2 has a floor of 10k dps which you can get by just pressing 1 in almost every classes in a mix of gear/traits, and yet the majority of players are doing below 5k.

Not to mention, leveling the field so 'casual players' can supposedly 'enjoy' the game, will punish high-end players for maximize their playstyle for faster and smoother runs in whatever content they running. 

Edited September 28, 2023 by Supernova Starr.2069

[LadyKitty.6120]

2 hours ago, rotten.9753 said:

You can also try playing slightly newer content than 8 years old deprecated raids, I'd like to see how good you can perform with melee only builds on encounters like XJJ and OLC. Come back when you can outdps any decent virtuoso, scourge or specter as a weaver.

Kitty did specifically mention Ankka (aka. boss of XJJ). Forgot about OLC, true, should've included that in the list of exceptions.
 

19 minutes ago, soulknight.9620 said:

Not to mention fractal CMs like Arkk with some instabilities where there is literary "things" happening all around. Its pointless to prove to any of these "pro raiders" that harder content exists and that raids are not hard at all. 

 

Yes, most of EoD strike CMs are indeed harder than most of raids, that's no secret.
And when it comes to Arkk CM, the main thing during burns that someone needs to stop DPSing for is anomaly and the bomb bubble (and still, at least 2 DPS can just burn the boss). And if the squad is even somewhat decent, anomaly-bomb only happens 3-4 times during the boss (100%, 70%, 40%, 30%). At 80% and 50% you can just burn to miniboss to despawn the anomaly. For pretty much all other mechanics you can just dance around the boss and look away for half a second if needed (if support isn't stabbing/blocking the eye for you). Orbs? Bubble. Push? Trivago.