DPS and PowerCreep has gotten out of control. Nerf DPS

[Blumpf.2518]

This is for PVE only!

With the latest Balance changes and the upcoming changes - if they are released as stated at the moment -the DPS of all classes is way too high.

You can skip phases with DPS or just burst down the enemy so hard, that he wont use mechanics at all or only just a few. The so called "High-End content" - Raid CMS, Fractal CMs, Strike CMs becomes a bad joke if DPS is so high that the battle is so short that you hardly see any of the bosses mechanics.

And thats exactly what makes fights really lame and boring.

So heres my suggestion: Nerf every skill that does DPS to bring down the classes to a reasonable amount of damage.

Now im talking about Golem-Damage in the raid training Area cause thats usually used as an Indicator.

Nerf easy to play classes down to 15k Golem-DPS

Nerf medium to play classes down to 20k Golem-DPS

Nerf hard to play classes down to 25k Golem-DPS

Nerf the Tank/Heal/Support Specc down to 5-10k DPS.

 

And another suggestion while we are at it. Tanks/Healers/Supporters shouldnt be able to permanently keep up the important boons like quickness/alac if they have no boon duration at all. Better change it, that with 50% Boonduration you can achieve permanent quickness/alac but with no buffer, should the rotation go wrong or you get interrupted then the group loses the boons for a short time. And under 50% boon duration it shouldnt be possible to have that boons up permanently. The good players will be able to play with 50% boonduration and those that want to play safe can take something between 50-100% boon duration to make sure boons are always up, even if something goes wrong.

[Puck.3697]

Nerfing dps doesn't fix power creep, because it's not the classes that have been power crept. 

What's generated power creep are:

- boons becoming 100% uptime. 

- the introduction of alacrity. 

- role compression.

If you want to break the power creep, boons are what need hitting. Nerfing the flat dps, leaves the core problem in motion realistically. 

Also balancing the game based on build difficulty would be ridiculous, no mmorpgs would do this in sane mind, this would hugely damage the games accessibility. 

Edited November 2, 2023 by Puck.3697

[fatihso.7258]

Shave half of power coefficients from each skill. Problem solved. Easy and cost effective. 

[LadyKitty.6120]

2 hours ago, Puck.3697 said:

Nerfing dps doesn't fix power creep, because it's not the classes that have been power crept. 

What's generated power creep are:

- boons becoming 100% uptime. 

- the introduction of alacrity. 

- role compression.

If you want to break the power creep, boons are what need hitting. Nerfing the flat dps, leaves the core problem in motion realistically. 

Also balancing the game based on build difficulty would be ridiculous, no mmorpgs would do this in sane mind, this would hugely damage the games accessibility. 

Does Kitty need to say this in every thread to correct you? Situation with boons has mostly the same since HoT and including unique buffs that could be counted in, boons been nerfed since then with just Fury getting slight buff to partly compensate for crit rate lost with unique buff removal. Boon uptimes haven't changed since 2015. Meanwhile the numbers on skills and traits themselves had essentially caused combined 50% increase in the class's own numbers (combined 'cause most of traits' buffs are multiplicative). And those increases first caused overall power creep from 33k to 40k between 2018 and EoD and then over that in early 2023.

Though true, removal of unique buffs did allow further role compression since BS was replaced by DPS and tank chronos by "now-75% on pure DPS" boon DPSers. When 10-target Alac was a thing until EoD launch, the comps indeed had 7.5 total DPS instead of 5.5-5.75 of pre-Firebrigade era (pre-autumn 2018).

1 hour ago, fatihso.7258 said:

Shave half of power coefficients from each skill. Problem solved. Easy and cost effective. 

Not sure if you're aware of that but there's something like 1200-1300 skills in this game and looking at how long the time between balance patches has been, it doesn't seem to be like changing condi durations and power modifiers is just "open excel, change number in a cell, done". Not to mention that it's mostly 3-4 weapons per class overperforming and plenty of others underperforming so slashing the numbers further on those underperforming weapons would be a horrible idea.

Though dropping baseline DPS from 40-43k back to 30-33k for most efficient builds would be a healthy thing to do. Things had just the right amount of challenge at that point.

[Puck.3697]

1 hour ago, LadyKitty.6120 said:

Does Kitty need to say this in every thread to correct you? Situation with boons has mostly the same since HoT and including unique buffs that could be counted in, boons been nerfed since then with just Fury getting slight buff to partly compensate for crit rate lost with unique buff removal. Boon uptimes haven't changed since 2015. Meanwhile the numbers on skills and traits themselves had essentially caused combined 50% increase in the class's own numbers (combined 'cause most of traits' buffs are multiplicative). And those increases first caused overall power creep from 33k to 40k between 2018 and EoD and then over that in early 2023

Yes boons have been 100% uptime since 2015 it hasnt changed the fact the slots required in a group to obtain. 100% has continously fallen. Not to mention thr dps support builds are capable of. 

You'd achieve tbe reduction in dps via nerfing boons. Without increasing the difficulty of unorganised gameplay if you nerf classes. You basically increase the difficulty of every part of the game. Including solo, which would raise the gates higher to casuals. 

If u nerf boons you simply reduce collateral damage. 

Look at wingman aswell as any other result. People aren't doing 30k+ dps lol, vast majority of raids and more are done with sub 25k dps numbers. 

Nerfing the entire playerbase because of the amount of abuse boons can be used in high performing teams would not be healthy. Ud bring the average raiders dps down below 15k. 

Edited November 3, 2023 by Puck.3697

[DanAlcedo.3281]

If you reduce the maximum dps possible by 75%. Do you also make the game easier so that everyone can reach them? 

Because if the difficulty stays the same, most players won't even reach 5k dps. 

Have fun killing dagda. 

Also have fun explaining to the community why class X deserves 10k more dps then class Y. 

Not gonna be a kitten show. I'm sure! 

Edited November 3, 2023 by DanAlcedo.3281

[MagicBot.1570]

The age old post that was already true in 2015, in 2017, in 2019, in 2020, in 2021... Oh? And it wasn't in 2022. Guess what happened? Reddit shitstorm!

[Mevelios.4809]

If DPS is too high to your taste, walk into a raid naked? Problem fixed! Maybe you'll even find a hidden achievement. I mean, nothing prevents anyone finding the game too easy to impose a handicap on themselves! Harder with a group, but pretty sure you can find some challenge-starved players and ask them to do the same. Makes for some content to show when advertising your guild!

[Eekasqueak.7850]

Almost nobody likes nerfs that steep, it would probably make a lot of content feel worse to play for a lot of people.  Metas would start failing more, there'd be a lot of people complaining on the forums etc, don't think your idea is anything but a pipe dream. Maybe play with less meta comps? 

[Obtena.7952]

It makes no sense to complain about power crept DPS numbers that most people who play PVE would never achieve and likely doesn't affect you anyways ....

... but OK. 🤷‍♂️

Edited November 3, 2023 by Obtena.7952

[Puck.3697]

23 hours ago, Eekasqueak.7850 said:

Almost nobody likes nerfs that steep, it would probably make a lot of content feel worse to play for a lot of people.  Metas would start failing more, there'd be a lot of people complaining on the forums etc, don't think your idea is anything but a pipe dream. Maybe play with less meta comps? 

I'd love to see a metacomp in the average players hands actually do the dps that's so powercrept first 

[Kuma.1503]

What needs to happen is two things. 

1. Bridge the gap between inexperienced players and experienced players. 

2. Update existing content

 

How do we do this?

The first priority is to better explain and streamline the gearing process. 

One reason why newbies deal so little damage compared to vets is gear. If you're running around on a pistol engineer with soldier stats and masterwork gear, you're not going to pump out the same numbers as a player in full viper exotic/ascended. 

Step 1 is to make it more easy and more intuitive for a player to work their way up to the stats they want/need as they level through Tyria. The player should learn which stats are good for their build naturally as they play the game. 

This will go a long way towards bridging the gap between newbies and vets. Only once this is done do we move on to the next step. 

 

The next step: Update existing content. 

Core Tyria needs an update. DPS has ballooned since the days of old, so it's time we make mobs tankier. However, it doesn't feel good for new players to spend 2 hours trying to kill a random veteran goat in the open world. 

That is why it is imperative that the gearing process be streamlined first! This will help ensure that a newbies don't try to go into the open world with improper gear for their build, take hours to kill a simple veteral goat mob, and quit out of frustration. 

By doing these two things we help to bridge the gap between players while making open world less of a one shot fest. Ideally by doing so, we can start to introduce challenges into the open world that will prepare players for engame. Challenges that aren't trivialized by players with high DPS. 

 

Speaking of which. The next step is to update  legendary/ champion mobs, and revamp dungeons. 

These are natural challenges that a leveling player might experience as they go through the game. Perfect opportunities to throw mechanics at them that will prepare them for endgame. By doing so, Anet can start to tune up the difficulty of the game in response to DPS creep without making things inaccessible to casuals. The difficulty of each dungeon can be tweaked to be slightly harder than the next so there is more of a smooth progression between early and end game. 

 

Finally, we also increase the durability of end game bosses. In response to naturaal DPS creep, we update old bosses that were tuned for the ~25-33k DPS era. This is to prevent players from easily skipping mechanics with raw DPS. 

Ideally in new fights  we can also start seeing some mechanics that encourage groups to take healers into their comp. Such as mechanics that require periodic raid-wide healing above a certain health threshold, or mechanics that require you to periodically heal an NPC along with some minor unavoidable damage to the raid that slowly builds up if not dealt with. This would cut one less full DPS from the group, further reducing the amount of overall DPS. AND it would give heals enjoyers fights where they feel useful, even at high level where heals are usually dropped. 

 

Doing things this way is both more exciting to players than a patch full of nerfs that will probably break multiple balanced builds in the process. Thus creating more work for them in the future that will get pushed off into one of their infrequent balance patches several months down the line. 

And, more importantly, it addresses three of the long standing issues of this game. Outdated content, the gap between newbies and vets, and the massive difficulty spike that comes once players reach level 80. 

 

 

Edited November 4, 2023 by Kuma.1503

[xellink.7568]

Let's start with something simple. Like an overcap warning and tooltip for people with crit chance exceeding 75% without fury/100% with fury. That's a very common mistake for beginners. Eg. Virtuosos on full rampages, most players know they need rampagers but they don't know when to stop. Many people also exceed crit cap with fury. 

[Dadnir.5038]

"Easy", "Medium", "Hard"... That's subjective...

Every single player with a "main" profession believe that it's neighbor have it better than them, that they are harder to play and less rewarding. And you want nerfs based on those subjective point of view? I don't think your "suggestions" will lead to a "better" game, in fact it will probably be impossible to implement.

On another hand, the tank/support dps issue is one of the easiest thing to fix, they just have to reduce the range of possibility that the gear stat sets offer.

• Limit tank sets to vitality, toughness, concentration and expertise combinations.
• Limit support sets to Healing power, concentration and expertise combinations.
• Limit dps sets to power, condition damage, precision, expertise and ferocity combinations.

If players want hybrid stats they can just mix their gear but the final result will most likely be more punishing than what we have right now.

[Kozumi.5816]

It should be clear to everyone by now they intend the game to be mobile game autobattler tier.

Edited November 5, 2023 by Kozumi.5816

[Kozumi.5816]

On 11/3/2023 at 12:10 PM, Mevelios.4809 said:

If DPS is too high to your taste, walk into a raid naked? Problem fixed! Maybe you'll even find a hidden achievement. I mean, nothing prevents anyone finding the game too easy to impose a handicap on themselves! Harder with a group, but pretty sure you can find some challenge-starved players and ask them to do the same. Makes for some content to show when advertising your guild!

This isn't a single player game.

If players need to artifcially handicap themselves for challenge in a MMO the devs have failed.

  

On 11/2/2023 at 7:31 PM, LadyKitty.6120 said:

Not sure if you're aware of that but there's something like 1200-1300 skills in this game and looking at how long the time between balance patches has been, it doesn't seem to be like changing condi durations and power modifiers is just "open excel, change number in a cell, done". Not to mention that it's mostly 3-4 weapons per class overperforming and plenty of others underperforming so slashing the numbers further on those underperforming weapons would be a horrible idea.

Though dropping baseline DPS from 40-43k back to 30-33k for most efficient builds would be a healthy thing to do. Things had just the right amount of challenge at that point.

int32 CBattleEntity::takeDamage(int32 amount, CBattleEntity* attacker /* = nullptr*/, ATTACKTYPE attackType /* = ATTACK_NONE*/, DAMAGETYPE damageType /* = DAMAGE_NONE*/, bool isDOT)
{

 if (attackType == ATTACK_POWER)

 amount = amount * 0.5;

    return addHP(-amount);
}

Edited November 5, 2023 by Kozumi.5816

[Mevelios.4809]

1 hour ago, Kozumi.5816 said:

This isn't a single player game.

If players need to artifcially handicap themselves for challenge in a MMO the devs have failed.

Indeed; single player games are harder. If you crave a challenge, just ask for a few titles!

MMOs have huge fees to keep their services working. They need a comparably huge player base to keep it running, so they can't cater exclusively to the most reactive ones, the most knowledgeable ones, and so on and so forth - whichever name you use pertaining to that umbrella term of "player skill".

Hence: you can take off your gear! They didn't fail, they need to consider the largest player base possible. Their very economical model relies on it; this is a business, not a charity.

[Solo.6873]

33 minutes ago, Mevelios.4809 said:

Indeed; single player games are harder. If you crave a challenge, just ask for a few titles!

MMOs have huge fees to keep their services working. They need a comparably huge player base to keep it running, so they can't cater exclusively to the most reactive ones, the most knowledgeable ones, and so on and so forth - whichever name you use pertaining to that umbrella term of "player skill".

Hence: you can take off your gear! They didn't fail, they need to consider the largest player base possible. Their very economical model relies on it; this is a business, not a charity.

^All of this.

It is not a viable business model to cater to the 1% of people that want the game to be on challenge mode all the time. 

I'm not sure if this has escaped peoples notice but this game is a casual players dream. That is why it is still somewhat running. 

People don't have a gear treadmill. This game doesn't have a best in slot that changes every content update. You have ACCOUNT WIDE sharing options for all of the highest gear available which can be obtained by doing almost anything in the game ( until the new legendary gear comes out then it will be literally everything). This is not the game of the 1%. Never has been.

 

Solution though, which would probably be less work and have less backlash from the majority of the games community. Add a hard mode to high end content. Give bosses what ever you want to make the game challenging for those that need to sweat and have constant adrenal responses to enjoy things in life.

Pleases them, and leaves the rest of us happy. 

Edited November 5, 2023 by Solori.6025

[Avatar.3568]

Just use PvP Balance, than you Cut halve the DMG easy

[Angesombre.4630]

Of course... the content gets harder with each expansion, so if you have to take an hour to do the more recent events, with their reduced dps, you might as well stop now. EoD was already intended to be harder than PoF, and SotO's event mobs are more resistant. Our character has evolved over the years, so theoretically he's become stronger. So yes, there's easier content, but is it really necessary to reduce everything? The world bosses of the first zones had already gained quite a bit of HP a few years ago, and at some point they even became boring because they were bags of HP.
There's still some content that you can roll on, but depending on the group, things don't always go smoothly either.

[Kalthea.4326]

When only TWO BOONS are required to turn a 10k DPS chart into a 30k DPS chart, then boons are the issue.

Quickness and Alacrity have been massive issues since Alacrity was introduced. Once you introduce the option to speed up gameplay, then those automatically become the "must haves" for any group that runs any content, full-stop. Initially, getting quickness wasn't a guaranteed thing, and it was in small bursts that allowed for "setups" where you could pop quickness, get out a usually slow attack, then go back to the normal rotation. But now that Quickness is up ALL THE TIME, there's no point in acting like it's not an issue. And Alacrity is worse! Having any buff in a game that reduces the cooldown on skills automatically makes it a "We need to have the class that can provide this" situation. You don't even need to be in end-game content to understand why it's so powerful.

I'll keep typing it until something is done about it. Remove Quickness and Alacrity from Guild Wars 2.

[Mevelios.4809]

18 hours ago, Kalthea.4326 said:

I'll keep typing it until something is done about it. Remove Quickness and Alacrity from Guild Wars 2.

Then I'd be out of the game, simple as that. I just couldn't bear it.

I agree the nature of quickness & alacrity largely alter individual gameplays & their efficiency. But if we were back to how slow the game was playing at release, I'd be most definitely out, just as I walked away back then because only thief felt satisfying for me - it was one of the rare classes not suffering from merely auto-attacking because all other skills were on 40s CD or more (you can still see the remnants with some CDs going up 180s on racial skills), but it quickly grew too repetitive spamming the same skills.

The fact quickness & alacrity has been made progressively more accessible to each profession is the right way to adress it IMO. If we're just back to two or three seconds-long channels,  in the meantime I sure would be peeling the skin off precious parts of mine waiting for these actions to end, without mentioning boredom!

Besides, these effects lead groups to find synergies and accept builds that are otherwise not the top damage dealers. That's merely up to two characters over a squad of ten! There will always be the issue of player behaviour, obviously, but that falls precisely on - player behaviour. Find more tolerant guilds, make your own more tolerant groups; there will always be elitists, no matter what! The removal of both buffs wouldn't change that fact; it would simply switch the "alac/quick dps" requirements to "full buff dps" or whatever it would be called.

Edited November 9, 2023 by Mevelios.4809

[Kalthea.4326]

4 hours ago, Mevelios.4809 said:

Then I'd be out of the game, simple as that. I just couldn't bear it.

I agree the nature of quickness & alacrity largely alter individual gameplays & their efficiency. But if we were back to how slow the game was playing at release, I'd be most definitely out, just as I walked away back then because only thief felt satisfying for me - it was one of the rare classes not suffering from merely auto-attacking because all other skills were on 40s CD or more (you can still see the remnants with some CDs going up 180s on racial skills), but it quickly grew too repetitive spamming the same skills.

The fact quickness & alacrity has been made progressively more accessible to each profession is the right way to adress it IMO. If we're just back to two or three seconds-long channels,  in the meantime I sure would be peeling the skin off precious parts of mine waiting for these actions to end, without mentioning boredom!

Besides, these effects lead groups to find synergies and accept builds that are otherwise not the top damage dealers. That's merely up to two characters over a squad of ten! There will always be the issue of player behaviour, obviously, but that falls precisely on - player behaviour. Find more tolerant guilds, make your own more tolerant groups; there will always be elitists, no matter what! The removal of both buffs wouldn't change that fact; it would simply switch the "alac/quick dps" requirements to "full buff dps" or whatever it would be called.

"But if we were back to how slow the game was playing at release, I'd be most definitely out, just as I walked away back then because only thief felt satisfying for me - it was one of the rare classes not suffering from merely auto-attacking because all other skills were on 40s CD or more (you can still see the remnants with some CDs going up 180s on racial skills), but it quickly grew too repetitive spamming the same skills."

You do realize that you can remove the boons by making them baseline, right? If you always have them up 100% of the time already, baselining them would change nothing.

"Besides, these effects lead groups to find synergies and accept builds that are otherwise not the top damage dealers. "

Hard disagree. What happened is that ANET completely stripped every unique buff in the game and made them all into 5 person boons. Wow, exciting, I can give the whole team 3 seconds of protection. Or I could play this other class that gives 6 seconds of protection on a shorter cooldown. Oh, but this class gives protection and regen and might! You see the problem? People aren't bringing synergies. They're bringing what offers the most in the limited pool of boons.

[Mevelios.4809]

36 minutes ago, Kalthea.4326 said:

You do realize that you can remove the boons by making them baseline, right? If you always have them up 100% of the time already, baselining them would change nothing.

The fact they're not baseline means a balanced group can strive for them, and benefits from it. Removing them would just remove the interest of all boons-providing builds; I wouldn't even want to start listing all specs related!

And they're not necessarily up 100% of the time. Some mechanics make you or the buffer walk away from the group; some formations do not look at whether each and every of the most common buffs are provided constantly; and human error! It's something to strive for, but never is absolutely guaranteed unless carefully looking at each member of the group. You don't exactly do that in LFG.

37 minutes ago, Kalthea.4326 said:

Hard disagree. What happened is that ANET completely stripped every unique buff in the game and made them all into 5 person boons. Wow, exciting, I can give the whole team 3 seconds of protection. Or I could play this other class that gives 6 seconds of protection on a shorter cooldown. Oh, but this class gives protection and regen and might! You see the problem? People aren't bringing synergies. They're bringing what offers the most in the limited pool of boons.

I'm not sure I understand what are you pointing out with this. Is it the fact buffing is collective on cast ("made [every unique buff] into 5 person boons")? If it weren't, boon-providing builds wouldn't exist in a game that largely removes the tanking concept, so we'd be left with ordinary healers & damage dealers. Down the drain for fewer and fewer diversity!

Is it the redundancy of several professions capable of providing the same boon? Well, that's variety and I sure wouldn't want to see it removed! During HoT & PoF years as a main mesmer, I just couldn't stand being constantly pestered by groups to switch chrono for their fun because we were the exclusive providers of both alacrity & quickness. I ended playing it so much that it made me sick of this e-spec! Without mirage I sure wouldn't have kept playing that character, and today I can play the way I want with a lot more ease - so indeed, we'll disagree on that point. But disagreeing's fine too! 😊

[Kalthea.4326]

21 hours ago, Mevelios.4809 said:

The fact they're not baseline means a balanced group can strive for them, and benefits from it. Removing them would just remove the interest of all boons-providing builds; I wouldn't even want to start listing all specs related!

And they're not necessarily up 100% of the time. Some mechanics make you or the buffer walk away from the group; some formations do not look at whether each and every of the most common buffs are provided constantly; and human error! It's something to strive for, but never is absolutely guaranteed unless carefully looking at each member of the group. You don't exactly do that in LFG.

I'm not sure I understand what are you pointing out with this. Is it the fact buffing is collective on cast ("made [every unique buff] into 5 person boons")? If it weren't, boon-providing builds wouldn't exist in a game that largely removes the tanking concept, so we'd be left with ordinary healers & damage dealers. Down the drain for fewer and fewer diversity!

Is it the redundancy of several professions capable of providing the same boon? Well, that's variety and I sure wouldn't want to see it removed! During HoT & PoF years as a main mesmer, I just couldn't stand being constantly pestered by groups to switch chrono for their fun because we were the exclusive providers of both alacrity & quickness. I ended playing it so much that it made me sick of this e-spec! Without mirage I sure wouldn't have kept playing that character, and today I can play the way I want with a lot more ease - so indeed, we'll disagree on that point. But disagreeing's fine too! 😊

Back when the game first launched, every class had their unique buffs. This caused some issues, sure, but each class was unique in what it could provide to a team. When alacrity came out and was forced onto Chrono, I agree, that was awful. However, I feel like the issue with Alacrity on Chrono and Chrono being a requirement was because of just how strong Alacrity was. If Alacrity itself wasn't so powerful, and there were other competitive options, then we wouldn't have the problem with being forced to run Chrono.

And no, I wasn't pointing out that the issue was boons being group-wide. I was more suggesting that having multiple professions that all provide the same boon with others that just do it better and with more is a bad state of balance for the game to be in. You call it "being able to play how you want", I call it "being directly compared to other classes for the exact same benefits but some just come out on top because they are clearly better." I can respect the concept that you feel you can play what you want, however. But I think getting rid of unique buffs and just making boons the only way to support was the laziest way of doing it, and it has caused far too many imbalances in how classes are played.

Though I do like your attitude. Disagreement is fine, and if you enjoy the game how it is, then I hope you continue to enjoy it. I'm just vying for the classes to become more unique and less homogenized.