Vindicator Balance Feedback

[beng.7594]

I want to preface this by saying I like the direction of the new traits, theyve just missed the mark for PvE and need adjusting.

Song of Arboreum
Losing 25% vigor effectiveness by itself breaks all current rotations as we lose more and more endurance per loop eventually running out. Currently we get to dodge twice per legend at nice points and getting more/less endurance sucks as we either cant dodge enough or we lose leviathan uptime. This wouldnt be so much of a problem if energy meld was a good skill but ill get to that later. Losing this by itself is around a 400 dps loss.

The real problem is losing the vigor generation on dodge as that is 80% of our self vigor generation and even now we cant keep it up by ourselves. How about others giving us vigor though? Here is a table showing some sources of group vigor from typical support classes. https://i.imgur.com/Hsk1cdK.png

Looks like theres a fair amount right? Well not really, boon supports are not in the mindset that vigor needs to be given as its not a priority boon that affects dps or survivability, so any vigor you get is either automatic with the rotation or an afterthought. Hfb would never realistically use azure sun, heal revenants wouldnt want to tank their energy with natural harmony, druid has a lot of utility and is keen to swap out traitlines/entangle for whatever situation. Some dps classes give vigor like dh/condithief and theres some possible new supports coming out with chaos chrono/war but I cant say how they will end up. If you look at some typical wingman logs with vindicator you'll see that they are generating most of their vigor themselves and sometimes being topped up by a support/thief.

Overall the takeaway is that if you dont have a htempest/hspectre/hdruid/hmech/condithief in your subgroup you are pretty boned, even another vindicator wont help unlike now. No vigor is around a 2k dps loss and IMO it would be unrealistic to benchmark with vigor.

Solution:
Move the current song of arboreum to tenacious ruin/balance in discord so the class built around dodging actually gets to dodge. I would go even further and buff the vigor duration to 5s so we can self sustain. Doing this at the very least would keep us in the same spot dps and playability wise and it would mean we could ignore the new traits if no other changes are made.

Reavers Curse & Angisiyans Trust
Despite everything ive said so far the dodge is not a good skill. We dodge to keep buffs up and do so when theres nothing else going on to inconvenience us as little as possible. One metric we use to determine whether a skill is good or not is damage divided by cast time as a skill that does a lot of damage but has a long animation can be worse than a short cast but weaker damage. In those terms our skills look like this:

auto attacks < alliance utility skills < dodge < everything else

For the typical raid setup death drop will do on average 29783 damage with a cast time of 800ms giving it a dmg/cast time value of 29783/0.8=37229. With the new energy meld enhancing our next dodge we can pretend that this skill is glued to the dodge and create a new skill called enhanced death drop. From what ive seen on the previewed tooltips it will deal 25% more damage which results in dealing 37228 damage with a cast time of 440ms(energy meld)+800ms(death drop)=1240ms giving it a dmg/cast time value of 37228/1.24=30023. This is lower than the normal dodge above and it costs 10 energy on top so you can see its just a waste of time pressing energy meld. Even if it did 50% more damage its still worse.

Looking at the value of our skills above you should see why having more energy isnt great either. We already do everything we want in shiro and all the alliance utilities are bad. We wouldnt be able to do more of the good skills as we already use them all off cooldown. This is on top of the cast time being a factor where it has to make up for us wasting 440ms doing nothing.

Solution:
Remove the cast time on energy meld. Turn this from a "oh no i need to dodge in half a second" button into a "oh no i need a dodge NOW" button which would be beneficial for all game modes. This would make it way more appealing to try and fit into a rotation and gives us options at least.

Eternity's Requiem
Something thats been a problem from the start so while im here I thought I would mention it. The rng on this skill is so bad I dont know why its not more of a complaint point. 
Some statistics for you:
-If your primary target is gigantic (>240 radius hitbox) and theres no ads nearby you have 100% chance to hit with all 14 requiem procs if centered correctly. If a single ad comes within 360 range that chance goes to 1%.
-If you have a small primary target (something like sabetha/xera) and a single ad walks in the 360 range theres a 1% chance you dont deal any damage to your primary target at all. 0 Damage with your highest damaging ability.
On average in encounters with ads (most of them) your best skill will have its damage halved if you dont play around it and a lot of the time theres nothing you can do.

Solution:
Please raise the PvE target cap per explosion from 1 to at least 3 (preferably 5 like every other aoe skill), this would change nothing on the golem and would promote good gameplay encouraging stacking and pulling ads on top of your main target so all the explosions cleave. It would also be nice if the skill radius was made smaller and/or the explosion radii made larger. Tone down the damage difference between small targets and massive targets that dont exist.

If you feel like this is too many buffs on an already strong class sitting at 43k then honestly I couldnt argue against that and an easy solution is just nerf forerunner of death down to 24%.

TLDR
-give us back our vigor
-make energy meld worth casting
-tone down requiem rng
-actually fix the dodge bug 
-give us some CC that isnt staff 5

[Angesombre.4630]

I'm not in favor of changing the "Song of Arboreum" trait unless just the effect of sharing vigor and adding without giving the ally the 25% bonus we currently have and keep it individual.

If they really want to change the vindicator traits and remove the 25% extra stamina, maybe they should put the "Enduring Recoveryde" trait back at 25% for the vindicator in PvP and WvW instead of 10% and "Unwavering Avoidance" which was also reduced to 1s seconds in those modes last year.

 

Edited November 7, 2023 by Angesombre.4630

[ArthurDent.9538]

The insanely buggy/inconsistent nature of gs5 is quite infuriating and for some reason it seems most people don't even notice.

[arazoth.7290]

1 hour ago, ArthurDent.9538 said:

The insanely buggy/inconsistent nature of gs5 is quite infuriating and for some reason it seems most people don't even notice.

what part is buggy/inconsistent of it?

[ArthurDent.9538]

11 minutes ago, arazoth.7290 said:

what part is buggy/inconsistent of it?

All of the impacts are single target and it is seemingly totally random what target they go after in multi target situations. Even the tracking impacts target a random enemy within range so instead of hitting the boss you have targeted that is right in front of you, sometimes they decide to nuke a random firefly off to the side.

[Buran.3796]

5 hours ago, ArthurDent.9538 said:

The insanely buggy/inconsistent nature of gs5 is quite infuriating and for some reason it seems most people don't even notice.

     Is hard to me to notice since I no longer run greatswords or power Vindi builds in PvE. Between the nerfs in the base damage for the greatsword  skills, the nerf of cleave auto attacks from 5 to 3 targets (a -40%) and the fact that Eternity's Requiem was never a cleave attack (since it splits the damage against muli targets, the same as Unrelenting Assault) what you emd is having a power AoE build that in reality is mostly tailored for single targets. And the true nerfs are still to coming thanx to the gloriefied nothingness of Energy Meld (by the way, I don't known why people tals so much about the incoming Song of Arboreum sharing vigor: the current one already does it and last forever.

   You known what Vindi build rules? Condi/celestial build: you cleave as much as you want, you dont care a crap about Contained Temper no longer giving fury, and you can ignore the whole mid column of Vindicator traitline.

[Tokizo.8917]

8 hours ago, ArthurDent.9538 said:

The insanely buggy/inconsistent nature of gs5 is quite infuriating and for some reason it seems most people don't even notice.

Well tbf in a lot of pug groups vindi use S/S Staff. I am mostly top dps at at least top 3 with that setup. On the golum i even make more dmg excluding GS

[arazoth.7290]

2 hours ago, Buran.3796 said:

     Is hard to me to notice since I no longer run greatswords or power Vindi builds in PvE. Between the nerfs in the base damage for the greatsword  skills, the nerf of cleave auto attacks from 5 to 3 targets (a -40%) and the fact that Eternity's Requiem was never a cleave attack (since it splits the damage against muli targets, the same as Unrelenting Assault) what you emd is having a power AoE build that in reality is mostly tailored for single targets. And the true nerfs are still to coming thanx to the gloriefied nothingness of Energy Meld (by the way, I don't known why people tals so much about the incoming Song of Arboreum sharing vigor: the current one already does it and last forever.

   You known what Vindi build rules? Condi/celestial build: you cleave as much as you want, you dont care a crap about Contained Temper no longer giving fury, and you can ignore the whole mid column of Vindicator traitline.

Would be ideal if energy meld had 15 second baseline cd. This is to correspond with the trait you talked above but also for the other 2, for having more regular uptime on the effects by cd useage.

I have no doubt that the total vigor boon duration for pve will still be 100% uptime, and more balanced for pvp/wvw. The only difference is that energy meld baseline cd is high atm, which needs to be lowered. Atm song of arboreum has more frequent appliance because dodging, so that's why energy meld needs lower baseline cd for having close to same effect.

Once that part is fixed, it will become more regular/frequent to apply in general. Self vigor uptime you always will have enough for increased endurance, but appliance to allies needs to be higher then what current energy meld will give or the other 2 traits.

Also, this way it becomes more frequent pressed in your rotation and not every 20-30 seconds (lower with alac) and it will feel like it buffs you, allies or both.

I still think it is a great idea to melt this ability with dodge and traits around it. Also again this is easier to balance since it's a cd useage and not only for doing more frequent dodge damage or those other buffs. 

It is easier to balance with it the quality around dodge effects + uptime of the amount of dodges to do it.

 

[Howluffu.7259]

I won't stop saying this: Energy Meld is a useless cr*p button that was put in the first place cuz devs had the "brilliant" idea to make an elite spec around dodge mechanic while at the same time creeping the hell out the meanings of the spec to do so. EM shouuuuuuuldn't exist. Shouldn't shouldn't shooooould NOT exist!! Simple.

The spec its fine how it is even tho they like to keep nerfing gs to make us forget this cool weapon. They shouldn't have nerfed it in the first place they SHOULD have just ssssslapped an 5% or 10% less damage on the Elevated Compassion trait and it would make everythin even. 

Now they want to cripple the dps rev elite spec even more going backwards to the endurance starvation it had in the beginning with the change of Song of Arboreum. Just leave that trait alone/unchanged and change the other 2 that no one else uses and Buff back the greatsword damage and targets at least on vindicator baseline.

[GenerationX.9178]

Great post, I think for pvp/wvw the dodges shouldnt do damage would be start to making vindicator more fluent. Just having normal dodge animation with trait buffs mabye add back the chill on Vassals of the Empier dodge. 

[Angesombre.4630]

In relation to the maj of the 28th I had already said them too in another post.

"Incensed Response" (Gain might when you grant yourself fury "5 powers")
"Ferocious Aggression" (All damage dealt is increased while you have fury "Damage Increase: 10%")
"Roiling Mists" (Critical-hit chance is further increased while you are under the effect of fury)
If we no longer have the fury buff with "Contained Temper" we lose dps at the same time, as we have less power, less potency as we are no longer under fury. To replace it with a trait that will give energy if we can use an anti stun. Either it won't do any good because it's too little or too much, and it'll just make a legend count instead of a legend switch.

All this to replace it with a RELIC that does the same thing. So if we want to continue doing the same thing, we lose damage because of the relic.

So it comes down to nerfing the revenant's dps. If you take one of the elite specializations and don't use its legend, you have almost no fury effect.

I confess I hadn't realized that Song of Arboreum already gave vigor to allies, but in the update you lose the 25% regeneration effect under vigor. So Nerf all Major Grandmaster traits.
All this for a f2 that's almost useless since the double dodge, not to mention its CD and energy cost. What's more, in competitive mods there's the Enduring Recovery reduction to 10% (instead of 25%) and Unwavering Avoidance to 1s of vigor (which is actually nothing) in competitive modes like WvW and PvP. So here's another nerf because of Song of Arboreum.

It's not part of the patch, but it's still part of the latest version:
We already have the weakest GS on skills 1 auto and 2. Even the guardian has a good potato on skills 2 with buffs for a CD of 8s. And we have the GS5, which divides its damage according to the number of targets.

So, to sum up:
Nerf fury and power at the same time.

Nerf enduance vindicator and force to use F2, a not very useful button.

 

On the other hand, bugs are still present on vindicator and renegat.

Edited November 25, 2023 by Angesombre.4630

[Buran.3796]

  Most of the changes are just nerfs, outside buffs to a couple of weapons almost no one uses.

[Angesombre.4630]

I've never really used it, but even the trait that gave fury and speed power has been removed for renegat. So 2 traits that gave fury have been removed. And vindicator's best trait too. I think I'm really going to change classes as time goes by, because it's becoming a bit of a kitten. Or we'll just play herald until he's nerfed.

Edited November 25, 2023 by Angesombre.4630

[arazoth.7290]

Or they just can increase Fury duration on the other still existing traits/abilties to compensate. It wouldn't for invocation proc more might anymore. But they can increase maybe might stack when fury procs to compensate too?

[Angesombre.4630]

And as for the Vindicator nerf, they just want to make it less efficient, whereas at the start it sucked, it's been improved to make it suck again?
I liked what it had become, but from the 28 onwards, it's become disgusting.

I don't know what's going to happen to the other classes, but if it's the same thing, it's not a good sign.

Edited November 25, 2023 by Angesombre.4630

[Buran.3796]

   I mean...  Is not like the power build for raids is that special anyway. I've tried the Snow Crows meta for Vindicator in OW and you have lame amounts of might stacks and you can lose fury sometimes. And of course you have 0 procs of regeneration and protection, no cleanses in evades, and you must use evades as attacks, which is not bad but is not like you do amazing damage when you're alone.

   ANet already removed fury from Fireworks and Pack runes, didn't provide anything similar with relics, and is now butchering fury access to every Rev build (which means that condi based ones are less impacted). Yes, the patch improves shield and hammer, plus short bow (largely uneeded) but outside that everything else is nerfs. And that's after nerfs in greatsword damage, greatsword cleave and base damage values of several other skills across the whole class.

   Honestly I would chose to not have this patch: it won't do anything beneficial for any build I would use. They already made Renegade a useless redundant simp, and Herald has been nigh unplayable from me since the pre-EoD nerfs. Keep messing with Vindi and you'll lose me in no time...  And I generally won't play alts that much.