Balance and development choices are making less and less sense to me.

[Leo G.4501]

3 minutes ago, Thevaultdwellinggamer.4267 said:

By telling it how it is. Hell, people had the same mindset when there were over 50 pages of complaints of a patch and Anet didn't listen.

The only thing that forced Anet to actually do anything to address their situation is an unhealthy combination of a controversy, and the death threat that were sent their way, and frankly, Death threats is going way too far, no matter the circumstance, so it's an outright tragedy that resorting to that, bore more fruit than just giving out feedback they're just throwing into the shredder.

So unless you want me to resort to being a degenerate, the next best thing is to vote with my wallet and go else where, but that doesn't mean I can't keep tabs on the game, too see where things are going.
 

When presenting arguing points, it's better to steelman them than strawman them, which is really the only argument I had here. Threats and attacks on character can be ignored.

Like I said before, I took the latter of protesting with the wallet as I haven't bought anything from the gem store in quite some time and didn't purchase the last expansion. And yeah, you still want to keep tabs and log in every now an then to burn a little server power. 

[Assuk.2157]

On 9/3/2024 at 18:41, Puck.3697 said:

Tbh I’ve played a lot of mmorpgs, and they don’t make sense ever, the more mmorpgs you engage with, the more you remorse Devs are aware they’re fighting a losing battle and meta will replace everything and anything regardless of how close they get things.

so they aim for randomness and things that will chase to shuffle things continuously to get things different

 

I have also played many mmorpg and it is different because there are tanks, healers, differentiated dps and there is always imbalance but it is not as exaggerated as in this game.
In my opinion, the worst balance I've seen is in this game, and I'm already tired of it....
Here it's all mixed, tank, healer, dps all in one and they're messing up even more by adding more weapons to all classes. Classes with meaningless and superior weapons, and the weapons that should be, let's say, their main weapons are useless. 
I think it's out of an attempt to keep player interest in the game that they're including kitten weapons to all classes, and they're digging themselves into an increasingly dark hole. 
Balancing all the crap they are doing is becoming more and more impossible.
Besides that those who think about balancing are either mentally kitten or 5 year olds, because they don't make any sense at all.

[Magmi.6723]

26 minutes ago, Assuk.2157 said:

n my opinion, the worst balance I've seen is in this game, and I'm already tired of it

I’ve just quit WoW when people say this same thing on their forums tbh… 

I’ve yet to see a mmorpg where this doesn’t get posted on a bi weekly bases realistically. 
 

however not exaggerated? I don’t know the finer details concerning this game, but WoW goes through periods of 3/4s of its class options not even existing in top 250 PvP teams outright. We had a full season of boomkins pressing 1 exact button and one shotting multiple players 😂😂 

let’s not even get started on the new evoker support spec which crushed down over 80% of m+ participation into 1 exact comp. 
 

and your paying 3x more money to play that game then gw2 lol. At least gw2 costs pennies so when somethings abit sour it can be to some extent justified by the fact ur actively not paying them lol 

[KryTiKaL.3125]

On 4/19/2024 at 10:30 AM, Magmi.6723 said:

I’ve just quit WoW when people say this same thing on their forums tbh… 

I’ve yet to see a mmorpg where this doesn’t get posted on a bi weekly bases realistically. 
 

however not exaggerated? I don’t know the finer details concerning this game, but WoW goes through periods of 3/4s of its class options not even existing in top 250 PvP teams outright. We had a full season of boomkins pressing 1 exact button and one shotting multiple players 😂😂 

let’s not even get started on the new evoker support spec which crushed down over 80% of m+ participation into 1 exact comp. 
 

and your paying 3x more money to play that game then gw2 lol. At least gw2 costs pennies so when somethings abit sour it can be to some extent justified by the fact ur actively not paying them lol 

You are absolutely not incorrect in this assessment with WoW balance. WoW does have phases where something it just so obscene it overrides everything else in the game, as well as the fact that RMP is still an egregiously oppressive comp in 3s and this has essentially never changed ever since it first appeared.

The difference being, I would argue, is that RMP is the only consistent thing that overbears whereas everything else will essentially "have its time in the sun", so to speak. One season it may be boomkin brainless gameplay, another it may be Mage blowing everyone up, or Demon Hunter just out DPSing and out surviving everything else. Same thing goes for M+.

GW2 doesn't have these "seasons" necessarily, if something is overbearingly oppressive it basically stays that way until the next expansion with a new Elite Spec showing up, or ANet takes an actual cannon to something and craters the whole thing and it again stays that way...for a long time. I'll take a 3 to 4 month cadence of balance at least making some notion of a physical shift over the silliness that confounds me that ANet does.

No MMORPG has perfect balance, never will, but no other studio confuses me more with their approach to balance changes like ANet does. Note, it took them 6 years to address a repeated point of feedback about both Spellbreaker and Mirage that would rein in some things that were oppressive about them both (FC activating burst traits simply from being triggered and not actually hitting and Mirage Cloak needing to not be allowed to be used while CC'd) whereas ANet did anything but that in the interim which gutted both classes fairly extensively (Mirage single dodge being the biggest offender).

Also note that in their balance philosophy post a while back they point out wanting to emphasize "counterplay" and yet the rise of the boonball due to their removal of boon strip/corrupt is a direct contradiction of that philosophy.

ANet confuses me.

[Magmi.6723]

16 hours ago, KryTiKaL.3125 said:

W2 doesn't have these "seasons" necessarily, if something is overbearingly oppressive it basically stays that way until the next expansion with a new Elite Spec showing up, or ANet takes an actual cannon to something and craters the whole thing and it again stays that way...for a long time. I'll take a 3 to 4 month cadence of balance at least making some notion of a physical shift over the silliness that confounds me that ANet does

While that can be problematic, it kinda has to somewhat accepted that in WoW you pay their devs monthly to balance that game, the money input value is higher.

where Anet likely bulk hours at a expansion launch, and drain to skeleton hours to reduce costs due to not having that same monthly generation. That is likely the issue in the grand schemes of things. WoW hourly input is consistent. So its flaws get patched during downtime, Anet bulk hours at an expansion launch when delivering on fixes for old, and demand to produce new content conflict 

I can’t imagine a b2p game has the same consistency when it comes to dev hours 

And i know we have a store, but WoW has a store too, that costs twice the amount of gw2 without reasonable grinds to generate gold to use in. Where gw2s store seems pretty easy to farm gold for. 

There are other variables tho, for example, WoW has seen mages as an example remain meta for consecutive years, while monk has not been meta since Legion and that was for one patch. 
 

there are definitely classes and specs in WoW which just go unused for years and years, but yes they do shake balance up a lot more, but that balance generally consists of like 10 specs over a expansion, they ignore a lot of specs for several years, especially if reworks are required. 

Edited April 24 by Magmi.6723

[KryTiKaL.3125]

2 hours ago, Magmi.6723 said:

While that can be problematic, it kinda has to somewhat accepted that in WoW you pay their devs monthly to balance that game, the money input value is higher.

where Anet likely bulk hours at a expansion launch, and drain to skeleton hours to reduce costs due to not having that same monthly generation. That is likely the issue in the grand schemes of things. WoW hourly input is consistent. So its flaws get patched during downtime, Anet bulk hours at an expansion launch when delivering on fixes for old, and demand to produce new content conflict 

I can’t imagine a b2p game has the same consistency when it comes to dev hours 

And i know we have a store, but WoW has a store too, that costs twice the amount of gw2 without reasonable grinds to generate gold to use in. Where gw2s store seems pretty easy to farm gold for. 

There are other variables tho, for example, WoW has seen mages as an example remain meta for consecutive years, while monk has not been meta since Legion and that was for one patch. 
 

there are definitely classes and specs in WoW which just go unused for years and years, but yes they do shake balance up a lot more, but that balance generally consists of like 10 specs over a expansion, they ignore a lot of specs for several years, especially if reworks are required. 

I'm not sure on the dev hours point. Microtransactions (mtx) generate a lot of money, more than people may sometimes realize. If you are aware of this creator, Pirate Software, they used to work with Blizzard and they said that Celestial Horse mount, the very first store mount they offered, by itself made more money than Starcraft 2 did. Which is unfortunate, but it illustrates just how much mtx can generate, and GW2 has mtx, but the issue this game runs into is keeping people around. They see bulk increases in population like any other game surrounding releases, particularly expansion releases, but the falloff does seem to happen sooner than others which means that is less people sticking around and bothering to buy gems and use the gem store.

Yes, converting gold to gems is a thing, but truthfully more often than not people are just going to opt to swipe their card rather than spend a week grinding out any number of things for the gold they would need for 800 gems, or more, for things like cosmetics or even just things like bag slot expansions, shared inventory slots, bank tabs, material storage increases, etc.

You can actually see this over time as to how ANet doesn't seem to necessarily manage their development all that well. Like their priorities seem to be off, like the few times now where people have visibly noticed a sort of decline in quality of updates and focus on GW2 back around the times when ANet was known to be trying to get other projects off the ground only for them to go nowhere and then layoffs or reallocation of talent happens. This is how we got things like The Icebrood Saga...and the complete and utter actual waste of money that little "event" they held surrounding it where they bought some hall, hired a host, etc.

Balance really doesn't feel much different to where it just seems like their priorities are not there or are just off, they have repeatedly had "this is our philosophy" posts and they basically didn't stick with any of them. The whole "trade offs" thing being the biggest offender of this habit, which I think some classes really still have not fully recovered from. This kind of feels like another instance of that with this whole "power budget" philosophy they spoke about, as well as the "balance philosophy" post they made a good while ago that I mentioned before where the changes they are making seem to effectively contradict one section where they speak about counterplay.

Point being, I don't think its about the hours being put in, I think it is about where the focus is being applied and how they communicate with the playerbase, both things they are historically not great with. The priority of any given thing they are looking to work on. Now per a recent post of theirs they have seemingly been working on a lot of backend stuff and making improvements and changes due to the game now being fully on DX11. Would have been nice if they communicated "Hey, going forward for the time being we will be working on bringing new content to the game, but a large focus for much of our team will be to improve and iterate on a lot of backend systems now that we can work with DX11".

Blizzard has issues, oh boy does it have issues, but I can at least personally appreciate the consistency and frequency with which they will actually look for feedback and then actually implement at least some of it. People can hate on DF for whichever reasons they want and it certainly isn't perfect, regardless of any of that they needed it as a "stepping stone" expansion with the changes and additions it brought. ANet is at least doing that with some QoL things, which are a long time coming and are looking for feedback on what next they could implement, good move, but they really need to get more on point with getting feedback and actually listening to the community.

[Leo G.4501]

22 hours ago, KryTiKaL.3125 said:

(FC activating burst traits simply from being triggered and not actually hitting and Mirage Cloak needing to not be allowed to be used while CC'd)

And even when they fix things that need fixing, they manage to still do odd stuff.

Mirage Cloak definitely shouldn't be a stunbreak equivalent BUT it certainly should allow you to dodge while immobilized (that's the whole schtick of Mirage Cloak...dodge while standing still)...but they managed to screw that up and bundle MC's nerf with both CC and immob.

Considering Full Counter not only requires adrenaline on top of a specified cooldown for the skill, many say these multiple penalties for War's profession mechanic is oppressive for utility and skill plays. That adrenaline drains near instantly upon exiting combat is another hinderance. Necro doesn't lose life force out of combat and Mesmer can still use their shatters without clones...

[Magmi.6723]

14 hours ago, KryTiKaL.3125 said:

not sure on the dev hours point. Microtransactions (mtx) generate a lot of money, more than people may sometimes realize. If you are aware of this creator, Pirate Software, they used to work with Blizzard and they said that Celestial Horse mount, the very first store mount they offered, by itself made more money than Starcraft 2 did. Which is unfortunate, but it illustrates just how much mtx can generate, and GW2 has mtx, but the issue this game runs into is keeping people around. They see bulk increases in population like any other game surrounding releases, particularly expansion releases, but the falloff does seem to happen sooner than others which means that is less people sticking around and bothering to buy gems and use the gem store

They do, but WoW has microtransactions with subscription which is something to remember there, 

imho gw2 store likely does worse then WoWs to gw2,

WoW sells pure power increase, which has made it a standard to keep up, I.e buying gold to afford the steep pricing of stuff demanded (enchants etc etc) the average player is completely unable to keep up with the costs to be optimal, which drives gold sales through the roof not to mention the continuous boosting systems that get supported with fomo due to limited time achievements holding collectables. 

and that’s what I mean, a player in gw2 can reasonably buy a large pool of goods from the trade post through transferring their gold into gems, because the market never became unusable for non paying players unlike WoWs. 
 

Gw2 makes its profit, but realistically gw2 only makes money on microtransactions, WoW store is double the price and comes side by side its subscription model, with more expensive box prices on its expansions, it does generate more money per player

tbh WoWs fall off is incredibly fast also, let’s not miss the fact WoW is estimated to lose 33-40% of its player base after 2 months of a expansion launch, the population loss is massively felt. 
 

mtx can generate ALOT if it’s heavily incentivized, I.e lacks other means of obtaining, gw2 doesn’t support such a system realistically. It gives soooo much away for free that it is rather amazing in all honesty 

WoW became p2w to generate masses realistically. And blizzard have launched some huge p2w games to passively generate income to support WoW 

Edited April 25 by Magmi.6723

[KryTiKaL.3125]

9 hours ago, Magmi.6723 said:

They do, but WoW has microtransactions with subscription which is something to remember there, 

imho gw2 store likely does worse then WoWs to gw2,

WoW sells pure power increase, which has made it a standard to keep up, I.e buying gold to afford the steep pricing of stuff demanded (enchants etc etc) the average player is completely unable to keep up with the costs to be optimal, which drives gold sales through the roof not to mention the continuous boosting systems that get supported with fomo due to limited time achievements holding collectables. 

and that’s what I mean, a player in gw2 can reasonably buy a large pool of goods from the trade post through transferring their gold into gems, because the market never became unusable for non paying players unlike WoWs. 
 

Gw2 makes its profit, but realistically gw2 only makes money on microtransactions, WoW store is double the price and comes side by side its subscription model, with more expensive box prices on its expansions, it does generate more money per player

tbh WoWs fall off is incredibly fast also, let’s not miss the fact WoW is estimated to lose 33-40% of its player base after 2 months of a expansion launch, the population loss is massively felt. 
 

mtx can generate ALOT if it’s heavily incentivized, I.e lacks other means of obtaining, gw2 doesn’t support such a system realistically. It gives soooo much away for free that it is rather amazing in all honesty 

WoW became p2w to generate masses realistically. And blizzard have launched some huge p2w games to passively generate income to support WoW 

Just to avoid this delving anywhere further off-topic, I'll just shift away from the "p2w" subject. Yes WoW has the WoW Token, its used for any number of things. We'll leave it at that. I will also spoiler this next chunk of text because this is getting to be a lot.
 

Spoiler

As for GW2, gold to gem conversion does not technically confer "free". Time still has to be spent to get the gold, and like I said in my previous post more often than not people will simply opt for the shortest route of simply spending money to get the thing they are after. Cosmetics, QoL features, whatever. Why spend however many hours it would take to get gold worth 400 to 800 gems when you can just get it immediately by spending money? Now that isn't necessarily a problem, but that doesn't really make GW2 that much different from WoW. Especially so if we are talking about "incentives". You are absolutely incentivized to pick up more bag slots, more bank slots, and increase your material storage limits. With the amount of loot, and especially redundant loot this game hands out you run out of inventory space very quickly especially as a newer player. And that gold you have may be more valuable to them to try and get things like Ascended gear, or Legendary gear, but all of this still tracks back to the itemization in the game and inventory space being a consistent annoyance.

WvW by itself, a single reward track, will have 5 to 13 different loot containers that give just about the same loot with little bits of variation. More recent ones always have 10 or more. Add in junk loot, loot bags from looting players, then take into account slots you are using to hold extra gathering tools because infinite tools also cost gems, food and utility buffs, utility items such as birthday boosters and the like, extra gear you may want to swap to for a different build if you don't have full Legendaries.

Go into PvE and its even more space being taken up with the three different Unidentified gear rarities, junk items, the however many randomly generated loot bags you get from enemies, random gear you loot, plus holding onto all of the things I mentioned before. They quite literally want people to pick up extra bag slots, bank tabs, infinite gathering tools, material storage cap increases. Yes, you can convert gold to gems for these, but like I said before, people will more often than not just opt for the shortest route possible and simply spend money. Now that isn't a problem, I have no issues with that. Spend your money how you want to spend it, its your money. I will just not sit here and pretend like ANet doesn't do the exact same things as basically anyone else...because they do, they are a company they have to make money.

The difference is GW2 has a shorter period of player retention than other games, even WoW, because the lack of vertical progression is a bit of a double edged sword. You won't have to worry about gearing constantly or anything, its nice and chill, but it also means it puts more of an onus on the individual to decide what they want to chase after or what they give a crap about doing and honestly people tend to just want the mandatory carrot on a stick that is gear treadmill to keep them going and make them care. GW2 does a great job at making zones feel alive with how it handles sharding and overflow and underpopulated maps. You definitely don't necessarily notice when there are dips in the population because the game handles that well, but there tends to be little reason for people to stick around much longer than a month, if that, when a new update lands. They'll clear the content and move on. (No I do not think GW2 is dead or dying).

Just to note, though, that if player population has a falloff of 2 months thats...kind of better than normal. The way the game cycle happens these days 1 month and having a population falloff is pretty typical, even for more widely popular games not even in the MMORPG genre. Anything more than a month is atypical, and anything more than probably 5 months is rare and honestly I think only Baldur's Gare 3, Elden Ring and Helldivers 2 have been able to accomplish this in the last year or so.

Anyway, point being, I don't consider it to be an issue of dev hours, it is again I believe an issue of priority and where they set their focus. As of 2023, their last reported number of employees is 322, which is over double what they fell to after the layoffs a few years back. We also have direct examples of them just very clearly having issues with understanding the gameplay, how the Warrior Banner Rework in its initial implementation happened...at all bewilders me still. Genuinely don't know how anyone who was actually playing Warrior, or even just the game, thought those were good changes to put through.

I just don't think they have their focus in the right places and they don't stick with the philosophies they outline as their supposed approach to balance, not only does it visibly show but we have examples of this being their issue in the past. Trade offs, power budget. They don't stick to them. I understand things change with this stuff, but they don't communicate that maybe they have shifted how they want to approach things, they aren't clear, and things sit in very frustrating states for very long periods of time.

[keykey.9182]

I agree with everything OP said , I would also like to add as a returning player that everything is as stale as it was +2years ago.

Mesmer+Necro still dominate/pump out everything in PvE.

Guardian+Mech still best healers.

Elementalist is still Memelentalist , but now it has a gun.

There are.... so many 5+ year old bugs that are still in the game even after all this time.

I guess there's always next year

[Zenith.7301]

This is the MMO with the least frequent and tiniest, low impact balance updates, so it's no surprise. Doesn't help half the updates are for PvP only.

[Gaiawolf.8261]

32 minutes ago, Zenith.7301 said:

This is the MMO with the least frequent and tiniest, low impact balance updates, so it's no surprise. Doesn't help half the updates are for PvP only.

Doesn't help whom, exactly? PvE players or PvP players? Both?

[Arheundel.6451]

Huh?...scepter condi ele?.....Scepter has always been power, and got used as condi weapon for a brief time when they overbuffed fire auto-attack, after the nerfs, it's laughable to consider ele scepter as a condi weapon. Pistol as it stands is the to go for condi ranged ele

[Dadnir.5038]

13 hours ago, Arheundel.6451 said:

Huh?...scepter condi ele?.....Scepter has always been power, and got used as condi weapon for a brief time when they overbuffed fire auto-attack, after the nerfs, it's laughable to consider ele scepter as a condi weapon. Pistol as it stands is the to go for condi ranged ele

I do believe that many don't have SotO and, for those poor souls, scepter is a nice condi weapon option.

[otto.5684]

From PvE standpoint, over the past 2 years the devs brought a ton of stuff from the dead. Stuff that was ignored for years. Anyone remember things like how bad Herald was at everything?

IMO, is the issues in the last 3-4 balance patches is in homogenisation. Many of the uniques class elements were removed in favor of easy balancing. That + inflation resulted in much redundancy.

I think one of the solutions is to remove alacrity and quickness from being boons to being class specific buffs. I think that will go a long way in adding more variety.

[ShadowKatt.6740]

11 hours ago, otto.5684 said:

From PvE standpoint, over the past 2 years the devs brought a ton of stuff from the dead. Stuff that was ignored for years. Anyone remember things like how bad Herald was at everything?

IMO, is the issues in the last 3-4 balance patches is in homogenisation. Many of the uniques class elements were removed in favor of easy balancing. That + inflation resulted in much redundancy.

I think one of the solutions is to remove alacrity and quickness from being boons to being class specific buffs. I think that will go a long way in adding more variety.

But then not every class might have access to Alacrity and Quickness and at that point you may as well just throw this game in the trash and light the servers on fire. There is NO GAME without Alacrity and Quickness. I know. I've been told that by every Q- and A- build player in the game.

[Burnfall.9573]

On 3/6/2024 at 4:32 PM, Yogurt Goblin.5934 said:

Don't want to go on a huge rant here and I am very aware this opinion is my own, but the balance and development teams choices just make me lose interest in the game with each round of major updates. I'm not sure if there has been a huge shake up in the team or they have orders from above to how the game should be, but its weird to me.

So I'll just jump right in, the choices that they are making rarely have good intentions behind them in my mind. Whether this is a best-of-the-bad situation or actually malicious, either way its not good. I'll rattle off a couple of examples of things that aren't quite sitting right me;

• Balancing spec/builds by top dps on golem (dps that normal players don't achieve)
• Sometimes they balance encounters to the new power level of the game due to power creep (see above point) which just make the game more difficult for player who aren't in organised groups pumping out top dps. This has recently came up with raids now having the negative-buff for dying, which just won't affect the hardcore raiders but will really make it difficult for new raiders and players to complete wings.
• Buffing/nerfing a build for no reason, with the most recent examples of these being confusion nerf and WvW Willbender buff. I'm not really sure the devs are actually still playing the game anymore, because there is truly no reason to buff willbender when it desperately needs anerf.
• Weapon choices that offer nothing new/are just worse than previous. This one I'm looking at Ele pistol and Engi shortbow,  (which may be a coincidence that they both only have 1 weapon set in combat). The Ele pistol just sucks, Ele has a condition based ranged one-handed weapon, sceptre, so why add another one that is worse? they needed a power ranged weapon, or a main hand heal, or a ranged 2-handed weapon for either condi or power, but they go something useless. Engi has a different problem, shortbow does lots of different things, just not very well, want to use it as a support weapon, we mace/shield is better, use it for dps, all other weapons are better, so why add it in?
• Massive amounts of bugs getting through to live game. This is just getting worse and worse, they clearly aren't testing anything they are doing to an adequate enough level, but refuse to do a test realm, they need to swallow their pride and just start a test realm.

So yeah, might just be me, but the devs seems to be pumping out updates, based on the wrong type of data, their own preference to classes, or just being lazy and upping health and difficulty of encounters instead of doing their actual jobs with is to balance the game.

("quotes")

Guild Wars 1 mission statement, its goals, values, vision, philosophy, objectives was: Putting The Players Experience First And Optimizing The Players Experience From A Posititive Competitive Game Design, To Immerse The Community Engagement At All Time, To Prioritize Creating An Engaging And Inclusive Environment For All Players, Putting In The Effort To Balance Counterplay Gameplay Mechanics And Ensuring Fair Matchmaking To Foster A Sense Of Community And Enjoyment Among Players.

Guild Wars 2 mission statement about its goals, values, objectives, balance and development choices are non-existent...thus: there is no need to make any sense of it.

Guild Wars 2 was dead on arrival since day 1 and will remain so until it learn the lesson from its predecessor Guild Wars 1 mission statement, its goals, values, vision, philosophy, roots and objectives.

Edited May 14 by Burnfall.9573

[Zenith.7301]

On 5/4/2024 at 3:46 PM, Gaiawolf.8261 said:

Doesn't help whom, exactly? PvE players or PvP players? Both?

PvE players more than PvP ones, but given the haphazard balancing, it comes down to a wash considering the negative changes.

Scrapper stayed a unusable PvE profession for over 5 years in raids. Reaper was similarly bad for very long, and Revenant had no competitive power spec for a similar time.

So many weapons in PvE are just worthless, same with utilities. Reaper shouts took forever to become half decent, and Scourge punishments are still pretty bad.

[otto.5684]

On 5/12/2024 at 8:21 AM, ShadowKatt.6740 said:

But then not every class might have access to Alacrity and Quickness and at that point you may as well just throw this game in the trash and light the servers on fire. There is NO GAME without Alacrity and Quickness. I know. I've been told that by every Q- and A- build player in the game.

Obviously you won’t remove the boons and call it a day. Devs will still have to balance classes/builds based on the tools available to them. However, if everyone has quickness and alacrity, then they add nothing, since the balance option is to have them on all the time. 
 

And this applies to most boons. There should be much less boon sharing. Boons are supposed to added unique tools/buffs for each class. If all classes have all of them 100% of the time, they become useless for balancing and diversification. This is exactly why many players are not happy with the game balance. Things are becoming more homogeneous and redundant.

[Gaiawolf.8261]

1 hour ago, otto.5684 said:

Obviously you won’t remove the boons and call it a day. Devs will still have to balance classes/builds based on the tools available to them. However, if everyone has quickness and alacrity, then they add nothing, since the balance option is to have them on all the time. 
 

And this applies to most boons. There should be much less boon sharing. Boons are supposed to added unique tools/buffs for each class. If all classes have all of them 100% of the time, they become useless for balancing and diversification. This is exactly why many players are not happy with the game balance. Things are becoming more homogeneous and redundant.

At this point, boons are more like a tax more than anything else You figure out the 2 players in your party composition that are gonna provide which boons at 100% all the time and realize that they are taking a DPS hit to raise the DPS of the whole party. That's about it. Well, at least the healer also keeps people alive, but half of that is just upkeeping 100% defensive boons anyway.

[ShadowKatt.6740]

8 hours ago, otto.5684 said:

Obviously you won’t remove the boons and call it a day. Devs will still have to balance classes/builds based on the tools available to them. However, if everyone has quickness and alacrity, then they add nothing, since the balance option is to have them on all the time. 
 

And this applies to most boons. There should be much less boon sharing. Boons are supposed to added unique tools/buffs for each class. If all classes have all of them 100% of the time, they become useless for balancing and diversification. This is exactly why many players are not happy with the game balance. Things are becoming more homogeneous and redundant.

Are you sure about that? I mean, yes, technically, a lot of things would have to be rebalanced. But if there was a giant switch labelled "Boons" and you could just flip that from "On" to "Off"....what would change? SOme skills would become useless because they're support abilities that do nothing but give boons. I think of, I think, Ranger Warhorn 4, which just grants boons to yourself and others in earshot. That skill is now dead, and a few others like it as well. But the rest of the game? No more boon support in Raids and Strikes. No more boon ball in WvW. It would radically dial things back and change the very nature of the current game.

Obviously that won't happen though. So lets get to your suggestion. You know, once upon a time, things were like that. Guardians had more protection and aegis than anyone else, elementalist had more regeneration, mesmers had quickness, necromancers had fear. But people didn't like being told no and so every boon had to be for everybody. You're not getting things turned back any more than I'm getting them turned off.

[Yasai.3549]

Their focus on shaking up the meta over fixing fundamentally broken stuff is grinding my gears real bad. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful they buffed things like Rev Hammer for example but Sword 3 has been functionally inconsistent in application in all game modes since forever and that has yet to see any emergency patches or fixes for over 10 years. Ridiculous. Ridiculous and horrifying. 

Edited May 20 by Yasai.3549

[ShadowKatt.6740]

9 hours ago, Yasai.3549 said:

Their focus on shaking up the meta over fixing fundamentally broken stuff is grinding my gears real bad. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful they buffed things like Rev Hammer for example but Sword 3 has been functionally inconsistent in application in all game modes since forever and that has yet to see any emergency patches or fixes for over 10 years. Ridiculous. Ridiculous and horrifying. 

The meta needs to be broken. You might be annoyed by that but imagine if they ignored it to exclusively work on the broken things. The game would degenerate into one playstyle, one build, one way to play. And if you don't believe that look at the statistics. Guardian is nearly over half of all characters in the game. Firebrand literally owns WvW because these things haven't recieved a balance in YEARS. And everyone that plays knows full well that if you see a firebrand, you lose. You just lose, because that's the current state of the game.

This is not to excuse the fact that things are broken. You're worried abuot weapon skill functionality, I'm worried about thinks like Hearts and Minds that TO THIS DAY still has GAME-BREAKING PROBLEMS, as in the game is literally broken and will crash to desktop if the wrong thing triggers in the PENULTIMATE MISSION OF AN ENTIRE EXPANSION PACK. There is a lot that needs to be fixed and there is zero excuse that it hasn't been fixed by this point, but the meta cannot be ignored in the process otherwise the current game will just become unplayable.

[Yasai.3549]

8 hours ago, ShadowKatt.6740 said:

I'm worried about thinks like Hearts and Minds that TO THIS DAY still has GAME-BREAKING PROBLEMS

Oh god I don't want to ever remember my first Hearts and Minds experience...

[Inssengrimm.7924]

On 5/13/2024 at 9:12 PM, Burnfall.9573 said:

Guild Wars 2 was dead on arrival since day 1 and will remain so

Lmao, rofl even.