What makes GW2 combat in WvW fun? (and how I feel recent changes go in the wrong direction)

[kash.9213]

12 hours ago, Cael.3960 said:

I don't know where to even begin with this. There's a great deal of unspoken assumptions and selective bias here which is going to feel like a personal attack when I try to explain my own perspective and why I feel this would be disastrous for the future of this game mode. I'm not arguing at you, I'm not slamming you for wanting the game to appeal more to your particular playstyle even if I feel it comes without an understanding of what other kinds of players want from the game. I'm not questioning your understanding of the situation or your awareness of mechanics and playstyles that aren't something you personally play or have significant experience with. My intent is to create an open-minded dialogue to explore both sides of the situation so a reasonable compromise, if it exists, can be found. My position on this issue isn't rooted in stone, nor is it based on knee-jerk outrage or a preference for a particular style of gameplay. I'm trying to see the broadest possible interpretation of these changes as it would effect not just how I play, but how a wide variety of players of varying levels of skill and coordination are likely to experience it. So please, understand that I'm responding out of a desire for expansive discussion not to 'win' an argument. There's a difference. 

Hitting more targets doesn't mean an individual player is doing more damage to a single target. At best you're assuming that by having a higher target cap there's more overlap so that multiple squadmates can tag the same enemy player. Yes, this has the potential to generate more kills because you're more likely to land damage on glass targets or those who don't have defensive procs, passive mitigation or enough situational awareness for active mitigation. That's the obvious value of a limitless target cap, anything that can take damage will take damage and thus the odds of generating a down are highest. 

But it also makes the assumption that you're running nothing but DPS players on high-spike builds who always get to strike first. That means your 50 man target isn't running reflects, aoe denial, pulls, strips or spike damage of their own. You're basically assuming they sit there and eat your best alpha-strike with zero pushback, awareness or personal initiative. You're also assuming that they just let you smash them for followup damage while they stand in your bomb and try to heal through it. What exactly are their own DPS doing? Or do you just assume they all died on the first hit? Did you strip all their boons, apply vulnerability and CC on your mega-spike DPS burst so they never had a chance to escape as well? Groups like this DO exist in the game right now. They get farmed by groups half their size because most of them aren't good enough at the game to carry their own weight, let alone punch back at anything of equal numbers. Increasing the target cap to deal with groups like this is basically asking for the ability to farm casuals en-masse. That's not a healthy place to put a competitive meta, especially not one where participation numbers are declining. 

Sustain is so strong in this current meta because coordinated groups of high-quality DPS players working together are rare. Squads who possess that kind of talent can easily burn through squads of 4-support parties already. They don't need the crutch of increased target caps to fight bigger groups, they have the proper builds and enough coordination to get the job done without them. Those who blob up without that kind of punch usually can't succeed against a tiered up keep in the first place. They don't have the confidence to win a real fight so the only advantage their numbers have is to sustain through siege and/or carry enough supply to burn through walls quickly to ninja an objective before they're farmed by defense responders. Increased target caps would collapse these casual groups and either drive them from the game mode altogether or scatter their population amongst the broader base of ineffective defenders. That means less bags for you because now your competition is mostly other solos/roamers who aren't easy meat, casuals who won't play without something to defend, or the kind of highly organized and capable squads whom you won't be able to one-shot wipe without more at least half their number in the first place. At that point it's just a blob-vs-blob with a different meta. Your problem remains but now you've lost the easy bags. Makes for great youtube videos while it lasts though. 

I admire the cloud, truly. On an individual level they represent the level of skill a better-than-average squad with compted parties would usually have. Being better than average, they don't need buffs to dominate weaker opponents. They just need more time because fragmented coordination requires individuals to recognize opportunities and act on them without direction. In a quality cloud most will hunt the tail, prioritize targets without stab who can be pulled away from their supports and resist the urge to clump up to land damage when they know it'll make them a target for the full blob. You're already better than your opponents, why do you need to increase the gap? For a healthy game to exist even it's most skilled, most talented members need a challenge. When the game gets easy people get bored and stop playing. The smart play is to leave yourself with enough challenge that the game never gets boring. Victories don't create personal growth, overcoming disadvantage does that. I think a 50-target cap takes away a lot of the challenge in this game. Veteran players shouldn't be looking for a way to farm casuals, the casuals farm themselves enough already. 

 I get the impression you don't run with squads that have effective leadership, strategy, or a style of engagement that requires critical thinking. More to the point, I don't feel you have experience with large squads who also have these traits. To someone who's never run in a quality group or been in the voice coms of one I can understand how it looks like two big blobs just circle each other until one just rolls over the other. You don't see how one tag baits damage from the other, how the bigger a group becomes the greater the relationship between degrees of attrition have on party cohesion and squad effectiveness. The playmaking abilities of individual players who manage to pull targets, secure downs in the skirmish, and the general level of play and attention to detail required to remain tight on tag so you're not an opportunistic kill. That mindless orbit you describe? That's one commander paring the wheat from the chaff until they can line up a decsive blow on the core of a group--the only real threat in the fight. That orbit? That's one commander getting a feel for bomb timings, the advantages and disadvantages of their differing comps, defensive cooldowns, gaps in boon coverage, the effective level of sustain in that other group and how reactive they are to a push. All the magic you ascribe to that disorganized 20v20 that 'ebbs and flows' where individual players have an impact. It's easy to miss when you see the forest and not the trees, but it's there. Making the assumption that 50 means casual and incompetent (but still too much for skilled veterans to handle) is a disservice to everyone. 

The cloud absolutely drives away new/inexperienced members. You see this everytime someone in chat/forums/reddit mentions the latest Mag matchup and how they're not going to play. It's no different at all from those who say the same about BG or whatever bandwagon server has all the boonblob fight guilds. 'I hate this garbage meta and this trash matchup. I'm just going to PvE this week.' The funny thing is that instead of solo players complaining about boonblobs, it's small-midsize attack groups who complain about unbeatable magclouds. It's the same problem but from a different perspective. In both cases it's typically the newer, less skilled and less experienced players who are upset about being farmed by those who know the game much better. Boonblobs are built around theorycrafted comps and the guilds who train a member to fill them. That degree of skill and coordination is going to outclass casual players without organization. Magclouds are filled by veteran solo/roamers who have spent enough time fighting outnumbered that they can intuit opportunity and quickly move to strike. That level of individual skill is going to outclass a lack of game understanding and poor organization/coordination. Both versions of casual are getting farmed and neither veteran perspective requires a buff to make that farming easier. The casuals who might abandon the game because they have no chance of winning? They do need the help, but what help they get shouldn't be something those with extensive game knowledge can exploit to even greater benefit. 

I'm not an advocate for dumbing down the game. That should be more than clear from this post and others I've made; I prefer new players take it on the nose and learn to grow rather than play with the training wheels perpetually on. Numbers are an advantage, but numbers aren't an 'I-Win' button that trumps higher quality play. Choosing to believe you can't win under any circumstance unless the game devs nerf or buff a particular strategy is defeatist. Worse, it removes the impetus to theorycraft and generate player-driven evolution within the game. You can overcome greater numbers. You can overcome significant greater numbers. But each additional player is an additional advantage and overcoming them requires more out of you and your team each time. Eventually every strategy has a breaking point; when one fails it's time to create another. Or combine multiple so that they have a greater net benefit. Ultimately you're part of a team and a team has many different tools at it's disposal, there's more than one path to victory. 

In the first year or two of launch 'zerg-busting' groups were common, yes. They were established guilds who transferred from other large-scale competitive games like DAoC and Warhammer Online. They were among the first to overcome the limits of the game mode by expanding their group sizes by coordinating 5-man parties in voice coms. Many were also elitist and exclusive, and with no weak links a 15-man could punch far harder than an unorganized mob with numbers and litterally nothing else. Squads were also smaller in general back then as there were much higher ques and activity across all servers so squeezing in a comp group was more difficult. Boonballs existed back then too, but unlike today it could take half-a-day for many of them to form and once they were rolling on a map they could exist in perpetuity so long as there was another commander to tag in. Even then much of the 'ball' were just floaters who glommed onto a rolling mass of people, the real success was always in that voice-com core. WvW was a much different beast back then, however. PvP was the esport scene and WvW was more of a hilarious group combat experience than a serious meta. Balance was rarely a consideration back then, and it wouldn't become one until the competitive skill split divided WvW from PvP. 

As for zergs being forced to disperse as a way to adapt to a higher target cap... I don't feel you understand the reasons why a group bands together. In many cases it has nothing at all to do with winning a fight. People like friends, people like running together while laughing about random junk in voice coms. It's a shared activity. Enforcing a skill balance that tells these players they can't play with each other and have a good time will simply cause them to abandon the game and go somewhere else. You need to understand that the social context of the game mode is just as important as the mechanical balance of it. People will want to play together, regardless of whether or not it's optimal. Creating an environment where they're harshly punished for doing so does not improve the health or longevity of the game. Relish the fact that many of these people are easy bags or the kind of difficult challenge that keeps the game interesting for those with skill. You don't have to win all the time to enjoy something. Strangely enough, casual players understand this far more readily than veterans do. Their silent majority is a voice worth paying attention to, even if it means the training wheels still have to come off. 

As for skill lag... I don't know what to tell you. Server stability has suffered with the switch to Amazon and all the expansions which were added to the game. There's just more going on with less server resources to handle it. If enough people on a map are using their skills, you're going to see lag no matter where you are on the map. When two blobs fight in hills, I've seen lag in bay while all I'm doing is harvesting resource nodes. If your dream of WvW is that there are no groups bigger than 10 anywhere on the map, everyone has a chosen objective to attack or defend and there are no large-scale engagements at all to generate lag.... What's the point? One reason many people play GW2 is because large scale pvp is such a niche form of gameplay there aren't a lot of games that do it. There might be a dozen games that offer 5v5 and 10v10 competitive experiences from an MMO perspective. Very, very few offer 70+ players on the same screen trying to kill each other. And unfortunantely... most of them are terrible. If not unplayable, than so poorly balanced that players have all but abandoned the game mode altogether. People play WvW because it offers them the possibility of true, large scale conflict in a satisfying fashion. I don't feel you'll see zergs 'adapt' and shrink down to 15s and 20s just because they're a target if they get any bigger than that. People will want to play together as a social experience. People will want to play a game that allows them to engage in large-scale combat. You're forgetting that zergs usually seek other zergs. They don't care about the 10-man group who got upset they they were steamrolled by 5 times their number. They'd much rather spend their time 'circling' another 50 man group for the kind of content GW2 offers that no other game does. You need to understand the downstream effects of raising target caps beyond your specific need to have a competitive edge to beat down one form of gameplay. 

Please don't respond to this in another giant blockquote. It was as exhausting for me to read your cut-up of mine as I'm sure this has been for you to read this. If there's something in here that really aggravates you, focus on that and we can talk about it in greater detail and cycle back to the rest if it's still something that you feel needs to be addressed. 

I'll leave the rest of that but the cloud driving away new players is a new thing to me. My server has a loose core of regulars and guilds, but we're not stacked unless we get a few quick transfers for a match.  Cloud fighting and travel might be one of the major things that keeps our server from tanking entirely and newer players actually have some options on a map, especially in matches when we're not stacked and there's not a lot of large scale tags to get a full rolling blob going. 

It's also probably a factor in what makes a match against Mag just a normal match because regular and newer players, at least when I'm logged in, have people to link up with to move around the map. I haven't felt a huge numbers imbalance in those matches for a few years and it was never for long anyway, so we're not losing that many on those weeks. 

I get that it can be largely different server to server and I'm not discounting your perspective, but I feel like if that kind of fighting or team movement was the factor in driving away new players, we'd only have the same old feral pugs sneaking out of spawn every week. 

[Mistwraithe.3106]

Interesting thread and I agree with both OP and Cael in places.

I think it is very hard for new players to compete with roamers. I have been playing WvW steadily for over a year now and I win some roaming encounters now but I lose more. Cloud fights are a bit easier than 1v1 because you can do things to avoid being focused but they have the same problems that players who have been doing WvW (or pvp) for years know most/all the specs, abilities and tricks for combining and countering them while new players don’t. 

Joining a not too elitist Zerg is a very good way for a newish player to feel  like they are contributing and even “winning”, vs usually “losing” when solo. And it is easier to learn a Zerg support build to the point where you are actually contributing than getting competitive at roaming and clouding.

Edited April 24 by Mistwraithe.3106

[kash.9213]

43 minutes ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

Interesting thread and I agree with both OP and Cael in places.

I think it is very hard for new players to compete with roamers. I have been playing WvW steadily for over a year now and I win some roaming encounters now but I lose more. Cloud fights are a bit easier than 1v1 because you can do things to avoid being focused but they have the same problems that players who have been doing WvW (or pvp) for years know most/all the specs, abilities and tricks for combining and countering them while new players don’t. 

Joining a not too elitist Zerg is a very good way for a newish player to feel  like they are contributing and even “winning”, vs usually “losing” when solo. And it is easier to learn a Zerg support build to the point where you are actually contributing than getting competitive at roaming and clouding.

If you ever try to break in a friend who's new to WvW, maybe try clouding your sides zerg part of the time. There's a huge difference in the feel of the fight and how oriented or disoriented they'll be moving with a core of a squad or floating around it or weaving in and out of it. There're a few focal points they might zero in on when they're covering their people or running interception for them. I say cloud them sometimes instead of join squad because you'd be a dot and a health bar their commander is wondering about otherwise. 

They might find themselves scanning the horizon and peripheral in a different way and pick up on creeping stealth signs and all that, and they might tune into the different types of map lag as a heads up (sometimes I can feel the exact moment that I need to drop some stuff and run interception for my side who haven't scoped anything out yet from the type of map lag). 

That might ease up on some of the pressure they're probably feeling trying not to mess up too bad or have to run from spawn too much. I also think the different vantage points can help tune into body language from all sides more and that might give them better reaction time or be able to get ahead of stuff. I feel like floating in and out and around is the safest way for me to support and get around but there are a handful of commanders who move how I like to move with a fight. I feel super stuck sometimes being totally dialed into a squad where it's do or die by their calls because you've committed to their lane and how far they've driven into stuff already. 

Edited April 24 by kash.9213

[ZTeamG.4603]

19 hours ago, Cael.3960 said:

 

I feel like you're not hearing what I'm saying--you're taking the idea in a wildly different direction that assumes the current status quo is the only way things can be and that people would never adapt to change. So here are my responses to your main points:

-When support/heals are kept the same but offensive target caps are limitless, incoming damage for a group that doesn't adapt is comparatively much greater than before. The unchanged support/heals can't suddenly deal with anywhere from 3x to 10x the damage that was coming in when each AoE hit a small fraction of the group of 50 before. The point isn't for one or two people to be able to wipe a zerg, the point is to push the zergs--and the gamemode in general--towards engaging gameplay rather than letting them win for simply showing up. A group of 50 would still be far more dangerous than a group of 5, but a group of 5 would be able to do something--would pose at least some threat if ignored--to the group of 50, which is not the case in the current meta. Heck, you can use the numbers 50 and 25 instead of 50 and 5 and it's still the same situation in the current meta.

-To the point about people playing to play with friends rather than to just get rewards for karmatraining everything: I agree. And if that is the case for the boonballs in question, as I assume it is, they would continue to play with their friends, just in smaller groups spread out over the field rather than one giant blob moving through the field as one. The difference would be that instead of only the commander making the calls in battle, there'd be more callouts from random people to focus targets, save one group from a push, etc. You imply that boonballs are simply an excuse to get a bunch of friends together in a discord call and that making boonballs no longer invincible to smaller groups would just lead to those players quitting. Idk about you, but I've never had trouble hanging out with friends in roaming/havoc groups, and my experience has been that the banter and camaraderie is both more frequent and more fun in smaller roaming/havoc groups--in a disorganized 10v10 fight, for instance, when one person is being focused and yelling for help, or another just landed a long stun on and enemy and is calling for everyone to nuke them. Even in zergs, the camaraderie is all between fights, with the comms clear for the commander (aside from a few CD callouts or warnings) in fights.

-Regarding skill and challenge: I don't think you understand what this means regarding boonballs in the current meta. If you only play in large zergs--especially if at peak times on a server that consistently outnumbers or matches its opponents at those times--maybe you don't get to experience what gameplay is like when outnumbered and/or when only one of the three servers can field a full zerg. The latter is the majority of the time, and most of the time I get to play. I occasionally play with zergs--some of them that are quite good, well-coordinated ones, others that are decidedly not. The changes I propose aren't some attempt to make myself always win. In fact, I don't care about winning or getting bags--I played tons of WvW before they added the ranks and rewards to the mode. I like having fun. In the current meta, notably after the recent nerfs to defense, there is almost nothing that a small group can do against a fully comped boonball, and the few things that can be done are the type that leads to the boonballers sending you rage-whispers. The current meta is decidedly un-fun, both when outnumbered and when your server outnumbers the enemies. With targets uncapped for offensive skills, that wouldn't mean a group of 5 can reliably wipe a group of 50 because no group of 50 would still be clumping up in one spot. A group of 50 would still be far more dangerous than a handful of roamers. What it would mean, however, is that the smaller group can do something, can pick at the backline or the sides or the overextended parts of the larger group, etc. Speaking from experience, nobody in the current meta thinks "Oh yay I can't wait for the challenge of trying to fight a boonball with 5 people to test our skill" because everyone knows that's impossible. You quite literally can watch your participation tick down into the red if you try to defend an objective while outnumbered against a boonball, and refreshing it  means leaving the objective to hunt some late arrivals. As a result, most would-be defenders just give up on even trying to defend objectives that are under attack by a larger force because there's no point and all your tools have been removed. You either go to a different map and hope for some content or go play a different game. I don't know how you think that massive imbalance is leveling the playing field, allowing for skill expression, or increasing player engagement, because it's doing quite the opposite. The "zergs seek out other zergs" thing only applies to a fraction of the large zergs--most are content to karmatrain around papering everything (because, as you pointed out, it's more of a social experience for them than an attempt to find engaging gameplay) and, because a difference in numbers of merely 10 people makes such a huge difference in the current meta, even a sizable zerg on one team will actively avoid the bigger zerg on the other, a phenomenon that remains the same (albeit with the sides swapped) an hour later when the zerg of 40 has risen to 50 and the zerg of 50 has dropped to 40.

-I think you illustrate my point quite well regarding all the interesting stuff going on in boonball fights: if 90% of the gameplay decisions are being made by two people out of 100, that's not very engaging gameplay for the other 98 people.

When it comes to adaptation, I think you and I just disagree about the ability of primarily-largescale players to adapt. Zergs adapted just fine going between the hammertrain/blast meta, the pirateship meta, the stealth gyro meta, the current boonball meta, etc. Whenever a new balance update borks the balance, the zergs quickly adapt to it. Fighting as parties of 5 working together in a group of 50 rather than as a single boonball would be a larger adjustment, but I'm confident it would immediately lead to a healthier, more engaging, more fun game overall.

[Cael.3960]

24 minutes ago, ZTeamG.4603 said:

I feel like you're not hearing what I'm saying--

Yeah, that sounds about right. Sorry, but I don't have the time to explain myself a third time if all you're interested is an echo chamber that supports your position. I've tried to expand this discussion beyond this need of yours to have 50-man target caps to enhance your preferred playstyle so you can see the wider impact it will have on players who also play something different. I've offered perspectives from multiple playstyles and squad sizes to try and give you the fullest idea of what this change would mean to them and why it's important to have choice and strategy rather than a meta that removes choice.  At some point you have to step back and understand that this game is bigger than yourself and if you want a healthy meta is has to include players with different wants/needs and priorities. 

I get it, I really do. You feel you can't beat a blob unless you have a blob of your own and you've chosen not to see any other way to do this but to buff your particular playstyle sufficient to make it happen. I'm telling you there are other ways to win, if winning is the only thing that matters to you. I'm telling you that there's a community to think about and a social structure that exists beyond the sweaty need for domination. I'm telling you that player choice is a consideration that goes hand in hand with balance and taking away choice isn't healthy. Blobs aren't the be-all-end-all expression of how players play this game. It's just one way to play. There are many different kinds of 'blobs' and many different skill levels and coordination within each. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to devote more time to a discussion that won't meet halfway. I've tried. 

[Coldtart.4785]

What I think needs to come back is a split between frontlines and backlines. In the past this existed because certain classes had things you wanted but weren't frontline material, but now homogenisation and overpowered supports have made it possible to run anything you want on the frontline.

[Sansar.1302]

WvW should have higer skill ceiling than it have now.

And pure support builds should not exist as they make gw2 boring and the game where not designed for it.

[ZTeamG.4603]

2 hours ago, Cael.3960 said:

At some point you have to step back and understand that this game is bigger than yourself and if you want a healthy meta is has to include players with different wants/needs and priorities. 

...

Blobs aren't the be-all-end-all expression of how players play this game. It's just one way to play.

This is a bit ironic considering the recent changes--what prompted me posting this in the first place--are all about restricting playstyles and only incentivizing boonblob karmatrain (note: not even blob v blob, just unrestricted karmatrain) gameplay.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

I'm not sure exactly how it is so many people became convinced that removing the target caps on offensive skills wouldn't increase the favor of smaller groups vs. larger ones.  I still remember an old Woodenpotatoes vide on on the subject back in the day: 

This was pre-nerf Ice bow, but you get the gist of it.  A group of 5 players buff themselves up, use Shadow Refuge to sneak in, and then unload a boatload of damage all at once.  I'd have to look at what builds we have now to come up with an "optimum" comp, but without a target cap a group of 4 berserker dragonhunters and 1 specter could CC and kill an entire zerg by dropping all their symbols/traps/CC all at once from out of stealth.  To put it into perspective, think of your current WvW build, and could it handle taking the burst from 5 berserker/marauder players all at once.  I'm not sure any actually could.  Without the target cap to buffer the damage via superior numbers, every player would effectively be hit by that same burst.  A group of 50 players could hit a group of 5 players just as hard with or without the target cap, so the smaller teams stand mostly to gain from such a change.  

[Mistwraithe.3106]

I am not convinced that allowing a 5 or 10 person group to blow up a stacked Zerg will have the effect OP thinks. That’s because I don’t think it is dead for most Zergs to split into 5 man groups working autonomously”. They don’t have the necessary number of party decision makers, skills or desire to run this way and I suspect if they tried then clouding players who have been training for years in this type of spread out play will likely own them. 

Instead of adapting and learning to play in parallel 5 player parties as OP argues I think most zergs would fail and then disband.

Maybe that is OPs goal here but for the reasons Cael and others gave Zergs are important for new and less skilled players. If you force most to disband then you damage WvW badly.

I thinks Zergs are too strong currently and am not impressed with recent changes as per other posts I have made but as presented this is the nuclear option. Maybe a lesser version could help tho.

[T G.7496]

There's some interesting back and forth in this thread. The internet is the natural habitat of entrenched thinking, so props for trying to push through that.

For me, the current meta isn't fun, and the recent changes don't make much sense at all.

But I also think that removing target caps is a bad idea.

Perhaps there's a sweet spot. I mean, it's a dial they could twiddle with. 10, 15, 20, I dunno. I guess there's a lag cost to pay though.

I'm not a game designer, and I have to remember that; players generally make terrible game design suggestions. My job is to complain on the forums.

I keep hoping that the game designer custodians of my favourite game mode can make smart choices.

I keep hoping.

For now though, I'm taking a break from the game.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

I did the math on this stuff several years ago now. I summarize some of it here :

Can just read the whole thread and clicking on links for deeper context, but essentially

1) Lower target cap has a mathematical bias towards bigger groupings through dispersal of damage packets. This is a non-trivial advantage for groups of larger size

2) target caps are the one of the primary causes of balance issues in the game, in a very general sense. The limitations and bad design of skills due to the existence of the caps prevent skills from scaling invariantly with the scale of the fight, and this has major consequences on how much damage and healing skills are designed to do.

3) unleashing target cap for damage but not for healing is a big mistake, because of the nature of how this scaling in fights work. When target caps are dropped for all skill, You will receive more packets of damage and more packets of healing where health generally stays the same so the fight simply increases in volatility (more drastic changes in increasing and decreasing health pool during a fight). So you get rid of the number of players bias, without effecting deeply how damage and healing interface with each other in the game. Greater volatility also means more attentiveness, meaning you need a faster reaction time to respond to attacks. If you tip the balance in any direction, your dropping a nuclear warhead level of imbalance since this volatility is operating on way high scales.
 

For instance if you have 1 player doing 1000 damage per second, to 50 players, they are doing 50,000 dps. If you are healing 1,000 heals per second to 5 players, your doing 5000 heals per second. 
 

increase the damage and healing of each player by 4000 (a general increase in player skill). Then the damage player 1 is doing 5000 damage per second for 50 players = 250,000 damage per second. The healer is doing 5000 x 5 players = 25,000 healing per second. 

That is a 200k+ increase in disparity when the dps and healing increase as a function of skill. That’s just for 1 player…you can imagine a group of 50 players…and you can imagine players doing 10k dps or more…the disparity between the healing and damage diverges really hard, really fast if target caps are not just the same for everyone. So no…no bias is needed for target cap. Just it’s removal.

4)  mentioned in that link, anet has a very logical reason for not wanting to increase target caps…I have my own opinion about this problem…but it seems unlikely we will ever see a change to this stuff and therefor the game will always have these kind of balance problems. 

5) I explain in detail how target cap functions in this game and how skills that can bypass target caps work across these threads with hyperlinks…mostly because I’m a theory-crafter (I model theory’s of the games mechanics) and not just some funky build crafter that just like “bro this build so sick dude look at this damage bro”, but actually doing high level scientific modeling and analysis on the mechanics in this game, deriving principles, doing experiments and formulating strong mathematical proofs. 
 

The proofs for target cap bias is one of induction: where you can show for n number of players (all cases) that there exists a bias for how much damage gets dispersed simply as a function of the number of players that exist in a radius. For an infinite number of players, hitting the same target again has a 0% probability…meaning that if you want to asymptotically approach becoming invulnerable to damage you simply stack more and more players.

TLDR: Long story short I’m saying that basically the intuition of your thread is correct (it’s been formally proven). The only issue with the thread is that if you get rid of target cap you got to get rid of it for all players not this 50 for damage 5 for healers thing. finally I highly doubt Anet will change anything about target cap since their excuse deals with optimization and computational complexity of the problem. Computational complexity is hard limit type of stuff which describes the solvability of certain problems.
 

 

Edited April 25 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[ZTeamG.4603]

13 hours ago, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

 

11 hours ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

 

3 hours ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

 

Thanks for those insights. Though the discussion has almost 100% been about target caps, I intended for the main point of my post to be my gripes with how un-fun the current meta is and how it squanders the potential of GW2's combat system. My target caps proposal is very much a nuclear option, though it's intended to push people to change playstyles to more engaging gameplay--the intention is to get zergs to spread out (thus making it a good thing that all standing in one spot = death) but not to make them quit, though I do see how it runs the risk of driving away people that have become used to the more laid-back zerg gameplay. Part of the reason that proposal goes to 50/unlimited offensive target caps is because my worry is that any less would still heavily favor numbers and just lead us back to the old pirate ship meta.

[Hyperballad.5693]

I admittedly did not read through this entire thread besides the OP and a couple posts.

I see both sides of the issue in regards to target caps. I tend to agree with the people saying the servers probably can't handle all the additional computations from removing caps. In any case, I think the elephant in the room which people rarely speak about in-game is the minstrel stat-line.

Comparing old WvW to Today

Stability - 2 guardians coordinating
Today - minstrel npc playing piano

Cleansing - 3 or 4 party members coordinating
Today -  minstrel npc playing piano

Healing - Entire parting coordinating regroups and water blasts
Today - minstrel npc playing piano

DPS - Entire party's responsibility
Today - 1 or 2 DPS free casting while you guessed it, being pushed around in a baby carriage by minstrel npcs

The game has been dumbed down to the dirt. And this is not about me hating support; I was a monk main in GW1. But GW2 and its UI simply weren't designed with healers/support in mind and it shows. There's a reason minstrel doesn't exist in SPvP. No one wants to run to a capture point and deal with a bunker stalling the match for its entirety (boring). WvW has this problem scaled up. Some groups are running 4 supports to a party now, I mean, come on.

I'd like ANET to experiment and run a weekend event with minstrel removed, concentration/expertise removed from celestial, and see where the meta shakes up. Will it be better or worse? I don't know but it would be something DIFFERENT. The meta has been stale for so long and the worst thing I can say about WvW in its current state is that the combat has become boring and predictable vs. GvG comps, organized comps, pug comps... everything. They all feel exactly the same to fight against with the only difference being who wkeys on tag more effectively. Another interesting experiment would be giving players their own defiance bar for a weekend and see how it plays.

This of course requires developer resources which ANET seems unwilling to allocate, so I know I'm just a boomer WvW'er yelling at the clouds. The point being, there are other avenues to improve the game that don't involve completely dumbing down the combat system. But we've had a minstrel meta for so long with the playerbase conditioned to play this way (and the devs too apparently), I feel it's a lost cause at this point. Just play another game to scratch that competitive itch.

[Coldtart.4785]

11 hours ago, Hyperballad.5693 said:

weekend event with minstrel removed

I reckon an event that makes wvw character building run entirely on pvp rules could be interesting.

[ArchonWing.9480]

20 hours ago, Hyperballad.5693 said:

I admittedly did not read through this entire thread besides the OP and a couple posts.

I see both sides of the issue in regards to target caps. I tend to agree with the people saying the servers probably can't handle all the additional computations from removing caps. In any case, I think the elephant in the room which people rarely speak about in-game is the minstrel stat-line.

Comparing old WvW to Today

Stability - 2 guardians coordinating
Today - minstrel npc playing piano

Cleansing - 3 or 4 party members coordinating
Today -  minstrel npc playing piano

Healing - Entire parting coordinating regroups and water blasts
Today - minstrel npc playing piano

DPS - Entire party's responsibility
Today - 1 or 2 DPS free casting while you guessed it, being pushed around in a baby carriage by minstrel npcs

The game has been dumbed down to the dirt. And this is not about me hating support; I was a monk main in GW1. But GW2 and its UI simply weren't designed with healers/support in mind and it shows. There's a reason minstrel doesn't exist in SPvP. No one wants to run to a capture point and deal with a bunker stalling the match for its entirety (boring). WvW has this problem scaled up. Some groups are running 4 supports to a party now, I mean, come on.

I'd like ANET to experiment and run a weekend event with minstrel removed, concentration/expertise removed from celestial, and see where the meta shakes up. Will it be better or worse? I don't know but it would be something DIFFERENT. The meta has been stale for so long and the worst thing I can say about WvW in its current state is that the combat has become boring and predictable vs. GvG comps, organized comps, pug comps... everything. They all feel exactly the same to fight against with the only difference being who wkeys on tag more effectively. Another interesting experiment would be giving players their own defiance bar for a weekend and see how it plays.

This of course requires developer resources which ANET seems unwilling to allocate, so I know I'm just a boomer WvW'er yelling at the clouds. The point being, there are other avenues to improve the game that don't involve completely dumbing down the combat system. But we've had a minstrel meta for so long with the playerbase conditioned to play this way (and the devs too apparently), I feel it's a lost cause at this point. Just play another game to scratch that competitive itch.

Well, I got to agree that having 80% minstrel dominance is absurd but minstrel existed for quite a while until combat degenerated to this point. Though certainly its existence played no small role.

I think post PoF and especially EoD balance really got too obsessed with "one size fits all" roles. Firebrand was a good example, having essentially all support roles literally baked into the spec itself. A firebrand with no traits, skills, or equipment offered water fields, reflects, stability, and resistance right out of the gate, and it was only natural that it was a balance disaster. A lot of the stuff simply got nerfed, but the core design remains and is still problematic.

To make matters worse, the changes simply made the class more annoying to play, and meaningful choices were removed (to make balance easier) and in general Anet took the balance approach of simply deleting alternate traits in an effort to railroad people to pick the traits they intended for turning builds into what is basically an illusion of choice.

And then other support builds would all have to be power crept up, or they just couldn't compete. Meanwhile, PvE degenerated into a mandatory quickness and alarcrity meta, so the game went in that direction that only got reversed in recent time. But it was too late.

But it would seem after EOD came out, they were finally making changes to remove this pve booncreep.. Things were looking up until SotO came out and at this point any semblance of effort was tossed out the window.  This expansion was clearly rushed with them struggling to find something to do, and while they haven't been the best of planning, the lack of any real plan here was simply blatant. It would have been fine if they just released a few maps nobody cares about and some legendary skins but they decided to release something with massive implications on all aspects of the game with about zero thought.

The weaponsmith training alone was a balance nightmare even in concept, and with the most ambitious thing being repackaged rune bonuses, things went south the fastest I've ever seen for this game since maybe the 2019 layoffs.

Edited April 26 by ArchonWing.9480

[Triptaminas.4789]

On 4/24/2024 at 12:42 AM, ZTeamG.4603 said:

I'm not sure where you're getting this idea from that they'd be able to outheal the damage from. Look at the damage you deal with a typical DPS skill, even with minimal might/buffs, and multiply it by 10. Would you be able to perpetually sustain that incoming damage, or would you instantly go down? Those healers in minstrel gear would still be limited to 5 targets for their healing/support, and the 2 or 3 per subgroup wouldn't be able to outheal the equivalent of 10+ people whaling on them and their party--the stacked zerg would get instantly downed. The reason sustain is so strong in the current meta is because low target caps and overtuned supports mean that the DPS to Support ratio is almost 1:1, and the low offensive target caps (some going down to 1 or 2 targets, whereas most support is 5 targets) mean that every AoE from a DPS player is going to have a corresponding support counterhealing it. In a clash of two boonballs of 50 each, you're not getting hit more than you're getting healed as long as you stay stacked. If a few people are caught away from the zerg, they melt even if their supports are sending healing their way. With offensive target caps being 50 each, everyone would rightfully melt when just standing in AoEs.

It's only despised in the case of number imbalance (ie Mag) and people who exclusively run in organized zergs and can't adapt to more than a point-and-click adventure. Are you telling me that you seriously enjoy two boonballs slowly circling each other more than you enjoy a disorganized 20v20 fight over an objective, a fight where the frontline ebbs and flows and individual players can actually have an impact? Even at the full cloud level of 50v50ish, cloud fights over a keep--with each side's siege attacks flying overhead as the attackers try to push into the breach and the defenders try to push to the attackers' siege--are far more fun than boonball fights. The cloud only gets boring when it's a stagnant line in the middle of nowhere (ie the "OW sentry meta"), but, even there, that's because it's downtime when the cloud has no objective to attack or defend--the boonball gameplay that corresponds to that is just not getting to fight anything at all.

This describes boonballs just as well as the cloud, except instead of just new/inexperienced players the boonball drives off everyone from a server that can't match the boonball's numbers. And I'd disagree about the cloud driving off new/inexperienced players. There'd be growing pains, sure, but they'd be pushed to get better rather than just treat WvW like another mindless PvE meta train.

Regarding the effectiveness of experience: maybe, just maybe, the goal shouldn't be to dumb down WvW combat to the point that a brand new player is just as effective as a veteran. I prefer when games with complex combat systems reward skill rather than just rewarding the outnumbering of the enemy. The fight shouldn't be over in the organization phase before the fight even starts.

It's not as if what I'm suggesting is without precedent. Back in the early days of the game, "zerg busting" groups of 15-20 that would win against groups of 40+ were quite common, and WvW was more popular than ever. The higher skill ceiling wasn't driving people off, it was pushing them to get better.

Once again, that would only be the case if the zergs didn't adapt. If they refuse to stop plopping their whole group of 50 in a bunch of red circles at once, then they deserve to go down easily. Organized groups would still be superior to randoms because groups of 5 could take advantage of boons and having supports--it's just that they would be a mobile group of 5 rather than one cog in the blob of 50. 

If all else remained equal you'd have a point, but you're not considering the downstream effects of raising offensive target caps. After the day or so it would take for people to adapt, you would almost never have the target caps getting used up because people would stop stacking all in one spot. There would only be the occasional spike if someone does get caught unaware with their zerg all in one spot (a spike in lag that would immediately subside since the zerg would all be dead). Once people adapted, you'd probably have less skill lag because you'd be spreading the fight out into a bunch of localized smallscale fights within a larger battle rather than 100 players all trying to cast skills within 600 range of each other.

Aney goal is indeed to dumb down wvw combat to the point where completely new player is as effective as veteran and there is nothing og's or their little forum friends can do about it

[DeceiverX.8361]

Trying to fix the problem of boon/support defensive powercreep via increased target caps is merely addressing a symptom to a problem rather than addressing the problem itself.  At best you get pirate ship meta where nobody can engage without instantly blowing up, at worst, nothing changes.

These things just need deletion and re-evaluation along with nerfs to CC skills and outlier damage.  That's the crux of the problem and the only way to actually fix the game to match how its systems were intended to be played from day 1.

Edited April 27 by DeceiverX.8361

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

3 hours ago, DeceiverX.8361 said:

Trying to fix the problem of boon/support defensive powercreep via increased target caps is merely addressing a symptom to a problem rather than addressing the problem itself.  At best you get pirate ship meta where nobody can engage without instantly blowing up, at worst, nothing changes.

It's the other way around. Target caps is the root cause of the problem, because stacking is caused by the geometric properties of sphere's and points. Target Cap is also the reason why AOE's are designed to do less damage, where single target skills are designed to do more damage...and that leads to the problem of power-creep : Anet has to design single target skills to do thousands more damage, and AOE's to do thousands of less damage.

For instance you have a skill, skill A, that does 5000 damage, and another Skill, Skill B. To balance this example game, Skill B can either hit 5 targets and do 1000 damage... or it can hit 1 target and do 5000 damage...or it can hit 10 targets and do 500 damage.

On one side you have people complain about skills that do one shot damage in 1v1...on the other you have people complain about skills that don't do enough damage in ZvZ...and when things get nerfed or buffed its the opposite (not enough damage in 1v1, too much AOE damage) and its a perpetual back and forth.

That's why there is no real solution and why Anet has consistently buffed and nerfed the same skills multiple times over the course of years, up and down up and down...because there's no level in which you actually have balance : the geometric properties of the problem simply don't allow that to happen when target cap exists. 

The way to solve this geometric problem is through scale invariance : where skills can scale invariantly at any arbitrary scale. How to actually make skills scale invariantly has to do with tradeoffs on skills, and how the designs of those tradeoffs scale and behave when combat is scaled up in size. Skills in this game do not have tradeoffs, let alone tradeoffs that scale with the size of combat.

Relic of Lhyr is one of the only few examples that are currently live in this game, of a mechanic that actually scales with the size of combat. For each additional person the healer is protecting, the healer takes more damage...to the point where if you are healing too many people, you are gonna take to much damage and blow yourself up...Therefor this mechanic self regulates its own existence.

It's a bit too punishing at larger scales (and could use a bit of an adjustment) but the mechanical design is the kind of design that the game needs in order to regulate itself at all of these different scales of combat.

Scale Invariance is a (very interesting) mathematical property, one common in nature and so you can actually learn more about it and how it works in the world to see how it regulates other systems. The reason you'd want to look into it as a solution to the problem should be a logical one : There are already models of systems that show that it works.

Anyway, i'm not here to start an argument, i just wanted to point out that the problem is much deeper than just nerfs and buffs which has been the only thing that this game has ever done over the past 10 years. I'm also not saying power-creep doesn't exist (in the form of bloat.) But design is definitely a non-ignorable component of this problem, and nerfs and buffs are not the right tools to try and solve it.

[Santo.2419]

I used to be able to do something against a blob...

Signed, Staff Weaver.

 

[Coldtart.4785]

People have been blaming aoe caps since 2012 it's getting a bit old. Let's all just ignore the support builds that do more than what a whole party used to do alone and are stacked 4 to a party while we're at it.

[DeceiverX.8361]

20 hours ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

It's the other way around. Target caps is the root cause of the problem, because stacking is caused by the geometric properties of sphere's and points. Target Cap is also the reason why AOE's are designed to do less damage, where single target skills are designed to do more damage...and that leads to the problem of power-creep : Anet has to design single target skills to do thousands more damage, and AOE's to do thousands of less damage.

For instance you have a skill, skill A, that does 5000 damage, and another Skill, Skill B. To balance this example game, Skill B can either hit 5 targets and do 1000 damage... or it can hit 1 target and do 5000 damage...or it can hit 10 targets and do 500 damage.

On one side you have people complain about skills that do one shot damage in 1v1...on the other you have people complain about skills that don't do enough damage in ZvZ...and when things get nerfed or buffed its the opposite (not enough damage in 1v1, too much AOE damage) and its a perpetual back and forth.

That's why there is no real solution and why Anet has consistently buffed and nerfed the same skills multiple times over the course of years, up and down up and down...because there's no level in which you actually have balance : the geometric properties of the problem simply don't allow that to happen when target cap exists. 

The way to solve this geometric problem is through scale invariance : where skills can scale invariantly at any arbitrary scale. How to actually make skills scale invariantly has to do with tradeoffs on skills, and how the designs of those tradeoffs scale and behave when combat is scaled up in size. Skills in this game do not have tradeoffs, let alone tradeoffs that scale with the size of combat.

Relic of Lhyr is one of the only few examples that are currently live in this game, of a mechanic that actually scales with the size of combat. For each additional person the healer is protecting, the healer takes more damage...to the point where if you are healing too many people, you are gonna take to much damage and blow yourself up...Therefor this mechanic self regulates its own existence.

It's a bit too punishing at larger scales (and could use a bit of an adjustment) but the mechanical design is the kind of design that the game needs in order to regulate itself at all of these different scales of combat.

Scale Invariance is a (very interesting) mathematical property, one common in nature and so you can actually learn more about it and how it works in the world to see how it regulates other systems. The reason you'd want to look into it as a solution to the problem should be a logical one : There are already models of systems that show that it works.

Anyway, i'm not here to start an argument, i just wanted to point out that the problem is much deeper than just nerfs and buffs which has been the only thing that this game has ever done over the past 10 years. I'm also not saying power-creep doesn't exist (in the form of bloat.) But design is definitely a non-ignorable component of this problem, and nerfs and buffs are not the right tools to try and solve it.

I'm not going to disagree it's not a contributor as to the relative power of the omni-blob strategy, but the fact of the matter is that removing a target cap won't do much to create a healthy atmosphere as it stands.  You address stat bloat as a problem; letting 5 people provide enough damage simultaneously to burst down a group of infinite size mandates pirate ship/hesitancy metas where nobody actually engages as I said.  It makes commanding pugs basically impossible, and discourages anything but cloud setups which isn't what the mode actually needs, either.  It might be what *some* players want, but the mode needs the options available broad-spectrum.

Removing target caps does almost nothing to let groups fight upwards in size via tactics.  It just calls for a demand or more bombs on grouped targets and a discouragement of stacking at all in the opposite extreme.  Under optimized play, your groups/players are splitting further and further apart to be out of range of others' AoEs.  Then it boils down to a boonball stat-stick in the subgroups where the AoE uncapping no longer matters either way.  Fact is, 4 supports and 1 DPS will out-sustain 5 DPS in the current game.  Target uncaps don't fix this.  It's still ultimately decided by boon support dominance.  Which is why smallscale is dominated by celestial offtank builds with everyone running support.  There's just barely enough damage to grind down one target at a time *eventually* with a misplay, otherwise most such fights go infinite.

There's also the pragmatic reality that skills will never be uncapped due to server performance limitations.  Past reductions in targeting happened because of this.

The static boonball strategy exists because it's just blatantly superior at all stages and all sizes of play.  The smallscale scene permits the use of some damage-oriented builds because there are some players skilled enough to pilot them and build to counter enough boons from one singular player and get some kills, but more prominent is the simple lack of desire to constantly wet-noodle fight other players until someone messes up a rotation.  And that simply, some of the roaming specs have absolutely absurdist power creep numbers that overwhelm some defensive options.  But these are outliers which are flagrantly unbalanced, and similarly inhibit opposing DPS builds by simply just being better stat sticks.

It has to be boons that go first in order to create multiple overarching available strategies.  This makes target prioritization and coordination of burst damage way more crucial in any size engagement rather than just flooding a group with AoE's as the be-all-end-all.  It also rewards single-target damage builds laser-focused on taking our priority targets in group play, which we do not see today, either.

So while I don't disagree that target caps exacerbate the problem, its removal as a system is both unrealistic and not the core crux of the problem, which is, fundamentally, support/sustain boon builds being numerically OP and driving all facets of builds for competitive play.

And it's been this way since 2014 with the cele ele meta in sPvP.  As soon as a certain support option becomes mathematically overpowered and nigh impossible to shut down, nothing stops them except their strict removal, like removing multiple of the same class in competitive sPvP tournaments altogether.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

2 hours ago, DeceiverX.8361 said:

There's also the pragmatic reality that skills will never be uncapped due to server performance limitations.  Past reductions in targeting happened because of this.

ya, I mentioned this in my original post. but it’s worse than that. Computational complexity is not about performance so much as it’s about the nature of the problem. By problem, I’m talking formally about problems as they are understood in a formal computational sense.

For instance, It’s like saying that to crack the hash algorithm (the algorithm used to store information on blockchain) that you just need to upgrade your computer. You see, you need to exponentially increase the size of the computer, with diminishing increases in speed and at a certain point, that size of the computer need to become so vast that it is for all intensive purposes impossible to go any faster. This video explains the computational complexity of this kind of problem, and the problem of target cap computation is likely in the same class of problems.

that is if the problem of unlimited target cap really is an EXP problem…Anet never mentioned what complexity class their issue is in…so we can’t know for sure if there exists an algorithm that would in fact solve their problem in polynomial time. But what I’m saying is that this stuff is related to how clever their algorithms are not how powerful hardware is. If is an exp problem, then it won’t be solvable…no amount of hardware will due. 
 

Target cap is (in fact) the real problem as you can tell by the nature of the problem that video demonstrates; it just can not be dealt with… it is a monster…a monster not specific to Arena-net only…it exists abstractly in this universe, and people have to cope/coexist with it…whether that be through scale invariant solutions, adding target caps, or adding player collision (which straight up, physically prevents infinite numbers of people stacking onto a single point)

remember: we are actually talking about a mechanic that truly approximates to infinity (stacking more and more players closer and closer together). its a problem that is not in the same league as couple hundred damage here or couple hundred there.

[DeceiverX.8361]

15 hours ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

ya, I mentioned this in my original post. but it’s worse than that. Computational complexity is not about performance so much as it’s about the nature of the problem. By problem, I’m talking formally about problems as they are understood in a formal computational sense.

For instance, It’s like saying that to crack the hash algorithm (the algorithm used to store information on blockchain) that you just need to upgrade your computer. You see, you need to exponentially increase the size of the computer, with diminishing increases in speed and at a certain point, that size of the computer need to become so vast that it is for all intensive purposes impossible to go any faster. This video explains the computational complexity of this kind of problem, and the problem of target cap computation is likely in the same class of problems.

that is if the problem of unlimited target cap really is an EXP problem…Anet never mentioned what complexity class their issue is in…so we can’t know for sure if there exists an algorithm that would in fact solve their problem in polynomial time. But what I’m saying is that this stuff is related to how clever their algorithms are not how powerful hardware is. If is an exp problem, then it won’t be solvable…no amount of hardware will due. 
 

Target cap is (in fact) the real problem as you can tell by the nature of the problem that video demonstrates; it just can not be dealt with… it is a monster…a monster not specific to Arena-net only…it exists abstractly in this universe, and people have to cope/coexist with it…whether that be through scale invariant solutions, adding target caps, or adding player collision (which straight up, physically prevents infinite numbers of people stacking onto a single point)

remember: we are actually talking about a mechanic that truly approximates to infinity (stacking more and more players closer and closer together). its a problem that is not in the same league as couple hundred damage here or couple hundred there.

I understand computational complexity because I have a degree in CS and work on embedded systems as my day job.  Based on no evidence of ANet's server code, but simply an understanding that skill effect application is a very trivial problem to solve, I believe the lag problem is likely caused on the data validation layer of the game, which is a consensus algorithm as noted and requires significantly more computational resources.  I also suspect there are ways to improve the existing algorithm for WvW, because I do not believe it was developed with the current game state of boons and timed-effects like mass conditions in mind.  I have a slight hunch on its current implementation, which I believe the lag is caused by limitations of some specific lock designs often used in parallel processing when writing concurrent real-time systems.  And that this validation layer is utilized game-wide, and the original developers did not account for the use case of the current day WvW setting for how it handles processing.  And rightfully so; writing the code for this is extremely difficult, time-consuming, and can easily break a lot of stuff.  Post-game-release, this is likely not something to be fiddled with if at all possible, and there are no guarantees other solutions would still be truly sufficient.  I actually think ANet's programming staff are largely very capable, and so I suspect a solution with any meaningful performance improvements to be non-trivial.

I still disagree with your assessment that it's the source of anything pertinent to the boon-dependent state of the game.  Smallscale has the same issues with nearly an identical meta and the skill target argument does not apply.  Boon builds and supports themselves simply over-perform on a numerical stat-level and while theoretical unlimited target caps would likely influence how large groups of players interact by reverting to pirate ship metas, I do not believe this would have any impact on the build choices utilized in any meaningful way, because even when distributed away from stacked groups, the builds often used are almost identical conceptually.  My roaming guild ran 4 supports to one DPS like seven years ago because it was optimal even in 5v5.  5x Cele ele was optimal in sPvP back in 2013.  None of this is new; boonstack builds have *always* been OP.  Just concentration makes them very easy to maintain their performance and peak efficacy with, and unlike in 2013, a single necro can't just corrupt once and end the gravy train for a full 10 seconds.

But we can agree to disagree.

[ZTeamG.4603]

On 4/27/2024 at 5:15 AM, Coldtart.4785 said:

People have been blaming aoe caps since 2012 it's getting a bit old. Let's all just ignore the support builds that do more than what a whole party used to do alone and are stacked 4 to a party while we're at it.

Support powercreep is a large part of it, but it's heavily exacerbated by the simultaneous shift to pool-noodle offense and lower target caps for that now-weaker offense.