The "glass cannon" concept doesn't exist in this game [Merged]

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

What if we nerfed damage universally in a giant balance patch?

[Rdm.3186]

Just now, Paradoxoglanis.1904 said:

What if we nerfed damage universally in a giant balance patch?

Then we will just get another bunker meta where nothing dies. You need to de-power creep active (including resustain) and passive defense too. In terms of rotational skill ceiling in conquest also mobility.

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

1 minute ago, Rdm.3186 said:

Then we will just get another bunker meta where nothing dies. You need to de-power creep active (including resustain) and passive defense too. In terms of rotational skill ceiling in conquest also mobility.

Yeah i know, it was a joke. I brought up those exact same points for the 2020 nerf patch. Reversing power creep takes way more work. It didnt happen back then and it wont happen now.

[Rdm.3186]

Just now, Paradoxoglanis.1904 said:

Yeah i know, it was a joke. 

You never know in this forum^^

Just now, Paradoxoglanis.1904 said:

Reversing power creep takes way more work. It didnt happen back then and it wont happen now.

Do not be so negative, nothing is impossible. Anet just needs to hire competent balance devs. I saw way more unlikely things happen 😁

[Azure The Heartless.3261]

On 5/7/2024 at 3:55 AM, Shagie.7612 said:

Before I start I just wanna point out that plenty of people have raised this concern and that I think it's one of the biggest parts of the game's powercreep over its lifetime.
I'm also not trying to say that the builds used as examples are super OP and need nerfed. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but they're being used for relative comparisons.

If I'm a Gunflame enjoyer, because I think Sol Badguy is awesome, and I jump into a match with other fairly squishy, high burst specs, what am I bringing to the table against them? If I get caught by the power Mirage, or the Deadeye, the Soulbeast, or whatever, I instantly lose. That's okay, that's how high burst fights tend to go. But on the flip side, if I catch those guys out, they have infinitely better tools to handle my attempt than I do to handle theirs.
Gunflame doesn't have many of the tools that those do, but also doesn't have significantly higher damage in exchange. Or at least, not enough to matter, because those other scary specs do enough to kill, and that's as much as you need.

I don't make any attempts to hide that I really like Renegade, it's basically the only thing I play anymore because I think it's fun, so it's what I'm most familiar with. I especially like Mallyx/Kalla, but this happens for both condi and power builds often.

If I'm fighting something like a DH, and I get caught by Spear, I lose. Even if I stunbreak the pull before getting all the way into the traps I've committed too much energy. I gotta skedaddle or I die because I don't have enough sustain to use that energy on anything but the DPS race. That's okay, he landed his win condition, he earned it.
Why then can I throw all 3 ghosts, SB4, and Citadel Bombardment onto the guy and between aegis, Shield of Courage and Wings of Resolve and a potential RF he isn't in the same situation? I've committed even more for my win condition, landed it, and it didn't get me anywhere.
If I get hit by a Willbender's immobilize, I die. If I get power blocked by a Mirage on my heal (or even just reactively on Call to Anguish tbh), I die. If a Holosmith realizes I exist, I die.

I don't think that having bad match ups is bad for the game, I think it's an important part of team compositions. What I don't understand is why I, the bad spec player, don't have the ability to either do the same thing back to them, or the ability to clobber something that they struggle with just as easily. That Holosmith that realized I queued for PvP while he was online is immune to me as condition Renegade, but if I go power, he still handles me incredibly well between all of his available tools while still outpumping me.

That's the case for almost all the weak builds, but especially glassier ones. They don't have a win condition because actual good builds do just as much or even more damage while having them beat in blocks/blinds/evades/invulns/stealth/mobility, sometimes even general survivability or tankiness.

What's their purpose, then? Clearly they're not allowed to do extra damage in exchange for the tools they lack, because otherwise getting hit by any of a warrior's rifle skills would have to do enough damage to set your computer on fire, so what are they supposed to do?

The gap between the top and bottom of the meta is larger than it's ever been and the poor balance between the haves and have nots is the main reason why, and there's no attempts to fix it and instead we just see the same handful of favored specs juggled around every 6 months.

Extend subject to whatever you think is squishy and weak.

anyways yeah i'm mad about landing lots of stuff on someone, avoiding as much as possible of theirs and still losing because i wanted to play guilty gear wars 2, i'm not denying it

Shagie and Zekent are both correct. 

The balance is out of whack for classes that do big single hits of damage because not only are those big single hits evaded by anyone that has seen and comprehended the animation before, the hits themselves are easily mitigated by a number of easily applicable factors like weakness, blind, prot, aegis, etc.

On top of this all of the skill streamlining seems to be afforded to any skills that DONT do this, on classes that are built around landing those big single hits. Their sustain comes from landing skills people in their right mind wont let hit them.  

 Either make the skills easier to land, tie traits to skill use instead of skill hit for the glassier iterations, increase the damage delivery on these skills without reverting it right after because zerg players singled out the most visible skill that still hit them for balancing, or provide defensive support for offensive classes that isnt tied to hard block at baseline, instead of requiring specs like (you know what I mean) to trait for it in GM. 

Not holding my breath though. 

Between devs that are at a loss for which way to move classes that *dont* have all that stuff baked in, and players that whine and moan the moment their roleplay fantasy of being innately better than (insert profession here) is not reinforced by the game, it's been long enough to assume its just gonna be like that. 

Edited May 8 by Azure The Heartless.3261

[Rdm.3186]

27 minutes ago, Azure The Heartless.3261 said:

Shagie and Zekent are both correct. 

The balance is out of whack for classes that do big single hits of damage because not only are those big single hits evaded by anyone that has seen and comprehended the animation before, the hits themselves are easily mitigated by a number of easily applicable factors like weakness, blind, prot, aegis, etc.

On top of this all of the skill streamlining seems to be afforded to any skills that DONT do this, on classes that are built around landing those big single hits. Their sustain comes from landing skills people in their right mind wont let hit them.  

 Either make the skills easier to land, tie traits to skill use instead of skill hit for the glassier iterations, increase the damage delivery on these skills without reverting it right after because zerg players singled out the most visible skill that still hit them for balancing, or provide defensive support for offensive classes that isnt tied to hard block at baseline, instead of requiring specs like (you know what I mean) to trait for it in GM. 

Not holding my breath though. 

Between devs that are at a loss for which way to move classes that *dont* have all that stuff baked in, and players that whine and moan the moment their roleplay fantasy of being innately better than (insert profession here) is not reinforced by the game, it's been long enough to assume its just gonna be like that. 

Dunno, i think this particular topic of the few outliner builds which are duo to power creep, badly designed with being built around hitting one single big skill you make unnecessary complicated.

Berserker is HoT power creep. What can go wrong when you take a balanced core skill like rifle warrior f1 and reduce the casttime/animation remarkable while adding more dmg?

It is stupid design (either broken when good enough to be playable or bad and easy outplayed, there is no inbetween). Skill ceiling in an mmo heavily depends on the requirement to interact with, and  actively outplay the opponent (due to missing aim skill ceiling from shooters). Telegraphed skills can exist and be successful hit because you can bait out cds with other offensive skills to hit telegraphed keyskills.

But ofc the moment the telegraphed keyskill is so insanely potent by itself, means you cannot give those builds enough power on that many other skills to make those outplays/baits, since those other skills in the kit need to be extra weak, to compensate the overpower on the one skill. None of your ideas to fix that flaw will work in a way that those build with such a potent single skill will be skillful and/ or healthy balanced ever. The only way i see, is to rework those builds away from this one hit wonder to a more versatile playable and in potency better balanced out (means power is spread out over the whole skillbar instead just one skill) skill kit.

[Lighter.5631]

the only true glass canon left is rifle warrior

you truly have to sacrifice everything in order to do big damage.

your damage diminish substantially every sustain you take, and takes set up and has to be in combat..

core mes still takes stealth/blink, fa weaver get like multiple anti projectiles, blink, blind etc

 

1 hour ago, Rdm.3186 said:

power creep. What can go wrong when you take a balanced core skill like rifle warrior f1 and reduce the casttime/animation remarkable while adding more dmg?

 

killshot "techanically" "statistically" does more damage, even only tier 2.

gunflame feels more damage, because berserker damage buff apply directly when berserk, while core buff like berserker's power apply AFTER you land killshot, so only your second killshot will benefit from core damage buff..you can not buff up to killshot, you have to killshot to buff up, funny right?

so it made it seems like initially gunflame does more damage..because nobody really relies on second killshot..since 60 adrenaline back to back with rifle in 15 seconds buff duration is a pretty ridiculous demand..but yea, i wouldn't be mad if killshot can move, then i would prefer it over gunflame..

 

also concerning primal burst, it is gated behind 2 cooldowns and 2 energy gauges, core burst requires adrenaline and it's own cooldown.

primal burst is gated behind berserk cooldown and it's own cooldown and still requires adrenaline even after you used locked 30 adrenaline to berserk (gives you one free primal burst cast with10 adrenaline refund, but that's it)

also non berserk mode berserker is a lesser core war that is functionning with only 2 trait lines, that's 50% of the times. the trade off is loud and clear.

primal burst NEEDS to be a better version of core burst, or else the trillion gates and trade offs won't make sense and the elite would just be a core war with slightly prettier animation for the same skill, pointless..

 

 

Edited May 9 by Lighter.5631

[Aaron.1294]

There are plenty of things that can be done to improve the game and theorycrafting significantly, one example may be reducing cast time of active defences (so they aren't last for 3 sec which is just the dumbest design ever in such a fast-paced gameplay) healing also should be reduced by half of it's present version (either by heavily increasing the cd or decreasing the heal effectiveness of them). It's also worth pointing out that not every single cc in this game is made equal and decreasing damage of every single one of them is just bad. And obviously instant cast teleports would need to get their cd increased aswell.

Then and only then Arenanet can actually reduce dmg significantly (unlike feb2020 patch...), and that would put real "glass cannon" builds in their deserved place.

 

Edited May 9 by Aaron.1294

[Shagie.7612]

12 hours ago, Rdm.3186 said:

The Truth is:

Good changes are never impossible, no matter how unlikely they might seem to be at some point.

I'm not gonna quote this whole wall of text of "no actually they need to nerf everyone else instead!" because even if they did, Renegade, the thing I like, would still be bottom tier. That's how bad the underlying design of it actually is. That's why the only time it's ever actually been good was when everyone else took a 25%+ nerf to all their damage and it did not.
The Feb 2020 patch was an absolute disaster for the game. It bombed hard and they've doubled down since on it not being the way they want to go and instead everyone has every kind of button ever.

Why am I not allowed to join the party?

I don't CARE about whether or not they should undo powercreep, I want to play the game as the thing I enjoy for the first time in 7 years.
I want my actual good plays to mean I beat someone who didn't bother to dodge the giant glowing ghosts trying to jumpscare them.

The only way to do that in any reasonable timeframe is to match me with what everyone else has, or to create a niche for what the spec is about (damage and only damage), not some far out project that would take a bajillion man hours and an entire overhaul of the game's class design. And you're here telling me that nah actually they need to redo the entire game and you should wait another 7 years.

Sevenshot should kill seven people every time it goes off, including my own team. It might actually be a playable elite at that point.

You think gunflame enjoyers are over here like, yeah man that guy took two of my gunflames to the face and then topped himself and hit me back even harder, but it's okay because glass cannons are bad for the game!

7 hours ago, Lighter.5631 said:

the only true glass canon left is rifle warrior

absolutely untrue lol

Edited May 9 by Shagie.7612

[Rdm.3186]

On 5/9/2024 at 3:34 AM, Lighter.5631 said:

primal burst NEEDS to be a better version of core burst, or else the trillion gates and trade offs won't make sense and the elite would just be a core war with slightly prettier animation for the same skill, pointless..

Ok since you admit that berserker rifle f1 is a better version of core rifle f1, we in the end agree to my statement.

But i obviously was not detailed enough in explaining, what i mean with berserker is HoT power creep. My bad, so i try to make it better now:

Ofc warrior has trade offs and need to give up things when going from core to berserker.  I more meant the interaction changes when you face a core rifle war vs. a berserker. Core rifle f1 is a prio one skill to avoid, but for that the warrior has a very long casttime, very visible animation and cannot move. For that downtimes there is room on core warrior for other skills to do some stuff and for decent sustain. They changed that on berserker to be a skill with number one prio to dodge while deleting downtimes, as movement restriction,  big parts of the origin casttime and way better visibility of the animation. It is just a design direction i dont think is that great. But my main argument was, that builds, having its overall power too much concentrated in one single skill, are a bad design. Also for the player of those builds, since you are very limited in your offensive and defensive outplay options to compensate for the overpower of that one single skill.
 

Edited May 10 by Rdm.3186

[Rdm.3186]

On 5/9/2024 at 6:03 AM, Shagie.7612 said:

That's why the only time it's ever actually been good was when everyone else took a 25%+ nerf to all their damage and it did not.
The Feb 2020 patch was an absolute disaster for the game.

So i will not quote your whole wall of text either, at least not in one piece 🙂 Since you did not bring the complete build you talk about and since rev is one of the classes i know the least about, i will and cannot judge if your outliner build could need some qol improvements or mechanical reworks or even buffs without becoming braindead and broken itself. But since you mention that a 25% gamewide dmg reduction on everything else than that build was enough to make it good in comparison, i doubt it needs so much buffs (qol and mechanical reworks can always happen without increasing the power lvl/ without buffing the power lvl of that build and without deleting skill ceiling from it).

The Feb pacth was a disaster because of bad execution not because the attempt was wrong. They just need to do some more effort to de-power creep sustain the same way or (i would say) even more than the dmg. And that is possible in a decent amount of time. It is a more a matter of dev competence not time/ effort investment.

On 5/9/2024 at 6:03 AM, Shagie.7612 said:

I don't CARE about whether or not they should undo powercreep, I want to play the game as the thing I enjoy for the first time in 7 years.
I want my actual good plays to mean something (sry for skewing your words a bit)

 Here we are again about self contradiction. You either care about good plays being meaningful, what actually means aiming for an overall less power creeped, healthier and higher skill ceiling gamestate, or you selfishly do not care about the overall gamestate and higher skill ceiling and only care about being able to compete with a specific build. It is ok to have a more selfish or more casual (don't mind or even prefer a lower skill ceiling) mindset but do not act as if well-founded bigger pic suggestions are senseless.  Asking for every build to be able to compete in a game with that many different variables is a way more impossible take, than asking for balancing the game in a way, that it does not actively aim for low ceiling builds to be meta only because devs have a casual approach, since they are bad at playing and balancing the game. I mean, even off meta builds are to 99% still pretty broken and braindead playable these days.

Also sry for you, that you only can enjoy one build in the whole game that offers so many different ones. 

On 5/9/2024 at 6:03 AM, Shagie.7612 said:

You think gunflame enjoyers are over here like, yeah man that guy took two of my gunflames to the face and then topped himself and hit me back even harder, but it's okay because glass cannons are bad for the game!

Glass canons are by definition: A character or unit with strong offensive power but weak defensive capabilities. 

There is nothing about assassin oneshots written. Means dropping so low on active defense, that you only can gank or oneshot ppl, is not required to be a glass canon. A glass canon in an mmo is supposed to maximise dmg in a healthy way, while still being able to fight interactive and that for more than one second. If your active defense drops lower than that, your build is not a healthy design and should not exist or should just be too bad to be used. So, either devs balance makes it impossible to give up that many defense (that is actually the case for most classes in gw2, in the core game even amulets made sure you could not go too offensive with marauder stats being the squishiest you could go for, they rly should delete berserker amu tho, while reducing vita stats a bit on marauder in the de-power creep process, toughness should be reduced on amulets even more)  or devs make sure, that those unhealthy builds are not good enough that players go for them.

Or the build is actually not a build with too less active defense (like power mesmer) and its only problem is, that everything else is broken and power creeped in an unhealthy not skillful way. Than you ask for nerfs to those unhealthy stuff, you do not ask for assassin oneshot dmg to compensate bad balance on other classes. 

Tldr: glass canons are not unhealthy for the game, just one dimentional assassin oneshot builds are. Since neither their dmg (too high and too easy to apply), nor they active defense (too low) comes even near a point on the bell curve where skill ceiling is at its minimum requirement (for an mmo at least). 

Edited May 10 by Rdm.3186

[Axl.8924]

2 hours ago, Rdm.3186 said:

So i will not quote your whole wall of text either, at least not in one piece 🙂 Since you did not bring the complete build you talk about and since rev is one of the classes i know the least about, i will and cannot judge if your outliner build could need some qol improvements or mechanical reworks or even buffs without becoming braindead and broken itself. But since you mention that a 25% gamewide dmg reduction on everything else than that build was enough to make it good in comparison, i doubt it needs so much buffs (qol and mechanical reworks can always happen without increasing the power lvl/ without buffing the power lvl of that build and without deleting skill ceiling from it).

The Feb pacth was a disaster because of bad execution not because the attempt was wrong. They just need to do some more effort to de-power creep sustain the same way or (i would say) even more than the dmg. And that is possible in a decent amount of time. It is a more a matter of dev competence not time/ effort investment.

 Here we are again about self contradiction. You either care about good plays being meaningful, what actually means aiming for an overall less power creeped, healthier and higher skill ceiling gamestate, or you selfishly do not care about the overall gamestate and higher skill ceiling and only care about being able to compete with a specific build. It is ok to have a more selfish mindset but do not act as if well-founded bigger pic suggestions are senseless.  Asking for every build to be able to compete in a game with that many different variables is a way more impossible take, than asking for balancing the game in a way, that it does not actively aim for low ceiling builds to be meta only because devs have a casual approach, since they are bad at playing and balancing the game. I mean, even off meta builds are to 99% still pretty broken and braindead playable these days.

Also sry for you, that you only can enjoy one build in the whole game that offers so many different ones. 

Glass canons are by definition: A character or unit with strong offensive power but weak defensive capabilities. 

There is nothing about assassin oneshots written. Means dropping so low on active defense, that you only can gank or oneshot ppl, is not required to be a glass canon. A glass canon in an mmo is supposed to maximise dmg in a healthy way, while still being able to fight interactive and that for more than one second. If your active defense drops lower than that, your build is not a healthy design and should not exist or should just be too bad to be used. So, either devs balance makes it impossible to give up that many defense (that is actually the case for most classes in gw2, in the core game even amultes made sure you could not go too offensive with marauder stats being the squishiest you could go for, they rly should delete berserker amu tho, while reducing vita stats a bit on marauder in the de-power creep process, toughness should be reduced on amulets even more)  or devs make sure, that those unhealthy builds are not good enough that players go for them.

Or the build is actually not a build with too less active defense (like power mesmer) and its only problem is, that everything else is broken and power creeped in an unhealthy not skillful way. Than you ask for nerfs to those unhealthy stuff, you do not ask for assassin oneshot dmg to compensate bad balance on other classes. 

Tldr: glass canons are not unhealthy for the game, just one dimentional assassin oneshot builds are. Since neither their dmg (too high and too easy to apply), nor they active defense (too low) comes even near a point on the bell curve where skill ceiling is at its minimum requirement (for an mmo at least). 

Its a little bit of both clearly classes with extremely high damage with high mobility and high block/evade is a bit overpowered while also giving itself tons of buffs.

Anyone who doesn't have the level of mobility of a guardian/revenant with buffs and mobility of a thief which guardians/revenants/eles/thief and ranger have, you are vastly underpowered due to how effective mobility is.If you got superspeed and teles and evades and your opponent doesn't, its a lose/lose, and i think we need to nerf evades, teles and spam of superspeed and buffs like blocks/aegis and severely cut down on the buffspam some classes can do.Boon corrupts were nerfed severely but buffs were not, and it made a new meta of boonspam zerg meta where you buff run in and kill kitten and that has even effected  SPVP.

The game just keeps getting worse and worse with power creep in these aspects and some stuff that gets nerfed just causes one class to dominate.This is why everyone just spams mobility unblockable buff and then 1 shot and GG, because that is what this game turned into.

 

 

Edited May 10 by Axl.8924

[Eddbopkins.2630]

On 5/7/2024 at 9:58 AM, Endorphin.9147 said:

Glass cannon does exists. You could go around 1 shotting people on FA weaver or Core power mes. But why do that when you can dish the same dmg on a hammer vindi or an unga bunga untamed 🤡

Fa ele/weaver does not have the burst you are talking aboot. Scepter is a horribly weak weapon.  

[Shagie.7612]

3 hours ago, Rdm.3186 said:

i doubt it needs so much buffs

You have no idea what you're talking about by your own admission and then turn around and say this.
Go play some games with Kalla. It doesn't matter what your other legend is or whether you play power, condi, or support.

I think most people here agree that class design's gone in a bad direction, that powercreep is out of control, and should be reigned in. Most people here probably also realize it's not happening any time soon.
It's not selfish to want to be placed on the same level as everyone else when a realistic timeline of actually reducing power creep would take years of tuning to finally reach a good spot.
Even if they WERE to suddenly change directions and start working on reducing power creep, what am I supposed to do in the meantime?

I wanna play the game on an equal level to everyone else until that time is reached. Because I find playing Renegade fun, and I would like to have fun while also trying to compete, and the amount of time and effort it would take to temporarily assist the underperformers is orders of magnitude less than an entire redesign of the game's combat. That's it. It's not selfish, it's not casual, it's being realistic about how they invest their time into PvP balancing.

3 hours ago, Rdm.3186 said:

There is nothing about assassin oneshots written.

Two gunflames is not an assassin one shot. I don't even mean that in the literal sense of it being two casts, I mean that there's a significant amount of time required to reset it via Blood Reckoning or getting the adrenaline and cooldown back naturally.
Getting killed because you didn't watch out for the thing that has zero teleports and zero stealth walking up, getting in combat, popping zerk and gunflaming you isn't some "assassin oneshot" and isn't unhealthy for the game. It's you having bad awareness or actively misusing your mitigation tools.

Just answer this:
Why are you trying so hard to decide that some builds shouldn't get to join the club on powercreep and bad design?
If everyone else gets to have all this stuff, then I want in too up until the moment they change their design philosophy and start working on removing powercreep. Why are you arguing so hard that that shouldn't happen?

Edited May 10 by Shagie.7612

[Lighter.5631]

6 hours ago, Rdm.3186 said:

Ok since you admit that berserker rifle f1 is a better version of core rifle f1, we in the end agree to my statement.

But i obviously was not detailed enough in explaining, what i mean with berserker is HoT power creep. My bad, so i try to make it better now:

Ofc warrior has trade offs and need to give up things when going from core to berserker.  I more meant the interaction changes when you face a core rifle war vs. a berserker. Core rifle f1 is a prio one skill to avoid, but for that the warrior has a very long casttime, very visible animation and cannot move. For that downtimes there is room on core warrior for other skills to do some stuff and for decent sustain. They changed that on berserker to be a skill with number one prio to dodge while deleting downtimes, as movement restriction,  big parts of the origin casttime and way better visibility of the animation. It is just a design direction i dont think is that great. But my main argument was, that builds, having its overall power too much concentrated in one single skill, are a bad design. Also for the player of those builds, since you are very limited in your offensive and defensive outplay options to compensate for the overpower of that one single skill.
 

berserker's amount of power creep is really justified due to how insane the trade offs are. which off set heavily the power creep, the effectiveness between core power war and power berserker is incredibly close now, but core power war used to be better for so long, until they gave super power-ed up traits like eternal champion and super buffed berserker utilities with adrenaline, for how trash berserker was, even with slightly beefed up primal bursts, due to all the trade offs.

which can not be the same for 90% of other elite tbh.

Edited May 10 by Lighter.5631

[Vinny.7260]

2 hours ago, Eddbopkins.2630 said:

Fa ele/weaver does not have the burst you are talking aboot. Scepter is a horribly weak weapon.  

FA Weaver specifically has a strong burst, but it got nerfed when they changed Arcane Blast to no longer immobilize in Earth. It still has very high damage, but it has to meet very specific criteria of:

• Enemy doesn't have Protection
• Enemy doesn't have Aegis
• Enemy doesn't have Projectile Blocking/Reflecting
• Enemy DOES have Weakness on them

From there, you'll see large numbers, assuming everything crits and you're min-maxxed for crit-chance. The issue is that it has so many parameters to meet compared to something like Mesmer (but has its own significant weaknesses).

For a Core Power Mesmer, here are the criteria:

• Enemy doesn't have a significant amount of boons (to cover Protection)
• You don't have Weakness
• You have Blink available or are in stealth
• You have an interrupt available to force either a stun break or Mirror Blade landing

Also you claiming Scepter is an incredibly weak weapon is definitely not the case, it's a very linear weapon, but has a lot of versatile options for how to use skills and has strong advantages compared to other weapons such as being able to cast skills like Dust Devil or Shatterstone from behind. These can be used to keep distance or trigger Fresh Air, which can trigger One with Air, which means more mobility for more distancing. Its issue currently is just the meta doesn't reward glassier builds right now, especially with things like Hammer Untamed, Hammer Vindicator, and other things that utilize a variety of defenses.

 

A lot of issues with the current 'glass' builds are that the defensive builds are just stronger right now. Arguably the best approach is to look at what is making those builds stronger in a debugging step-by-step basis. What traits does it take? What weapons are being used? What makes these weapons the ideal choice? Anything look out of the ordinary compared to what was intended? Are there any specs that can target intended weaknesses? Are those specs that are intended to counter it doing well? What could happen if X was buffed to handle with Y?

A lot of the more committed players would have a better approach than 95% of us on the forums. Some of us have a good understanding on what we believe needs done, but we also work a job that takes up more of our time than those who sink 5-10 hours daily. Those 40-50 hours we sink into our jobs are hours that the committed players are burning.

 

Anyway, all hail Gunflame.

 

[Endorphin.9147]

5 minutes ago, Vinny.7260 said:

FA Weaver specifically has a strong burst, but it got nerfed when they changed Arcane Blast to no longer immobilize in Earth. It still has very high damage, but it has to meet very specific criteria of:

• Enemy doesn't have Protection
• Enemy doesn't have Aegis
• Enemy doesn't have Projectile Blocking/Reflecting
• Enemy DOES have Weakness on them

From there, you'll see large numbers, assuming everything crits and you're min-maxxed for crit-chance. The issue is that it has so many parameters to meet compared to something like Mesmer (but has its own significant weaknesses).

For a Core Power Mesmer, here are the criteria:

• Enemy doesn't have a significant amount of boons (to cover Protection)
• You don't have Weakness
• You have Blink available or are in stealth
• You have an interrupt available to force either a stun break or Mirror Blade landing

Also you claiming Scepter is an incredibly weak weapon is definitely not the case, it's a very linear weapon, but has a lot of versatile options for how to use skills and has strong advantages compared to other weapons such as being able to cast skills like Dust Devil or Shatterstone from behind. These can be used to keep distance or trigger Fresh Air, which can trigger One with Air, which means more mobility for more distancing. Its issue currently is just the meta doesn't reward glassier builds right now, especially with things like Hammer Untamed, Hammer Vindicator, and other things that utilize a variety of defenses.

 

A lot of issues with the current 'glass' builds are that the defensive builds are just stronger right now. Arguably the best approach is to look at what is making those builds stronger in a debugging step-by-step basis. What traits does it take? What weapons are being used? What makes these weapons the ideal choice? Anything look out of the ordinary compared to what was intended? Are there any specs that can target intended weaknesses? Are those specs that are intended to counter it doing well? What could happen if X was buffed to handle with Y?

A lot of the more committed players would have a better approach than 95% of us on the forums. Some of us have a good understanding on what we believe needs done, but we also work a job that takes up more of our time than those who sink 5-10 hours daily. Those 40-50 hours we sink into our jobs are hours that the committed players are burning.

 

Anyway, all hail Gunflame.

 

Thank you. You just saved me so much time

[ccccc.4963]

Buff grenades yeah

[Rdm.3186]

3 hours ago, Shagie.7612 said:

You have no idea what you're talking about by your own admission and then turn around and say this.

I based that guess on YOUR words, NOT MY own assumption. You confirmed that a 25% dmg reduction on all other builds made your favorite build good in comparision to those nerfed builds. The needed gamewide de-power creep of dmg would be around that % number and with YOUR own words would make your build good without receiving a single buff.

 

3 hours ago, Shagie.7612 said:

Two gunflames is not an assassin one shot. I don't even mean that in the literal sense of it being two casts, I mean that there's a significant amount of time required to reset it via Blood Reckoning or getting the adrenaline and cooldown back naturally.
Getting killed because you didn't watch out for the thing that has zero teleports and zero stealth walking up, getting in combat, popping zerk and gunflaming you isn't some "assassin oneshot" and isn't unhealthy for the game. It's you having bad awareness or actively misusing your mitigation tools.

  Sry that was my fault quoting too much of your things. I never called gunflame a oneshot assassin. I was reacting too your claim, that i seem to think, that glass canons are bad for the game. So i first defined what glass canon means (that it does not include oneshot dmg by default) and then i made clear, that i do not think that glass canons are bad for the game. 

MY design problem with rifle berserker is not that i think it is a glass canon, my problem with the design of berserker and other builds centered around one megapower single big skill to hit is:

Quote

 I more meant the interaction changes when you face a core rifle war vs. a berserker. Core rifle f1 is a prio one skill to avoid, but for that the warrior has a very long casttime, very visible animation and cannot move. For that downtimes there is room on core warrior for other skills to do some stuff and for decent sustain. They changed that on berserker to be a skill with number one prio to dodge while deleting downtimes, as movement restriction,  big parts of the origin casttime and way better visibility of the animation. It is just a design direction i dont think is that great. But my main argument was, that builds, having its overall power too much concentrated in one single skill, are a bad design. Also for the player of those builds, since you are very limited in your offensive and defensive outplay options to compensate for the overpower of that one single skill.

 

3 hours ago, Shagie.7612 said:

 

Just answer this:
Why are you trying so hard to decide that some builds shouldn't get to join the club on powercreep and bad design?
If everyone else gets to have all this stuff, then I want in too up until the moment they change their design philosophy and start working on removing powercreep. Why are you arguing so hard that that shouldn't happen?

You ask devs to invest effort and time to make the games balance even worse by bringing your outliner build into or close to meta , what also means they need to do even more work after those buffs to undo them, the moment they want to bring the game back into the right direction. So you ask for double work of devs as a single player, who has such a limited taste, that he can only enjoy a single legend on a single class. And you think you are not selfish? xD

 

Also where do you guys get those numbers? 7 Years for a bigger patch? Hell even i could make such a patch in around 3 months if i have 40 hours a week paid time, give it another 3 months for testing on test servers (oopsi) and do the needed adjustments. I think a single player only liking a single build in the whole game can be kindly asked to be that patient.

Edited May 10 by Rdm.3186

[Shagie.7612]

19 minutes ago, Rdm.3186 said:

I based that guess on YOUR words, NOT MY own assumption. You confirmed that a 25% dmg reduction on all other builds made your favorite build good in comparision to those nerfed builds. The needed gamewide de-power creep of dmg would be around that % number and with YOUR own words would make your build good without receiving a single buff.

What are you even talking about?
That was 2020. That was a pre-EoD, pre-SotO, pre-weaponmaster training world. You can't just make that same comparison and same sort of balance determination anymore. That's not how that works lol

20 minutes ago, Rdm.3186 said:

You ask devs to invest effort and time to make the games balance even worse by bringing your outliner build into or close to meta , what also means they need to do even more work after those buffs to undo them, the moment they want to bring the game back into the right direction. So you ask for double work of devs as a single player, who has such a limited taste, that he can only enjoy a single legend on a single class. And you think you are not selfish? xD

No, I don't think it's selfish for people to want to play what they find fun and for it to be at least within an acceptable level of balance. It's not double the work to buff up underperformers temporarily either. Fixing up a couple weak specs is nothing compared to overhauling the entirety of the combat system.

21 minutes ago, Rdm.3186 said:

Also where do you guys get those numbers? 7 Years for a bigger patch?

It's hyperbole you goon. PoF came out in September of 2017. That's almost 80 months at this point. In that time, Renegade's been low to bottom tier, even playing Shiro/Jalis, but especially when playing Kalla/x, for all but about 8 months of that, from Feb2020 when it dodged the nerfs to Oct2020 when it got hammered into the position it's been sitting in since.
How much longer are you telling me to wait before it's allowed to have a niche? For some mythical change in design philosophy that's never gonna happen, because powercreep's bad and one more spec being thrown into the pile of powercrept specs is suddenly too far?

Just say you don't care about the things that are currently underperforming and don't want them buffed, stop trying to pretend like you're on some moral high ground about game design.

[Rdm.3186]

2 hours ago, Shagie.7612 said:

What are you even talking about?
That was 2020. That was a pre-EoD, pre-SotO, pre-weaponmaster training world. You can't just make that same comparison and same sort of balance determination anymore. That's not how that works lol

No, I don't think it's selfish for people to want to play what they find fun and for it to be at least within an acceptable level of balance. It's not double the work to buff up underperformers temporarily either. Fixing up a couple weak specs is nothing compared to overhauling the entirety of the combat system.

It's hyperbole you goon. PoF came out in September of 2017. That's almost 80 months at this point. In that time, Renegade's been low to bottom tier, even playing Shiro/Jalis, but especially when playing Kalla/x, for all but about 8 months of that, from Feb2020 when it dodged the nerfs to Oct2020 when it got hammered into the position it's been sitting in since.
How much longer are you telling me to wait before it's allowed to have a niche? For some mythical change in design philosophy that's never gonna happen, because powercreep's bad and one more spec being thrown into the pile of powercrept specs is suddenly too far?

Just say you don't care about the things that are currently underperforming and don't want them buffed, stop trying to pretend like you're on some moral high ground about game design.

What are you even talking about? 😂The past is the past, let go. I never refered to the past. I talk about now and that we NOW (late is better than never) should stop making shortsighted, narrowed and selfish balance suggestions and focus on the bigger picture, to speak with one clear voice to anet. Atm every single player complains like a 5yo about his one single favorite build and all together deliver 300 pages of nonsense per day in this forum.

As said, even i could make a big gamewide patch to de-power creep the game in 3 months, 6 months  including testing and adjusting, if i would  get 40 hours a week time for it. And i would need to increase my class knowledge about 2-3 classes during that time to be able to provide decent changes for them. So 2-3 competent devs (which together should know and understand all classes by default) can be even faster. Give us 2-3 months as playerbase to stand as one, to make enough pressure on anet and you can wait patiently for another year with your overlimited taste in builds. But if everyone just cares for himself and his one favorite build and ask anet to make the game worse and worse for his selfish lvl of fun, we do not stand as one, we do not develop enough pressure and devs probably stop reading this senseless back and forth over obvious stuff after the second post in this thread and no one will achieve anything. This is how this forum is going since game release and because of that devs did not listen the slightest to the few balance suggestions on this forum that actually made sense over the last years. And that is how we get a gamestate barely anyone can really enjoy anymore. So in the long run your shortsighted, selfish demands will hurt yourself. Anti-smart!

Edited May 10 by Rdm.3186

[Shagie.7612]

7 hours ago, Rdm.3186 said:

I never refered to the past.

You quite literally said they should do another patch that nerfs everyone by 25% like the Feb 2020 patch, and that would make Renegade good again. Except that was 2 expansions ago, and that statement doesn't necessarily hold true because those two expansions brought massive powercreep into the game.

I don't know why you think it's not possible to support two different things at once, but at this point I'm pretty sure you're either trolling or completely fried.

Yes, if they decide to finally do something about powercreep, I am absolutely down for that. I haven't ever denied that to begin with.
Until they change their mind, and you're absolutely delusional if you think they are any time soon even though the remaining PvP playerbase pretty much unanimously agrees with that, I want the underperformers to join the club with everyone else.

It's really that simple. There's no reason to deny them the same opportunity and powercreep everyone else got if they're unwilling to remove it from everyone else.

[Bladestrom.6425]

11 hours ago, Shagie.7612 said:

You quite literally said they should do another patch that nerfs everyone by 25% like the Feb 2020 patch, and that would make Renegade good again. Except that was 2 expansions ago, and that statement doesn't necessarily hold true because those two expansions brought massive powercreep into the game.

I don't know why you think it's not possible to support two different things at once, but at this point I'm pretty sure you're either trolling or completely fried.

Yes, if they decide to finally do something about powercreep, I am absolutely down for that. I haven't ever denied that to begin with.
Until they change their mind, and you're absolutely delusional if you think they are any time soon even though the remaining PvP playerbase pretty much unanimously agrees with that, I want the underperformers to join the club with everyone else.

It's really that simple. There's no reason to deny them the same opportunity and powercreep everyone else got if they're unwilling to remove it from everyone else.

The solution to power creep is not more power creep, the solution is to nerf overpower classes to achieve balance.  Th real problem is the frequency of balance updates, it should be weekly in small increments to allow Anet to react quickly to discovered overpowered builds.

[Axl.8924]

47 minutes ago, Bladestrom.6425 said:

The solution to power creep is not more power creep, the solution is to nerf overpower classes to achieve balance.  Th real problem is the frequency of balance updates, it should be weekly in small increments to allow Anet to react quickly to discovered overpowered builds.

This precisely and also we need someone to fix that and of course a overhaul of many classes and power creep created years ago and reinforcement of counters to certain spec types so that they are kept in line:

You a very agile class? well agile classes need to be countered by something and they need to lose something for so much movement.

nerfs are needed to keep them in check.Rangers are one of those kind of classes that have kitten amounts of everything destroying everyone and everything because they got evade frames blocks  teles   stuns plus tons of damage.

.This whole game as a whole is a issue because some classes are so overtuned with what they can do and some classes cannot and will not ever be able to keep up.
Not every class is equally tuned and those that are overtuned are enjoying being at the top in classes

 

[Rdm.3186]

On 5/11/2024 at 2:43 PM, Bladestrom.6425 said:

The solution to power creep is not more power creep, the solution is to nerf overpower classes to achieve balance.  Th real problem is the frequency of balance updates, it should be weekly in small increments to allow Anet to react quickly to discovered overpowered builds.

You trolling, fried goon! I love how emotional and insulting ppl get when you just put that pretty basic and simple piece of logic into their face 😂
As for me, i am happy to see, that there are at least some desinterested  ppl with enough iq left in the game to make senseful calls like yours.
 

Edited May 13 by Rdm.3186