A criticism of the current meta-game and my thoughts on the biggest issue that I want addressed

[Philalive.8654]

35 minutes ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

You're not crazy, it's a way (which I've read several times in the forum) to see how you can change group constructions. However all those abilities you listed, of reduced damage, you describe as if the group of 50 players in formation couldn't use them, or fart them continuously as they keep rolling on anything. If your initiative is to increase the damage to break that group of 50 players, you have to consider that the same 50 you want to break, will also be able to use them. 

If you really want to change things, you need to look at shared defenses and protections. We know that your damage is limited to 5 targets or even less than some even recent changes. But what about the defenses? All the walls or protective spheres that I see all the time secure that whole group of 50 players stacked on top of each other. Let's change that and you'll see how those 50 players will have to move their butts to survive.

If you think you can solve it through damage, then you should have the damage increased by x% when you hit an enemy when they are extremely close to an ally. If they are 2 allies, the % increases, up to a maximum accumulated damage of 10 allies. Then you'll see the formations split up to mitigate the damage and then regroup.  and so on. 

Yeah, I agree that there are more issues than just boon stripping in the game.

My logic of this being able to fix more than it would first seem is basically this:

You can't really kill anyone in a decent-ish group without Strips & CC. Protection, Stability, Barrier, damage mitigation through stacking and so on are way to strong to crack no matter how many Holosmiths/Berserkers you have in your party. In my experience people start dropping when 1. Holosmith greeds slightly of stack and gets deleted or 2. Supports start falling behind after a few people down, they get CCd, etc. I'd say I'm a heal Vindicator main atm and at least I feel like as long as I'm not CCd I can basically keep my group alive through anything. When I get pulled or CCd things go south very fast (assuming the teams are fairly balanced).

So we definetly need boon strips to be able to kill anything (within reason). That's why we have Renegades and Necromancers - for boon strips. Now this role used to be filled with offensive Necromancer builds eg. Power Reaper or Power Scourge. Those builds didn't really provide much support and were quite good targets to kill, and they did alright damage but not enough to out-compete actual DPS builds. But instead of that, we now have 2 full minstrel supports that spam boons, barriers and transfuses - as well as boon strip.

This makes every squad way tankier than it has any right to be. However, if we make (somewhat) intelligent changes to the builds that are the biggest issue; the overperforming Supports with boon strip capabilities and the underperforming DPS boon strip builds. We should see that squads lean back towards at least 3 Supports, 1 DPS boon strip and 1 DPS instead of 2 supports, 2 supports with boon strip and 1 DPS that we have now.

That would DOUBLE the amount of Berserker (other flavors available) gear users in blobs at the moment which I think we can all agree is a step in the right direction. I also don't think you could really justify Celestial Support Renegade if they didn't provide boon strip so hopefully the meta that would emerge after fixing the support builds and bringing up some DPS strips would be healthier than the one we have now.

As I see it atm, the WvW meta is on fire and we need a fix with some haste. There are a lot of issues to tackle after this but imo, this is the best place to start.

Shared defenses - especially reflects, really do need some looking at in the future too. They're a scary topic to mess with though because the game is so heavily balanced towards projectiles basically not working at all.

Edited May 27 by Philalive.8654

[Arheundel.6451]

34 minutes ago, Philalive.8654 said:

Yeah, I agree that there are more issues than just boon stripping in the game.

My logic of this being able to fix more than it would first seem is basically this:

You can't really kill anyone in a decent-ish group without Strips & CC. Protection, Stability, Barrier, damage mitigation through stacking and so on are way to strong to crack no matter how many Holosmiths/Berserkers you have in your party. In my experience people start dropping when 1. Holosmith greeds slightly of stack and gets deleted or 2. Supports start falling behind after a few people down, they get CCd, etc. I'd say I'm a heal Vindicator main atm and at least I feel like as long as I'm not CCd I can basically keep my group alive through anything. When I get pulled or CCd things go south very fast (assuming the teams are fairly balanced).

So we definetly need boon strips to be able to kill anything (within reason). That's why we have Renegades and Necromancers - for boon strips. Now this role used to be filled with offensive Necromancer builds eg. Power Reaper or Power Scourge. Those builds didn't really provide much support and were quite good targets to kill, and they did alright damage but not enough to out-compete actual DPS builds. But instead of that, we now have 2 full minstrel supports that spam boons, barriers and transfuses - as well as boon strip.

This makes every squad way tankier than it has any right to be. However, if we make (somewhat) intelligent changes to the builds that are the biggest issue; the overperforming Supports with boon strip capabilities and the underperforming DPS boon strip builds. We should see that squads lean back towards at least 3 Supports, 1 DPS boon strip and 1 DPS instead of 2 supports, 2 supports with boon strip and 1 DPS that we have now.

That would DOUBLE the amount of Berserker (other flavors available) gear users in blobs at the moment which I think we can all agree is a step in the right direction. I also don't think you could really justify Celestial Support Renegade if they didn't provide boon strip so hopefully the meta that would emerge after fixing the support builds and bringing up some DPS strips would be healthier than the one we have now.

As I see it atm, the WvW meta is on fire and we need a fix with some haste. There are a lot of issues to tackle after this but imo, this is the best place to start.

Shared defenses - especially reflects, really do need some looking at in the future too. They're a scary topic to mess with though because the game is so heavily balanced towards projectiles basically not working at all.

Again: necromancers and revenants must not have access to copious boon corruption/strip under any circumstances! You're talking about professions who have access to boonbot specs like vindicator and harbinger, then you want to give them amazing boonrip ....and who's gonna stop them after??

Boonrip should be given solely to Thieves-Warriors...and even rangers in some capacity. The first two haven't got access to boonbot specs and thus makes sense to give them great boonrip and ranger could use something other than GvG druid healing meme.

We want to diversify the meta...not cement it even more by polarizing the few remaining roles in the hands of over-spammed/represented professions like necromancer and revenant, on top of that, you want to give boonrip to celebunker nightmares like harbinger and vindicator...who will stop them after?...not like now it's easy anyway, don't make it impossible but I am at least certain the current devs will come to the same conclusion.

Edited May 27 by Arheundel.6451

[Philalive.8654]

58 minutes ago, Arheundel.6451 said:

Again: necromancers and revenants must not have access to copious boon corruption/strip under any circumstances! You're talking about professions who have access to boonbot specs like vindicator and harbinger, then you want to give them amazing boonrip ....and who's gonna stop them after??

Boonrip should be given solely to Thieves-Warriors...and even rangers in some capacity. The first two haven't got access to boonbot specs and thus makes sense to give them great boonrip and ranger could use something other than GvG druid healing meme.

We want to diversify the meta...not cement it even more by polarizing the few remaining roles in the hands of over-spammed/represented professions like necromancer and revenant, on top of that, you want to give boonrip to celebunker nightmares like harbinger and vindicator...who will stop them after?...not like now it's easy anyway, don't make it impossible but I am at least certain the current devs will come to the same conclusion.

I think we have enough systems in place to make build mutually exclusive with each other. There's nothing inherently bad with a class having multiple viable specs. The issue only arises when they start blending together (like in the current iteration of Barrier Scourge with Strips and Support Renegade with Strips).

Like I said in my suggestions I'm advocating for them to make sure boon supports don't have access to good strips. You don't have to remove all strips, from all classes, that happen to be capable of support though. For example you could make Well of Corruption only do strips with a certain trait, if you're really worried about it you could even tie it to Reaper, I doubt we're going to see many support boon strip Reapers running around anytime soon. But you could also just improve other parts of their kit that isn't available to a Barrier Scourge. We're intelligent enough that we can use a scalpel instead of a chainsaw when approaching these issues.

And of course we want a more diversified meta, that's why I gave examples for improvements to Warrior and Virtuoso, to make sure there are alternative to Necromancer. Just because a Class has been (and is) over-represented doesn't mean we need to butcher them now to make up for it.

[Cyninja.2954]

I'll be straightforward: I believe a great many players would love to see a change in approach to WvW balance, at least the vocal majority on the forums.

So yes, most will agree with you that the trajectory of nerf boon removal, buff boons, buff celestial, make fighting more stale, is a very boring and bad approach.

Unfortunately the developers seem to have decided that:

A. they can go with a similar approach in WvW as in PvE with celestial. Give players a one fits all stat solution to even the playing field between more casual players and more hardcore players

B. near permanent boon uptime too evens the playing field between groups of players

C. going along with B, toning down boon removal to prevent boons dropping helps with creating an even playing field

 

The common theme here is: remove player skill in any form from build-craft and boon management. This works rather well in PvE, where now the net result content design wise is to introduce more spongier and difficult encounters to balance the resulting power creep. Unfortunately the same approach does not work in WvW given there is no magical NPC encounter you can design around.

Instead what is happening is homogenization across builds in some areas (hello all you non celestial roamers, are you having fun yet?) with more stale content in other areas (boon balls meeting each other and nuking each other until one side falls asleep first).

The irony here: gone are the memorable moments desperately trying to get out of that Warrior bubble, or better being the warrior who placed the bubble (I once circled around the north of bay to get a good jump onto an enemy blob camping on in-front of inner gate with my commander just waiting for me to call push). Gone are the moment where you were able to take on an enemy public as squad of 1/3 the size. Now it's all about have a critical mass of WvW guild members (25-30 decent organized players will do the trick and take on an enemy full zone) or just be larger than the enemy.

The mode has been stripped so much of individuality and individual high impact skills, it's a lot less fun than before. I was really expecting Untamed to have something similar to Winds of Disenchantment, it being designed as pvp spec. Instead WoD was nerfed and so were many other boon denial skills.

Edited May 27 by Cyninja.2954

[Philalive.8654]

9 minutes ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

I'll be straightforward: I believe a great many players would love to see a change in approach to WvW balance, at least the vocal majority on the forums.

So yes, most will agree with you that the trajectory of nerf boon removal, buff boons, buff celestial, make fighting more stale, is a very boring and bad approach.

Unfortunately the developers seem to have decided that:

A. they can go with a similar approach in WvW as in PvE with celestial. Give players a one fits all stat solution to even the playing field between more casual players and more hardcore players

B. near permanent boon uptime too evens the playing field between groups of players

C. going along with B, toning down boon removal to prevent boons dropping helps with creating an even playing field

 

The common theme here is: remove player skill in any form from build-craft and boon management. This works rather well in PvE, where now the net result content design wise is to introduce more spongier and difficult encounters to balance the resulting power creep. Unfortunately the same approach does not work in WvW given there is no magical NPC encounter you can design around.

Instead what is happening is homogenization across builds in some areas (hello all you non celestial roamers, are you having fun yet?) with more stale content in other areas (boon balls meeting each other and nuking each other until one side falls asleep first).

The irony here: gone are the memorable moments desperately trying to get out of that Warrior bubble, or better being the warrior who placed the bubble (I once circled around the north of bay to get a good jump onto an enemy blob camping on in-front of inner gate with my commander just waiting for me to call push). Gone are the moment where you were able to take on an enemy public as squad of 1/3 the size. Now it's all about have a critical mass of WvW guild members (25-30 decent organized players will do the trick and take on an enemy full zone) or just be larger than the enemy.

The mode has been stripped so much of individuality and individual high impact skills, it's a lot less fun than before. I was really expecting Untamed to have something similar to Winds of Disenchantment, it being designed as pvp spec. Instead WoD was nerfed and so were many other boon denial skills.

Trust in the ArenaNet design/balance team really has hit rock-bottom, huh? I'm not saying you're wrong at all, in fact it's probably justified.

Maybe, just maybe though? (I got enough copium to share)

[One more for the road.8950]

What you are describing in this thread is what is making people like me stop playing. After years, on several accounts/servers.

I don't know why during recent balancing they are not able to keep skill floor and skill ceiling apart, but they aren't. It ruins the game mode on several levels. Not to mention leads to some form of end game that resembles EotM of yore. Which was left behind for a reason.

[keramatzmode.1906]

Absolutely well written post, OP.

 

[Lionwait.4815]

What a great post! I thought I might give my 2 cents on a simple way to fix all this.

 

First off, I believe boon stripping is random and is the main problem. If Anet made boon stripping less random, it could fix a lot of this meta. For instance, we keep the random boon stripping but in a smaller pool of boons. Call them boon tiers and there will be an order of tiers that need to be removed first before stripping to another tiers of boons. For example, let's say the 1st tier of boons are protection, resolution and vigor and the 2nd tier of boons would be regeneration, resistance and alacrity. To remove any boons in the 2nd tier, one would have to remove all of the 1st tier boons first to move on to the 2nd tier of boons. That said, keep in mind, that in each tier it would still be random on what boon will be removed. If I had protection, resolution and vigor on me and someone tried to remove one of my boons, it would be random on what of the three boons that will be removed but if I only have protection up in the tier 1 set of boons then it will be a guaranteed removal of protection because it would be in the first tier of boons that need to be removed before removing from the 2nd tier of boons like regeneration, resistance and alacrity. 

 

Now you might ask how this fixes the mindless boon blob meta? It all depends on how such a system is implemented. The 1st tier of boons that get removed would be the sustainable boons and the close to last tier of boons would be the damage type of boons. It would look something like this:

Tier 1: Protection, Resolution & Vigor

Tier 2: Regeneration, Resistance & Alacrity

Tier 3: Might, Fury & Quickness

Tier 4 Stability, Aegis & Swiftness

I am certain of tier 1 boons, but the other tiers are debatable. Just look at stability. does it really need to be removed by a boon stripping skill when there are so much disabling skills out there that remove them? Or consider aegis. Do we need that to be used up by a boon stripping skill when all you have to do is swing your weapon one time and its gone or a good counter to swiftness is cripple, chill & or immobilize. But like I said it is debatable on the other tiers. What do you all think? Should stability be on tier 2 because it has stacks?

[Auragen.4162]

CMC and the rest of the 'balance team' should have been fired by now.

[Meizu.1846]

This is a tough nut to crack. Mainly because the vast majority of players are not amused seeing an elitist carefully selected closed group of 15 people owning and out-skilling everyone in EBG and Anet knows this and is doing anything to try and avoid it. 

It caters to a very small group of people and it's a question whether such changes negatively or positively impact the wvw population in general. 

Me personally, I'm kinda in between. I love partaking in casual public zergs as much as I like following a commander via discord and I think there should be an equal place for both in wvw. You don't want a situation where joining discord and following voice becomes a mandatory thing in wvw in general. Even though ironically, it is already pretty much mandatory to do that if you want to do anything at all because stacking is so insanely emphasized in gw2. And whether that's good or not is a whole another can of worms if you ask me personally. 

What I would personally focus my attention to is to actually think of a way to change the whole wvw world in a meaningful way such that the zone itself would encourage all types of play - roaming, dueling, small gvg and full blown zergs boon balling around. That's what I feel is a major challenge and is something that could solve the issues if thought out very carefully. 

Also, I feel like the main reason why the current "meta" is particularly troublesome is the server population and related wvw activity - some servers are just active nonstop and always have a strong presence, while in a majority of worlds, you're basically chasing people and trying to join when majority plays, thus creating such unfair population ratios. 
 

I know the following might sound ridiculous but I've been extremely casually contemplating a version of wvw where servers would be sharded based on currently active population, no matter what server you're from. In turn I would consider a dynamic size map, which would expand or shrink based on the current population in wvw (kind of like battle royale wannabe? Just thinking). So then you would have the opportunity of playing zergs on a massive map when fully populated, but would also have a lot of space for random roaming, small gvg encounters, and so on.  And when the population would be at their lowest, the size of the map would shrink, effectively reducing the ghost town moments where you roam for hours and don't find a single soul. 

I haven't given much thought about it after that so yeah I do know there's many things to consider when contemplating this model but it could be cool. 

The other way around would be to limit the size of enemy players in wvw based on the other participating servers wvw population average. This would suck for a while, but if Anet decided to implement a free weekly or monthly transfer lets say, it would've drastically helped in spreading the population among the servers in favor of shorter queues rather than transferring to the next highly populated server. And yes, recent Anet changes do in fact indicate that they're trying to achieve a similar thing, but I personally believe that the approach is a bit clunky. Instead of rotating joined servers vs. high population servers, it would make sense to let people do their thing and naturally spread among the existing servers themselves. It also makes for a better feeling seeing a majority of medium-high populated servers rather than 2 servers being full, 1 high, couple medium and the rest is low to medium. 

My measuers are drastic, but please do hear me out, I really do believe that a lot of wvw issues are related to population fluctuations. In other words: You can't have one major zerg doing the whole map when the enemy surrounds you and takes double your land while you focus all of your forces on one tower. That could help break the numbers a bit for sure. 

Maybe reducing the immunity timers could also help break the numbers a bit because having a 5min immunity timer in EBG for example results in one large zerg easily defending their whole territory and is discouraging small group skirmishes because the timers are sufficient for one zerg defense/offense rotation. 

-----------------

Disclaimer: I'm mainly proposing these ideas as food for thought and potentially a discussion not only about meta balance but also environment balance and its potential. Don't get all angry on me hehe. 

Edited June 1 by Meizu.1846

[urd.8306]

In my opinion they should have never gotten away from the original GW2 path. It was way better when no trinity existed without dedicated heal builds and when blasting fields was the best way to get boons running

[Cuks.8241]

7 hours ago, urd.8306 said:

In my opinion they should have never gotten away from the original GW2 path. It was way better when no trinity existed without dedicated heal builds and when blasting fields was the best way to get boons running

To be honest it looks like we are going towards full hybrid meta with at least 3/5 players in subgroups playing celestial. Instead of the old 2/5 minstrel supports we will have 3+ celestials. Cele FB, Cele Ren, Cele Scourge with maybe a real healing support and a dps. It took some time but it looks like the amount of stats on cele and what that brings  just can't lead to anything else.  Soon the whole wvw will be only celestial.

And that means super tanky condi meta. Where the only way you can actually fully kill anything is via banner or similar skills. Static fights.

[Dawdler.8521]

10 hours ago, Cuks.8241 said:

And that means super tanky condi meta.

Everyone run perma 25 might, the power and condi damage increase is the same from minstrel to cele - well actually power is much more, since it get precision and ferocity gains while the condi duration is irrelevant as an enemy zerg just instantly cleanse most of it. The power gains for the zerg is exponentially better than condi.

So super tanky “condi” meta hohum. It would just be less tanky more power meta.

Edited June 2 by Dawdler.8521

[DeceiverX.8361]

On 5/26/2024 at 8:12 PM, Sviel.7493 said:

As a non-zerg player, this was enlightening and horrifying.  I didn't realize it had gotten this bad.

It was and has been this way in high-tier smallscale since PoF dropped, because most of the aforementioned boon denial isn't effective in small-scale where groups move really fast and the overall uptime is lower.  Most people just stopped playing that scene because running 3 supports and a reaper or soulbeast as a base comp was really, really boring.

Which is why it honestly even isn't about boon denial at the end of the day.  It's group boon uptime/concentration and Alacrity that's been so powercrept that just needs massive reductions to open up other things.

Because running without boons just figuratively and literally aren't options.  Builds without them suck.  And incidental boons getting stripped means more power downtime overall when they're easier to strip and harder to re-apply, since they keep replacing profession mechanics with boons.  If you don't build specifically for boons and get boon stripped or corrupted, you no longer have traits or a functional build, full stop.

Application/Duration are the problems.  Buffing boon denial is the band-aid, but it won't cause any fun meta changes since no matter what, it's still boon-centric and if they go overboard you end up with Pirate Ship metas where nobody can engage because stability is immediately removed.

[Cuks.8241]

7 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Everyone run perma 25 might, the power and condi damage increase is the same from minstrel to cele - well actually power is much more, since it get precision and ferocity gains while the condi duration is irrelevant as an enemy zerg just instantly cleanse most of it. The power gains for the zerg is exponentially better than condi.

So super tanky “condi” meta hohum. It would just be less tanky more power meta.

Well on EU in the last weeks I see more and more groups running hybrid cele setups. Maybe not as their main setup but testing it. This week we fought at least 2 guild running it and also I ran with one in a semi pug. Cele FB with a ton of burning and cele ren and scourge for a ton of every condi you can imagine.  Even saw asking for cele reapers. I mean it's not just condi, these are hybrids, support/condi/power. You can cleanse to a point where you can't keep up anymore. And then you're dead.

 

[jul.7602]

Pretty much agree 100%. Then one thing I would add to this post is that certain stats like Minstrel and Celestial are fundamentally broken; and they are banned from Spvp for a reason. Celestial gear is balanced backwards; it gives you a superior stat-spread (ex. effective damage is maximized by investing in multiple offensive attributes instead of 1 or 2), and gives you more total stats which is in most cases a pure mathematical advantage. Celestial and other 4 stat combos should give you fewer stat points than the traditional 3stat combos for this to not be blatantly overpowered. Minstrel has the issue of giving best-in-class support capabilities and best-in-class survivability, which is effectively merging the healing+tank in the holy trinity. Typically, as in the case of berserker, to get best-in-class damage you need to pay a "premium" in the form of having zero innate survivability. Imagine if Berserker gear was a 5 stat combo that gave you vitality+toughness, at only a tiny expense to the other stats, it would be op. As a general principle; if a prefix has healing+concentration, it should not be allowed to have vitality or toughness. If it has either concentration or healing, it can have at most either vitality or toughness. 

[Meizu.1846]

I personally view minstrel set as an attempt of making healers less desireable targets. Because as is per usual in any mmo pvp, squishy healers get targeted first, then dps, then tanks. Makes for a less attractive option to be wanting to play healers to a majority of people which would kinda break the comp.

I might be a bit biased though because I'm an old school MMO dude and prefer the holy trinity setup to a pure self sustain system. 

[Silinsar.6298]

6 hours ago, Meizu.1846 said:

I personally view minstrel set as an attempt of making healers less desireable targets. Because as is per usual in any mmo pvp, squishy healers get targeted first, then dps, then tanks. Makes for a less attractive option to be wanting to play healers to a majority of people which would kinda break the comp.

I might be a bit biased though because I'm an old school MMO dude and prefer the holy trinity setup to a pure self sustain system. 

The reason that supporters get targeted is that they are very strong in a group - they are force multipliers, they make your damage dealers more dangerous and your frontliners sturdier.

Making them tanky in response to them being high prio targets makes them even stronger, especially in the context of GW2 where the usual trinity wasn't originally a thing and everyone can contribute to the damage output as well (and more so if they have all the boons). A group with good supports should be stronger than one without, but those supporters should also be their weakness. Focusing them should be the counter play to supports, so the group with support would either need to protect them or reduce the opponent's numbers in time to reduce the pressure. The problem starts when the force multipliers also become the force themselves. They'll be the ones protecting themselves and still have enough damage to be dangerous.

Imo that is a direction caused by expansions and raid-centric changes to the group (/ raid / zerg) meta. Support is overtuned for group play.

 

[Infusion.7149]

On 5/29/2024 at 11:44 PM, Lionwait.4815 said:

What a great post! I thought I might give my 2 cents on a simple way to fix all this.

 

First off, I believe boon stripping is random and is the main problem. If Anet made boon stripping less random, it could fix a lot of this meta. For instance, we keep the random boon stripping but in a smaller pool of boons. Call them boon tiers and there will be an order of tiers that need to be removed first before stripping to another tiers of boons. For example, let's say the 1st tier of boons are protection, resolution and vigor and the 2nd tier of boons would be regeneration, resistance and alacrity. To remove any boons in the 2nd tier, one would have to remove all of the 1st tier boons first to move on to the 2nd tier of boons. That said, keep in mind, that in each tier it would still be random on what boon will be removed. If I had protection, resolution and vigor on me and someone tried to remove one of my boons, it would be random on what of the three boons that will be removed but if I only have protection up in the tier 1 set of boons then it will be a guaranteed removal of protection because it would be in the first tier of boons that need to be removed before removing from the 2nd tier of boons like regeneration, resistance and alacrity. 

 

Now you might ask how this fixes the mindless boon blob meta? It all depends on how such a system is implemented. The 1st tier of boons that get removed would be the sustainable boons and the close to last tier of boons would be the damage type of boons. It would look something like this:

Tier 1: Protection, Resolution & Vigor

Tier 2: Regeneration, Resistance & Alacrity

Tier 3: Might, Fury & Quickness

Tier 4 Stability, Aegis & Swiftness

I am certain of tier 1 boons, but the other tiers are debatable. Just look at stability. does it really need to be removed by a boon stripping skill when there are so much disabling skills out there that remove them? Or consider aegis. Do we need that to be used up by a boon stripping skill when all you have to do is swing your weapon one time and its gone or a good counter to swiftness is cripple, chill & or immobilize. But like I said it is debatable on the other tiers. What do you all think? Should stability be on tier 2 because it has stacks?

Or the dev team can follow the revenant route: only remove a particular boon such as stability
Brutality - Guild Wars 2 Wiki (GW2W)

This would not overly complicate smallscale and do quite a bit for larger scale combat.

Edited June 3 by Infusion.7149

[Meizu.1846]

12 hours ago, Silinsar.6298 said:

The reason that supporters get targeted is that they are very strong in a group - they are force multipliers, they make your damage dealers more dangerous and your frontliners sturdier.

Making them tanky in response to them being high prio targets makes them even stronger, especially in the context of GW2 where the usual trinity wasn't originally a thing and everyone can contribute to the damage output as well (and more so if they have all the boons). A group with good supports should be stronger than one without, but those supporters should also be their weakness. Focusing them should be the counter play to supports, so the group with support would either need to protect them or reduce the opponent's numbers in time to reduce the pressure. The problem starts when the force multipliers also become the force themselves. They'll be the ones protecting themselves and still have enough damage to be dangerous.

Imo that is a direction caused by expansions and raid-centric changes to the group (/ raid / zerg) meta. Support is overtuned for group play.

 

A minstrel build support has literally zero damage. 

A meta where supports are to be prio targeted with so much cc in the game and all the debilitating conditions without a support being able to defend themselves at least a bit properly is a meta where support builds are dead. No one will play it and the meta will shift to even more bubbles for projectile hate and the whole deal will be who can implode the other zerg the fastest. Essentially a respawn simulator. I may be exagerrating things a bit but it is definitely a possible outcome, especially in GW2.

As for self survival instead of "holy trinity" model I always see ESO in my mind. ESO has its own WvW mode and what self sustain and self buffing does there are players that are chugging tri-pots on a CD, being able to outsustain and outplay anything, essentially being able to take whole unskilled groups by their own. I don't believe that this is a desirable gameplay element for a healthy wvw population. 

In my mind if boons are there they should be provided by specifically specced builds that basically completely sacrifice damage for support, but also need to be survivable enough in general cases where you're accompanying a pug, a single deadeye picks you and nobody supports you by taking him/her out, to be able at least to defend yourself. It's hard enough as it is though, deadeyes can pew pew you for 4k all the time and it's basically impossible to outsustain that for a longer period. The damage is just too high. 

Also, boons shouldn't be hard to pulse because if there's too much inertia with boon share, stuff like vanilla wow happens, although that was the extreme of it. For those who don't know, buffing yourself in vanilla wow basically made you twice as strong but in order to buff yourself it took a good part of an hour if you wanted to grab every buff. So when you died and lost the buffs it was extra painful and also for the rest of the event you were basically half of what you were. 

I know that this doesn't have much to do with GW2 as you don't lose food buffs and such on death but what I'm trying to say is that the problem with restricting or weakening boon sharers will essentially mean that this will elevate good players but in terms create an even larger skill gap between good and average players. In my mind I see this as troublesome for GW2 health of wvw because skill cap is extremely high as it is right now and increasing that skill gap even more will essentially mean that worlds (or later alliances) will tank certain wvw matchups even more, essentially making for a decreased wvw population unless a matchup is favorable. 

With strong boon supports at least bad players are able to blend in and at least make up the numbers, because in my book, it's better to be able to smash something/someone in WvW rather than watching a ghost town and only fight elite zergs. Or in other words, I think strong supports are basically the only thing that actually enables pug zerging as an at least viable alternative to organized zergs. As I myself like doing both organized and unorganized zergs I can recall a lot of moments where we actually had to coordinate well and bit by bit outplay a pug clouding zerg because they had good supports. Even though the zerg itself was bad, it was still "content" because it wasn't just a simple roflstomp storm through the group. And I personally like that. Might not be a popular take though, I admit that. But I bet the majority of average players love it. 

[Meizu.1846]

To whoever is laughing at my post above: 

No one ever knows what the consequences are when you buff/nerf something because as much as it is possible to predict a certain meta it's also possible to completely misjudge the end result. 

All I know is that ESO self sustain version of WvW isn't appealing and it shows: 

This is almost !always! bad for the gamemode population.

Edited June 4 by Meizu.1846

[ArchonWing.9480]

4 hours ago, Meizu.1846 said:

A minstrel build support has literally zero damage. 

Yea it's a trade off. It's also irrelevant in a group setting because that's their job.

4 hours ago, Meizu.1846 said:

A meta where supports are to be prio targeted with so much cc in the game and all the debilitating conditions without a support being able to defend themselves at least a bit properly is a meta where support builds are dead. No one will play it and the meta will shift to even more bubbles for projectile hate and the whole deal will be who can implode the other zerg the fastest. Essentially a respawn simulator. I may be exagerrating things a bit but it is definitely a possible outcome, especially in GW2.

????

Why would supports die to CC? That has nothing to do with stats. If you don't have active defenses and the rather OP form of defense known as dodging, minstrel gear wouldn't save them anyways.

And to further push this point, we already are seeing Cele hybrid supports, though granted they aren't that less tanky than Minstrel.  But that's it's own problem I guess.

4 hours ago, Meizu.1846 said:

In my mind if boons are there they should be provided by specifically specced builds that basically completely sacrifice damage for support, but also need to be survivable enough in general cases where you're accompanying a pug, a single deadeye picks you and nobody supports you by taking him/her out, to be able at least to defend yourself. It's hard enough as it is though, deadeyes can pew pew you for 4k all the time and it's basically impossible to outsustain that for a longer period. The damage is just too high. 

It's not like attacking them is going to make a difference even if you did have damage as all they have to do is string you out a bit more. Dropping CCs and cycling defensive cooldowns will buy a few seconds away to get back to your group. Fighting them is generally the worst idea in a group scenario, even if you have a roaming build that could take them out.

This isn't like PoF where they could noscope you for 20k out of the blue; many adept players can survive a few seconds vs a deadeye chasing them in marauders ; there is no excuse to die as a cele, much less minstrel,  that quickly.

 

4 hours ago, Meizu.1846 said:

With strong boon supports at least bad players are able to blend in and at least make up the numbers, because in my book, it's better to be able to smash something/someone in WvW rather than watching a ghost town and only fight elite zergs. Or in other words, I think strong supports are basically the only thing that actually enables pug zerging as an at least viable alternative to organized zergs.

Strong disagree. We've reached a meta where many of these players have builds that mechanically make them deadweight, and thus only guilds with the luxury of being solid enough are taking them, or pugmanders with no real choice. A lot of guilds run completely closed for that reason and don't let people in, typically just using them as a distraction.

It does not help that pugmanding is also a dying art because it is put at such a huge disadvantage, and even those that try cannot viably fit people in a comp unless they run very specific support builds-- even more marginally support builds are glossed over and build diversity is almost nonexistent.

WvW is a much less pug friendly space than it was a few years ago, and it doesn't look to improve either, despite all this power of supports.

 

Edited June 4 by ArchonWing.9480

[Meizu.1846]

35 minutes ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

Why would supports die to CC? That has nothing to do with stats. If you don't have active defenses and the rather OP form of defense known as dodging, minstrel gear wouldn't save them anyways.

Active defenses are a problem. Because there is a large discrepancy in the amount of active defenses scattered among the classes. For example a FB can stab and aegis himself to death if it needs to return back to group but a heal vindi for example? Not many active defenses, 3x stab every 10 seconds and some defenses from staff, namely a short distance evade skill 5 and block on staff 3 but with condi meta staff 3 doesn't prevent ticking damage. Also, most competent players in zerg fights use at least some form of unblockable attacks to continue to pressure opponents. Shield is useless because you're a static object for the duration. It's basically easy food for any competent willbender/thief/ele/reaper, especially hammer warrior. So without detuning active defenses in general some specs would be left at an unfair advantage. 

 

35 minutes ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

And to further push this point, we already are seeing Cele hybrid supports, though granted they aren't that less tanky than Minstrel.  But that's it's own problem I guess.

That I agree with, celestial offers too much to hybrid classes and too little to mainly power classes (warrior). Or maybe you could even say that what celestial gear does to a power spellbreaker is what cele should perform with other proffessions too. 

35 minutes ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

It's not like attacking them is going to make a difference even if you did have damage as all they have to do is string you out a bit more. Dropping CCs and cycling defensive cooldowns will buy a few seconds away to get back to your group.

Yes, a few seconds. Dropping the defenses on supports would mean that you wouldn't even get those couple seconds. Unless again you are a guardian. 

35 minutes ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

Strong disagree. We've reached a meta where many of these players have builds that mechanically make them deadweight, and thus only guilds with the luxury of being solid enough are taking them, or pugmanders with no real choice. A lot of guilds run completely closed for that reason and don't let people in, typically just using them as a distraction.

I don't belong to any wvw guild in particular and yet I've never had a problem joining discord zergs ran by specific guilds, at least not in EU Blacktide, which also rotates with other servers due to not being a full population server. I might have had luck with that but I really never had issues with it. As long as you bring a decent build that complements the group in some meaningful way, you'll be fine. If you're trying to join a zerg as a soulbeast though, yeah you will be questioned on that. 

35 minutes ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

It does not help that pugmanding is also a dying art because it is put at such a huge disadvantage, and even those that try cannot viably fit people in a comp unless they run very specific support builds-- even more marginally support builds are glossed over.

That I do agree with. Even though I stated before that strong supports make pugs at least a bit viable. But the emphasis is on "a bit", which means they will still usually get stompe

 

35 minutes ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

WvW is a much less pug friendly space than it was a few years ago, and it doesn't look to improve either, despite all this power of supports.

I agree with this. Hear me out, I'm not promoting this boon ball zerg thing. In fact, I'm against the whole stacking system in gw2. I feel like the constant need of being stacked so tight is kinda smothering the whole vibe and the game would feel much more breathable if you didn't have to constantly pay attention to that small commander tag and nervously track it all the time. Commanders on discord when leading these zergs often sound like they're gonna pass out from the lack of breath when they mumble rap commands basically for a straight hour or two. 

What I'm trying to discuss is the fact that a support on its own in this game already has no viable option to outsustain a proper duelist/dps if played at least half decent. It's simply not possible to outheal or out-evade all the incoming thunder, especially if you lack on solid stab application. 

What I would personally explore is the possibility of not necessarily nerfing the supports defense, but rather nerf the boons instead. The boons are simply too powerful. Might gives too much power, there's too much crit chance going on, prot is arguably not even that powerful because of the non-additive nature but is multiplicative with other reduction bonuses, so it's a progressively diminishing return no matter how you look at it. Anet is already doing the boon nerfing with slowly removing alac and quickness from the wvw which is the right move in my opinion. Still, there's chronomancer relic which benefits well users greatly. 

So I guess it's more about the whole ecosystem that's over tuned and needs some chill. I'm all up for nerfs but I also want the nerfs to be of a sensible nature. However, due to the current stacking system, this will always be a problem in my humble opinion because it's impossible to keep a cloud boon-ed up. 

Zergs always were volatile in nature though, I can't recall any MMO where zerging wasn't perceived as an issue, and I have about 20 years of MMO experience and played loads of titles. That's why I already mentioned on this forum that the proper way of dealing with this would probably be recreating the maps and creating both roam, small gvg and zerg friendly environments. 

What I personally believe are the biggest issues usually in pvp environments  is when a solo or duo is able to farm on 5+ people. That's when the gap gets too big for the majority of people to handle and is what mainly causes people to leave the gamemode. So managing cele builds to not overbloom is crucial and top priority IMO. 

I believe that a lot of players play in zergs because they know they're going to get stomped as roamers because the learning curve is so big in gw2. So they resort to zerging for more safety and anonymity where they get stomped again by organized zergs. It's in the bigger picture I guess. 

Edited June 4 by Meizu.1846

[ArchonWing.9480]

42 minutes ago, Meizu.1846 said:

Active defenses are a problem. Because there is a large discrepancy in the amount of active defenses scattered among the classes. For example a FB can stab and aegis himself to death if it needs to return back to group but a heal vindi for example? Not many active defenses, 3x stab every 10 seconds and some defenses from staff, namely a short distance evade skill 5 and block on staff 3 but with condi meta staff 3 doesn't prevent ticking damage. Shield is useless because you're a static object for the duration. It's basically easy food for any competent willbender/thief/ele/reaper, especially hammer warrior. So without detuning active defenses in general some specs would be left at an unfair advantage. 

First off, we're generally discussing supports when they're actually in a group and not wandering around.  Like I sure hope that FB is casting stab for the whole group instead of themselves usually or they're going to group 1.

Although I don't really think Vindi is any less survivable when caught. At a minimum they can stunbreak --> dodges, ---> fill up meter, swap  to proc energy if you have  and dodge again, and that allows for any of the defense cooldowns, or even switching flipping alliance stance for the leap. I mean I guess you could get done in by some chain immobolizes and stuns but that usually takes a few people.

 

If you have to run further than this regularly and getting picked by a single player then you really need to stick tighter on tag or add more defensive utilities if your fb is afk or something.  Like no meme here; you are letting 4 other people down every time this happens. Just have to try, and try harder.

 

I suppose you may have those commanders that are deliberately trying to kill their pugs but I wouldn't follow them.

The only zerg build that should get picked off is maybe some of the necros or eles but usually those still take a while to take down.

Most of the time on any support, I wouldn't be ganked by just one , and usually when I'm afk or posting on the forums. 🤣

 

42 minutes ago, Meizu.1846 said:

That I agree with, celestial offers too much to hybrid classes and too little to mainly power classes (warrior). Or maybe you could even say that what celestial gear does to a power spellbreaker is what cele should perform with other proffessions too. 

I meant more that there are supports that work perfectly fine even though they are less tankier than the average minstrel support and more advanced groups is starting to realize this.

42 minutes ago, Meizu.1846 said:

Yes, a few seconds. Dropping the defenses on supports would mean that you wouldn't even get those couple seconds. Unless again you are a guardian. 

The point is that many people survive even without these defenses from stats , much less a support that naturally has them baked in the build.

I mean nobody (at least I think  nobody) is saying to go from one extreme to another. But the real truth is that minstrel gear isn't that profound -- we just take it because most support builds can't make use out of offensive stats very well. Most just don't have the capability of delivering that sort of aoe damage to a zerg, and those that do run celestial.

42 minutes ago, Meizu.1846 said:

I don't belong to any wvw group in particular and yet I've never had a problem joining discord zergs ran by specific guilds, at least not in EU Blacktide, which also rotates with other servers due to not being a full population server. I might have had luck with that but I really never had issues with it. As long as you bring a decent build that complements the group in some meaningful way, you'll be fine. If you're trying to join a zerg as a soulbeast though, yeah you will be questioned on that. 

I mean, a lot of people don't use Discord, and as for invisible groups, well, it's kinda hard to know about them.

Yea I gather if you shouldn't come on a soulbeast. I just think the amount of builds you shouldn't come on has increased a lot over the years.

Though I understand NA pugs need to get their kitten together a lot more.

42 minutes ago, Meizu.1846 said:

I agree with this. Hear me out, I'm not promoting this boon ball zerg thing. In fact, I'm against the whole stacking system in gw2. I feel like the constant need of being stacked so tight is kinda smothering the whole vibe and the game would feel much more breathable if you didn't have to constantly pay attention to that small commander tag and nervously track it all the time. Commanders on discord when leading these zergs often sound like they're gonna pass out from the lack of breath when they mumble rap commands basically for a straight hour or two. 

It's more that it was easier for any potato to pick up a tag and as long as they stayed together and had numbers, they would have a decent chance at doing some damage to an enemy group.

This is mostly gone now, which is why the commanders remaining are kinda like that.

42 minutes ago, Meizu.1846 said:

What I'm trying to discuss is the fact that a support on its own in this game already has no viable option to outsustain a proper duelist/dps if played at least half decent. It's simply not possible to outheal or out-evade all the incoming thunder, especially if you lack on solid stab application. 

Builds made for groups suck outside of groups. I just really don't understand the point of this tangent. If it weren't like that then, there would be no point in roamers at all.

42 minutes ago, Meizu.1846 said:

What I would personally explore is the possibility of not necessarily nerfing the supports defense, but rather nerf the boons instead. The boons are simply too powerful. Might gives too much power, there's too much crit chance going on, prot is arguably not even that powerful because of the non-additive nature but is multiplicative with other reduction bonuses, so it's a progressively diminishing return no matter how you look at it. Anet is already doing the boon nerfing with slowly removing alac and quickness from the wvw which is the right move in my opinion. Still, there's chronomancer relic which benefits well users greatly. 

Yes, the strength of boons is a problem due to them giving flat amounts of power. But you should note that also negates the relatively lack of offensive stats of minstrel supports too. One minstrel support won't hit for much, but 10 of them with 25 stacks of might will do some damage.

This is just one aspects of how supports scale.

But the boons themselves have been around for 10+ years. The boon frequency (as well as the weakness of boon strips) plays a certain role. Alright, except quick and alac....

You should also note that the nerfing of quick/alac is more to straighten out pve balance. Which kinda leads to the issue that these boons are a given

 

42 minutes ago, Meizu.1846 said:

Zergs always were volatile in nature though, I can't recall any MMO where zerging wasn't perceived as an issue, and I have about 20 years of MMO experience and played loads of titles. That's why I already mentioned on this forum that the proper way of dealing with this would probably be recreating the maps and creating both roam, small gvg and zerg friendly environments. 

What I personally believe are the biggest issues usually in pvp environments  is when a solo or duo is able to farm on 5+ people. That's when the gap gets too big for the majority of people to handle and is what mainly causes people to leave the gamemode. So managing cele builds to not overbloom is crucial and top priority IMO. 

Well, almost all of WvW is balanced around large scale now, pretty much any adjustments are based on that, so that is the game we will all have to play.

Edited June 4 by ArchonWing.9480

[keramatzmode.1906]

I personally think Alacrity and Quickness ruined PvP and WvW. Especially Alacrity. Both of them should be removed entirely from non-PvE environment.
Stability is a design flaw in the game. The existence of stability isn't offensive, but it's duration and it's ease of access ruins all game modes. Stability changes in 2015 was to cater lower skilled players and zergs.  
Unblockables and especially, instacast unblockables with CC are the worst thing to ever exist. 
Gap closers like shadowsteps and dashes powercreep ruins the other professions who don't get any.  
Players get angry about "damage" heavy class gain access to support specs, but hypocritically shuts up when "support" heavy class gain access to damage specs. 
CC stacking is a fundamental design flaw since release. 
Giving aegis access to everybody, because willbender exists, is akin to punch a hole of an already leaking pot, and close the other hole with a duct tape. 
Stealth is not a problem. Anti-stealth mechanics is the problem. Removing revealed, reveal application and its duration, nearby stealthed detection should be reviewed.  
Out of combat mechanics are bad and we have been conditioned to accept this flawed mechanic existence since release. 
Nerfing combo fields or outright remove it, downplays the cunning creativity of players and worse, punished for it. 
As a silly band aid solution, they keep adding more and more buffs access to support utility skills to the boonball meta we see today that indirectly ruined small scale fights and roaming.
The status quo of certain profession keep getting sidelined over the years because why pick profession A that is good at 1 thing well, when profession B can do 2 things (or sometimes, better)?

My honest opinion.