Nerf quickness to 25% and Alac to 15%

[Riba.3271]

These boons were decent addition to the game, but they are bit too strong for how accessible they are. Reducing them to level of next strongest boons (fury, protection) and in return increasing their uptime slightly, should lead to healthier meta. Benefits are quite obvious:

1.  Longer fights where cooldown management decides the winner,
2.  Stealth engages are weaker
3. Overall reduction of burst.
4. You have approximately 21.2% longer to react to major crowdcontrol abilities.

For example everyone here knows that Fury is extremely strong boon and necessity for power builds. However numberwise it is only 10-15% damage increase. In comparison quickness allows one to cram 50% more spells in initial engage which means 50% more damage to initial burst. This even extends to crowd control and various support abilities. So best way to increase length of fights and promoting build diversity is by touching quickness boon.

Now I am aware that this is only first step for great WvW fights, and further adjustments to damage across the board are needed. Good candidate for follow up buffs would be 3rd or 4th abilities in optimal burst rotations so DPS stays significant but initial burst doesn't return to insane levels.

Edited July 17 by Riba.3271

[Nefras.7314]

You ever played Reaper without quickness ?

[CafPow.1542]

3 minutes ago, Nefras.7314 said:

You ever played Reaper without quickness ?

Okay but that one specc could also be adjusted a bit to be fair.

generally speaking:

boons are alright but i think their accessibility is unhealthy (through all Gamemodes btw.)

it should not be the thing, neither in pve nor in pvp/wvw that it is possible to have „all boons all the time“.

just delete all boons then and raise coefficients of abilities cause boons are permanent, thus, without a purpose. Make boons a temporary power spike / defense spike you react with to something happening.

[XenesisII.1540]

Quickness and Alacrity shouldn't exist, or certainly not as spamable boons.

Every skill is created with a hard skill cast time, a skill cooldown, and/or a skill resource to use it for a reason.

They used this reasoning for justifying the recent golem boon nerfs, why isn't this same reasoning extended to the entire game?

These two boons affects every single thing in combat. It should have never been designed as spam, but burst usage with very long cooldowns.

The boons are so powerful that they had to add them to all support classes to make sure everyone gets the benefits, because it feels bad when it isn't running 100%, of course they had to nerf it in wvw a year later when they finally updated their spreadsheets to see powerful it made boon balls. If they feel like quickness and alacrity need to exist 100%, then take them out and make the permanent adjustments to all the skills instead.

 

Look, this is how you implement something like this, from world of warcraft... https://www.wowhead.com/spell=2825/bloodlust

5 min cooldown

Increases haste(quickness) by 30% for all party and raid members for 40sec.

Allies receiving this effect will become sated and unable to benefit from Bloodlust or Time Warp again for 10 mins.

 

Anet doesn't know what balance means, and never will.

[CafPow.1542]

1 hour ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Quickness and Alacrity shouldn't exist, or certainly not as spamable boons.

Why only these 2?

you are right but think it through.

pure offensive wise: what is the difference between alac and,,, fury? Or 25 migjt stacks?

all those boons do is „more pewpew“ for me, in some way or the other.

and other boons work defensively.

it is odd to say that only those 2 are a problem. A boon is a temporary buff. It makes you pewpew harder or take less pew pew for ->a certain amount of time<-

having them up ->all<- the time is kinda the opposite of „temporary“ so boons might aswell be passives.

the Problem, as i said before, is imo the accessibility of boons.

i agree with you but i extend your point to „all boons“. (And to some amount this also counts for conditions like vulnerability or such things)

[Cuks.8241]

Remove alac. Give quick only to offensive boon supports. Heal supports have enough other boons to keep up and dont need another with possibly ackward rotation and frees up more reactionary play for some.

[Cuks.8241]

1 hour ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Anet doesn't know what balance means, and never will.

Your example is less about balance and more about interesting gameplay. Not just spam spam spam.

I mean bloodlust was super inbalanced in a way. And shamans had a guarantee spot because of it until they dispersed it. Lots of changes to that effect. But it was always fun.

Edited July 17 by Cuks.8241

[XenesisII.1540]

24 minutes ago, CafPow.1542 said:

Why only these 2?

you are right but think it through.

pure offensive wise: what is the difference between alac and,,, fury? Or 25 migjt stacks?

all those boons do is „more pewpew“ for me, in some way or the other.

and other boons work defensively.

it is odd to say that only those 2 are a problem. A boon is a temporary buff. It makes you pewpew harder or take less pew pew for ->a certain amount of time<-

having them up ->all<- the time is kinda the opposite of „temporary“ so boons might aswell be passives.

the Problem, as i said before, is imo the accessibility of boons.

i agree with you but i extend your point to „all boons“. (And to some amount this also counts for conditions like vulnerability or such things)

All boons are a problem in general, but those two are the topic of discussion. Also they affect all abilities in the game, every single skill that has additional boons attached to them, whether it's offensive or defensive boons.

A lot of us I'm sure don't agree with the spammability of boons in the first place, and I'm sure would like to have them back to the more tactical uses, use them when it's appropriate, not spam it because you're too dumb to think about when to use it.

Concentration is also another problem area when it comes to boon spam.

Bottom line is, there's set numbers on cooldowns and cast times for balancing purposes, any reductions to those obviously increase their power, but if anet intends for us to have 100% uptime on these boons they might as well go back and adjust the ability numbers instead. These two boons should not exist.

We've had dozens of discussions on boon spam at this point, anet is not going to listen.

[Johje Holan.4607]

Agree, but I would go further. Remove Alacrity and Quickness from WvW entirely. I’d also add Superspeed to the list- remove it. None of these make WvW better. They just make it worse in every way. 

[CafPow.1542]

1 hour ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

These two boons should not exist.

I understand that the topic is about these 2 boons. And we agree in general about boon uptime overall i think. (At least more or less).

 

personally i find these 2 boons way funnier gameplay-wise than might or fury.

all those boons give you a certain amount additional damage, right? Why do you think these 2 specifically are problematic?

[kash.9213]

2 minutes ago, CafPow.1542 said:

I understand that the topic is about these 2 boons. And we agree in general about boon uptime overall i think. (At least more or less).

 

personally i find these 2 boons way funnier gameplay-wise than might or fury.

all those boons give you a certain amount additional damage, right? Why do you think these 2 specifically are problematic?

Maybe the rate of fire. They're saying that Anet developed the skills and tested them around their cooldown, even given some room for modifiers that might change that temporarily, but the boon output is not very temporary anymore. I'd take a little less damage tallied at the end of a fight if my rate of fire dominated the start of the fight and possibly closed out the fight quick by just outgunning everyone faster. 

[Hesione.9412]

6 minutes ago, kash.9213 said:

Maybe the rate of fire. They're saying that Anet developed the skills and tested them around their cooldown, even given some room for modifiers that might change that temporarily, but the boon output is not very temporary anymore. I'd take a little less damage tallied at the end of a fight if my rate of fire dominated the start of the fight and possibly closed out the fight quick by just outgunning everyone faster. 

Exactly, this is why boonballs are so strong. Even before Anet nerfed the strips and change-boon-into-condition counters, they were still strong.

Given history, I can't see Anet doing anything about the boons. Everything they have done is to promote boons.

[joneirikb.7506]

* Alacrity + Quickness wasn't in original GW2 (back when it was actually balanced for pvp), it was added later with expansion (when they ditched pvp and balanced 99% for pve/raids).
* Those two adds on top of Might+Fury exponentially, so even if we where to say they're ok, there's too many offensive boons compared to what the combat system was originally balanced around. (Not that they haven't screwed things up enough other places...)
* Skills are supposed to have a "duration/effect" and a "cooldown" as a balancing factor. They've constantly over they years extended the duration and shortened the cooldown. And Alacrity just further messes this over. (Big part of why we have so much boon spam)
* Boons have changed from being something you used for brief windows of opportunity/benefit in combat, that you had to time well, and be punished for using at wrong time with long cooldowns. To, always on.
* At this point they might as well just make every class like Revenant/Dragon elite, and put upkeep costs on skills but let them permanently pulse boons, at least it would cost them SOMETHING.
* Heck, make PVE GREAT AGAIN, and just make all signets passive pulse all the boons permanently, so players can go back to just playing signet builds with all the boons! Imagine all the happy PVE noises in gemstore!

Random example. (You used to be able to pick a trait to get a CD reduction of 20% for shouts)

Hold the line (current)
* cooldown: 20 (16 with alacrity)
* Prot 4s
* regen 6s

Hold the line (original)
* cooldown: 35 (28 with trait)
* Prot 4s
* regen 6s

So, it's been a steady change/shift in the game ever since 2014/2015 when they ditched pvp balance. And it's not one I expect them to ever change. From a PVE perspective all of these changes are just seen as good, as generally they just want more of everything since there's no downside for them. Now, if enemies used player classes/builds, that would likely change the tone a lot (loved that in gw1). But in WvW and PvP you notice it very clearly, because every change changes every encounter, it's not just you and your side that gets benefits against a bunch of unchanging ai bots.

And at this point, I think the ANet balance team has just thrown WvW/PvP under the carpet, and ignore it until their bosses complains that there's a bit too many dust-balls sticking out from under the carpet. After all they don't have much incentive to care about the WvW/PvP balance, as people still play, and PvE is their main interest, and as long as those are happy, the bosses are mostly happy.

Edited July 19 by joneirikb.7506

[Mangoyami.2418]

4 hours ago, Nefras.7314 said:

You ever played Reaper without quickness ?

yes, there's nothing wrong with condi reaper and it can easily win fights. you're addicted to quickness

[Nefras.7314]

3 minutes ago, Mangoyami.2418 said:

yes, there's nothing wrong with condi reaper and it can easily win fights. you're addicted to quickness

Play power reaper with blighters. Tell me how much fun it is trying to hit shroud skills without quickness.

Also good luck hitting power specter shroud skills without quickness.

[DeceiverX.8361]

8 hours ago, Nefras.7314 said:

You ever played Reaper without quickness ?

Yeah, and it was still just as good because the rest of the entire kit wasn't nerfed and rest of the game powercrept to hell.  Reaper needs quickness now because the rest of the game is the same way and all of its shroud builds were gutted.  Like literally half the prominent and powerful traits don't even exist anymore, and most of them aren't used.

They could also just change the animation speeds and give actual useful GM options over RO.

Doesn't help that largely, people are just bad at Reaper.

These kinds of comments prove the point that boons being OP with some ridiculous access shouldn't be answers to "fixing" a class's performance.

Edited July 18 by DeceiverX.8361

[Nefras.7314]

3 hours ago, DeceiverX.8361 said:

Yeah, and it was still just as good because the rest of the entire kit wasn't nerfed and rest of the game powercrept to hell.  Reaper needs quickness now because the rest of the game is the same way and all of its shroud builds were gutted.  Like literally half the prominent and powerful traits don't even exist anymore, and most of them aren't used.

They could also just change the animation speeds and give actual useful GM options over RO.

Doesn't help that largely, people are just bad at Reaper.

These kinds of comments prove the point that boons being OP with some ridiculous access shouldn't be answers to "fixing" a class's performance.

Yeah but this isnt 2017 anymore. We long transitioned away from 7s shroud/a dozen proccs with massive crit dmg on single hit gameplay on reaper.

I dont see Anet adressing actual class issues on top of making such a drastic change as nerfing quickness.

[Johje Holan.4607]

21 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

make PVE GREAT AGAIN

Please no, we don’t want to destroy it completely. 

[SweetPotato.7456]

This is why this  game mode is destroyed. one by one torn down by people who never spend time in the game, but thinking up non-problem to take peoples fun away.

[TexZero.7910]

22 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

Random example. You could pick a trait to get a CD reduction of 20%.

No thanks. We had this before and being shohorned into it to make skills better always felt bad as it locked you into often times sub-optimal traits.

[joneirikb.7506]

10 hours ago, TexZero.7910 said:

No thanks. We had this before and being shohorned into it to make skills better always felt bad as it locked you into often times sub-optimal traits.

Badly worded on my part, I meant to say we used to have a trait you could pick to reduce the cooldown. And I calculated that into the examples. It's to show/contrast with the Alacrity, where now all those cooldown reductions have just been baked into the base skills, as another example of them just reducing the CD's to make skills more spammy.

[zinkz.7045]

On 7/18/2024 at 12:47 AM, joneirikb.7506 said:

* Alacrity + Quickness wasn't in original GW2 (back when it was actually balanced for pvp), it was added later with expansion (when they ditched pvp and balanced 99% for pve/raids)

Quickness has always been in the game. (it was also originally a 100% increase)

Edited July 19 by zinkz.7045

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

No. Increase the number of boon strips, rips, and corrupts instead.

[Dawdler.8521]

2 hours ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

No. Increase the number of boon strips, rips, and corrupts instead.

When the answer to nukes is to have more nukes.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

1 hour ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

When the answer to nukes is to have more nukes.

Not the same. The issue is that they removed boon counter play, not the boons themselves.