The Current Boon Ball Meta and Balancing Suggestions

[igmolicious.5986]

10 hours ago, Lai.6259 said:

make all blocks missiles skill have block number limit, for now , this is the only reasonable way for nerf boonball and won't influence balance too much.

I get frustrated with projectile blocks too, but feel like if they require a limit, skills that block all attacks during a duration do too. Both types of block are countered by unblockable tho, so just having a staff warrior with your group gives reasonably good access if your profession doesn't already have something that grants it.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

1 hour ago, Sheff.4851 said:

I'm not sure what part of Lucid Singularity you want me to notice...On the other hand, if you mean Overload removing movement-impairing conditions, sure.

Yea, this is what im referring to : Lucid Singularity us-to be a skill that negated inhibiting conditions upon casting an overload. Nobody took it, because to be frank, it wasn't all that useful. An update made about 1 or 2 ish years ago, changed its functionality to provide alacrity instead. (Now it does might/fury)

A similiar slew of changes occurred across many skills across the whole game. Mechanics that were "special" were replaced with mechanics that provided something "useful" ...useful in many cases meant throwing a boon on it. Warrior Banners is another example of this streamlining.

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You just run more boonstrip professions to compensate. In the 2019 meta, you had one Scourge per party and a handful of Spellbreakers to handle boon removal. Now, because individual boon removal skills are worse, you run one Renegade per party, and two Necromancers, either two Scourges or a 1:1 split between Scourges and Reapers. The number of boons removed are still roughly identical (excepting the way that old Spellbreaker dome worked), but the number of professions that an organized group has to use to achieve that level of boon removal is much larger.

People are doing the best with what they got kinda... but its nowhere near enough. Most conversions, became strips instead...and those strips have declined more and more over time...from 3 boons removed to 2 boons removed...from 2 boons removed to 1 boons removed.

Ironically, and now this is just a personal anecdote...i dont even run concentration based stuff anymore...because i know that i will always have boons on me, and i know they will almost never be stripped while standing in bombs (rather, even when they are stripped, they are just instantly replaced with new boons, and hit duration cap fairly quickly). When you consider that the duration of boons on many skills are already quiet short (say 3 seconds) investing 1000 stats for an additional 1.5 - 2 seconds, is not worth it, because then, you are either just duration capping or putting to many stats for very little gain (diminishing returns) which serves no real purpose. It kinda just shows that the source of the problem is lack of impactful sinks and counterplay, and not so much their duration or the stats.

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Right, most people who run boonballs will refer to that as target capping, where you stack close to tag to distribute damage evenly across the whole squad, giving healers a chance to catch up. I'm with you on this, I think a buff to target caps with a decrease to damage would be an effective tool for smaller, more coordinated groups to punch up against larger, less coordinated group. In fact, it's part of why people run Renegade per party (Inspiring Reinforcement has no target cap), Scourge (Shroud skills with 2-3 Shades down break target cap parity, hitting more than five targets), and Berserker/Holosmith (Scorched Earth and Prime Light Beam hit more than five targets, though this was recently nerfed slightly). Organized groups know that skills which strike more than five people are valuable, which is why they already use them.

Yep. Back like 4-5 years ago (pre 2020) scourge (i think it was called carpet bomb meta) is sorta the extreme example, for how 10 man targets were an effective measure in combating dispersal (albeit it was a bit extreme) but the idea generally speaking, was that you could do more with less people... 15 v 30's in my gvg crew was commonly what we did and liked to do. As target caps got normalized, and damage/healing decreased across the board, individual player contribution (the impact single players have in determining a fight) decreased, by a lot. Given how dispersal works, you really cant impact a fights anymore on some rambo kitten, you gotta just stack more people, to rack up your dispersal advantage against smaller groups, and reduce the opposing dispersal advantage fighting larger ones.

Like you alluded to earlier with strips: When the effectiveness of skills go down, you need to compensate by bringing more people. The same is basically true for target caps.

Just to summarize the point : This 4 man hybrid/healer meta thing, would get decimated by players whos damage was actually effective, which means raising caps, or increasing damage. Technically, raising damage is not a great idea..i mentioned earlier that this isn't a solvable balance problem...its these gofers that pop up in this game of wack-a-mole. One problem gets solved, another problem takes its place. During Carpet bomb, it was close to suicidal to equip anything but minstrel gear because you needed the vitality and toughness to not explode. So it's a very very hard problem (i claim its not solvable)... and its reasonable to be concerned about the particular course of action that is taken.

Edited July 25 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Sheff.4851]

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Ironically, and now this is just a personal anecdote...i dont even run concentration based stuff anymore...because i know that i will always have boons on me, and i know they will almost never be stripped while standing in bombs (rather, even when they are stripped, they are just instantly replaced with new boons, and hit duration cap fairly quickly). When you consider that the duration of boons on many skills are already quiet short (say 3 seconds) investing 1000 stats for an additional 1.5 - 2 seconds, is not worth it, because then, you are either just duration capping or putting to many stats for very little gain (diminishing returns) which serves no real purpose.

What profession are you playing in organized groups? The duration of Stability on Stand Your Ground for Guardian is six seconds base, concentration cap puts it at almost 12, when you can cast it every 18 with the Alacrity from a Renegade. Speaking of, the duration of Alacrity on Orders from Above is three seconds of Alacrity, every second, for six seconds, so it stacks itself up to the 15 seconds you need to maintain permanent Alac on Renegade. Renegade also stacks Resistance with Pain Absorption, taking the three second base duration to six seconds, giving you almost perfect uptime as long as you're using it twice while you're inside your Demon Stance rotation like you're supposed to. Meanwhile, Inspiring Reinforcement is 3 seconds of Stability, pulsing every second for five seconds, so boon duration bumps that to six seconds of Stab every second for five seconds. Like Demon Stance, you can drop Reinforcement immediately when entering Dwarf, and immediately before leaving, and cover Stability almost entirely by yourself. None of these rotations work without Concentration capped.

Concentration is the single most important stat to make these builds function, because they are all long duration boon uptime skills, or uptime skills that pulse. You can talk about nerfing the strength of pulsing skills if you want, that's fair, but getting rid of Concentration prevents a lot of the current boonball meta from working effectively.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

2 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

What profession are you playing in organized groups? The duration of Stability on Stand Your Ground for Guardian is six seconds base, concentration cap puts it at almost 12, when you can cast it every 18 with the Alacrity from a Renegade. Speaking of, the duration of Alacrity on Orders from Above is three seconds of Alacrity, every second, for six seconds, so it stacks itself up to the 15 seconds you need to maintain permanent Alac on Renegade. Renegade also stacks Resistance with Pain Absorption, taking the three second base duration to six seconds, giving you almost perfect uptime as long as you're using it twice while you're inside your Demon Stance rotation like you're supposed to. Meanwhile, Inspiring Reinforcement is 3 seconds of Stability, pulsing every second for five seconds, so boon duration bumps that to six seconds of Stab every second for five seconds. Like Demon Stance, you can drop Reinforcement immediately when entering Dwarf, and immediately before leaving, and cover Stability almost entirely by yourself. None of these rotations work without Concentration capped.

Concentration is the single most important stat to make these builds function, because they are all long duration boon uptime skills, or uptime skills that pulse. You can talk about nerfing the strength of pulsing skills if you want, that's fair, but getting rid of Concentration prevents a lot of the current boonball meta from working effectively.

I play a lot of things, and explore a lot of builds. One thing to note is that Minstrel gear is BIS for Heal Firebrand, but not exactly due to concentration extending boons. There's a lot of reasons why, but mostly it's because having concentration gives you the most outgoing heal modifier...it doesn't make sense to not stack concentration on a heal firebrand, since no other stat is going to give you more healing. So in this sense, its like a juicy bonus for playing heal firebrand : Free boon duration.

Similiar principles drive gear selection for pretty much all heal and support builds, which is why one commonly sees them all running Minstrels gear rather than Harrier Gear... Bountiful Maintence Oil and Rice Balls...rather than Spiced Pepper Creme Brule. The way the heal equation works is that the more Healing Modifiers you have, and the more healing power you have, the more healing that you will typically do, depending on what skills you press (the skill coefficient) The Heal equation is trivial in the sense that the more you have of everything, the better healer that you are (The equation can be described by just addition and multiplication). So ideally, people aim for the highest outgoing heal modifier as possible...Heal Power, plus secondary concentration via mainetence oil gives 16 - 20 something percent, which is a pretty big chunk. Imagine you play a DPS build, and i said "you are gonna do 20% less DPS" that is what it is like to not use bountiful maintence oil, and why many classes are preassured into straight up taking ministrels over anything else.

Not all heal builds have minstrel as their only BIS option though because it really depends on what skills you have in your build, what those skills do, and how you intend to play or look at the game and its mechanics. For instance, Vitality and Toughness, are only useful to you, if you are actually being hit by attacks. If your build consists of many invuln or evade frames...or if you are just really good at playing the game and don't stand in the red circles, than vitality and toughness mean way less to you, and options like Clerics...Magi's...or oddballs like Apothecary become reasonable replacements without loss in effectiveness (some of us veterans actually see minstrels as training wheels). In the same vein: if you happen to have boons that are either very low base duration, or very high base duration, than concentration starts to mean less to you : Why invest in boon duration when you have a boon that lasts for 1 second and only get an additional 1 second duration...likewise if your boon lasts 20 seconds why do you need it to last 40 seconds? If it's not the only option, and your getting massive diminishing returns on the stat, then it gets hard to justify it at all.

For instance, If a healer has say...100% outgoing heal modifiers, and wants to shave off 10% of it to go into a different stat that might allow said healer to press new buttons that would produce bigger heal numbers or to gain a new function all together even...than Minstrels is no longer a BIS choice for that profession. Mileage varies, but some builds have this kind of freedom to choose.

You can parse this kind information in several different ways. For instance on my druid : I changed from Minstrels to Clerics some time ago...mostly because i don't really need vitality (Ranger has 16000 base health, which is high enough) having Power gives me Healing Power, and Concentration doesn't do much for me because my boons either have a long enough base duration, or they are too short to even care to press them....the most important aspect of the build, is entering celestial avatar and staying in it as long as possible, to use my healing skills and condition cleanse, to then reenter it again as soon as possible because of lingering light. Due to these choices, which makes my heal output far larger, I run Anti-toxin since the idea is i can double my condition cleanse output (rather than +10% healing) which augments the playstyle of camping CA, even further. It also makes for a really sweet rotation with no downtime, so I don't have to wait for opportune moments to use my skills, I just use my rotation, and the boons are just output as a result of that rotation (, therefor negating the need for concentration.)

Alterative way to parse this sort of information : In principle, a zerg doesn't even want to have a fight that lasts for a long time. The most ideal fight scenario for a zerg is one where you instantly destroy the enemy. Therefor, boons like Alacrity, a boon that becomes more valuable the longer a fight goes on, becomes less valuable to you, if your zerg can just roll people over on the first burst. In other words, the usefulness of alacrity is not objective...it's contextual. Me personally, I could care less about when or if i get alacrity, because when I curate my builds, I build them without the assumption that i will be under boon effects. If my build can't heal (or kill) people without alacrity well that's a pretty poo build to me and it doesn't even enter my build creation process. I should be able to do the job i need to do, with zero boons or at least boons i can supply to myself. That's just how i do things and think about its value.

There's a laundry list of ways to parse and pick apart this topic from many different angles...many different kinds of builds, and playstyles and perspectives to consider that could be discussed in depth. Celestials is a good example of people splintering off in changing value judgements away from full heal firebrands, to damage firebrands which lets be honest, actually makes way more sense for firebrand. It always had this idea of being a fire damage based boon engine, now it finally has arrived, and i think that's cool. Not exactly sure about celestial being the best stat choice...but anyway I haven't analyzed the theorycraft of the build to say much about it.

 

Edited July 25 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Sheff.4851]

That's interesting. In the groups that I play with, the role of healing is usually handled by a Druid, Scrapper, Tempest, or Vindicator because they all wipe the floor with a Firebrand's healing ability, even one that's specialized towards healing instead of giving boons. What kind of parties do you use a heal Firebrand in? Who are your other supports? I don't think that's a comp that I'm familiar with.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

Just now, Sheff.4851 said:

That's interesting. In the groups that I play with, the role of healing is usually handled by a Druid, Scrapper, Tempest, or Vindicator because they all wipe the floor with a Firebrand's healing ability, even one that's specialized towards healing instead of giving boons. What kind of parties do you use a heal Firebrand in? Who are your other supports? I don't think that's a comp that I'm familiar with.

Heal Firebrand has been meta for ages, its pretty much been the only meta (along with scourge) since POF. I think this is the first time in history where Heal Firebrand is no longer holding the primary meta healer role.

The secondary healer has always been Scrapper, Tempest, Revenant, and Druid in that order... 90% of the time it was scrapper, the other 10% sprinkled in with Tempest and Ventari-Revenants...It was only more recently recently (early last year) that Druid came onto the scene because of some critical changes to how CA functioned, coupled with the nerfs to scrapper which busted their condi-cleanse and heal output by a lot. When Antitoxin was re-introduced with Relics, it took some time, but Scrapper POP meta slowly came back.

I honestly still think scrapper is terrible because its heal output is still really bad (nowhere near as good as druid) but people are using it for POP +Antitoxin which is very strong and useful interaction...though if you ask me...if there was a Damage Scrapper build that could use POP, I'd pick that over a heal scrapper, and take either Aura-Blast Tempest (massively strong) or a Full Heal Druid (Also very strong).

[Sheff.4851]

14 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

Heal Firebrand has been meta for ages, its pretty much been the only meta (along with scourge) since POF. I think this is the first time in history where Heal Firebrand is no longer holding the primary meta healer role.

The secondary healer has always been Scrapper, Tempest, Revenant, and Druid in that order... 90% of the time it was scrapper, the other 10% sprinkled in with Tempest and Ventari-Revenants...It was only more recently recently (early last year) that Druid came onto the scene because of some critical changes to how CA functioned, coupled with the nerfs to scrapper which busted their condi-cleanse and heal output by a lot. When Antitoxin was re-introduced with Relics, it took some time, but Scrapper POP meta slowly came back.

I honestly still think scrapper is terrible because its heal output is still really bad (nowhere near as good as druid) but people are using it for POP +Antitoxin which is very strong and useful interaction...though if you ask me...if there was a Damage Scrapper build that could use POP, I'd pick that over a heal scrapper, and take either Aura-Blast Tempest (massively strong) or a Full Heal Druid (Also very strong).

Boon Firebrand has been meta for ages. I'm unfamiliar with Heal Firebrand. Maybe we're using different words to describe the same thing. Metabattle's build (https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Firebrand_-_Support_Firebrand) and GW2Mists' build (https://gw2mists.com/builds/guardian/boonbrand) both prioritize boon availability over healing generation, with the biggest tells being that they take Indomitable Courage over Battle Presence and Stoic Demeanor over Loremaster. In fact, my own Support Firebrand guide is one of the only builds that I'm aware of for group play that suggested running Battle Presence, and even then, you can see that I'm getting dumpstered on heals according to the ArcDPS overlays (video linked at the bottom of this post). Are any of these three builds the ones that you are talking about?

 

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

8 minutes ago, Sheff.4851 said:

Boon Firebrand has been meta for ages. I'm unfamiliar with Heal Firebrand. Maybe we're using different words to describe the same thing. Metabattle's build (https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Firebrand_-_Support_Firebrand) and GW2Mists' build (https://gw2mists.com/builds/guardian/boonbrand) both prioritize boon availability over healing generation, with the biggest tells being that they take Indomitable Courage over Battle Presence and Stoic Demeanor over Loremaster. In fact, my own Support Firebrand guide is one of the only builds that I'm aware of for group play that suggested running Battle Presence, and even then, you can see that I'm getting dumpstered on heals according to the ArcDPS overlays (video linked at the bottom of this post). Are any of these three builds the ones that you are talking about?

 

Ya same build. It's all the same.

It's not that firebrand prioritized healing over boons (its job is to be a stability bot)...its that minstrel gear (and concentration as a stat) is BIS choice for heal firebrand (boon brand whatever) due to bountiful maintence oil, hence why its not running harrier gear or the other wacky oils (which all provide concentration. bountiful maintence oil is one of the only few oils that do not) The same logic applies to pretty much any support build with the intent on healing as being part of their job.

[Cuks.8241]

3 hours ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

People are doing the best with what they got kinda... but its nowhere near enough. Most conversions, became strips instead...and those strips have declined more and more over time...from 3 boons removed to 2 boons removed...from 2 boons removed to 1 boons removed.

Support Rene.

Banish Enchantment - 3 strips per target, 5 targets, unblockable over 1/2 second, 900 range Targeted ability. 5 sec base CD but you have alacrity up about 90% and definitely 100% during engage.

Scorchrazor + Sigil of Nullification - 1 strip per target, 5 targets, 900 range. It also eats 1 stack of stability but that doesnt really matter in engage because you will have like 8.

Only this combo gives you 4 strip in first second on a selected target at 900 range. Plus another 3 over 5 secs. You can add Brutality (trait in Devastation) with source of quickness to that. It doesn't stop there but other strips can't be focus like that.

You'll want to have a rene per subgroup. Lack of strips is not a problem in today's meta at all. I wouldn't be surprised if Banish enchantment gets nerfed in near future. If a group coordinates and focuses there are no boons. Renes don't get big strip numbers over a longer fight, Scourge and even Spb will have bigger. But it's absolutely devastating during engages which today are pretty much focus strip + pull + kill.

 

[Sheff.4851]

Just now, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

Ya same build. It's all the same.

It's not that firebrand prioritized healing over boons (its job is to be a stability bot)...its that minstrel gear (and concentration as a stat) is BIS choice for heal firebrand (boon brand whatever) due to bountiful maintence oil, hence why its not running harrier gear or the other wacky oils (which all provide concentration. bountiful maintence oil is one of the only few oils that do not) The same logic applies to pretty much any support build with the intent on healing as being part of their job.

Gotcha. Okay. We are talking about the same thing then. So if you aren't running concentration-based gear on your Heal Firebrand, what are you running? Harrier, Minstrel, and Celestial all include concentration. If you're running healing power, but not concentration, are you on something like Cleric's, or Apothercary's?

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

3 minutes ago, Sheff.4851 said:

Gotcha. Okay. We are talking about the same thing then. So if you aren't running concentration-based gear on your Heal Firebrand, what are you running? Harrier, Minstrel, and Celestial all include concentration. If you're running healing power, but not concentration, are you on something like Cleric's, or Apothercary's?

I think you maybe...mis-read what i wrote? Minstrel gear, is BIS (best in slot) for a support firebrand. All other stat choices, are not the best choice. That means that any other stat you pick (magi's, clerics etc) is going to give you less than the optimal amount of healing for a healing character.

 

[Sheff.4851]

48 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

I think you maybe...mis-read what i wrote? Minstrel gear, is BIS (best in slot) for a support firebrand. All other stat choices, are not the best choice. That means that any other stat you pick (magi's, clerics etc) is going to give you less than the optimal amount of healing for a healing character.

 

I was going off of when you said this:

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Ironically, and now this is just a personal anecdote...i dont even run concentration based stuff anymore...because i know that i will always have boons on me, and i know they will almost never be stripped while standing in bombs (rather, even when they are stripped, they are just instantly replaced with new boons, and hit duration cap fairly quickly). When you consider that the duration of boons on many skills are already quiet short (say 3 seconds) investing 1000 stats for an additional 1.5 - 2 seconds, is not worth it, because then, you are either just duration capping or putting to many stats for very little gain (diminishing returns) which serves no real purpose.

I think what you meant was Concentration-based sigils and utilities, and what I read it as was gear with Concentration stats. Maybe that's the disconnect -- since "investing 1000 stats" is way above what you'd get out of choosing a wrench, I assumed you were talking about prefixes specifically.

[Mike.3196]

On 7/24/2024 at 11:34 AM, Sheff.4851 said:

As somebody who commands boonball groups, I'm not sure I agree. I go to significant lengths to make sure that people in my squads understand how to play the game. In reality, it's usually 90% of players in the squad carrying the other 10% that spend most of their time brain afk and not paying attention, and it's a trend that I see when I run with other commanders as well. Groups of large players aren't inherently less skilled, and in many cases it's the opposite, some players in larger squads are there to kill time between roaming, sPvP, or GvG, and play at an extremely high level.

The first part you said.  There a reason anet buffed boons balls  it wasn't to make it more competitive it was to make it more easier for players. The reason before that those same grps using boonballs were getting farmed by randoms. Idk how you play the game for so long don't realize skill curve so low and kitten easy cause anet made it that way. Idk how you think boonballing is hard.

The spvp ,gvg  part.

Your talking about 5 players  maybe 7 that are high lvl maybe and for roaming in a zergs any player would get run over by a solo roamer any day there's like 10 people in those could hold there own but cele exist so idk.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

4 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

I was going off of when you said this:

I think what you meant was Concentration-based sigils and utilities, and what I read it as was gear with Concentration stats. Maybe that's the disconnect -- since "investing 1000 stats" is way above what you'd get out of choosing a wrench, I assumed you were talking about prefixes specifically.

i don't think i follow what your saying here. but what im saying is straight forward: ministrel gear, is bis for heal firebrand. all other stat sets, produce less healing. there is no reason to play anything but ministrel, even if you didn't care about concentration and increased durations on boons.

You get what i mean? Playing Magi's...produces less healing, than playing Minstrels. Playing Clerics produces less healing than playing Minstrels...playing Apothecary produces less healing than playing Ministrels.

There's no reason to play these stat sets, because they do not do better healing than minstrels. Therefor regardless of whether you care about concentration, it is BIS for Heal firebrand. The same logic applies to other builds...and the reason why minstrels, even though it has less healing power than magi's...is because it has 800 stats worth of concentration, that bountiful maintence oil takes advantage of and rewards the player for taking that stat...even if you had no boons...it would still be BIS on the class for healing.

That property of Minstrel's being BIS, is exclusive to firebrand, and a few other support builds (practically every meta support build that's ever existed) but its not BIS for a select few of them, which i explain later on in the posts.

Edited July 26 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Sheff.4851]

45 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

i don't think i follow what your saying here. but what im saying is straight forward: ministrel gear, is bis for heal firebrand. all other stat sets, produce less healing. there is no reason to play anything but ministrel, even if you didn't care about concentration and increased durations on boons.

You get what i mean? Playing Magi's...produces less healing, than playing Minstrels. Playing Clerics produces less healing than playing Minstrels...playing Apothecary produces less healing than playing Ministrels.

There's no reason to play these stat sets, because they do not do better healing than minstrels. Therefor regardless of whether you care about concentration, it is BIS for Heal firebrand. The same logic applies to other builds...and the reason why minstrels, even though it has less healing power than magi's...is because it has 800 stats worth of concentration, that bountiful maintence oil takes advantage of and rewards the player for taking that stat...even if you had no boons...it would still be BIS on the class for healing.

That property of Minstrel's being BIS, is exclusive to firebrand, and a few other support builds (practically every meta support build that's ever existed) but its not BIS for a select few of them, which i explain later on in the posts.

Sure. But if you're running Minstrels you are running Concentration-based stuff. That's the part I'm confused by, is when you said that you were fine giving out three second boons on Heal Firebrand, when Stand Your Ground on Minstrel Firebrand isn't 3 seconds, it's 12.

[Sheff.4851]

3 hours ago, Mike.3196 said:

The first part you said.  There a reason anet buffed boons balls  it wasn't to make it more competitive it was to make it more easier for players. The reason before that those same grps using boonballs were getting farmed by randoms. Idk how you play the game for so long don't realize skill curve so low and kitten easy cause anet made it that way. Idk how you think boonballing is hard.

The spvp ,gvg  part.

Your talking about 5 players  maybe 7 that are high lvl maybe and for roaming in a zergs any player would get run over by a solo roamer any day there's like 10 people in those could hold there own but cele exist so idk.

You should come to one of my squads sometime, and see how you measure up against the 5-7 high level players! Maybe we'll get linked soon. 🙂

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

1 hour ago, Sheff.4851 said:

Sure. But if you're running Minstrels you are running Concentration-based stuff.  That's the part I'm confused by when you said that you were fine giving out three second boons on Heal Firebrand, when Stand Your Ground on Minstrel Firebrand isn't 3 seconds, it's 12.

Minstrels is the "having a cake, and eating it too" stat set for certain support builds. If you stack concentration rather than for healing modifiers for those builds...then Minstrels is no longer BIS, Harriers and Hylek Oils would be BIS right...but nobody does that. The reason is cause of healing modifiers...that's what one is optimizing for, and concentration is the icing on that cake.

I think the reason you're getting confused about this is because your underestimating how important outgoing heal modifiers are and their ability to improve the healing of a build. It's equivalent to increasing the skill coefficients of all of your healing skills. if you have 50% healing modifiers, this is the same thing as adding a 0.5 skill coefficient to all of your healing skills. Having a 100% healing modifiers, is like adding 1.0 coefficients to your skills. If your skills have 1.5 skill coefficients, your effectively making it a 2.5 coefficient skill.

Say you are a DPS class that outputs boons. but then i said "Hey, you can have 100% boon duration rather than 70% boon duration...but it will cost you 50% of your dps." You would probably say "hmmm...idk bro" that is the impact that outgoing healing modifiers have have with respect to a build, that has a primary task of keeping people alive. If you had to choose between DPS, and increasing boon durations by a few seconds...that's a tall order. 

Firebrand is one of the few special cases, where they can say "ya i can sacrifice 50% of my healing output for longer stability" because of how important stability is to the game mode, and how much that build is shaped by Stability output, so nobody is gonna castrate anyone for playing sub-optimally, taking Harrier's instead of Minstrels (maybe) But other classes, that output way less important boons could (or should) really care less about sacrificing almost all of their healing output for a boons that are either not important enough, are going to get stripped, hit duration cap, or are too short to make any real use of out of in a fight...especially when healing is their primary job.

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you were fine giving out three second boons on Heal Firebrand, when Stand Your Ground on Minstrel Firebrand isn't 3 seconds, it's 12.

Not sure why you're saying this because I never mentioned stand your ground in particular, nor did I say stand your ground is 3 seconds in duration. 

I've been talking globally about support builds, and skills, in a very general, overarching way.

Edited July 26 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

offtopic (actually on topic since this is related to celestial firebrand)

Quickfire is absolute trash. Take anything else but this trait. its awful.

Just sayin' i wouldn't trust anything on meta-battle.

[Kozumi.5816]

Tried WvW again.

Every fight is over instantly, I'm talking 2-5 seconds.

You're either CCed/instantly killed, or roll over the enemy, No inbetween, ever.

You're basically playing an RTS but you're a single unit in a 200 food army.

Your contribution and personal skill does not exist.

You still need 10% of a squad(10) to be Firebrand.

Roaming? People quite literally instantly teleport and get out draw distance vision INSTANTLY, it's hilarious.

I'm not sure who this PvP is for, but it it quite possibly the worst PvP I've ever played in 30 years of gaming.

MOBA PvP is not trash like this, FPS PvP is not trash like this, no popular PvP game is trash like this.

This games combat is great, fluid, fun, classes are cool. But it's PvP is a -10/10.

Edited July 26 by Kozumi.5816

[Riba.3271]

Step 1: Start with boon/condi duration changes (to nerf cele/minstrel):

Concentration: 1% boon duration per 15 -> 1% boon duration per 25.  Expertise: 1% condi duration per 15 -> 1% condi duration per 25

Step 2: Follow up with specific boon/buff adjustments:

Quickness action boost: 50% -> 25%, Alacrity cooldown reduction: 25% -> 15%. Superspeed/Speed Relic: Movement speed 100% -> 66%.

Step 3: Return some damage to CC skills so smaller groups are not limited in their damage output first couple seconds.

Crowd control skill damage: 0% -> 25%

Step 4: Fix siege balance

Shield gens bubble around them and limited to 1/spot. Wall/Gate hitpoints increased by 25% on T2 and T3 objectives so defenders have time to show up. Additionally Watchtower only actives when tower is contested to keep NE/NW on alpine and inner towers on EB possible to capture if unscouted.

Step 5: Make mapstate playable when smaller groups log in

Keeps should take 50% more dolyaks to upgrade and Stonemist castle 100%, so smaller teams can attack something that doesn't take too long.  Additionally remove desert borderlands so people are willing to play any servers map.

Step most important: Return monoservers

So people care enough to log in, defend and group up... And can setup communication channels to call offline people.

Edited July 26 by Riba.3271

[Dawdler.8521]

6 minutes ago, Riba.3271 said:

Additionally remove desert borderlands so people are willing to play any servers map.

If I’m not willing to play on EB can we remove that too? 

[Riba.3271]

1 minute ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

10 minutes ago, Riba.3271 said:

Additionally remove desert borderlands so people are willing to play any servers map.

If I’m not willing to play on EB can we remove that too? 

We can add another EB since it is most popular map.

[Dawdler.8521]

1 hour ago, Riba.3271 said:

We can add another EB since it is most popular map.

That's not how demands for change work, Anet should listen to me.

[Mindwhip.8057]

On 7/24/2024 at 2:34 PM, Sheff.4851 said:

As somebody who commands boonball groups, I'm not sure I agree. I go to significant lengths to make sure that people in my squads understand how to play the game. In reality, it's usually 90% of players in the squad carrying the other 10% that spend most of their time brain afk and not paying attention, and it's a trend that I see when I run with other commanders as well. Groups of large players aren't inherently less skilled, and in many cases it's the opposite, some players in larger squads are there to kill time between roaming, sPvP, or GvG, and play at an extremely high level.

Commander's should be reduced to a max team of 25-30 players. This will force other Commander's to coordinate and not just follow the one pin. Some boons shouldn't effect the quantity of players they do currently and some boons, for example Super Speed, should only affect the player activating the boon, not the entire squad of 5.

[Sheff.4851]

40 minutes ago, Mindwhip.8057 said:

Commander's should be reduced to a max team of 25-30 players. This will force other Commander's to coordinate and not just follow the one pin. Some boons shouldn't effect the quantity of players they do currently and some boons, for example Super Speed, should only affect the player activating the boon, not the entire squad of 5.

Did you know that when Guild Wars 2 released, commanders were limited to just five people, because the squad UI didn't exist? And people still ran around in groups of 50, made up of individual little parties of 5, because coordination among multiple players to get better results is one of the core philosophies of pretty much any MMO. Changing the squad cap does absolutely nothing to boonball tendencies.