The Current Boon Ball Meta and Balancing Suggestions

[Hesione.9412]

49 minutes ago, Mike.3196 said:

If you think cele is fine then you don't actually play the game cause cele single handly and killing small scale and roaming. Other thing is if every single person you fight is cele and only cele that's a balance issue

I play cele to roam and survive. It also means against players I do little damage. It's a trade-off. Remove cele, you remove some roamers, and WvW dies even faster. I am not playing a mesmer, thief, or willybender though. (Why would a thief use celestial?)

[Sheff.4851]

17 hours ago, Hesione.9412 said:

I play cele to roam and survive. It also means against players I do little damage. It's a trade-off. Remove cele, you remove some roamers, and WvW dies even faster. I am not playing a mesmer, thief, or willybender though. (Why would a thief use celestial?)

Remove Cele and you also fix some of the most oppressive boonball professions right now -- Celestial enables Firebrand, Renegade, and Scourge to deal significant damage while still allowing them to hit 100% boon duration, giving them even better boon application. Removing Celestial would force these professions to switch back to Minstrel to preserve boons, but preventing them from doing any damage, or switch to Trailblazer or Marauder to preserve damage, but lose their boon uptime.

With Celestial, you don't have to choose. You just get every stat.

[Draygo.9473]

Cele isn't the problem. Target cap and ->passive<- stability is the problem. Boonball switching to minstrel does not change much other than boonball vs boonball and probably makes the game performance worse because damage is lower so fights will last longer. 

I don't see removing cele as an option. How exactly would you accomplish this? Introduced normalized stats into wvw like sPvP has? Does anet want to dedicate devtime to that? The cele discussion just feels like a pointless waste of time to me. 

Anet can keep balancing the game to more active gameplay, make stability last a shorter amount of time, limit the stab stacks, allow dodge to work against all CC. 

I also think something should be done to discourage stacking, upping target cap is one way. GW2 combat feels great 5v5, but 30v30 it just feels silly to me as the incentives switch from avoiding taking damage to distributing damage. 

[Sheff.4851]

47 minutes ago, Draygo.9473 said:

Cele isn't the problem. Target cap and ->passive<- stability is the problem. Boonball switching to minstrel does not change much other than boonball vs boonball and probably makes the game performance worse because damage is lower so fights will last longer. 

I don't see removing cele as an option. How exactly would you accomplish this? Introduced normalized stats into wvw like sPvP has? Does anet want to dedicate devtime to that? The cele discussion just feels like a pointless waste of time to me. 

Anet can keep balancing the game to more active gameplay, make stability last a shorter amount of time, limit the stab stacks, allow dodge to work against all CC. 

I also think something should be done to discourage stacking, upping target cap is one way. GW2 combat feels great 5v5, but 30v30 it just feels silly to me as the incentives switch from avoiding taking damage to distributing damage. 

You'd remove Concentration and Expertise from it.

[Draygo.9473]

26 minutes ago, Sheff.4851 said:

You'd remove Concentration and Expertise from it.

How.

[Sheff.4851]

6 minutes ago, Draygo.9473 said:

How.

The same way that Concentration and Expertise was added to it in like 2018 or whenever. Celestial hasn't included Conc/Exp since day one.

[Draygo.9473]

That wont balance boonball, and will nerf PvE, I don't see anet going with that option at all. A pointless change with little effect. 

[Sheff.4851]

3 minutes ago, Draygo.9473 said:

That wont balance boonball, and will nerf PvE, I don't see anet going with that option at all. A pointless change with little effect. 

Interesting. I think it's currently the biggest factor in the four-support comp that people are running, since you can have three of your supports pull double duty as damage professions as well. It's not uncommon for Celestial Firebrand to be competitive on damage and downs contribution while giving Stability at 100% boon duration and cleansing conditions, all at the same time. When you have one profession that powerful, you don't really need to specialize the rest of your comp, you can just stack them up. Can you explain why you think it won't balance the current boon meta, based on the Celestial professions that those players are actively using?

[Mike.3196]

20 hours ago, Hesione.9412 said:

I play cele to roam and survive. It also means against players I do little damage. It's a trade-off. Remove cele, you remove some roamers, and WvW dies even faster. I am not playing a mesmer, thief, or willybender though. (Why would a thief use celestial?)

The issue with cele is it's to strong if they nerfed and or adjusted like taking out what they added on it then would be fine but when everyone you see is cele something wrong cause before that there was actual build diversity now there's 0

[Mike.3196]

On 7/22/2024 at 11:06 AM, Sheff.4851 said:

I dunno, why don't people who are lesser organized want to use powerful tools that the game makes available to them? If you're outnumbered that's one thing, but if you're intentionally choosing to be disorganized, and not coordinate, it's hardly the game's fault when somebody more prepared shows up and rolls you. Especially because the coordinated groups are going to find any solution available to them within the game mechanics. If you nerf boonballs, they'll move on to the next tactics that reward organization and coordination, and then people will want to nerf that instead. And obviously, if you change the balance of your game so that coordination and organization don't matter, what's the point of it being a large-scale PvP game mode in an MMO. That sounds like a single player experience at that point, which isn't really what an MMO does.

Your wrong when you think that  needing  boonballing will do nothing cause it will actually force the boonballs learn  how to play the game. I really hope your understand that the boonballs  is carrying 90% players without it they would fall over. And like maybe on na like 2-3 guild would be fine 

[Sheff.4851]

1 minute ago, Mike.3196 said:

Your wrong when you think that  needing  boonballing will do nothing cause it will actually force the boonballs learn  how to play the game. I really hope your understand that the boonballs  is carrying 90% players without it they would fall over. And like maybe on na like 2-3 guild would be fine 

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.

[Draygo.9473]

1 hour ago, Sheff.4851 said:

Interesting. I think it's currently the biggest factor in the four-support comp that people are running, since you can have three of your supports pull double duty as damage professions as well. It's not uncommon for Celestial Firebrand to be competitive on damage and downs contribution while giving Stability at 100% boon duration and cleansing conditions, all at the same time. When you have one profession that powerful, you don't really need to specialize the rest of your comp, you can just stack them up. Can you explain why you think it won't balance the current boon meta, based on the Celestial professions that those players are actively using?

Can you explain how it would shake up the meta to allow other options other than boonball? I dont see how. The amount of damage a boonball can do is only really relevant against another boonball. This change does not touch the defensive nature of boonball or lead to more proactive play. When a boonball runs over a group of 5-10 players in a 50 boonball vs 50 cloud, missing a little damage isnt going to make any difference. Yes the boonball meta will change, but it still will be optimal unless you start nerfing passive mechanics. 

I dont think boonball players are bad players at all, I think they will adapt just fine to nerfing celestial, and celestial touches more than just people in a boonball, it touches roaming, pve, solo builds. And these easily accessible builds allows lesser skilled players to enjoy these modes while making that players contribution meaningful. 

You need to deal with the stability mechanic, you need to deal with the target cap in order to have any real effect. 

Edited July 24 by Draygo.9473

[ChrisWhitey.9076]

1 minute ago, Draygo.9473 said:

You need to deal with the stability mechanic, you need to deal with the target cap in order to have any real effect. 

You can't really just delete stab from the game though or have periods where there is no stab. If two large groups fought each other it is over in seconds by the fast group to basically on plug the other teams controller. Reworking stab is not a bad idea to add a concept of diminishing returns on cc but that could take years to perfect as you are rebuilding how cc works from the ground up.

[Draygo.9473]

Just now, ChrisWhitey.9076 said:

You can't really just delete stab from the game though or have periods where there is no stab. If two large groups fought each other it is over in seconds by the fast group to basically on plug the other teams controller. Reworking stab is not a bad idea to add a concept of diminishing returns on cc but that could take years to perfect as you are rebuilding how cc works from the ground up.

Its how it used to be, don't really see a problem with fights being over quickly. And yes I have stated that I think pin sniping skills should be nerfed along with any stability rework (single target ranged pulls), and all CC should be dodgeable. The idea that certain ccs can only be stabbed through is really bad design in a mode where they likely cant be seen in all the effect bloat and is inconsistent with the rest of the game design. 

If you want to change the viability of boonball you have to do something that allows players to split apart a boonball. If balance was to be achieved a cloud of players (organized, running optimal builds) should be able to attrition a boonball at roughly the same rate as the boonball is able to run over small groups of players in the cloud and send them to greyscreen. 

[Sheff.4851]

9 minutes ago, Draygo.9473 said:

Can you explain how it would shake up the meta to allow other options other than boonball? I dont see how. The amount of damage a boonball can do is only really relevant against another boonball. This change does not touch the defensive nature of boonball or lead to more proactive play. When a boonball runs over a group of 5-10 players in a 50 boonball vs 50 cloud, missing a little damage isnt going to make any difference. Yes the boonball meta will change, but it still will be optimal unless you start nerfing passive mechanics. 

I dont think boonball players are bad players at all, I think they will adapt just fine to nerfing celestial, and celestial touches more than just people in a boonball, it touches roaming, pve, solo builds. And these easily accessible builds allows lesser skilled players to enjoy these modes while making that players contribution meaningful. 

You need to deal with the stability mechanic, you need to deal with the target cap in order to have any real effect. 

Sure. The primary role of a Firebrand in an organized group is to provide defensive boons -- Stability, Resistance, Aegis, and Protection being the big four. To that end, the single most important stat for a Firebrand in a group is your Concentration, to maximize the uptime of your boons. Unlike most other stats (Power, Toughness, etc) Concentration has a cap, which means that you're heavily incentivized to use only as much Concentration as you need, before allocating your stat points elsewhere for more efficiency. And it just so happens that Celestial provides the most raw stats overall, and just barely enough Concentration to cap your boon duration. 

Same argument for Renegade. Renegade is a second boon support profession, primarily, one of the best professions for providing Alacrity. And like Firebrand, the Concentration provided by Celestial is sufficient to maintain permanent Alacrity for your group by using Orders from Above. The rest of Celestial's stat points contribute to your damage, letting you contribute to your group with damage instead of just being a support stick.

For Scourge, the Concentration from Celestial is less important. What's more important for Scourge is that it makes efficient use out of just about every single stat on Celestial. It generates significant condition damage through corrupting boons to Torment with Spiteful Spirit, Devouring Darkness, Well of Corruption, Trail of Anguish, and Sandstorm Shroud. It also has reasonable power coefficients on Greatsword, allowing it to do power damage with a reasonable crit chance. The healing power from Celestial increases your barrier, while the vitality increases your life force, and the toughness makes you tankier and harder to kill. Even the Concentration isn't wasted, because I think Scourge now generates Might and Vigor with its barrier instead of Alacrity (I could be wrong).

Firebrand, Renegade, Scourge composes the core of the "four support" meta that's often talked about for the current balance environment, so I think it's fairly obvious to see that, when three of those four professions are all running Celestial, that there's an issue with Celestial specifically.

As far as the fix goes, removing Concentration from Celestial forces these groups to make tradeoffs in their profession builds and comp choices. If Alacrity is the most important thing you have your Renegades doing, they need to sacrifice either damage for it, running something like Minstrel or Giver, or they need to sacrifice survivability for it, running something like Zealot. Both of these changes hurt your ability to fight against another boonball. If you sacrifice damage, you now don't have enough damage to punch through other groups running four supports, and if you sacrifice survivability, it's more likely that a random Overheat or Arc Divider puts you directly into downstate. So now you need to drop some of your worst supports, to make room for more damage, so that you can generate downs when you fight another boonball.

You're right in saying that the only time group damage matters is when you're fighting another group...but that's most of what a boonball does, is fight other boonballs. Nobody is running a comp so that they can run over ten roamers with fifty. A comp isn't necessary for that. But a comp is necessary for fighting another group of fifty, and those are the fights that influence the way that boonballs construct their groups.

[Draygo.9473]

Increasing tradeoffs isnt a bad thing, but you are nerfing roamers/solo players more than your nerfing boonballers by nerfing cele. So you are not shaking up the balance between boonball and cloud. Generally when people are complaining about boonball its because the only option to defeat a boonball (a good one, mind you) is to form a boonball yourself. So far you haven't provided any argument or solution that would change this dynamic. 

[XenesisII.1540]

3 minutes ago, Sheff.4851 said:

As far as the fix goes, removing Concentration from Celestial forces these groups to make tradeoffs in their profession builds and comp choices. If Alacrity is the most important thing you have your Renegades doing, they need to sacrifice either damage for it, running something like Minstrel or Giver, or they need to sacrifice survivability for it, running something like Zealot.

This is the way.

Concentration and Expertise should have never been added to Celestial, or certainly not without adjusting the other stats for it at the very least.

[Hesione.9412]

3 hours ago, Mike.3196 said:

The issue with cele is it's to strong if they nerfed and or adjusted like taking out what they added on it then would be fine but when everyone you see is cele something wrong cause before that there was actual build diversity now there's 0

There was not much in the way of build diversity, apart from roaming - and then only limited diversity. Builds in GW2 are cookie-cutter for the most part. If someone comes up with a build that is a dramatic improvement over other builds for a particular situation, Anet nerfs it. Except thief, and now willybender.

[Kozumi.5816]

On 7/23/2024 at 5:48 PM, Hesione.9412 said:

I play cele to roam and survive. It also means against players I do little damage. It's a trade-off. Remove cele, you remove some roamers, and WvW dies even faster. I am not playing a mesmer, thief, or willybender though. (Why would a thief use celestial?)

Cele literally does more damage than most pure DPS specs due to 25 might + fury...

[Hesione.9412]

1 hour ago, Kozumi.5816 said:

Cele literally does more damage than most pure DPS specs due to 25 might + fury...

Might is a boon, so is fury. Throwing on cele armour does not automatically give you boons.

[Sheff.4851]

13 minutes ago, Hesione.9412 said:

Might is a boon, so is fury. Throwing on cele armour does not automatically give you boons.

It automatically extends their duration, though.

[Lai.6259]

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.

Edited July 25 by Lai.6259

[Zyreva.1078]

3 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.

If you are talking about a limit to how many hits can be blocked and not abaut a target cap - then that hurts small numbers way more than boon blobs. Because the latter still won't care about projectiles just like they don'rt care much about anything else that gets thrown at them currently, while smaller numbers lose the ability to defend themselves against larger numbers. Not everything should get countered by more spam.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

16 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

Sure. The primary role of a Firebrand in an organized group is to provide defensive boons -- Stability, Resistance, Aegis, and Protection being the big four. To that end, the single most important stat for a Firebrand in a group is your Concentration, to maximize the uptime of your boons. Unlike most other stats (Power, Toughness, etc) Concentration has a cap, which means that you're heavily incentivized to use only as much Concentration as you need, before allocating your stat points elsewhere for more efficiency. And it just so happens that Celestial provides the most raw stats overall, and just barely enough Concentration to cap your boon duration. 

Same argument for Renegade. Renegade is a second boon support profession, primarily, one of the best professions for providing Alacrity. And like Firebrand, the Concentration provided by Celestial is sufficient to maintain permanent Alacrity for your group by using Orders from Above. The rest of Celestial's stat points contribute to your damage, letting you contribute to your group with damage instead of just being a support stick.

For Scourge, the Concentration from Celestial is less important. What's more important for Scourge is that it makes efficient use out of just about every single stat on Celestial. It generates significant condition damage through corrupting boons to Torment with Spiteful Spirit, Devouring Darkness, Well of Corruption, Trail of Anguish, and Sandstorm Shroud. It also has reasonable power coefficients on Greatsword, allowing it to do power damage with a reasonable crit chance. The healing power from Celestial increases your barrier, while the vitality increases your life force, and the toughness makes you tankier and harder to kill. Even the Concentration isn't wasted, because I think Scourge now generates Might and Vigor with its barrier instead of Alacrity (I could be wrong).

Firebrand, Renegade, Scourge composes the core of the "four support" meta that's often talked about for the current balance environment, so I think it's fairly obvious to see that, when three of those four professions are all running Celestial, that there's an issue with Celestial specifically.

As far as the fix goes, removing Concentration from Celestial forces these groups to make tradeoffs in their profession builds and comp choices. If Alacrity is the most important thing you have your Renegades doing, they need to sacrifice either damage for it, running something like Minstrel or Giver, or they need to sacrifice survivability for it, running something like Zealot. Both of these changes hurt your ability to fight against another boonball. If you sacrifice damage, you now don't have enough damage to punch through other groups running four supports, and if you sacrifice survivability, it's more likely that a random Overheat or Arc Divider puts you directly into downstate. So now you need to drop some of your worst supports, to make room for more damage, so that you can generate downs when you fight another boonball.

You're right in saying that the only time group damage matters is when you're fighting another group...but that's most of what a boonball does, is fight other boonballs. Nobody is running a comp so that they can run over ten roamers with fifty. A comp isn't necessary for that. But a comp is necessary for fighting another group of fifty, and those are the fights that influence the way that boonballs construct their groups.

Hello. I'm gonna have to disagree with you man. Celestials has always had this property for a very long time (as you said for nearly 6 years). What changed, over the past few years (culminating to this past year) has been about four things

1) Boon corruption and boon-strip has essentially been removed from the game.

2) Over the past couple of years, the game has been getting streamlined. unique, but less useful mechanics, were getting replaced with functioning mechanics. This skill for instance, is an example of this streamlining. In some sense this was a good thing...because it made builds and skills that weren't previously functional, functional, but that came at the cost of introducing a lot more boons into the game.

3) As a result of boons replacing unique mechanics, and boon-strip leaving the game, boons no longer have any real way to end their duration other than to just run out. So as you add more players to a squad, players just simply hitting skills on their actually functioning builds, will get their boons stacked up...in duration until they hit duration cap.

4) Target cap underwent a normalization (To a target cap of 5) starting from 2020. This is a much deeper topic...but basically this drastically reduces the amount of damage one can do to a group of larger and larger players, through an effect i call dispersion (Where damage packets from skills, get dispersed between different players leading to less damage done per player). 

All these together along with some build changes (like the reintroduction of Antitoxin Scrapper+Purity of Purpose) have made boons a lot more prevalent than they were prior, but also this is yet another symptom of the deeper issues which are about damage dispersal and target cap : which is not a solvable balance problem.

So why do I think this, aside from just observation : I am a major math nerd, and do very deep nerdy research on this game. I was actually inspired recently to make a stat optimizer for the healing equation, because as it would turn out, stat contribution to builds and skills, are non-trivial : whether you are wasting your stats, is highly dependent on the skills that you are pressing. The Optimizer basically shows the relationship between all of the variables  for that equation(Outgoing Heal modifiers, Skill Coefficient, Base Healing and Healing Power) and by and large, similiar optimizers can be made for the other schools of magic (Damage and Conditions)... the equations are a bit harder for those, so that will take a bit more time. I plan to share this optimizer soon (maybe in a couple days)

But at least for healing, it allows one to see whether they are wasting stats (suffering a diminishing return), or if they are gaining exponential value from their stats. This relates to celestials and is important because "more raw stats" does not equate to "better." Like i stated, the relationship between these equations is non-trivial and in high likely hood, players are more than likely suffering diminishing returns on their stat investment, in exchange for hybridization.

An additional component to these problems is just the availability of deep game information. For one, people do not even know that dispersion exists, and that it effects their ability to do damage to groups. The second is that people are often not even playing their builds in a way that is anywhere near close to optimal, nor are the builds themselves constructed in ways that are close to optimal. Part of gaining that information, is just doing math, but most people don't do real math. Not that people should, but the point is that if we want to quantitatively analyze the problems in this game, math is where it starts and where it should end. If we then talk about the qualitative nature of the game, things that can't be captured with math, like say, commanders simply playing celestials because its meta...then that is a different story and a different kind of argument. 

Btw I'm not even against turning off expertise and concentration on celestials. I don't even play it, either in roaming or zerging. I just do deep research into these topics and want people to know the actual story... what the truth really is... which math absolves. What it says is the story, is that sure...celestials might leave the meta probably, but it won't probably change the nature of boon ball...and the more extremist view : it will have no impact on the real problems in the game whatsoever. Same is true with Minstrels, where similiar arguments exist.

Edited July 25 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Sheff.4851]

2 hours ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

1) Boon corruption and boon-strip has essentially been removed from the game.

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.

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2) Over the past couple of years, the game has been getting streamlined. unique, but less useful mechanics, were getting replaced with functioning mechanics. This skill for instance, is an example of this streamlining. In some sense this was a good thing...because it made builds and skills that weren't previously functional, functional, but that came at the cost of introducing a lot more boons into the game.

I'm not sure what part of Lucid Singularity you want me to notice, but if it's the removal of Alacrity from it, the current state of Alacrity in World vs. World is way, way too strong. It needs to reduce skill cooldowns by like 10% instead of what it is now. On the other hand, if you mean Overload removing movement-impairing conditions, sure. I think the value of a relatively unique effect like that is reflected in how many people run Relic of Febe, and the change to how Resistance works, so that you can access these unique effects without being forced to comp for a single profession to access it.

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3) As a result of boons replacing unique mechanics, and boon-strip leaving the game, boons no longer have any real way to end their duration other than to just run out. So as you add more players to a squad, players just simply hitting skills on their actually functioning builds, will get their boons stacked up...in duration until they hit duration cap.

They do. You just add more players that can remove boons, instead of adding random players. You shift your Berserkers to Dagger. You run double Scourge per party for extra strips. You also coordinate your boon removal, because boons are easy to remove faster than they are applied for a coordinated group. The Alacrity given by Orders from Above is on a 20 second cooldown (15 second cooldown practically speaking with Alacrity). The Stability from Stand Your Ground is on a 20 second cooldown, again, 15 seconds practically speaking. But a commander calling for Well of Corruption, or strips on the head, will synchronize every Renegade's Banish Enchantment at the same time, removing every boon and making the critical ones, like Stability, Resistance, and Alacrity, more difficult to reapply because of cooldowns. This is a thing that commanders look for, they wait to see big cooldowns go out from an enemy group, and then call for strips to remove those boons, giving their group an opportunity to attack.

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4) Target cap underwent a normalization (To a target cap of 5) starting from 2020. This is a much deeper topic...but basically this drastically reduces the amount of damage one can do to a group of larger and larger players, through an effect i call dispersion (Where damage packets from skills, get dispersed between different players leading to less damage done per player). 

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.