ZephyrusSpring.5728 Posted September 4 Share Posted September 4 In this thread I want to talk about how the meta-boons, quickness and alacrity, have been designated to certain elite specialisations and not others. I will discuss my reasoning for why certain specs should have which boon, and we'll go into some of the theory behind what makes a good support. This is an extremely long post so I would appreciate a degree of professionalism in your responses. I'll start with a quick ramble about the pure dps specs. Pure DPS What exactly is the purpose of a pure dps specialisation? They're not allowed to do more damage than the specs which can provide these meta boons (quickness and alacrity), so why do the pure dps specs not also have access to these boons? Many players don't care that one spec per class doesn't have access and the existence of "pure dps" specs is not a large concern to them, but they do care about the meta boons being assigned to the "wrong" spec. A common topic is that one spec should have been given a meta boon instead of another which demonstrates that most people accept the paradigm of pure dps specs. Still, I would like to get a proper answer for why this paradigm exists, or why it is so rigid. Would the world end if one class had a spec give alacrity and two give quickness without any being pure dps? Meta Boon Assignments The meta boon assignments are currently as follows: Warrior: Quickness: Berserker | Alacrity: Bladesworn Guardian: Quickness: Firebrand | Alacrity: Willbender Revenant: Quickness: Herald | Alacrity: Renegade Ranger: Quickness: Untamed | Alacrity: Druid Engineer: Quickness: Scrapper | Alacrity: Mechanist Thief: Quickness: Deadeye | Alacrity: Specter Elementalist: Quickness: Catalyst | Alacrity: Tempest Mesmer: Quickness: Chronomancer | Alacrity: Mirage/Chronomancer Necromancer: Quickness: Harbinger | Alacrity: Scourge There are many opinions that such and such spec should have this or that boon, so I'll look into the "support capacity" of each spec because I believe that is the most important metric when discussing the sharing of boons. Trying to force a meta boon onto a class that struggles to share other boons or healing does not lead to a good outcome, and I'll demonstrate as much as we get to the particular specs I have in mind. Support Capacity It is my opinion that the support capacity of a spec largely revolves around how reactive you can afford to be. If your ability to generate boons and healing requires you to constantly attack or move then you'll struggle to cover certain situations where there's nothing available to hit. Likewise if the spec requires you to go into a mode or swap between modes then you'll run into situations where your hands are tied juggling your spec mechanics. This capacity can be broken up into two categories which I will refer to as the skeleton and the flesh. The skeleton refers to the structure of the elite specs, e.g. mode swapping, whilst the flesh refers to things that can be more easily changed such as utility skills and traits. I'm not an expert on every class so if you think I've missed something vital please let me know. Warrior Meta Boons & Support Capacity The overwhelming opinion on warriors is that Spellbreaker should have alacrity instead of Bladesworn. The common reasoning for this is that Bladesworn is not a good healer. Some people argue about thematics but I actually don't care about that. The follow up question to this is how could you give Spellbreaker alacrity? Bladesworn performs fine as a boondps though it is still beholden to all the problems Bladesworns face in general and as such it is not overly popular, but not non-existent. In a dedicated healer role Bladesworn is almost unplayable. Providing alacrity through dragon slashing strongly conflicts with the way warriors provide healing because the gunsaber is absolutely antithetical to healing. You have to spend time in your dragon trigger mode to provide alacrity which then puts you into your gunsaber mode which can't heal. I have never personally seen anyone play Bladeworn healer in any group I've been in. The skeleton of this spec is not conducive to healing but it can be resolved by changing the flesh. Spellbreaker is much closer to core warrior and as such it is a lot more free and open to building towards support. The spec has the capacity to run both the staff and the warhorn which is a step above Bladesworn. The utility bar is also a lot more open to running core warrior's support utilities. Spellbreaker itself lacks a lot of supporting capacity, so I'd imagine a Spellbreaker support would really just be core warrior support plus a meta boon. The skeleton of spellbreaker does not particularly help or hinder its ability to heal. Berserker plays very similarly to Druid when you look at it from a support perspective. You want to be in the mode to give the most boons and heals but you'll have to come out of that mode every now and again. Berserker's mode doesn't completely take over your weapon bar like Druid's does so it's not as impactful, but it is still just as necessary in order to grant the meta boon. Though it is similar to druid, I still have never seen one in any group I've been in. Like Spellbreaker, there is nothing immediately wrong with Berserker's skeleton and the main problem lies with the lack of flesh. Warrior in general lacks support capacity and none of the specs do anything to shore that up. Sure you could put alacrity on Spellbreaker to have the core warrior healer experience, but Anet could just as easily change a few things to make Bladesworn a better healer. I'm not inclined to lean one way or the other, in fact I wouldn't even be against Berserker losing it's access to quickness. None of the warrior specs lean into the healer role and it's really about how much they impact the healing capacity of core warrior. Guardian Meta Boons & Support Capacity There's not as much to talk about with this one. Firebrand was designed from the ground up to function as a healer and so it is a no-brainer that is has one of the meta boons. What is worth discussing is Dragonhunter vs Willbender. Willbender is a very awkward spec to play as both boondps and healer due to the way they provide alacrity. The trait selections are very forced, and the playstyle is uncomfortable for many people. The spec does not synergize well with the core guardian healing tools because the spec relies so heavily on getting lots of hits in a short window. The best way to play this class as a healer is to use the hammer and rely on the hits from the symbol to activate your virtues, though perhaps the new spear has filled the void that the other core guardian weapons could not. The skeleton of this spec forces you to constantly juggle modes, while the flesh requires you to hit a target and have room to move. I would argue this is the least reactive spec in the game, and is an example of how even a spec like this can function as a support when given the chance. Dragonhunter is very much a core+ spec and so naturally it can mesh with the core healing tools available to guardian. The spec's skeleton also has a small alignment with healing, and the traitline has a lot of junk traits that could be replaced with ones designed to heal or grant boons. In terms of reactivity it performs on a similar level as core guardian, though it's potential reliance on the justice tether is a mark against it. Overall, I believe Dragonhunter would make for a better alacrity provider than Willbender. Revenant Meta Boons & Support Capacity Revenant has had a lot of changes over the years, and they have not faired well. There was a good thread recently in the Revenant forum: The baffling design of Revenants lately which discussed this in more detail. Herald was designed as one of the major healing focused specialisations with Heart of Thorns and so it is a no-brainer that it should have a meta boon. However, I will make the case that Herald should have alacrity instead of quickness. When Herald was first given quickness it was on the Draconic Echo trait which made your facet passives linger on you after being consumed. This effect strongly synergises with alacrity more so than quickness to increase your overall uptime of the facet passives and being able to consume them again sooner to reapply alacrity. Of course, the meta boon is no longer tied to that trait and is now based on consuming upkeep energy to pulse quickness. This change has made Herald far less reactive because you have to constantly swap legends to regain energy to power your upkeep skills. Honestly this playstyle fits Vindicator much better than Herald. What I would like to see for Herald is a synthesis of the current implementation. Herald should have a trait which causes their upkeep skills to linger on them after deactivation, granting 0.25s of alacrity per second per pip of upkeep that skill consumes or was consuming. This is very similar to the current way Herald works but with the added bonus that you could upkeep less than 6 pips per second and still provide alacrity, as well as turn off your upkeep to regenerate energy without being forced to swap legends. It would open up new avenues to play support Herald for those who feel like Herald has become something different than what they used to enjoy. Renegade has never had particularly strong healing beyond what core Revenant provides. It can provide the team with a lot of lifesteal healing but that is locked behind two layers of team members needing to be in range and hitting a target with fast hitting skills; actually maybe that counts as three layers. (Mind you, those are flesh problems). Suffice to say Renegade is extremely energy hungry, and it's been no surprise to see the player numbers slowly decline over time. Renegade is definitely a strong candidate to be the class's pure dps spec, and I've always been confused as to why they seemingly have 2 utility bars at the same time. Vindicator is a strong WvW healer and the only reason it doesn't see play in PvE is because it lacks access to a meta boon. This is one of two specs that desperately needs a review from the developers on this topic. I recommend focusing the boon application around stance swapping because that is something Vindicator loves doing. Whether to leave alacrity on Renegade is not something everyone will agree on. While Renegade does have some capacity for supporting, it has always felt like it was holding Renegade back as a dps class more than anything. Ranger Meta Boons & Support Capacity Ranger has a lot of support capacity in its core toolbox with some of it not even seeing much use because you can only put so many things on your bar. It would take something on the level of Bladesworn's anti-synergy for any ranger spec to be a bad support. Druid was made as a healer first and foremost so it should obviously have a meta boon. Utilising glyphs gives it strong synergy with alacrity to reuse glyphs in different modes sooner. There's not much to say really. Druid actually struggles on the other end of the spectrum: it doesn't make for a particularly good dps class. There is definitely a pain point here for boondps druid but that's beyond the scope of this thread. Soulbeast is the second class that desperately needs a review from the developers when it comes to meta boons. Soulbeast has strong support capabilities which uniquely extend from core ranger in a way that no other class's specialisations have. In WvW the idea of support Soulbeast or "immob" Soulbeast has been tossed back and forth a lot, but it is definitely lacking in the cleanse department in my opinion. Soulbeast is a very strong candidate to provide quickness. Untamed heavily relies on the support capacity of core ranger for its healing. This spec is very focused around you and your pet, and not anyone else. Providing an additional skill of healing through ambushes is the extent of Untamed's alignment with supporting. I personally am not a fan of the way Untamed unlocks access to ambushes and so I recognize my bias here in recommending quickness be removed from this spec in favour of Soulbeast. Perhaps a more neutral stance would be to recommend giving quickness to Soulbeast in addition to Untamed. Engineer Meta Boons & Support Capacity Engineer is another class with extremely powerful core support capacity, and the elite specs actually add on top of that as well to create very powerful healing options. Scrapper is a very reactive spec which is essentially core+ but with utilities that provide even more support options. Scrapper is a great candidate for a meta boon, but it does not have any particular synergy with either quickness or alacrity. It has quickness and there's no reason to change that. Holosmith has a glimmer of support beyond core engineer but is definitely the weakest and least reactive healer of the three. The holoforge mode adds nothing to its capacity to support and it's likely that the meta boon would be tied to it somehow which is an overall negative. I'm not against giving this class a meta boon but it would need more flesh, particularly in the holoforge. It would basically be in the same position as bladesworn. Mechanist is somewhat unwieldly because a lot of its bonus support beyond core engineer comes from where the mech is standing. This bonus support from the mech does come at a cost of the toolbelt skills which removes access to some of engineer's very potent supporting capacity in their elixir skills. It's a strange position to be in but the tradeoff is reasonable and so the spec remains a popular healer. Tying the meta boon to barrier application somewhat hampers the boondps version though. Thief Meta Boons & Support Capacity Core thief has weak support and as such any healing build relies heavily on the specialisation. Stealth has the critical side effect of turning off your auto attack chain so even if thieves were good healers I'd imagine they wouldn't be welcome in many groups until that is addressed. Thief also naturally lacks synergy with alacrity. This is not a class I'm overly familiar with so bear with me. Daredevil is a very selfish spec which used to be capable of playing boon support with the old detonate plasma skill. It's possible that a water field relic could improve daredevil's support capacity but this spec otherwise relies heavily on core thief. Being the closest to core thief can easily skew perception towards giving it a meta boon so be aware of any unconscious bias there. Deadeye has a lot of boon support baked into the spec but not a lot of healing. Not even the scepter's stealth attack provides healing so it has even less ground to stand on than Untamed. Deadeye has half of what it needs to be a good support but is completely lacking in the other half. This is the root of the suggestions I've seen to move quickness to Daredevil. Deadeye just can't heal, and that is reflected in the number of deadeye healers I have seen or even heard of. There's nothing wrong with this spec's skeleton though, it's purely a flesh problem. Spectre appears like it was created by one person and then was handed over to someone else later. Spectre has a lot of tie-ins to power up and trigger the support of core thief but the popular builds don't lean into it. This class will need a review if thieves ever get another healer weapon. With that said, it was designed from the beginning as a healer and so putting a meta boon on it makes sense. Being forced to go into shroud mode to grant alacrity interrupts the use of their core tools though. Thief healing needs buffs in general but the meta boons do appear to be in the right places at least. Elementalist Meta Boons & Support Capacity Elementalist is unique because it always has access to the water element which is where the bulk of its healing capacity comes from. However various boons come from other elements so every build will have some kind of rotation to activate all the important skills. This means specs that have to spend more time out of water will be weaker healers overall. It is a very unreactive class by design. Tempest provides a meta boon by channeling overloads which has strong synergy with both quickness and alacrity. Quickness, to get through the vulnerable channel faster, and alacrity to get back into that element sooner. Tempest is forced to leave water constantly in order to provide boons and overload other elements, and paradoxically almost never wants to overload water itself. There is a clear anti-synergy here within Tempest, however the spec has multiple panic buttons which makes for a very reactive healer even if they have to leave water constantly. This is an example of how the flesh can overcome problems with the skeleton. Weaver appears extremely unreactive at first glance, however I would argue it is actually the most reactive healer of the three because it mends the skeleton of core elementalist. It is the only elementalist spec that never has to fully leave water. The problem with weaver is the flesh. The dual skills have largely been designed with a pure dps role in mind, and accessing the third weapon skill in a pure element is somewhat unreactive. All the same, I think Weaver is a good candidate for providing alacrity to help it move through the elements faster. Catalyst is a very selfish specialisation that relies heavily on core elementalist for the bulk of its supporting capacity. Like all elementalist builds it is forced to leave water often but lacks the panic buttons of Tempest. Most support Catalyst builds recommend bringing frost bow for this reason so that you have something to heal with in emergencies. Along with its overly clunky design this class is very unpopular. It has strong synergy with quickness in order to generate energy for the jade core faster. The skeleton of this spec is essentially core elementalist plus additional combo fields and boons. It is the overly clunky restrictions on the jade core energy that currently holds this spec back. Mesmer Meta Boons & Support Capacity Mesmer as a whole is somewhat unreactive given the conditions for shattering, but not all of its support is tied to that so it has strong support options regardless. The state of the meta boon designations is cause for confusion, and it appears that the devs have broken the established pattern as a bandaid instead of sorting out Mirage. Chronomancer is the one-stop-shop for support on mesmer. As such, I imagine it's difficult for the devs to separate Chronomancer from core mesmer in their designs for healer builds. Aside from flavour, Chronomancer doesn't have any particular synergy with quickness or alacrity, though the use of wells naturally aligns it with supporting. Mirage suffers from problems of the flesh. The ambushes offer another avenue for healing, but alacrity generation is tied to the staff which consumes resources that could be used for the rifle. Weapon swapping essentially functions like mode swapping for this class but it is entirely a trait problem. Like other weak healers, I have never seen a heal Mirage in any group I've ever been in. Mirage has better synergy with quickness rather than alacrity in order to get through the ambush animations faster. Mirage is known for avoiding shattering but I don't know how relevant that would be on a healer build. Virtuoso extends the support capacity of core mesmer in a similar fashion to Soulbeast. Anything that triggers off creating a clone will do so more often on Virtuoso, and their shatters are powered by 5 clones instead of 3 (which would matter if they designed the traits to support it). However, Virtuoso does not offer any other support of its own and relies on core mesmer. I believe a support Virtuoso could work with a few key changes to certain traits in the Inspiration line, and obviously access to a meta boon. Alacrity would be appropriate in order to generate clones and shatter more often. Necromancer Meta Boons & Support Capacity Necromancer has poor support capabilities in its core kit, and that shows very clearly in the difference between Scourge and Harbinger. Reaper is a very selfish spec that is capable of granting its own quickness. I do not think this method of generating quickness would be overly engaging or reactive if it were suddenly spread to allies as well. That is to say, it could, but shouldn't. Relying on shroud health to deal damage is already a problem for the class, there's no need to double up and tie boon generation to it as well. Scourge was designed as a healer spec from the beginning. It synergises well with alacrity in order to generate shades faster. A large amount of this spec's healing capacity comes from the spec and not core necromancer which can make builds feel very one-note. Harbinger brings its own support capacity but like Deadeye it is heavily lacking in the healing department. You are encouraged to stay in shroud to generate the meta boon but you have no capacity to heal in that mode. There is anti-synergy here within Harbinger and against core necromancer. It currently does not function well as a healer but the vision of a potion slinger makes it a strong candidate for a meta boon. I don't know what harbinger needs. The skeleton is anti-synergistic so that would need attention. Being able to provide real healing while in shroud would go a long way. Harbinger brings elixirs so any improvements to core necromancer's healing would have to take the form of traits. Mucho Texto 🤮 In summary, I believe there is sufficient evidence that any spec could function as a healer if they were given the love and attention needed. Traits and skills can overcome anti-synergies in the design, but a well designed skeleton cannot make up for a lack of flesh. I do not think there is anything inherently wrong with breaking the pure dps pattern, and to that end, Vindicator and Soulbeast should grant quickness whilst Weaver should grant alacrity. Additionally, core warrior, thief, and necromancer need a review of their healing tools. Please let me know if you disagree with any analysis or conclusion. I do not claim to be an expert in every class, and even among the classes that I do play I don't play every specialisation. 8 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dadnir.5038 Posted September 4 Share Posted September 4 There could be a lot to answer but, to sum it up: "The devs often put those strategic boons in awkward spot as a way to balance their potential output" 4 hours ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: In summary, I believe there is sufficient evidence that any spec could function as a healer if they were given the love and attention needed. Strictly speaking, every spec can already work as a "healer". It's just that not all spec can heal at "meta level" and grant one of the strategic boons at the same time. This is purely intentional on the dev's end as their goal lean more toward spreading each role than concentrating them onto a single character. Their ideal is that a "meta" party of 5 players should have 1 healer, 1 Quick provider, 1 Alac provider and 2 dps. This is one of their way to control the damage output in the game (I'll agree with you if you think that it's not going well, thought). 4 hours ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: I do not think there is anything inherently wrong with breaking the pure dps pattern, and to that end, Vindicator and Soulbeast should grant quickness whilst Weaver should grant alacrity. As a player that's what you want not necessarily what those specs should be able to do. 4 hours ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: Additionally, core warrior, thief, and necromancer need a review of their healing tools. Please, no. All 3 can already do perfectly fine with the tools they have when they are played properly with healing in mind. It's only if they are played with damage, boon and healing at the same time that they fail to perform. 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
draxynnic.3719 Posted September 4 Share Posted September 4 1 hour ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: Pure DPS What exactly is the purpose of a pure dps specialisation? They're not allowed to do more damage than the specs which can provide these meta boons (quickness and alacrity), so why do the pure dps specs not also have access to these boons? I think I can at least partially answer this one: It allows the devs to have more freedom in providing the means to have a range of trait setups and playstyles. You say that pure DPS specs aren't allowed to do more damage than pure DPS builds on specs that provide meta boons, and that's technically accurate, but the existence of boondps or healdps builds still affects the options available to the dps builds. When balancing a spec that has access to both, ArenaNet needs to keep both the dps build and the boondps build within the ranges that are appropriate for those roles - if the boondps build's DPS gets too high and it needs to be nerfed, the pure DPS build often suffers as a result (mirage after the introduction of alacmirage is a good example of this). The common resolution to this issue is to have traits that increase damage that are mutually exclusive to the trait that provides the boon - however, this requires a fairly specific trait setup, and can get in the way of having other options (such as having both a condition line and a power line, or having a line that's oriented more towards self-defence or sustain). Virtuoso is probably a good example of this. While it doesn't always work out quite this way in builds, there is a fairly clear intent with the trait setup: the top line is oriented towards a defensive playstyle, the middle line wants to maximise power DPS, while the bottom line is for conditions. Enabling boondps virtuoso would require one of these traitlines to be compromised, probably the top one, by converting at least one of the trats into an alacrity or quickness trait. Furthermore, a significant portion of the damage of the other two traitlines would need to be concentrated into the traits on the same tier so that both the boondps and fulldps builds can be in the same range. Bladesworn is, I think, controversial largely because it's an example of where such a compromise was made. Alacsworn was made by taking the least popular of the grandmasters and sacrificing it for the sake of alacrity. However, "least popular" didn't mean that there weren't people who enjoyed that particular grandmaster, particularly since it was the one that actually changed your playstyle, rather than just choosing between whether your dragon slash is more offensive of defensive oriented. While bladesworn was a pure DPS spec, it was able to have an additional playstyle that has been deleted from modern bladesworn for the sake of alacrity. The push to switch alacrity to spellbreaker does raise the question of where you'd put the alacrity on spellbreaker, but there have been a few suggestions that would not have the effect of deleting an existing playstyle. Introducing a heal build complicates matters even further, since a heal build typically requires having "flesh" suitable for healing. Some professions do have enough "flesh" in their cores to achieve that, but often there is need to provide some healing in the "flesh" of the elite specialisation, which reduces the options available to pure DPS - therefore, pure DPS players often appreciate having specialisations that focus only on that. Revenant is a good example of this in that every elite specialisation has been made with some eye to potentially being a healer, and therefore some portion of the "flesh" has always been healer-oriented. You're probably correct in that renegade is the worst healer (it was the healer of firebrigade once, but nerfs to Kalla's healing potential killed that build a long time ago), although I'd argue that Dragon Stance has very little healing and herald could have remained essentially pure DPS that just happens to help with boons if the top line of traits was changed. Vindicator, meanwhile, stands out as an elite specialisation that has plenty of healing and could be a great healer if only it had one of the essential boons. From the perspective of someone looking to play full DPS, this is problematic because any elite specialisation they play is going to have some of the "flesh" devoted to healing, reducing the options available to DPS builds and potentially placing some buttons in their interface that they can't remove but probably don't want to actually use. Full DPS elite specialisations avoid these issues. They can have a wider range of options and even entire playstyles, because none of their design space is occupied by support. And while it's true that specs with boondps builds are allowed to compete with the full dps specs for full dps roles, a full dps spec never needs to fear being the collateral damage of a nerf to the boondps build. TLDR There is an opportunity cost to having a boon role on a spec, and if the profession already has access to the boon, there are often more options available if that opportunity cost isn't being paid twice. Other than that, you've made an interesting analysis. I'm not sure I agree with all your conclusions, but I think there's only one I strongly disagree with, and that might be the obvious one: I think spellbreaker would definitely be better as an alachealer than bladesworn. Some of the reasons you've already covered, but some relate to the opportunity cost considerations I discussed above. Specifically, you mention that bladesworn could be made into a healer by changing the 'flesh', but there isn't really a clear way to do that. All of the bladesworn utilities see use (Electric Fence isn't in the standard build, but is a decent situational choice for projectile blocking), and I don't think there's really room in the traitlines to enable a healing build that way either. Trying to make a healing specialisation would therefore have a significant opportunity cost even from where bladesworn is now, let alone when you take into account the loss of the original Daring Dragon. Spellbreaker, in addition to having a skeleton that doesn't get in the way of core warrior healing as you point out, has a number of utility skills that are almost never used in practice. Some of these could potentially be reworked into supportive skills that would support a healing build, with little risk of raising an outcry from players. 2 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Isopod.4156 Posted September 4 Share Posted September 4 I don't know if I agree if everything (I'm far from having played every spec) but specifically I agree that willbender alac is so so awkward why is it like that >< Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mungozen.2379 Posted September 4 Share Posted September 4 5 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said: It allows the devs to have more freedom in providing the means to have a range of trait setups and playstyles. I agree with this thought. The opportunity cost for adding more play options dilutes the build potentials. We have Power, Condi, Hybrid, Sustain, Heal, Alac and Quick as build archetypes. A single trait line usually supports two of those options, while some try to support three (or even more, hello Chrono). Before adding healing, quick or alac to pure DPS eSpecs, I would much rather see existing Heal+Boon and DPS+Boon solidified and outliers cleaned up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vidit.7108 Posted September 5 Share Posted September 5 (edited) I think kind of overall your generalizations aren't that accurate to the root of things. Like the healing meta used to be wildly different when we had 10-player boons and heals. Saying, for example, Scourge was designed as a healer is kind of half truth since it wasn't expected to provide healing to 10 players, it was given strong barrier as a bonus that eventually became overbearing in the fractal game mode, but it wasn't in the mold of what came before. For a lot of it's life you didn't even need to take healing stats with it. There is also unspoken here a major balance issue that is responsible for how some of these boon providers are designed. After EOD they were raising the skill floor of a lot of healers most notably heal mech, and spreading fury/might. Since adding a new member to the balance team that's been rapidly reversing course as healing is getting easier and healers are back to always 25 might. Something like bladesworn really underprovides boons as a boon dps relative to something like alac specter. The thing I wanted to comment on is what's going on with thief. This thread by one of the people responsible for just about any heal Specter you are likely to see out in the wild sums it up. A lot of positive growth on specter has been moving away from it's original design and moving apart from core thief's. Shadow Arts is very meh, core boon support from trickery is great. Specter has more to gain from SA than Deadeye and yet does not rely on it. Further the core issue hurting it's competitiveness with other support builds is still ally targeting. It raises the skill floor with little to no benefit, and that's Specter's design, which was pointed out as an issue in beta and changes to specter have been from those initial criticisms that really did not change. After the first Specter Beta they really pivoted into only bringing up Specter's PvP viability as a healer, they continued to not make a ton of substantive changes to pve healing for about a year. Shroud's biggest drawback is just that alacrity is placed on a targeted ally, you can only lose uptime on regen and protection staying in shroud and the healing is fine. The biggest advantage DE has over DD at providing boons aside from quickness is an extra might source, both are capable of building to provide full fury uptime and the other boons are on core thief traits. It's still also a problem for them that scepter is the primary heal weapon, it's the most viable source for regen and protection and requires they engage with ally targeting. In DE's case that chokes malice generation, which it still needs in a heal build. Edited September 6 by Vidit.7108 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZephyrusSpring.5728 Posted September 5 Author Share Posted September 5 14 hours ago, Dadnir.5038 said: There could be a lot to answer but, to sum it up: "The devs often put those strategic boons in awkward spot as a way to balance their potential output" Strictly speaking, every spec can already work as a "healer". It's just that not all spec can heal at "meta level" and grant one of the strategic boons at the same time. This is purely intentional on the dev's end as their goal lean more toward spreading each role than concentrating them onto a single character. Their ideal is that a "meta" party of 5 players should have 1 healer, 1 Quick provider, 1 Alac provider and 2 dps. This is one of their way to control the damage output in the game (I'll agree with you if you think that it's not going well, thought). The devs can try as they might but the players will always optimise away. We have already squished those roles into 1 healer and 3.5 dps as best as possible. By the nature of a support it makes complete sense to have them provide one of the "awkward" boons along with all the other boons they're in charge of. Sure you could run around with a Soulbeast healer in zealots gear with 2 boondps, but that puts a lot more pressure on those boondps to provide more than just a meta boon. A party composition like that is a much bigger shift from the established meta than you may think. I don't hate it, mind you. I've always been a proponent for removing concentration, and changing the party composition wouldn't be as big of a deal if the boon duration of everything wasn't balanced around concentration. But we're all stuck in the constraints of reality, and reality dictates that meta healers have to be able to provide a meta boon if they want a spot in a meta party. 15 hours ago, Dadnir.5038 said: As a player that's what you want not necessarily what those specs should be able to do. Vindicator and Soulbeast in particular already have the appropriate skeleton and flesh built out for them. These are the two I am pushing for the most. I think it's a real shame that a lot of the work the devs have already done is going to waste when it would only take a small modicum of additional work to unlock its potential. Soulbeast already has a trait that grants personal quickness when using a merged beast skill, so all that spec needs is a few traits jumbled around. The damage traits of the spec are on the minor passives so that should be a fairly obvious and easy thing to rectify. Vindicator I'm less experienced with, but I do believe the playstyle they've designed for Herald would be more appropriate on Vindicator. Weaver I don't care as much about. I don't know how much elementalist work the devs can handle in one sitting, and I would rather they spend their immediate energy on catalyst. With that said, I have identified Weaver as being potentially the most reactive elementalist healer if it were given the chance. Like the other two specs I do not think Weaver needs much work; access to a meta boon should be enough on its own. If you look carefully at the trait line you may notice it already has a similar amount of team support as Tempest's line. 15 hours ago, Dadnir.5038 said: Please, no. All 3 can already do perfectly fine with the tools they have when they are played properly with healing in mind. It's only if they are played with damage, boon and healing at the same time that they fail to perform. I was careful with my words there. I asked for these classes to be reviewed, not anything else. I think warrior and thief already have very strong support tools but something is not clicking properly. Perhaps people with more experience with these classes could offer better insight. Necromancer is the only class in the game that has actually bad support potential in its core kit. The devs would need to be careful in how they shift capacity from scourge into core, or they could try hamfisting it into harbinger directly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZephidelGRS.9520 Posted September 5 Share Posted September 5 Holy s**t I’m surprised that didn’t break the word limit. Mirage can absolutely be a healer, it’s not a “weak” healer. In fact 2x Rifle Mirage farts the most green numbers out of anything in the game, that I can confidently say it dwarves everything else by miles. I play the thing myself, between Energy sigil and the Mantra spam + Dune Cloak, it’s a miracle if anyone even dies with a 2x Rifle Mirage by their side. The only problem is just that it doesn’t bring any Alac/Quick, and playing with Staff is clunky AF and a PITA. Still, a Staff/Rifle Heal Mirage build does work, you only need to be more mindful since the healing and boon sources are separated. But it’s been a year since they told us the Mirage Mantle bonus for Rifle was a placeholder, I wish they reworked the thing already. And I’ve always advocated that Weaver should have been the Quickness spec for Elementalist. Dual Attack is the perfect design space to shoehorn more support skills, or to rework existing skills to be more support-oriented. Conpared to Weaver, anyone can see the design space for Catalyst is extremely cramped and limited. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZephyrusSpring.5728 Posted September 5 Author Share Posted September 5 15 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said: I think I can at least partially answer this one: It allows the devs to have more freedom in providing the means to have a range of trait setups and playstyles. You say that pure DPS specs aren't allowed to do more damage than pure DPS builds on specs that provide meta boons, and that's technically accurate, but the existence of boondps or healdps builds still affects the options available to the dps builds. When balancing a spec that has access to both, ArenaNet needs to keep both the dps build and the boondps build within the ranges that are appropriate for those roles - if the boondps build's DPS gets too high and it needs to be nerfed, the pure DPS build often suffers as a result (mirage after the introduction of alacmirage is a good example of this). The common resolution to this issue is to have traits that increase damage that are mutually exclusive to the trait that provides the boon - however, this requires a fairly specific trait setup, and can get in the way of having other options (such as having both a condition line and a power line, or having a line that's oriented more towards self-defence or sustain). Virtuoso is probably a good example of this. While it doesn't always work out quite this way in builds, there is a fairly clear intent with the trait setup: the top line is oriented towards a defensive playstyle, the middle line wants to maximise power DPS, while the bottom line is for conditions. Enabling boondps virtuoso would require one of these traitlines to be compromised, probably the top one, by converting at least one of the trats into an alacrity or quickness trait. Furthermore, a significant portion of the damage of the other two traitlines would need to be concentrated into the traits on the same tier so that both the boondps and fulldps builds can be in the same range. Bladesworn is, I think, controversial largely because it's an example of where such a compromise was made. Alacsworn was made by taking the least popular of the grandmasters and sacrificing it for the sake of alacrity. However, "least popular" didn't mean that there weren't people who enjoyed that particular grandmaster, particularly since it was the one that actually changed your playstyle, rather than just choosing between whether your dragon slash is more offensive of defensive oriented. While bladesworn was a pure DPS spec, it was able to have an additional playstyle that has been deleted from modern bladesworn for the sake of alacrity. The push to switch alacrity to spellbreaker does raise the question of where you'd put the alacrity on spellbreaker, but there have been a few suggestions that would not have the effect of deleting an existing playstyle. I want to preface this with the notion that themed lines within trait lines only really became common with the EoD specs. The specs from previous expansions are much more jumbled, and trait lines which have received a lot of attention have been shifted towards that EoD design e.g. Berserker. Personally I think trying to force the trait lines to house inner lines is more restrictive than anything else, and it's only purpose seems to have been to give players something functional as they gather hero points to unlock everything. This design is inherently flawed as it can occasionally lead to noob traps. Virtuoso is a good example of this actually. The bottom inner line is meant to boost condition builds and yet you can squeeze more damage out of the build by taking Phantasmal Blade instead of Sharpening Sorrow. Sharpening Sorrow is a dead-end trait which induces design constraints on buildcrafting and leads to a less optimal build. This trait is occupying prime real-estate 😉. What happened with Bladesworn wasn't necessarily the fault of forcing alacrity into the line. They didn't have to make such drastic changes to the trait. They could have just tacked on "Grant alacrity to nearby allies when you use Dragon Slash." but they chose to redesign the trait and kill the playstyle. The Old Daring Dragon already did 3 different things, it wouldn't have been a big deal if it did 4 things instead. Whatever trait grants access to a meta boon does need to compete with other damage traits though. We have clearly seen the effects of needing to bring concentration in some boondps builds and not others, and I believe the devs are moving away from needing concentration. There's no denying that this squeezes the overall design space of builds. It doesn't necessarily need to be on the grandmaster trait, but something somehow needs to make room or double up with a meta boon. Knowing where to make that incision requires fairly in-depth knowledge of the spec and I'm sure a lot of people aren't confident that Anet can get it right everywhere, myself included. 16 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said: Introducing a heal build complicates matters even further, since a heal build typically requires having "flesh" suitable for healing. Some professions do have enough "flesh" in their cores to achieve that, but often there is need to provide some healing in the "flesh" of the elite specialisation, which reduces the options available to pure DPS - therefore, pure DPS players often appreciate having specialisations that focus only on that. Revenant is a good example of this in that every elite specialisation has been made with some eye to potentially being a healer, and therefore some portion of the "flesh" has always been healer-oriented. You're probably correct in that renegade is the worst healer (it was the healer of firebrigade once, but nerfs to Kalla's healing potential killed that build a long time ago), although I'd argue that Dragon Stance has very little healing and herald could have remained essentially pure DPS that just happens to help with boons if the top line of traits was changed. Vindicator, meanwhile, stands out as an elite specialisation that has plenty of healing and could be a great healer if only it had one of the essential boons. From the perspective of someone looking to play full DPS, this is problematic because any elite specialisation they play is going to have some of the "flesh" devoted to healing, reducing the options available to DPS builds and potentially placing some buttons in their interface that they can't remove but probably don't want to actually use. Full DPS elite specialisations avoid these issues. They can have a wider range of options and even entire playstyles, because none of their design space is occupied by support. And while it's true that specs with boondps builds are allowed to compete with the full dps specs for full dps roles, a full dps spec never needs to fear being the collateral damage of a nerf to the boondps build. TLDR There is an opportunity cost to having a boon role on a spec, and if the profession already has access to the boon, there are often more options available if that opportunity cost isn't being paid twice. Indeed there often needs to be tools crafted to support healing builds and the devs are only going to make so many utility and weapon skills, so they have to take up spots somewhere. If Engineer had strong elite toolbelt skills I'm sure players wouldn't have been overly happy with Scrapper taking over their f5 skill for example. We see that tradeoff on full display with Mechanist. Some of the utility skills help with damage and others with support, and the skeleton of the spec forces an even greater trade with the loss of the toolbelt entirely. However, support capacity doesn't necessarily need to come in the form of a blatant +healing or +boons. Using Virtuoso as an example again, Blade Renewal has some very interesting synergy with traits in the inspiration line and the devs designed that skill from a pure dps mindset! It is the combination of skills, traits and spec mechanics that makes for a good support, and skills can be designed to be multi purpose by synergising with multiple traits simultaneously. 16 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said: Other than that, you've made an interesting analysis. I'm not sure I agree with all your conclusions, but I think there's only one I strongly disagree with, and that might be the obvious one: I think spellbreaker would definitely be better as an alachealer than bladesworn. Some of the reasons you've already covered, but some relate to the opportunity cost considerations I discussed above. Specifically, you mention that bladesworn could be made into a healer by changing the 'flesh', but there isn't really a clear way to do that. All of the bladesworn utilities see use (Electric Fence isn't in the standard build, but is a decent situational choice for projectile blocking), and I don't think there's really room in the traitlines to enable a healing build that way either. Trying to make a healing specialisation would therefore have a significant opportunity cost even from where bladesworn is now, let alone when you take into account the loss of the original Daring Dragon. Spellbreaker, in addition to having a skeleton that doesn't get in the way of core warrior healing as you point out, has a number of utility skills that are almost never used in practice. Some of these could potentially be reworked into supportive skills that would support a healing build, with little risk of raising an outcry from players. Unshakable Mountain stood out to me as a clear way to make the gunsaber provide healing to allies. If that trait gave barrier to allies it could make for a very potent barrier provider while you wait to weapon swap back to staff and resolve a critical anti-synergy. It would also synergise strongly with the use of shouts. River's Flow could also be changed somehow to tie additional healing to flow generation e.g. generating flow beyond the maximum overflows into pulses of aoe regen (though that would cause another less critical anti-synergy). Other specs can provide examples of how the flesh can overcome the skeleton, and I believe key changes to these two traits would be all that Bladesworn needs. Warrior already has more than enough options on support utilities as it is. With all that said, it has occurred to me that Bladesworn synergises more strongly with quickness rather than alacrity given how slow the gunsaber is without it, and that generating the boon forces you onto the gunsaber. I do not think that moving alacrity to Spellbreaker would be any less work or synergise any better. Full Counter does not make for a reliable support tool and that's really all Spellbreaker has going for it mechanically. The theme of "boon control" or "anti-mage" manifest purely in the flesh of the spec so any utilities will have to compete with the existing core warrior tools. If core classes could give meta boons, what value would there be in choosing Spellbreaker to expand upon it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZephyrusSpring.5728 Posted September 5 Author Share Posted September 5 9 minutes ago, ZephidelGRS.9520 said: Holy s**t I’m surprised that didn’t break the word limit. Mirage can absolutely be a healer, it’s not a “weak” healer. In fact 2x Rifle Mirage farts the most green numbers out of anything in the game, that I can confidently say it dwarves everything else by miles. I play the thing myself, between Energy sigil and the Mantra spam + Dune Cloak, it’s a miracle if anyone even dies with a 2x Rifle Mirage by their side. The only problem is just that it doesn’t bring any Alac/Quick, and playing with Staff is clunky AF and a PITA. Still, a Staff/Rifle Heal Mirage build does work, you only need to be more mindful since the healing and boon sources are separated. But it’s been a year since they told us the Mirage Mantle bonus for Rifle was a placeholder, I wish they reworked the thing already. And I’ve always advocated that Weaver should have been the Quickness spec for Elementalist. Dual Attack is the perfect design space to shoehorn more support skills, or to rework existing skills to be more support-oriented. Conpared to Weaver, anyone can see the design space for Catalyst is extremely cramped and limited. The part in bold is what I was referring to when I said it was a weak healer. The anti-synergy is immense but it could easily be rectified by changing Mirage Mantle to allow weapons other than the staff to provide alacrity. Honestly the whole mirage line has needed a rework for a long time and I hope heal mirage can catch the wave when the devs make a big enough splash in their attempt to bring spear mirage into existence. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
draxynnic.3719 Posted September 5 Share Posted September 5 (edited) 1 hour ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: I want to preface this with the notion that themed lines within trait lines only really became common with the EoD specs. The specs from previous expansions are much more jumbled, and trait lines which have received a lot of attention have been shifted towards that EoD design e.g. Berserker. Personally I think trying to force the trait lines to house inner lines is more restrictive than anything else, and it's only purpose seems to have been to give players something functional as they gather hero points to unlock everything. This design is inherently flawed as it can occasionally lead to noob traps. Virtuoso is a good example of this actually. The bottom inner line is meant to boost condition builds and yet you can squeeze more damage out of the build by taking Phantasmal Blade instead of Sharpening Sorrow. Sharpening Sorrow is a dead-end trait which induces design constraints on buildcrafting and leads to a less optimal build. This trait is occupying prime real-estate 😉. You're picking on the details here while missing the point. I never said that virtuoso traits were perfectly set up - in fact, I was acknowledging this when I prefaced my use of virtuoso as an example with "it doesn't always work out quite this way in builds". The point, though, was that having an elite specialisation be pure DPS without trying to work in a meta boon allows for more options to be available for the pure DPS specs. You seem to be intimating here that Sharpening Sorrow could be converted into a meta boon trait, but think about what effect that could have for the design of the traitline as a whole. The general principle seems to be that boondps builds should be doing about 20-25% less damage to the full dps builds - consider that in herald's case, for instance, the quickness trait is competing with a trait that in similar circumstances is a straight up 20-28% boost in strike damage. What you appear to be suggesting would require that the other virtuoso traits be modified such that Phantasmal Blades was worth about 20% of a DPS virtuoso's output. That seems to be easier said than done. I suspect this is the real reason that the old Daring Dragon playstyle was deleted - being able to dragonslash over and over again while also providing alacrity per slash would result in too much damage, while possibly making alacrity too easy (or too spammy if they reduced the duration to compensate) to maintain. So that functionality was sacrificed so they could calibrate Alacrity Dragon to have the right reduction in damage output. I think there are also similar issues with your proposal to convert other bladesworn traits into support traits. At some point, balancing is going to come into play, and a trait that has been modified to be more suitable for supporting allies is going to end up becoming less effective at keeping the bladesworn themselves alive, especially without healing power investment - in order to be balanced, the traits would need to be made into something that's only really useful for the healing builds, otherwise you'd get DPS builds that also provide a lot of group barrier and healing (something we saw for a while with scourge until the nerfhammer came down). Spellbreaker, as I said, has the "advantage" of having utility skills that basically nobody uses and which therefore would not be missed if they were changed into something more support-oriented. You're right in saying that Full Counter doesn't directly boost a healing build - but that adjective is important. A dead healer isn't going to be healing anyone, and Full Counter helps keep the healer alive, and healers in instanced content often double as the tanks, and Full Counter is also likely to help there. DPS spellbreaker builds often don't get a lot of mileage out of FC in raids and strikes either, but it's still a useful tool to have. Spellbreaker also has the benefit, which you acknowledged yourself, of more easily being able to use support weapons such as staff and warhorn without being locked out of them when switching to gunsaber. There is, of course, the issue of where to place an alacrity trait, especially considering my comments about needing to balance it off against a high-damage trait: spellbreaker doesn't have any single high-damage major trait to balance it off. But perhaps a firebrand-like approach of relying on a combination of utility skills and multiple traits could work. For instance, No Escape (competing with Pure Strike) could generate a small amount of alacrity when landing a daze or stun skill, while Enchantment Collapse (competing with Magebane Tether) could generate a small amount of alacrity when landing a skill that removes boons (regardless of whether the target has a boon to remove or not). This could be combined with things like, say, Imminent Threat being reworked into generating barrier or aegis as a tool for defending the party against a big incoming hit. Edited September 5 by draxynnic.3719 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZephyrusSpring.5728 Posted September 5 Author Share Posted September 5 2 hours ago, Vidit.7108 said: I think kind of overall your generalizations aren't that accurate to the root of things. Like the healing meta used to be wildly different when we had 10-player boons and heals. Saying, for example, Scourge was designed as a healer is kind of half truth since it wasn't expected to provide healing to 10 players, it was given strong barrier as a bonus that eventually became overbearing in the fractal game mode, but it wasn't in the mold of what came before. For a lot of it's life you didn't even need to take healing stats with it. I started playing shortly before PoF so forgive me if I didn't understand things properly back then, but I thought barrier was introduced with PoF as part of Scourge's identity. Even if it didn't originally fit the mold of the established healing meta I always thought it could fill that role given how barrier works. It was a new form of healing and has taken a long time to naturalise across the game. 2 hours ago, Vidit.7108 said: There is also unspoken here a major balance issue that is responsible for how some of these boon providers are designed. After EOD they were raising the skill floor of a lot of healers most notably heal mech, and spreading fury/might. Since adding a new member to the balance team that's been rapidly reversing course as healing is getting easier and healers are back to always 25 might. Something like bladesworn really underprovides boons as a boon dps relative to something like alac specter. Can you go into more detail with this? The devs have put in a lot of work to shift the game away from the original paradigm of "no healers" and the concentration stat has been at the core of that. Naturally the boondps builds that don't need concentration for their meta-boon are going to struggle with providing every other boon, on top of actually lacking access to those boons through traits and utilities. 3 hours ago, Vidit.7108 said: The thing I wanted to comment on is what's going on with thief. This thread by one of the people responsible for just about any heal Specter you are likely to see out in the wild sums it up. A lot of positive growth on specter has been moving away from it's original design and moving apart from core thief's. Shadow Arts is very meh, core boon support from trickery is great. Specter has more to gain from SA than Deadeye and yet does not rely on it. Further the core issue hurting it's competitiveness with other support builds is still ally targeting. It raises the skill floor with little to no benefit, and that's Specter's design, which was pointed out as an issue in beta and changes to specter have been from those initial criticisms that really did not change. After the first Specter Beta they really pivoted into only bringing up Specter's PvP viability as a healer, they continued to not make a ton of substantive changes to pve healing for about a year. Shroud's biggest drawback is just that alacrity is placed on a targeted ally, you can only lose uptime on regen and protection staying in shroud and the healing is fine. The biggest advantage DE has over DE at providing boons aside from quickness is an extra might, both are capable of building to provide full fury uptime and the other boons are on core thief traits. It's still also a problem for them that scepter is the primary heal weapon, it's the most viable source for regen and protection and requires they engage with ally targeting. In DE's case that chokes malice generation, which it still needs in a heal build. I'm glad I was able to reasonably accurately assess the state of Specter! It's not a class I have much experience with at all but I noticed they weren't shadowstepping as much as I expected they would and followed the breadcrumbs from there. I have also read that Deadeye's version of the sceptre stealth attack does not heal allies in an area like the basic stealth attack does. Deadeye as a healer has definitely not been on the devs' to do list thus far. Thank you for linking the post of prominent Specter player. The google document buried in that post is an excellent writeup of Specter and a great source to refer to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZephyrusSpring.5728 Posted September 5 Author Share Posted September 5 1 hour ago, draxynnic.3719 said: You're picking on the details here while missing the point. I never said that virtuoso traits were perfectly set up - in fact, I was acknowledging this when I prefaced my use of virtuoso as an example with "it doesn't always work out quite this way in builds". The point, though, was that having an elite specialisation be pure DPS without trying to work in a meta boon allows for more options to be available for the pure DPS specs. You seem to be intimating here that Sharpening Sorrow could be converted into a meta boon trait, but think about what effect that could have for the design of the traitline as a whole. The general principle seems to be that boondps builds should be doing about 20-25% less damage to the full dps builds - consider that in herald's case, for instance, the quickness trait is competing with a trait that in similar circumstances is a straight up 20-28% boost in strike damage. What you appear to be suggesting would require that the other virtuoso traits be modified such that Phantasmal Blades was worth about 20% of a DPS virtuoso's output. That seems to be easier said than done. I suspect this is the real reason that the old Daring Dragon playstyle was deleted - being able to dragonslash over and over again while also providing alacrity per slash would result in too much damage, while possibly making alacrity too easy (or too spammy if they reduced the duration to compensate) to maintain. So that functionality was sacrificed so they could calibrate Alacrity Dragon to have the right reduction in damage output. I think there are also similar issues with your proposal to convert other bladesworn traits into support traits. At some point, balancing is going to come into play, and a trait that has been modified to be more suitable for supporting allies is going to end up becoming less effective at keeping the bladesworn themselves alive, especially without healing power investment - in order to be balanced, the traits would need to be made into something that's only really useful for the healing builds, otherwise you'd get DPS builds that also provide a lot of group barrier and healing (something we saw for a while with scourge until the nerfhammer came down). Spellbreaker, as I said, has the "advantage" of having utility skills that basically nobody uses and which therefore would not be missed if they were changed into something more support-oriented. You're right in saying that Full Counter doesn't directly boost a healing build - but that adjective is important. A dead healer isn't going to be healing anyone, and Full Counter helps keep the healer alive, and healers in instanced content often double as the tanks, and Full Counter is also likely to help there. DPS spellbreaker builds often don't get a lot of mileage out of FC in raids and strikes either, but it's still a useful tool to have. Spellbreaker also has the benefit, which you acknowledged yourself, of more easily being able to use support weapons such as staff and warhorn without being locked out of them when switching to gunsaber. There is, of course, the issue of where to place an alacrity trait, especially considering my comments about needing to balance it off against a high-damage trait: spellbreaker doesn't have any single high-damage major trait to balance it off. But perhaps a firebrand-like approach of relying on a combination of utility skills and multiple traits could work. For instance, No Escape (competing with Pure Strike) could generate a small amount of alacrity when landing a daze or stun skill, while Enchantment Collapse (competing with Magebane Tether) could generate a small amount of alacrity when landing a skill that removes boons (regardless of whether the target has a boon to remove or not). This could be combined with things like, say, Imminent Threat being reworked into generating barrier or aegis as a tool for defending the party against a big incoming hit. I'm not trying to miss the point. Sorry. I understand that the design space is cramped by trying to accommodate more playstyles and builds. I was trying to make the counterpoint that hooking into synergy between traits can greatly expand the design space beyond what the devs may originally intend. "Do X when Y" on core traits is a great way to add new functionality to skills and that Virtuoso utility is the perfect example. It doesn't work so well when you try to do it the other way around with elite spec tools, e.g. Specter's sceptre completely undercutting the core thief tools. I was definitely hinting that Sharpening Sorrow could be converted into a meta boon trait, but I hadn't given any thought beyond that. There's a lot you can do with an open trait slot and I don't think you've fully appreciated the possibilities. After some consideration I think the meta-boon trait will likely need some kind of negative aspect to it to drag the boondps build down. It could just be something numeric like reduced damage and condition duration from phantasms and shatters or something. You can build the negative trade-off into the trait itself which is exactly what they did with Bladesworn. If the trade-off would have to be too extreme they could also swap Phantasmal Blades into the minor slot and put Deadly Blades in its place. That would have an impact on builds using Duelist's Reversal but I'm sure Anet could come up with something for that. The problem with Bladesworn is they've put themselves into a prison of their own making. They have designated the adept traits to be about flow, the masters to be about ammo, and the grandmasters to be about dragon slashing. It doesn't have to be that way and it would probably be a whole lot easier to balance the class if it wasn't. When you look at the Tempest line you'll see a trait granting some benefit when overloading in every column. Another example is the Catalyst line requiring you to take 2 traits for boon support. There are plenty of things they could have done to put alacrity on Bladesworn but they chose to kill that playstyle to maintain the sectioning of the trait line. They could have crushed Immortal Dragon instead too which would've been a lot less controversial. I think it's fairly safe to assume that they wanted alacrity on Bladesworn to tick a box but didn't want to put even as much thought into it as we have here. When you look at the healing power scaling of Unshakable Mountain you'll notice that this skill has been explicitly designed to be used without much healing power. I have to question if it's balanced and fair that you can get a lot of healing without investing the stats into it. It is exactly the same topic seen repeatedly in mobas about bruisers. Is it fair for skills to be balanced with high base output and low scaling? Especially in a game like GW2 where we have the freedom to invest into stats as we please. Historically these types of skills are abused to the maximum effect and become the linchpin of entire builds. I would expect people attempting to use this trait to at least invest into traits like Stalwart Focus or Vigorous Shouts if they're not going to put healing power on their gear. Look no further than this old Bladesworn bunker build to see how the majority of their defensive strategy revolves around the trait. Personally I don't think that's balanced and Anet were right to nuke this build. They didn't nuke it in the right way though, they should have made Unshakable Mountain require more healing power. I like your ideas for Spellbreaker, and I think you could also do something with Slow Counter along the lines of some condition cleanse as an additional tool that doesn't necessarily make FC a part of the rotation. They have a lot of freedom with Spellbreaker because they haven't really used the entire design space of a pure dps class to its full extent. It is very easy to change this, that and the other when no one will miss their absence. It is worth pointing out once again that warrior already has a tonne of support utilities so Spellbreaker's meditations would have to be something special (or mandatory) to get a spot on the utility bar. I appreciate your input in this thread even it if the tone doesn't always translate through text. It's important for ideas to get run through the gauntlet before action is taken and this is exactly the kind of discussion I was looking for with this thread. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dadnir.5038 Posted September 5 Share Posted September 5 7 hours ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: But we're all stuck in the constraints of reality, and reality dictates that meta healers have to be able to provide a meta boon if they want a spot in a meta party. I can try to offer you a different perspective as someone that witnessed the evolution of the meta from 2012 to 2024. In the first few week of the vanilla game there was no meta, players were simply applying what they knew from other game onto GW2 and, despite the fact that it somehow worked, that wasn't great. Then people started to understand that going full berserker made things both easier and faster. So we got the "zerk meta" which lasted until HoT. It was a fun meta but it didn't leave much room for diversity. At the peak of this meta we were just playing 4 elementalists and 1 filler (either thief or mesmer). There was no notion of healer, support or even tank we were just skipping mobs with stealth and pulling the random boss against a wall before unleashing hell on them. To shake things up with HoT, the devs first introduced crippling changes to elementalist, then destroyed the trait system as we knew it while introducing elite specs and spreading boons everywhere. Without forgeting a new kind of instanced content that didn't have convenient walls to control the boss. And pretty quickly a new "meta" appeared, not one with a "healer" but one with our lord chronomancer alongside it's bannerslave and 6 dps. The chrono was taking care of quickness, alacrity and small frame of group invulnerability while the bannerslave was there for it's banners and boons like might and fury. The healer (druid) only became meta when the devs took away the group invuln from mesmer. Came PoF and chrono lost it's monopoly on quickness and Alacrity. It took some twist and turn but ultimately firebrand and renegade both managed to worm their way in the meta as healer. At this point we are in early/mid PoF and the typical meta has become 2 "boon healers" with barely any investment in healing power, a bannerslave and 5 dps. Now, because PoF lasted an eternity something unexpected happened due to an overlooked character in PvE: the scourge. It was seen as a noob carry, one that you'd only take for training raids as a convenient cushion to rely on. And yet, late in PoF, this inconspiscious character is the straw that broke the mentality of only pushing toward dps. A truly breathtaking transformation of the meta, in the mind of the players, the healer was no longer needed only for it's boons but also for healing. It took 8 years for players to consider the "healing" part of what we knew as "healer" as something potentially important in PvE. Your thread would have been seen as irrelevant pre 2020-21. EoD came and our trustworthy bannerslave gained freedom only for warrior to be put in a dark corner where it's conveniently forgotten. Boons started to be spread even more, which made the competition for the support spot bloodier than ever. The powercreep shot through the rough and the devs tried to salvage the situation by taking down the number of character affected by the skill providing boons from 10 to 5. Their goal: 1 healer, 1 quick dps, 1 alac dps and 2 dps per 5 man group. The answer of the player base was to cut corner and go with the 1 healer and 3.5 dps that you know well. Now, we are here and you want all specs to be potentially competitive (not viable) as both meta boon healer and meta boon dps. On another hand, unless they say otherwise, the devs still want to achieve their goal of 3 supports sacrificing damage output and 2 pur dps per 5 man group. Obviously, the new tools added with each mini expansion open up more room for what you hope for but is this reason enough for the devs to give up on their goal or is this just a lucky coincidence? To be fair, the real issue is Quickness and Alacrity and concentration (boon duration). The maximum increase in boon duration from concentration being caped at 100% simply isn't enough for players to really want to invest in boon duration when 2 dps could just offer the same amount of boon duration than someone could offer by investing heavily. As for Quickness and Alacrity they simply shouldn't be sharable by any specific profession or e-spec. In my opinion, only specific relics should be able to allow one to share such boon and being able to keep them up would should always translate in a steep investment in concentration/boon duration. 8 hours ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: Perhaps people with more experience with these classes could offer better insight. That's pretty simple, neither warrior nor thief can do optimal boon and heal at the same time (Warrior would need both banner and shouts at the same time while Thief would need to be able to use 3 to 5 traitlines at the same time). Whenever you invest on one side the other side suffer. Objectively it is pretty good design. 8 hours ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: Necromancer is the only class in the game that has actually bad support potential in its core kit. It's not that the support potential is bad, it's just that it's not attractive. The healing potential is decent and the boon output is alright. The issue lie in the diversity of the boon shared: Regeneration, Protection and Might. Might is superflous, Protection is merely convenient while you want Regeneration done by your healer and on another hand you want your healer to have more boons than that. It could be enough for a tank but necromancer is notoriously bad against CC due to it's sustain design so it can't be a tank. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
draxynnic.3719 Posted September 5 Share Posted September 5 Didn't the devs acknowledge midway through EoD that the meta was heal, boondps, and three dps and have been balancing on that since? 3 hours ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: After some consideration I think the meta-boon trait will likely need some kind of negative aspect to it to drag the boondps build down. It could just be something numeric like reduced damage and condition duration from phantasms and shatters or something. You can build the negative trade-off into the trait itself which is exactly what they did with Bladesworn. Might have the time to comment on the rest later, but just for the moment: They tried something like this with catalyst. It was so unpopular that they had to wind it back and put more weight on the competing trait instead - people don't like traits having penalties. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kalthea.4326 Posted September 5 Share Posted September 5 Can we just...get rid of Quickness and Alacrity? They're just a necessity at this point, and building the entire game around them is ridiculous. Talking PvE here, obviously, but even from a PvP perspective , most people use it as a quick burst and that's it. More people in PvP tend to focus on Stability to even be able to perform against an onslaught of control abilities. Honestly, this whole boon system is awful. You have all of the same buffs on every class, but not all of them are balanced in what they're paired with. Some classes get protection and nothing else, while another can get aegis, prot, and a heal in one button press. 2 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vidit.7108 Posted September 6 Share Posted September 6 21 hours ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: I started playing shortly before PoF so forgive me if I didn't understand things properly back then, but I thought barrier was introduced with PoF as part of Scourge's identity. Even if it didn't originally fit the mold of the established healing meta I always thought it could fill that role given how barrier works. It was a new form of healing and has taken a long time to naturalise across the game. It was certainly hyped by players and marketing as a new form of healing, but the reality was that this was an additional utility benefit for dps scourge at the time. Balance changes in the IBS era changed that when players in fractals realized they could go healer-less easier than ever before if all the full dps were scourge. It sometimes fit what players would call the off-healer or secondary healer in raids because it mostly lacked ways to get lost hp back and that was bad for scholar uptime (barrier doesn't count toward hp thresholds) One of the primary changes responsible for that IBS-era Heal Scourge was about 6 months post-PoF when Scourge was allowed to use it's healing power to contribute to Vampiric Presence, it didn't function that way on launch. 21 hours ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: Can you go into more detail with this? The devs have put in a lot of work to shift the game away from the original paradigm of "no healers" and the concentration stat has been at the core of that. Naturally the boondps builds that don't need concentration for their meta-boon are going to struggle with providing every other boon, on top of actually lacking access to those boons through traits and utilities. There was a brief period of time after the banner rework that failed where they came up with a new "design philosophy" for pve that seems to have been abandoned when they added a third person to the balance team. They were short changing might uptimes on healers and distributing uneven might amounts among boon dps. You might have noticed last patch Tempest was given more fury, it was previously a deliberate choice to make it pick between full fury uptime and some other options in the support kit. They took some might off staff for guardian that has since been added back in several ways over the last year and half. With the weapon mastery additions in Soto Heal Scrapper and Heal Chrono also had holes in their boon kit filled. AFAIK there isn't a viable healer right now that can't provide 25 might which wasn't always the case before Soto. Most boon dps don't actually struggle at all to provide many other boons, they just choose not to though there are some that just kind of can't without losing a lot of dps. A lot of boon dps have full or nearly full fury without additional boon duration like quick Deadeye and sometimes really substantial might output like with Tempest. Firebrand and Herald have some of the most spare boons. If the group needs stab or aegis, boon duration isn't usually the factor stopping the boon dps from covering it. Recent encounter design like with ToF LCM have made some boon dps less desirable due to non-boon related reasons like lacking portals 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeceiverX.8361 Posted September 6 Share Posted September 6 16 hours ago, Kalthea.4326 said: Can we just...get rid of Quickness and Alacrity? They're just a necessity at this point, and building the entire game around them is ridiculous. Talking PvE here, obviously, but even from a PvP perspective , most people use it as a quick burst and that's it. More people in PvP tend to focus on Stability to even be able to perform against an onslaught of control abilities. Honestly, this whole boon system is awful. You have all of the same buffs on every class, but not all of them are balanced in what they're paired with. Some classes get protection and nothing else, while another can get aegis, prot, and a heal in one button press. Yeah. Though short-form non-boon quickness as a unique effect like it used to be would still be a good implementation for the PvP modes for said burst patterns on some classes. If everyone runs around with permaboons, then there's no actual point to said boons as it becomes the new baseline of stats and combat speed/cooldowns; and let's be frank: stuff like Quickness and Alacrity therefore just reduces combat clarity, especially in the PvP modes. Reality though is ANet either just disagrees or doesn't care, and the PvE community collectively loses its mind if numbers ever go down and/or if the full swatch of an encounter's mechanics have to be interacted with rather than facetanking damage and skipping/burning half the phases. I think a good chunk of it is the designers think themselves cool and innovative by "reinventing" the support role and responsibilities away from "healer" to everyone contributing to the mass of bonus stats everyone else gets... when all they've really done is just make everyone a bland buff caster where nobody can deeply specialize while retaining efficacy, because boons are so out of control they stat-check literally everything outside their concept, while offering limited to not interactivity of other mechanics. Given how these complaints have been made since HoT, and how resistant ANet is to undoing bad ideas--especially in the PvP modes--I don't think we'll see this change ever made. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZephyrusSpring.5728 Posted Wednesday at 04:31 AM Author Share Posted Wednesday at 04:31 AM On 9/5/2024 at 7:48 PM, Dadnir.5038 said: I can try to offer you a different perspective as someone that witnessed the evolution of the meta from 2012 to 2024. In the first few week of the vanilla game there was no meta, players were simply applying what they knew from other game onto GW2 and, despite the fact that it somehow worked, that wasn't great. Then people started to understand that going full berserker made things both easier and faster. So we got the "zerk meta" which lasted until HoT. It was a fun meta but it didn't leave much room for diversity. At the peak of this meta we were just playing 4 elementalists and 1 filler (either thief or mesmer). There was no notion of healer, support or even tank we were just skipping mobs with stealth and pulling the random boss against a wall before unleashing hell on them. To shake things up with HoT, the devs first introduced crippling changes to elementalist, then destroyed the trait system as we knew it while introducing elite specs and spreading boons everywhere. Without forgeting a new kind of instanced content that didn't have convenient walls to control the boss. And pretty quickly a new "meta" appeared, not one with a "healer" but one with our lord chronomancer alongside it's bannerslave and 6 dps. The chrono was taking care of quickness, alacrity and small frame of group invulnerability while the bannerslave was there for it's banners and boons like might and fury. The healer (druid) only became meta when the devs took away the group invuln from mesmer. Came PoF and chrono lost it's monopoly on quickness and Alacrity. It took some twist and turn but ultimately firebrand and renegade both managed to worm their way in the meta as healer. At this point we are in early/mid PoF and the typical meta has become 2 "boon healers" with barely any investment in healing power, a bannerslave and 5 dps. Now, because PoF lasted an eternity something unexpected happened due to an overlooked character in PvE: the scourge. It was seen as a noob carry, one that you'd only take for training raids as a convenient cushion to rely on. And yet, late in PoF, this inconspiscious character is the straw that broke the mentality of only pushing toward dps. A truly breathtaking transformation of the meta, in the mind of the players, the healer was no longer needed only for it's boons but also for healing. It took 8 years for players to consider the "healing" part of what we knew as "healer" as something potentially important in PvE. Your thread would have been seen as irrelevant pre 2020-21. EoD came and our trustworthy bannerslave gained freedom only for warrior to be put in a dark corner where it's conveniently forgotten. Boons started to be spread even more, which made the competition for the support spot bloodier than ever. The powercreep shot through the rough and the devs tried to salvage the situation by taking down the number of character affected by the skill providing boons from 10 to 5. Their goal: 1 healer, 1 quick dps, 1 alac dps and 2 dps per 5 man group. The answer of the player base was to cut corner and go with the 1 healer and 3.5 dps that you know well. Thank you for the history lesson. I had always recognized that Firebrand was on the weaker end of supports in the healing department but never really connected the dots that groups weren't looking for powerhouse healers until more recently. I remember in the PoF days I would host a "bring whatever" T4 fractal group every day and we'd get through them just fine, so I was scratching my head when I saw people demanding a healer after I came back with EoD, but just chalked it up to the majority being intimidated by the reworked instabilities. Quick question: You mentioned twice that groups had 8 players in them, what exactly did you mean by that? Who are you leaving out? I thought the point of the boons targeting 10 players was that you didn't need to double up. I didn't get into 10 man content until after EoD so forgive me if I'm missing the obvious. On the opposite end of the spectrum from boons dropping to 5 targets, there was also the strange situation where some healers such as Druid and Tempest had (and still can have) so much healing that they could be ran as the single healer of a squad. It was a relatively easy transition when those specs were given a meta boon because you simply didn't need that much healing in a 5 man group. It has actually put those bonus healing traits into a weird spot where they're hardly ever considered; Druid, Tempest and Specter all suffer this same clash in design. It is a logical separation if you're approaching squad design as 1 healer, 2 boondps and 2 dps, but that comes with the implication that the healer would in some way cut back on their other healing options because of this upper limit on healing, and there's no efficient way to do that. This is the fatal flaw of the 1+2+2 design: You just don't need that much healing. This explains why all these other supports have been given more boons like aegis and stability in recent times because that is still the support's primary job even though healing is more valued than it used to be. This is purely speculation but I'd wager the shift towards healing supports was also largely because of the change to how regeneration stacks during the PoF era. That happened in the same patch that turned alacrity into a boon, and the same patch that buffed Vampiric Presence out the wazoo. Suddenly regeneration was the singular most important way for a healer to keep their squad topped up and the boon naturally wants a hefty dose of healing power and concentration to maximise its effect. And if you're maxing out on concentration, you may as well bring as many other boons as you can so others don't have to. This change had to have played a major role in killing the notion of a "pure healer". On 9/5/2024 at 7:48 PM, Dadnir.5038 said: To be fair, the real issue is Quickness and Alacrity and concentration (boon duration). The maximum increase in boon duration from concentration being caped at 100% simply isn't enough for players to really want to invest in boon duration when 2 dps could just offer the same amount of boon duration than someone could offer by investing heavily. As for Quickness and Alacrity they simply shouldn't be sharable by any specific profession or e-spec. In my opinion, only specific relics should be able to allow one to share such boon and being able to keep them up would should always translate in a steep investment in concentration/boon duration. I think we should approach the topic of doubling up on boondps with a reasonable level of skepticism. While it is certainly possible for groups to do so, it only happens in the tippy top end groups trying to break records. With how difficult it already is to fill boon roles in the lfg, I can't imagine your average commander would want to increase that burden unless it was easier for pugs to swap into it. Though, I do believe that is one aspect of why Anet has been moving away from needing concentration for boondps roles. It is definitely a problem with the overall game design but so far we haven't seen this manifest on a large scale. I do agree that meta boons should be entirely selfish. That is the ideal state so that all of these game design problems could be swept away. Quickness especially, more so than alacrity, should be something dps builds generate for themselves. On 9/5/2024 at 7:48 PM, Dadnir.5038 said: It's not that the support potential is bad, it's just that it's not attractive. The healing potential is decent and the boon output is alright. The issue lie in the diversity of the boon shared: Regeneration, Protection and Might. Might is superflous, Protection is merely convenient while you want Regeneration done by your healer and on another hand you want your healer to have more boons than that. It could be enough for a tank but necromancer is notoriously bad against CC due to it's sustain design so it can't be a tank. The thing that really kills necromancer for me is the way you lose access to all of your tools when you enter shroud. That's a large part of why Scourge works as a healer but the others don't. Harbinger has to go into shroud to grant the meta boon but has to get out as soon as any of their other boons fall off or the group takes a big hit. It all comes back to that 'reactivity' I was talking about in the OP. And yeah, I'd never given it much thought but the support is also generally the tank and Harbinger is not suited for it unless you once again largely ignore the spec mechanic and play it like a core class. (That could be resolved with a trait though). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dadnir.5038 Posted Wednesday at 09:56 AM Share Posted Wednesday at 09:56 AM 4 hours ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: Quick question: You mentioned twice that groups had 8 players in them, what exactly did you mean by that? I didn't. I said that it was basically 2 support and 8 dps. You just stuck to the 8 DPS. 4 hours ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: This is purely speculation but I'd wager the shift towards healing supports was also largely because of the change to how regeneration stacks during the PoF era. No, really, this is purely a change of mentality on the playerbase part. You need to keep in mind that the game had been stagnant for way to long in PoF. Player were sick of always running the same raids and nothing the devs did really changed that fact. The players had fallen into a routine and suddenly an alternative that made this routine easier was promoted (proven effective contrary to their belief) in front of them. There was some resistance from some hardcore full dps raid players, asking for nerf to the defensive options that made life easier, but ultimately the playerbase settled into the new meta. Objectively, regeneration have always been easy to keep up (Like might, there are professions that don't even realize that they are sharing regeneration). I don't think a change to the way it stack did anything to the meta (Thought, a good regeneration upkeep was mandatory for condimesmer at some point which might be why you can find reference to the boon in the instanced content history). 4 hours ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: And yeah, I'd never given it much thought but the support is also generally the tank and Harbinger is not suited for it unless you once again largely ignore the spec mechanic and play it like a core class. (That could be resolved with a trait though). I think you're wrong here, Harbinger really do have the potential to benefit from it's spec mechanic as a "tank". The issue is how you perceive it. You see it as a mechanic that reduce the maximum health pool of the harbinger, while you should see it as a mechanic that have to potential to vastly increase the Harbinger's self sustain (25 blight stacks + Unholy sanctuary = 1k+ HP/s with Plaguedoctor's gear). You never want to ignore a necromancer's class mechanic as it's quite weak outside of it. Also, a lot of the necromancer's tools try to push the player into stacking vitality and Harbinger is no exception to the rule. What the harbinger lack to be a tank is what the necromancer as a whole lack to fill the role: the ability to remained unphazed by hard CC (well, technically Reaper do have the requiered stability but it lack the support to be attractive as a tank). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dadnir.5038 Posted Wednesday at 11:35 AM Share Posted Wednesday at 11:35 AM 6 hours ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: That could be resolved with a trait though Sure, every perceived issue could be resolved by their own trait. Reaper isn't competitive as a tank? Add a 4th GM trait that let reaper share the boons he apply on himself while in shroud to 5 allies within a 360 radius (simple and easy, all of a sudden Reaper can fart Might, Fury, Quickness and Stability around him. Probably not enough to keep up Quickness, thought.) Harbinger not good enough as a Healer? Add a 4th GM that make Harbinger pulse health while in shroud and make elixir/shroud skills that vent blight heal instead of dealing additional damage/conditions. (not very imaginative but certainly effective) Scourge can't pdps? Just add a 4th GM trait that increase it's ferocity while a shade is out on the field and transform sand cascade into a skill that deal strike damage instead of granting barrier and cleansing. I mean, if there is a will, there are easy solutions (I even make the harbinger's solution fit the crappy design of this profession's GM traits. It was effortless). One can to the same for every single e-spec grievance (even bladesworn could by a single GM trait) 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZephyrusSpring.5728 Posted Wednesday at 03:46 PM Author Share Posted Wednesday at 03:46 PM 4 hours ago, Dadnir.5038 said: I didn't. I said that it was basically 2 support and 8 dps. You just stuck to the 8 DPS. Sorry it was just the way you said it. That “the new meta was without a healer but instead a chrono, bannerslave and 6 dps” had me puzzled as to who the other two roles were. So wait, groups were looking for powerhouse healers in a dedicated role? That makes me a lot more confident in what I said about regeneration. Don’t underestimate regen because it’s often the largest contributor to your overall healing, so making it work consistently was no doubt a major change to the game. Blurring the line between healer and booner would definitely bring the meta composition into question when the meta boons lost their 10 target capacity. I’ll be honest I’m a bit skeptical about this “mass realisation” that you’re trying to put forward as the reason for the meta shift. I’m sure if I dug through more patch notes I could find more changes that coerced the meta. I don’t doubt that it took a lot of convincing to get the old fogeys to adapt though. 😄 4 hours ago, Dadnir.5038 said: I think you're wrong here, Harbinger really do have the potential to benefit from it's spec mechanic as a "tank". The issue is how you perceive it. You see it as a mechanic that reduce the maximum health pool of the harbinger, while you should see it as a mechanic that have to potential to vastly increase the Harbinger's self sustain (25 blight stacks + Unholy sanctuary = 1k+ HP/s with Plaguedoctor's gear). You never want to ignore a necromancer's class mechanic as it's quite weak outside of it. Also, a lot of the necromancer's tools try to push the player into stacking vitality and Harbinger is no exception to the rule. What the harbinger lack to be a tank is what the necromancer as a whole lack to fill the role: the ability to remained unphazed by hard CC (well, technically Reaper do have the requiered stability but it lack the support to be attractive as a tank). I concede that through these 2 traits a Harbinger can give themselves significant regeneration. I didn’t consider the death magic line because it is so selfish, but I suppose none of the other lines are particularly good for support either. Even without it, the Alchemic Vigor trait is pretty juicy with 1200+ healing power. It’s still just a bunch of selfish healing though, which wouldn’t be necessary if necro’s core healing tools were better. The point I was trying to make is that if Deathly Haste didn’t require you to go into shroud I doubt a support harbinger ever would except to cleanup downed players. I want to rephrase what I said in my last post. It’s not that you want to ignore the spec mechanic and play it like core, in fact it’s the core shroud aspect that support harbinger wants to minimise as much as possible. This is the area that support Harbinger is weakest and no amount of changes to weapon skills or utilities is going to fix that. It’s going to have to be a to buff that comes through traits, and particularly it needs to help in spike healing, off-boss healing, and boons, which is too much for a single trait. Harbinger’s trait line is already stacked so there’d need to be some combining and reshuffling to make room for anything there. It’s the Blood Magic line that needs some work, and luckily for anet they have an easy out because Scourge can’t get into shroud and the other specs can’t be healed through normal means while in shroud. That leaves Harbinger as the lone beneficiary of any targeted buffs to traits along those lines. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dadnir.5038 Posted Wednesday at 06:05 PM Share Posted Wednesday at 06:05 PM 1 hour ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: It’s not that you want to ignore the spec mechanic and play it like core, in fact it’s the core shroud aspect that support harbinger wants to minimise as much as possible. This is the area that support Harbinger is weakest and no amount of changes to weapon skills or utilities is going to fix that. So you mean that support Harbinger lack boon output in shroud. I don't think I can agree or disagree with this. The gameplay of the necromancer require it to dance in and out of shroud and it's alright. Once Harbinger have vomited it's boons he only have shroud as an option anyway. Now, to be clear, I'd love if the necromancer had more incentive to enter and leave shroud "faster". In fact it used to be an appaeling option in the vanilla game but that's something that the balance gradually left behind (There is remnant of this era in some trait: Spiteful spirit and Weakening shroud). Recently with the spear#4 skill, a glimpse of hope appeared for a resurgence of this gameplay, but at this point It's still better to take a wait and see stance. 1 hour ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: I’ll be honest I’m a bit skeptical about this “mass realisation” that you’re trying to put forward as the reason for the meta shift. The funny point is that it's true, thought. To be accurate, a few years ago, PvE Raid guilds created an unofficial marathon competition were different party had to clear the various wing as fast as possible. All but one parties used the well established full dps strategy while the last party which was led by someone that really wanted to have Scourge heal recognized as a viable option in the meta chose a party with a lot of survivability. Long story short they ended up being almost tied with the winner of the competition. That was the prototype of the current meta that emphasize healing. 1 hour ago, ZephyrusSpring.5728 said: It’s the Blood Magic line that needs some work, and luckily for anet they have an easy out because Scourge can’t get into shroud and the other specs can’t be healed through normal means while in shroud. That leaves Harbinger as the lone beneficiary of any targeted buffs to traits along those lines. This statement is tricky. First Scourge can get into shroud. While Scourge's F5 run it's course, Scourge is considered as if it's in shroud for all traits that ask the necromancer to be in shroud. Using F5 alos proc the trait related to entering/leaving shroud. The second point is that it is dangerous to touch the Blood magic traitline. The amount of shared sustain and self sustain it provide is already right were it should be. More and it would be to much (and that's especially true for Harbinger which is already seen as an unkillable demigod in WvW). The necromancer's core traitline are already all in a good place. Yes, ideally they could use some tweak here and there but objectively they are pretty good and, as such, they should be left alone. If something need to be reworked on Core necromancer: Minions and Death shroud should be the priority target. Death shroud because no matter how many time they tweak bad thing, if they keep what make them bad they stay bad. Minions because those utilities are simply to passive and the player is encouraged to use those passively. Objectively this need to change, I'd love to give boons to my party throught the sacrifice of a minion and I'd love it even more since I can slot 5 minion in my utility bar (That's potentially 5 different boons). Alternatively, They can also rework lich form into a non-transformation skill that help necromancer support it's party. (Yes I hate this skill design and aesthetic and I'm just using this post to say the same thing I say about it since 2013). 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cuks.8241 Posted Wednesday at 06:50 PM Share Posted Wednesday at 06:50 PM (edited) I like your analysis and mostly agree (on the specs I actually know and play or just like and don't play because of reasons you mentioned). Let me just say I really like to play supports (dps and heal supps) in this game. I'm far from the best healer but I do like how they are designed - not a heal bot but a true group support in many ways. It's probably the first mmorpg where I actually enjoy playing a healer. And I also really like the concepts of active boon upkeep in pve content. Find it way more interesting than just pre-buffing and forgetting about it like many games do it for most buffs.. I will go maybe a bit off topic and radical but I think it still fits into this topic and addresses some of your concerns but differently. While I like the healing supports in this game and the concept of upkeeping boons I don't like healing supports having to upkeep alacrity or quickness at all. I think it only hurts the playstyle. And that is mostly because of the reasons you already mentioned: - The implementation is often forced and just locks the support into a rotation which is exactly the opposite of what I like with gw2 healing supports - reactive, multifaceted gameplay. We have some really nice defensive/healing traits that are almost never used outside of highly specialised premade groups because they compete with boon trait. - Healing supports are already tasked with upkeeping many boons. But while for most other, especially offensive boons (might, fury...) there is a lot of redundancy nowadays (which is good) it is expected that you are 100% on point with quick and alac. Which leads again to previous point - locked into a rotation, boons take top priority. Let healing support take care of actual supporting with mostly high value abilities for critical situations (proactive and reactive including aegis and stability which are a boon but very different) while also provide the defensive boons (regeneration, vigor, protection) with a decent but not too overwhelming and limiting involvement. And while defensive boons also often require some kind of rotation in the end it's you making sure everyone is alive and not CCed. And that's all that matters in the end (if you remove alac/quick from them), not the means how to do it. And the more boons you need to upkeep the more you're locked into a rotational gameplay. I am completely fine with dps boons supports though. The boon rotation fits well into their dps role and that's pretty much it. Now how to achieve this? Remove alacrity and make quickness come only from dps boon supports. Removing alacrity would not hurt the game at all. It was already mostly removed from pvp modes and having one less boon that essentially does nothing at 100% upkeep (like most of them anyway) wouldn't hurt anyone. It would also reduce the power creep. Edited Wednesday at 06:51 PM by Cuks.8241 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mell.4873 Posted Wednesday at 09:25 PM Share Posted Wednesday at 09:25 PM (edited) My take on the contradiction between the boons you apply for your elite vs the boons you want on your elite is that it works great. Druid for example would benifit alot more from Quickness so in a group setting you need to make sure you have someone always apply quickness for you like a Firebrand and then you help them by lowering there cooldown. This means you have loop that requires two player. If a class has the boon that is also required to produce more boons then it would defeat the purpose of being in a group. Chronomancer had this issue early on. Edited Wednesday at 09:25 PM by Mell.4873 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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