Boonsharing classes undermine class viability - they are simply too powerful

[Crackmonster.2790]

I am not quite sure what you are getting at - this is not "the" way to make classes viable. This is just one brick in removing things that makes them non-viable. What really makes them viable is them all being able to perform competitively in the hands of a competent player - handled through balance.

[yusayu.3629]

• Sorry for "reviving" this, but this topic is very important imho, and a discussion is needed

@"yann.1946" said:Do we have a trinity though. Their are very few places you need a tank (which is just a support who takes agro). And very few places you need a healer. The meta strat for fractals involves no healer. And condi druid is more of a dps/support hybrid which accidently throws a little heal around.

Well, Trinity doesn't necessarily mean Healer/Tank/DPS, it can be any kind of system, where class archetypes play vastly different and the whether a class is mandatory depends on its archetype. Chrono is mandatory, so are druids in many cases. Even if it's called "Trinity", it kinda doesn't even mean it's 3 classes. If a support (in this case Chrono) was an alternative to just slotting another DPS to achieve similar overall party damage, it wouldn't be a Trinity, but that's not the case.

Wouldn't this just kill teamwork.

Enforcing a Holy Trinity kills teamwork. Because each player has their dedicated job, less teamwork is required. People think of Healers in WoW as "team players", but they really aren't (not to bash Healers), but because they are mandatory, have a very defined role that they perform continuously there is little communication or coordination required. It might sound weird, but a Holy Trinity is the antithesis of teamwork.

Or they won't do this because their are better solutions. :)There are exactly three solutions, keeping supports and enforcing a Holy Trinity by making them mandatory (current state), keeping supports but adjusting their power level to make them optional (i.e. you can slot a support in depending on composition and availability, 1 more support = 1 more DPS), or removing full-support classes, making each class self-sufficient.

[yann.1946]

@"yusayu.3629" said:

• Sorry for "reviving" this, but this topic is very important imho, and a discussion is needed

@"yann.1946" said:Do we have a trinity though. Their are very few places you need a tank (which is just a support who takes agro). And very few places you need a healer. The meta strat for fractals involves no healer. And condi druid is more of a dps/support hybrid which accidently throws a little heal around.

Well, Trinity doesn't necessarily mean Healer/Tank/DPS, it can be any kind of system, where class archetypes play vastly different and the whether a class is mandatory depends on its archetype. Chrono is mandatory, so are druids in many cases. Even if it's called "Trinity", it kinda doesn't even mean it's 3 classes. If a support (in this case Chrono) was an

alternative

to just slotting another DPS to achieve similar overall party damage, it wouldn't be a Trinity, but that's not the case.

It's not a holy trinity tho cause that implies tank an healer. To be fair in fractals you can slot one dps extra if you're group is good enough.

Wouldn't this just kill teamwork.

Enforcing a Holy Trinity kills teamwork. Because each player has their dedicated job, less teamwork is required. People think of Healers in WoW as "team players", but they really aren't (not to bash Healers), but because they are mandatory, have a very defined role that they perform continuously there is little communication or coordination required. It might sound weird, but a Holy Trinity is the antithesis of teamwork.

Even if you believe this to be true. The no boonsharing and healsharing would just make it so people would play next to each other not with each other.

Or they won't do this because their are better solutions. :)There are exactly three solutions, keeping supports and enforcing a Holy Trinity by making them mandatory (current state), keeping supports but adjusting their power level to make them

optional

(i.e. you can slot a support in depending on composition and availability, 1 more support = 1 more DPS), or removing full-support classes, making each class self-sufficient.

For a balanced system the support will alway be stronger then a single dps. Because otherwise their would be no point in bringing any. ( higher impact if the support fails plus builds would need to have variants with or without support)

[Astralporing.1957]

@"Crackmonster.2790" said:Inbefore chronos says or but my work is so hard and complicated, this is something else a seperate point from the argument.Of course it is separate, but that's because your point aims at some made up situation, not what actually happens in the game. You are speaking about passive buffers, when chrono is anything except passive.

Consider this, the one who argue for this role now(the majority) want it because as long as they can provide their buffs they can relax more where dps is more stressful in terms of performance.Oh, but is dps more stressful? In many encounters, it's actually the opposite.

Imagine if you wanted to solidify the support role and make it demand equal as much effort, not a single moment for slack or suffer in buff uptime, not a moment, then suddenly this gets to be the most stressful role(compared to dps) because if you mess up the whole team suffers more than if 1 dps mess up.

It already is like that. If you mess up with your buff uptimes, the overall dps loss is way bigger than the effect of similar messup on a single dps player. If you mess up with tanking, potentially whole group wipes. If you mess up with healing, potentially whole group wipes. On the other hand, if you mess up with dps, you deal less dps for a while, but that shouldn't really have any serious consequences besides the fight taking a few seconds longer (consider, that you can do practically all dps checks with one dps player dead)

This mean you have 4 different classes to select for each buff , hardly restrictive.There will always be a BiS setup, this will never change. Even for dps roles it will never change. Therefore i will ignore it.Ignoring it won't make it go away, you know.Let me put it that way: either the buffs will be distributed in such a way that it will require effort in putting a group (in which case you exchanged having to get one player for having to make a more complicated group setup, hardly a gain). Or, they will be distributed in such a way you will not need an effort in creating a group (because most class compositions would do, barring some more extreme ones). In which case you have just simplified the game into stacking "moar dps".

Additionally, let me remind you GW2 is not balanced around perfection required, you aren't forced to play with perfect composition.Sure. You already don't need chronos for most of the encounters (probably even for all of them). Nor do you need druids. You'd do as fine with rev/fb setup, for example. There were kills that utilized even more weird setups too.Those however have no impact whatsoever on average groups. I see no reason why in your case it would be different.

I will now reverse the situation and apply critical thinking to what i just wrote.

So one thing that comes to mind in terms of limitation is now that in order to ensure the perfect 5 man setup, you cannot have more than 2 classes from the same boongroup if you want a perfect group. This is a problem. This i think is similar to the situation you talked about. It points towards setting max 1 boon per class as an insufficient number. It also requires understanding boongroups before you can find the correct party members. It can be solved in two or three simple ways. The first way is that classes can provide two boons, I am not a fan of that as it will make 2 class combos again BiS.

The second way is that there is a subset of classes maybe 4-8 that can provide two boons anyway chosen among some of the less demanded classes to give them relevance.

What if the less demanded classes change? Will we distribute the boons around again? Also, does that mean those classes will end up stuck being useless as dps options with no chance of ever being balanced properly, in order to keep them in those "less relevant" spots?

The third way is consumerables for pve to ultimately say - we want free choice to matter most.Consets move the whole situation from skill to gold consideration. Either they will be affordable for everyone, in which case you might as well remove those boons from the game. Or they won't be affordable by everyone, which would mean the high-end gaming would become the domain of the wealthy (and it would probably cause the need for it to have better rewards, because almost noone is going to play at a loss)

Second of all, if it is assumed that all groups have everything, then they might as well be removed because it is like having none at all.Currently, all good groups have good boon setups. Bad groups don't have those (if you don't believe me, just do a few pugs on more demanding bosses and check boon uptimes - 30% uptime for quickness and alacrity, no full might stacks, etc, are a norm).

Thirdly, having this weird support role with all-power leads to the biggest problem of them all. Class stacking.There's no functional difference between class stacking and strict class setups of mixed classes. Apart from the second one being much harder to fill, of course.

Again, i have to say, there is a good reason to discuss this because if you really want to have 1 class that can bring all the boons - then you are better off removing boons altogether or simply giving them through consumerables. Either of those situations, including your 1 class all buff setup leads to class stacking. The only thing that avoids stacking the single most powerful class for the job now is different tools and benefits like "class buffs" that makes it meaningful to bring a variety of classes instead of just the most efficient one.Variety for a role is caused by having more than one class that can fill the needed role. Not by having that role be filled by a (restricted) group setup of classes.

[yusayu.3629]

@yann.1946 said:

@"yusayu.3629" said:

• Sorry for "reviving" this, but this topic is very important imho, and a discussion is needed

@yann.1946 said:Do we have a trinity though. Their are very few places you need a tank (which is just a support who takes agro). And very few places you need a healer. The meta strat for fractals involves no healer. And condi druid is more of a dps/support hybrid which accidently throws a little heal around.

Well, Trinity doesn't necessarily mean Healer/Tank/DPS, it can be any kind of system, where class archetypes play vastly different and the whether a class is mandatory depends on its archetype. Chrono is mandatory, so are druids in many cases. Even if it's called "Trinity", it kinda doesn't even mean it's 3 classes. If a support (in this case Chrono) was an

alternative

to just slotting another DPS to achieve similar overall party damage, it wouldn't be a Trinity, but that's not the case.

It's not a holy trinity tho cause that implies tank an healer. To be fair in fractals you can slot one dps extra if you're group is good enough.

It's not about the word trinity, it's about the design behind it.

Wouldn't this just kill teamwork.

Enforcing a Holy Trinity kills teamwork. Because each player has their dedicated job, less teamwork is required. People think of Healers in WoW as "team players", but they really aren't (not to bash Healers), but because they are mandatory, have a very defined role that they perform continuously there is little communication or coordination required. It might sound weird, but a Holy Trinity is the antithesis of teamwork.

Even if you believe this to be true. The no boonsharing and healsharing would just make it so people would play next to each other not with each other.

I never said there should be no boonsharing. Just that full-on support classes should not exist. Imagine you keep Chronomancer, focused on the power build and focused on keeping Alacrity & Quickness up on himself (cause that's kinda Chrono's theme and all). But now you give Chrono the ability to give his team about 20% uptime on both those boons (at independent times). What happens now, is that (to maximize DPS), the Chrono has to work with his team to provide those boons at the correct time for the others to take maximum advantage of them. That's teamwork. Actually communicating with your teams and coordinating buffs/boons. You could even increase the power of boons to give more incentive for this playstyle. Now imagine if this wasn't just a Chrono sharing his two boons for 20% of the time, imagine if most classes had this mechanic. It would need to be balanced not to overshoot the teams DPS (like Chrono does now), to where classes that don't provide boons are still perfectly viable (I'd nominate something like Weaver for this) because they bring an increased amount of DPS themselves instead of increasing team DPS.

Or they won't do this because their are better solutions. :)There are exactly three solutions, keeping supports and enforcing a Holy Trinity by making them mandatory (current state), keeping supports but adjusting their power level to make them

optional

(i.e. you can slot a support in depending on composition and availability, 1 more support = 1 more DPS), or removing full-support classes, making each class self-sufficient.

For a balanced system the support will alway be stronger then a single dps. Because otherwise their would be no point in bringing any. ( higher impact if the support fails plus builds would need to have variants with or without support)

Yes, in a trinity system. You could balance supports to where adding a support to 4 players adds about 20% DPS to each player and does 20% of a player himself so it'd be perfectly viable to slot another DPS instead of the support. Right now Chrono adds, what, 80% damage to each player?