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Amulets should be replaced with a better system for the sake of balance.


Tycura.1982

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Yes it's been argued before but with each amulet erasure it only becomes more relevant.

 

Here is how I came to this conclusion

 

In another post I was typing up a long winded argument about the benefits of balancing by a gold standard per role. (Pointless I know but I've got nothing better to do.) So in an alternate timeline an Anet who cares about PvP asks the community via a forum poll what classes should be the standard. For the sake of the argument let's assume the community chooses support core guardian as the standard for the supporting role since it's arguably the most basic of the supports and is easier to quantify.

 

We look at what core guardian provides in it's support role: Great healing, a wide range of boons, instant resurrection signet, some CC, decent projectile denial. On the smaller side of support damage. Virtue sharing.

 

We would then go on to compare to each support and whether or not these overperform or underperform in relation to core guardian.

But thats not the point of this post so let's cut to the chase.

As a caveat I'm arguing this in vacuum and I am in no way calling for actual nerfs. All of this is just speculation.

 

As you stack up the supports you arrive at Avatar Scourge. So what does scourge do? Modest healing, highest barrier of the supports, a quick but not instant res, boon corruption, respectable damage, large condition variety via corruption, large boon variety via cleansing. Some CC.

 

And I start comparing the two under the lense of support. Again this just conjecture. In terms of support I believe that scourge performs modestly but deals too much damage if you were to balance in a vacuum. Why is that? Well I believe the line between damage dealer and support is just too blurry for Avatar Scourge. 

 

Its here we strike to the heart of the matter.

How do you broaden the difference between support scourge and damage scourge without adversely affecting the damage of any other necro build outside of scourge and removing an amulet or nerfing it into lopsidedness a la Paladin which would shift the meta and reduce the effectiveness of this change? My first thought was to reduce the damage of a skill and buff the scaling. At first glance this seems like a good approach but you hit a road block. Take focus 5 for example. The damage difference between Demo and Avatar is there but not by a very large margin as they both have the same power. The difference in support and bunker capability is massive between a build with Demo and a build with Avatar this is much more impactful than the damage disparity. So here's the kicker. If you were to lower the amount of barrier and buff healing power scalings of scourge skills you would separate damage scourge from support scourge but would kitten support scourge into unplayability. Why? There is no other option from here. With the removal of all 1000 healing power amulets there is very little room to properly balance as whatever you do to separate a support or bunker from it's damage will ultimately be a heavy handed nerf to all of it's class.

 

There's too few amulets at this point. I believe we should move to modular stats like the normal equipment system but with standardized stats to choose from for each slot. This provides a level playing field where you can balance any overperforming specialization by itself without affecting other classes. Should you seek to broaden the difference. You need only buff the scaling and nerf the base to encourage a support to drop extra power stats in favor of more healing to maintain the same level of support.

Edited by Tycura.1982
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You are saying:

 

You can pick a 3 stat or 4 stat amulet.

 

3 stat amulet:

First pick gets 1200 attribute points, the other two picks get 900.

 

4 stat amulet:

First two picks get 1000 attribute points, the other 2 get 500.

 

Perhaps diminishing returns per defensive stat that is selected, applied across all stats selected? So if you picked Toughness, Vitality, Healing Power it would not be 1200/900/900 but 900/600/600 instead because everyone hates bunkers right?

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4 minutes ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

You are saying:

 

You can pick a 3 stat or 4 stat amulet.

 

3 stat amulet:

First pick gets 1200 attribute points, the other two picks get 900.

 

4 stat amulet:

First two picks get 1000 attribute points, the other 2 get 500.

 

Perhaps diminishing returns per defensive stat that is selected, applied across all stats selected? So if you picked Toughness, Vitality, Healing Power it would not be 1200/900/900 but 900/600/600 instead because everyone hates bunkers right?

I'm thinking more like 6 armor slots to choose any combination of stats you want. Give people build freedom. There might be an argument for diminishing returns.

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6 minutes ago, Tycura.1982 said:

I'm thinking more like 6 armor slots to choose any combination of stats you want. Give people build freedom. There might be an argument for diminishing returns.

Ah. I missed that last statement in your post. So you are basically wanting the current amulet stats divided amongst 6 slots were you get to pick and choose.

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They should bring back the amulet & jewel system spvp had early on, maybe even have a 3 way split to allow better stat allocation; something like 50% amulet, 35% jewel, 15% chain?

Spvp has the issue of stats tied to just the 1 amulet slot making build crafting overly restricting which makes certain builds impossible to make, this is the main reason why ele became mostly lackluster ever since the celestial amulet nerf since the class needs multiple stats for many of its builds to function.

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17 minutes ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

That has more to do with ascended quality gear, infusions, food, and utilities.

While those certainly don't help, the ability to fully customise stats is still a problem.

 

Certain combinations are inherently problematic. If you give players the ability to simulate Trailblazer/Dire stats in PvP, you can guarantee that they will. Same issue with Nomad/Minstrel. If you think Scourge is a pain in the proverbial now, just imagine it in PvP with Apothecary/Plaguedoctor stats.

 

Even if you don't enable those specific combinations directly, if you allow people to, for example, mix up a combination of sage and rabid, the combination together will be far more powerful than either alone, because those items alone have clear weaknesses.

Edited by Ragnar.4257
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7 minutes ago, Ragnar.4257 said:

While those certainly don't help, the ability to fully customise stats is still a problem.

 

Certain combinations are inherently problematic. If you give players the ability to simulate Trailblazer/Dire stats in PvP, you can guarantee that they will. Same issue with Nomad/Minstrel. If you think Scourge is in a pain in the proverbial now, just imagine it in PvP with Apothecary/Plaguedoctor stats.

 

Even if you don't enable those specific combinations directly, if you allow people to, for example, mix up a combination of sage and rabid, the combination together will be far more powerful than either alone, because those items alone have clear weaknesses.

See my above recommendation on diminishing returns on defensive stats on such a system. If Trailblazer were brought into sPvP then it would have to get the Paladin Amulet treatment. Dire would as well.

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9 hours ago, Tycura.1982 said:

Its here we strike to the heart of the matter.

How do you broaden the difference between support scourge and damage scourge without adversely affecting the damage of any other necro build outside of scourge and removing an amulet or nerfing it into lopsidedness a la Paladin which would shift the meta and reduce the effectiveness of this change? My first thought was to reduce the damage of a skill and buff the scaling. At first glance this seems like a good approach but you hit a road block. Take focus 5 for example. The damage difference between Demo and Avatar is there but not by a very large margin as they both have the same power. The difference in support and bunker capability is massive between a build with Demo and a build with Avatar this is much more impactful than the damage disparity. So here's the kicker. If you were to lower the amount of barrier and buff healing power scalings of scourge skills you would separate damage scourge from support scourge but would kitten support scourge into unplayability. Why? There is no other option from here. With the removal of all 1000 healing power amulets there is very little room to properly balance as whatever you do to separate a support or bunker from it's damage will ultimately be a heavy handed nerf to all of it's class.

 

I'm glad you are thinking like this...more people should be thinking like this in order to understand exactly the implications of balance changes...rather then the current echo chamber that is "Nerf x! Buff y! Remove z!"

 

Balance as a philosophical concept is poorly understood, and by proxy poorly implemented. A lot of the news is unfortunately very bad...as in, that many operations one can do to the game are either futile, meaningless or detrimental;

 

  • Remove an amulet to balance a single meta build? You removed the amulets from 100 off meta builds.
  • Nerf a trait to balance a single meta build on Warrior? You nerf 30 other off meta builds on warrior.
  • Try and make all the numbers the same? You homogenize the classes and the game become boring.

 

If you asked me, this all has to do with the complexity of the game...how connected all these elements are too each other and traditional balance operations do not work on it. It's like taking a single monkey out of Barrel Monkeys, or trying to remove a single pair of headphones from a pile of wires. You try to pick one up and everything else comes out with it, no matter how careful you were are or how hard you try...

 

There is only one single operation I know in all my time looking into the problem that has any desirable change...and it aligns essentially with your proposal for free-form stat control. The more freedom people have to make builds, the more counters can exist, and a different kind of balance mechanism comes into play. Not gonna go into that here, but I'm just glad that you're thinking out of the box, and going deeper into the issue.

Edited by JusticeRetroHunter.7684
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I've had a similar idea as well. However the concept could be complex for Anet to implement for their engine idk.

 

* Players have a pool of 3000 pts to spend.

 

* Toughness, Vitality add 15% extra cost if paired together. Maximum per stats 900.

 

* Healing Power, Concentration, Expertise add 15% extra cost if paired together. Maximum per stats 500.

 

* Power, Precision, Ferocity and Condition Damage otherwise cost is 1:1. Maximum per stats 1200.

Edited by Shao.7236
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I know this is crazy to suggest it.. but why on earth dont they allow you to pick from 3(4 including both attack types) options:

 

Attack

Power

Condition

Defence

Support

 

From a balance point this would make skill balancing a hell of a lot easier to work out. Yes this is bringing the trinity system to PvP, but lets face it, PvP needs it. This could prevent builds which can Support and Attack with little challenge.

Would this mean that skills and traits would need to change to accomodate the stats? Yes.

PvP needs to encourage teamwork and sellecting the correct tools for the job (traits / skills / weapons). The current system encourages players to abuse stat combo's with their skills and traits.

Idealy you'd want to create the system where DPS > SUPPORT > DEFENCE ∞. Without Support the Defence will die, Without defence the node will be lost.

There will always be optimal stats in the game making the other options worth less as a result, limiting the number of stat options to Attack, Defence and Support should as a result shift the balance of the game to the team composition and team play in a team game mode.

Sadly I do not see this changing, we'll be forever in this endless cycle of balance out of wack and a deminishing number of players for pvp.

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21 minutes ago, Shao.7236 said:

I've had a similar idea as well. However the concept could be complex for Anet to implement for their engine idk.

 

* Players have a pool of 3000 pts to spend.

 

* Toughness, Vitality have 15% extra cost if paired together. Maximum per stats 900.

 

* Healing Power, Concentration, Expertise have 15% extra cost if paired together. Maximum per stats 500.

 

* Power, Precision, Ferocity and Condition Damage otherwise cost is 1:1. Maximum per stats 1200.

Perhaps on a Legendary Amulet. If only one were available in PvP... Oh wait.

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i had this idea a while ago, you get 3k stats to allocate however you want. problem is, there are too many problematic stat combos. tough + vital with either heal/ condi and all combos therein for starters, with plenty of other ones according to whatever build you're going for. there is also the issue of how damage plays out in this game in association with the various class mechanics: condi bombs and massive kiting/ stealthing will never be balanced, massive ranged damage and lots of mobility will never be balanced, insane melee burst with tons of hard mitigation will never be balanced etc etc. then there is power damage calculation, its scales way too fast with a good build and decent coefficients (maybe not so much anymore but with stat allocation i think it might make a comeback). in short, this game is too complex and has too many but if this then that so we can't do that type scenarios. this game really is doomed cuz it wasn't designed properly from the ground up. i think anet should stick with the amulet system as it is now but try to introduce more amulets with interesting stat combos, and by interesting i mean viable with some builds. not meta, but strong. manual stat allocation would work if conquest had more players per team (1v2 or even 1v3 was common on side node) and/ or there were more viable game modes. also there are too many do it all in one traits and skills. MSA (manual stat allocation) is too problematic for 1v1s without drastic change elsewhere.

Edited by Stand The Wall.6987
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Just now, Smoosh.2718 said:

I know this is crazy to suggest it.. but why on earth dont they allow you to pick from 3(4 including both attack types) options:

 

Attack

Power

Condition

Defence

Support

 

From a balance point this would make skill balancing a hell of a lot easier to work out. Yes this is bringing the trinity system to PvP, but lets face it, PvP needs it. This could prevent builds which can Support and Attack with little challenge.

Would this mean that skills and traits would need to change to accomodate the stats? Yes.

PvP needs to encourage teamwork and sellecting the correct tools for the job (traits / skills / weapons). The current system encourages players to abuse stat combo's with their skills and traits.

Idealy you'd want to create the system where DPS > SUPPORT > DEFENCE ∞. Without Support the Defence will die, Without defence the node will be lost.

There will always be optimal stats in the game making the other options worth less as a result, limiting the number of stat options to Attack, Defence and Support should as a result shift the balance of the game to the team composition and team play in a team game mode.

Sadly I do not see this changing, we'll be forever in this endless cycle of balance out of wack and a deminishing number of players for pvp.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a build being able to do both 'Support' AND 'Attack'.

 

It's only a problem if it can do both of them as well as a dedicated support or a dedicated DPS.

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10 hours ago, Tycura.1982 said:

Yes it's been argued before but with each amulet erasure it only becomes more relevant.

 

Here is how I came to this conclusion

 

In another post I was typing up a long winded argument about the benefits of balancing by a gold standard per role. (Pointless I know but I've got nothing better to do.) So in an alternate timeline an Anet who cares about PvP asks the community via a forum poll what classes should be the standard. For the sake of the argument let's assume the community chooses support core guardian as the standard for the supporting role since it's arguably the most basic of the supports and is easier to quantify.

 

We look at what core guardian provides in it's support role: Great healing, a wide range of boons, instant resurrection signet, some CC, decent projectile denial. On the smaller side of support damage. Virtue sharing.

 

We would then go on to compare to each support and whether or not these overperform or underperform in relation to core guardian.

But thats not the point of this post so let's cut to the chase.

As a caveat I'm arguing this in vacuum and I am in no way calling for actual nerfs. All of this is just speculation.

 

As you stack up the supports you arrive at Avatar Scourge. So what does scourge do? Modest healing, highest barrier of the supports, a quick but not instant res, boon corruption, respectable damage, large condition variety via corruption, large boon variety via cleansing. Some CC.

 

And I start comparing the two under the lense of support. Again this just conjecture. In terms of support I believe that scourge performs modestly but deals too much damage if you were to balance in a vacuum. Why is that? Well I believe the line between damage dealer and support is just too blurry for Avatar Scourge. 

 

Its here we strike to the heart of the matter.

How do you broaden the difference between support scourge and damage scourge without adversely affecting the damage of any other necro build outside of scourge and removing an amulet or nerfing it into lopsidedness a la Paladin which would shift the meta and reduce the effectiveness of this change? My first thought was to reduce the damage of a skill and buff the scaling. At first glance this seems like a good approach but you hit a road block. Take focus 5 for example. The damage difference between Demo and Avatar is there but not by a very large margin as they both have the same power. The difference in support and bunker capability is massive between a build with Demo and a build with Avatar this is much more impactful than the damage disparity. So here's the kicker. If you were to lower the amount of barrier and buff healing power scalings of scourge skills you would separate damage scourge from support scourge but would kitten support scourge into unplayability. Why? There is no other option from here. With the removal of all 1000 healing power amulets there is very little room to properly balance as whatever you do to separate a support or bunker from it's damage will ultimately be a heavy handed nerf to all of it's class.

 

There's too few amulets at this point. I believe we should move to modular stats like the normal equipment system but with standardized stats to choose from for each slot. This provides a level playing field where you can balance any overperforming specialization by itself without affecting other classes. Should you seek to broaden the difference. You need only buff the scaling and nerf the base to encourage a support to drop extra power stats in favor of more healing to maintain the same level of support.


A lot of food for thought.


Personally It would be great if they could force scourge nec to choose between having massive amounts of barrier or damage. and make it so nec doesn't get as much barrier when its giving it out, since sustain supporty classes can be broken ez.

 

Maybe reworking so they change blood bank location into 1 line in scourge and the other in the other area, forcing scourge to choose between the barrier and condition damage.

 

This would force scourges to choose and reworking damage while in scourge so its X amount while in scourge lowering the damage and then making it so if you choose the line of scourge for condi, you end up with balanced amount.

 

If bloodbank was moved into the scourge tree and forced scourges to do that, they could have a balanced build between dmg and support.

 

Another possibility is to nerf scourge damage into the ground and buff core shroud so it is better as conditions than scourge to equal amounts it was before.

 

 

Edited by Axl.8924
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On 6/16/2021 at 2:48 PM, Paradoxoglanis.1904 said:

The stat system could use a big overhaul, maybe by lowering base damage and healing but making it scale more with stats. Your amulet should have a bigger impact on what your build is good at. Pure supports shouldnt be able to do significant damage, and you shouldnt be a durable side noder with a zerker amulet.

There is no base damage in GW2

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The reason why several times amuletts where removed is because first. Ministrel and other stuff like that making players unkillable, in wvw it's easy to watch when a guard is running arround with that while 5 people attacking him and he gets no dmg at all. It's nothing about skill it's about stats. 

Second in vanilla we had more stat combinations to use because classes weren't that versatile and hadn't that kind of broken skills, which mostly come from reworks and especs. 

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They keep removing amulets because they are unable to balance the game with all the flexibility profession kits and stat combos resulted in(I'm not defending their ineptitude btw, just explaining it).
I understand you'd like to have options, to have meaningful buildcrafting sessions to wreck your brain with, but there is absolutely no use in asking for more options. They removed them for a reason, they will not give those back.

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No.

 

First off, in terms of gamedev what you are asking Anet to do here is a lot more work than you may realize. They would have to redo portions of the code for every skill, recompile, QA, and then do it again several times to get the balance right. Spaghetti code also makes it so they would likely have to have the QA team go through a whole bunch of other parts of the game you would normally think are unrelated, because base stats are deeply ingrained. This would also include many skills and buffs that do not even scale off base stats, because they are still balanced around how base stats currently work. This means they would have to touch everything in the game to get this  right, or risk VERY DEEP balance issues creeping up from unintended interactions. All for an idea that might not even make things better, because most balance problems are caused by lack of counterplay, which is a design issue of a small set of skills. Switching base stats around wouldn't change those issues at all.

 

Second off, the way stats work in this game, you are forgetting the balance issue of Condition Damage. Condi only requires one stat to be effective, this is why prefixes like trailblazers tend to result in problems in WvW, and why cleanse sigil removes 3 condis in that gamemode because otherwise it would be kitten.  If people could make their own 4 stat amulet everyone would just do this:

1000 Condi

1000 Vitality

500 Toughness

500 Healing

Do you want zero-skill-required full throttle braindead condi bunker monkey meta? Because this is how you get condi bunker monkey meta.

 

Edited by Master Ketsu.4569
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On 6/16/2021 at 6:20 AM, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

You are saying:

 

You can pick a 3 stat or 4 stat amulet.

 

3 stat amulet:

First pick gets 1200 attribute points, the other two picks get 900.

 

4 stat amulet:

First two picks get 1000 attribute points, the other 2 get 500.

 

Perhaps diminishing returns per defensive stat that is selected, applied across all stats selected? So if you picked Toughness, Vitality, Healing Power it would not be 1200/900/900 but 900/600/600 instead because everyone hates bunkers right?

Would we just do this for defense or offense as well?

 

if yes I’d think this would affect power much more than condi, even if you do it for expertise condi bunkers will still dominate 

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I dont think amulets are the problem. They remove some amulets to balance out the game becuase some classes are to oppressive with those kind of stats. However it's not the amulets fault that the skills and their respective values and coefficients seem to be to overly effective with certain stat combos. Arena net is not capable of understanding the changes they do with their skills so they remove amulets to straight up stop the usuage of some play styles and specs.  And in the end they make thinga worse by limiting the meta choices.

Edited by Eddbopkins.2630
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