Guild Wars 2

Since beginning PvP, PvE and WvW are constantly drifting away from each other. I think there needs to be some core mechanics addressed before we can start balancing classes.

Here is a list, what needs to be done and later I will give some examples:

• Stat difference between gamemodes
• condition cap
• core-mechanics of classes
• monster behavior and stats
• fix broken/bugged skills

After this we can start work on classes:

• beginning with traits
• polishing skills

So and now the examples:
Stat difference between gamemodes:
Right now we have 3 completly different games (not gamemodes) in GW2. This needs to change. You cant balance the game around sPVP, where stats are atleast 30% lower than in the rest of the game and where is no buff-food available. With ascended gear, we got the strongest gear for the rest of the game(?), so this should be base values for sPvP too. I would suggest, increasing the stats you can get in sPvP to the same values you will get with ascended gear, include every stat combination available, every rune/sigil and buff-food in sPvP.

Now more specific:

• Ascended gear should be clear, we need all gamemode to get stat wise closer together. Just for example: Condition gear in sPvP can get arround 2.6k condition damage and 30% duration, while in PvE you get 3.2k and 70% duration. which is a huge difference.
  PvP-Build
  PvE-Build

• Stat combinations in PvP are very limited and static values, nearly no combination of them is possible. I would include rings for combination and make the stats selectable like we have them on legendaries (but mainstats and minor stats, not full sets)

• sigils/runes should be clear, most of them dont excist in PvP, which means, there is no balance possible for them.

• Buff-food has a huge impact in PvE espacially WvW. 40% condition duration is equal to 40% more damage, plus ~30% normal damage is huge. Just include them in PvP. They dont need to be time limited, they could give a permanent buff in PvP. But include them, so a) they get balanced and b) the rest of the game can be balanced, due to PvP.

condition cap:
People claim about it since beta and it was never touched. I can understand, that there are technical limitations, but there are also numbers of useless calculations, that are done every tick.

• Get rid of this kittening condition cap. It makes absolutely no sense at all that conditions are capped. If there are any engine limitations, I would love to hear from a dev, where the limitations are. Probably the community has a good solution you probably didnt imagine, where everyone could live with. please devs talk to us
• If there are performance issues, then make conditions fire and forget. Right now conditions gets recalculated every second. I dont care that if I get 1 stack of might, then my bleeds deal 1 more damage. The conditions I will apply while I have those might stacks, will deal the same damage a few seconds later.
• If it is a problem of visibility, than screw it. If you die to 20 conditions, you will die to 40 or 60 aswell. right now condition builds lose alot of their damage if there are more than one other player around, sometimes it doesnt even need to be a condition build.

core-mechanics of classes:
ranger:

• pets need to hit moving targets:
  combat in GW2 is not static, everyone is moving (except current PvE, more later). To improve this, pets need to get their attack range increased, get a short ranged leap or attack while moving. Good example, a pet converted into a moa by a mesmer hits nearly everything
• Pet stats:
  In my opinion, pet stats should scale with ranger stats (each pet-type with different scaling factors). for example, every pet has 2 major, 2 minor stats, which he scales good with and the rest stay at base values. This would especially nerf rangers hybrid builds, which are too strong right now (spirit-bunker-ranger) and will allow balancing the ranger, because right now with those builds, you cant balance them correctly, nerfing the condition part will nerf every condition build and nerfing the pets damage will nerf direct damage builds which are weak right now.
• spirits: No procs without any conditions. Offensive procs on crit, defensive on getting hit. Only water spirit on hit, because its a heal.

Necromancer:

• Skill delay while leaving deathshroud needs to go on utility skills. It cant be possible that you cant use your healing skill for 2 seconds after leaving deathschroud.
• Allow heals in deathshroud: right now it is not possible to get healed while in deathshroud. Every regeneration on you is negated. It is not a sort of protection, its a lifesponge and doesnt help to survive nor is it usefull in some builds. which leads to the next point
• Split deahtshroud into several forms, one for condition damage, one for direct damage and one for defense (vampiric one would be cool too). Which can be selected (like rangers pets). Rght now, deathshroud is a life sponge and not a utility skill, it is full of different kinds of skills, that dont fit together and maximum half of them is usefull in builds.
• Minions need to scale with the players stats (same as rangers pets).

Guardian:

• his burning is a hit in the face to every condition class. there is no condition guardian build, but he steals the burning slots with his auto attacks. With the changes above (everyone gets his own stack) this wouldnt be a problem
• Same as every other minion class, spirit weapons need to scale with guardians stats.

Elementalist:

• Every weapon can do everything: on one side it is nice, because he cant swap weapons, but due to gear limitation, half of your set is useless because you miss the stats for those skills.
• conjured weapon: same as engineer kits, they need to scale with he equipped weapon.

Warrior:

• Not every burst skills actually bursts, GS is a buff (maybe swap with 100 Blades) and Longbow is damage over time (swap with arcing arrow)
• The actual mechanic of the adrenalin system is out of balance, you can only win with it. If you miss an atack, you dont lose the adrenalin, you only get a small CD
• I would include some sort of adrenalin regulation in his normal skills, so that every skill except 1 drains up to 2 adrenalin and if you hit a target you will get it back and If you miss, you will lose it. This will give the warrior some risk by simple spamming skills.

Engineer:

• Same as with rangers pets, his turrets (core mechanic) don’t scale with his stats, making them useless in higher level or with better gear.
• Kits: They have their own damage value. With new gear (ascended) every other class got 5% more base damage, engineers kits didn’t get this buff. Some scaling with the weapon damage equipped is needed.

thief and mesmer:

• im not into them, i know mesmer have problems in PvE, but I dont play them enough to say anything about them, maybe someone can help me out here. If there are any problems with their mechanic.

whyme.3281:

Engi,thief and mesmer:

• im not into them, i know engi and mesmer have problems in PvE, but I dont play them enough to say anything about them, maybe someone can help me out here. If there are any problems with their mechanic.

Regarding engineer, I’ll go ahead and quote myself:

[PvX]

• Turrets.
  After a series of nerfs and changes to turrets (even if aimed at supply drop), will there be any bugfixes for them? It’s hard to tell what will/has become of the net turret or any other turret since you never see them in action for very valid reasons.
  (list of several dozen bugs)

• Mortar.
  Name one part of it that does work as intented. There has been a lot of constructive feed back, so where are we on this matter?
  (lack of elite skill diversity)

[Pve]

• Scaling with ascended gear or any stats at all is not very common among our utility and elite skills. What is your opinion on the hobo sacks issue? Some people even claim to recognize toilet paper attached to them…
  (Core mechanics of the class actually go against a lot of what Pve promotes)

Conclusion: 1/2 – 2/3 of our skills have no chance in this meta except for occiasional abuse or are completely broken by default. We don’t get anything out of being successful in pve and on top of that it’s been this way for almost a year. We are so lucky to be competetive in sPvP, while on the other hand that’s most likely the reason we don’t get our issues revisited by anet.

Carighan.6758:

Honestly, I think WvW and PvE can be ~easily balanced on the same set of abilities.

It’s only sPvP which is highly problematic because it forces characters into a combat mode which RPGs generally aren’t viable for.

No you cant balance them, because you have 2 types of enemies.

fast hitting players vs dumb slow-hitting monsters
more or less intelligent moving players vs static AI
maximum 30k health vs 1+million for bosses
active condi remove vs defiant, unshakable and immunity
zerg against zerg vs group of 5 againt 1 boss
….

there needs something to be done. Right now, you cant balance one skill for every 3 games. And on the other hand, you cant split every skill to every 3 gamemodes.

E: sPvP works, the problem is, that we have a stat gap of more than 30% between both game modes. Which results in a damage difference of more than 60% (the stats are multiplying). And this makes balancing needlessly complicated. And ends in doing the balancing work for at least 2 (if not all 3) different games.

@Escadin: I will look at it. Im not sure how implement it here, because these are more bugs and if we start with bugs, I will definitely need more space.
The scaling of skills is the only thing, that’s a general problem. If I remember correctly, than the kits dont scale with the stats too.

whyme I aggree with most what you say but I do dissaggree with this one:

" for example, every pet has 2 major, 2 minor stats, which he scales good with and the rest stay at base values."
This will make it so that some pet will become useless depending on your build. Instead I suggest that 50% of the stats are preset depending on the type of pet and that the other 50% scales with the ranger.

Tim.6450:

whyme I aggree with most what you say but I do dissaggree with this one:

" for example, every pet has 2 major, 2 minor stats, which he scales good with and the rest stay at base values."
This will make it so that some pet will become useless depending on your build. Instead I suggest that 50% of the stats are preset depending on the type of pet and that the other 50% scales with the ranger.

Can you be more specific here? I was thinking in my post, that every pet has lets say 900 base stat for everything and health depending on pet type. The rest will get increases with every base point (no might etc.) the ranger gets.
Lets make some examples:

• A cat will scale very good with power and precision and gets lower benefits out of crit damage (ferocity) and vitality.
• A bear will scale good with defensive stats and probably as minor stats, power and healing power
• A spider will go for condition damage, duration and its minors will be precision and toughness.
• …..

The final numbers needs to be tweaked, maybe a fifth stat is needed, but I think you know what I mean.

If I understand you correctly, than you want the cats for example still have their high base damage and scale with condi damage and defensive stats (the rest). This woulndt change the current problem with those hybrid builds we have. Right now in PvP the only good ranger builds are tanky with cat (Tanky heal or tanky-condition). These builds completely destroys rangers balance, because they get 100% benefit out of their stats plus the full damage of the pet (30%+ of a berserker build). All this can be topped with spirits. Because he gets full benefit out of armor and condition stats compared to bad power scaling caused by the pet. And now try to balance this mess, with simple number tweaking, it’s impossible.

[added the point fix bugged skills, so that they work as intended. Some buggs are known for over a year now and were never touched]

I’m not sure about your point on ele, because most skills that are useless… are useless no matter the stat you build on them.

For example in a typical dagger/dagger build, they build mostly power and crit, maybe some toughness/healing power here or there.
- All fire skills are useful and do lots of damage
- All water skills are great for healing and applying chill, which helps surviving
- Shocking Aura is questionable since it requires you to get hit in order to take effect (and it’s a rather squishy ele) but it also means that any channeled skill that hits you gets interrupted. So it’s by no means useless. Other skills are very nice, high mobility and control effects.
- Earth is a mostly condition spec so it doesn’t deal as much damage as it would otherwise but it still does some horrific damage and great control effects if you manage to hit the burst skills of it. The leap part of 3 is arguably useless because its leaping animation is horrible, but it’s horrible no matter what you build anyway. The 1 and 2 skills don’t do that much damage but they can be casted whether you’re facing the target or not, which is very strong since most can’t deal damage to targets behind them and it keeps you mobile.

Maybe if you build full bunker on your ele then your damage focused attunements might be less useful but they’re still pretty good when you need to burst something, and they still offer some minor survivability tool too, like vigor on phoenix, dragon’s tooth + shatterstone zoning power, blind on blinding flash and the whole of the focus caters to defensive capability.

whyme.3281:

core-mechanics of classes:
ranger:

• pets need to hit moving targets:
  combat in GW2 is not static, everyone is moving (except current PvE, more later). To improve this, pets need to get their attack range increased, get a short ranged leap or attack while moving. Good example, a pet converted into a moa by a mesmer hits nearly everything
• Pet stats:
  In my opinion, pet stats should scale with ranger stats (each pet-type with different scaling factors). for example, every pet has 2 major, 2 minor stats, which he scales good with and the rest stay at base values. This would especially nerf rangers hybrid builds, which are too strong right now (spirit-bunker-ranger) and will allow balancing the ranger, because right now with those builds, you cant balance them correctly, nerfing the condition part will nerf every condition build and nerfing the pets damage will nerf direct damage builds which are weak right now.

Necromancer:

• Skill delay while leaving deathshroud needs to go on utility skills. It cant be possible that you cant use your healing skill for 2 seconds after leaving deathschroud.
• Allow heals in deathshroud: right now it is not possible to get healed while in deathshroud. Every regeneration on you is negated. It is not a sort of protection, its a lifesponge and doesnt help to survive nor is it usefull in some builds. which leads to the next point
• Split deahtshroud into several forms, one for condition damage, one for direct damage and one for defense (vampiric one would be cool too). Which can be selected (like rangers pets). Rght now, deathshroud is a life sponge and not a utility skill, it is full of different kinds of skills, that dont fit together and maximum half of them is usefull in builds.

Agree with you – love the deathshroud split idea – that would be something cool to try out.. a bunker deathshroud so that Necros could actually bunker!

whyme.3281:

Tim.6450:

whyme I aggree with most what you say but I do dissaggree with this one:

" for example, every pet has 2 major, 2 minor stats, which he scales good with and the rest stay at base values."
This will make it so that some pet will become useless depending on your build. Instead I suggest that 50% of the stats are preset depending on the type of pet and that the other 50% scales with the ranger.

Can you be more specific here? I was thinking in my post, that every pet has lets say 900 base stat for everything and health depending on pet type. The rest will get increases with every base point (no might etc.) the ranger gets.
Lets make some examples:

• A cat will scale very good with power and precision and gets lower benefits out of crit damage (ferocity) and vitality.
• A bear will scale good with defensive stats and probably as minor stats, power and healing power
• A spider will go for condition damage, duration and its minors will be precision and toughness.
• …..

The final numbers needs to be tweaked, maybe a fifth stat is needed, but I think you know what I mean.

If I understand you correctly, than you want the cats for example still have their high base damage and scale with condi damage and defensive stats (the rest). This woulndt change the current problem with those hybrid builds we have. Right now in PvP the only good ranger builds are tanky with cat (Tanky heal or tanky-condition). These builds completely destroys rangers balance, because they get 100% benefit out of their stats plus the full damage of the pet (30%+ of a berserker build). All this can be topped with spirits. Because he gets full benefit out of armor and condition stats compared to bad power scaling caused by the pet. And now try to balance this mess, with simple number tweaking, it’s impossible.

---

[added the point fix bugged skills, so that they work as intended. Some buggs are known for over a year now and were never touched]

Ok, the first part of argument ment that with your idea you pidgeon hole certain pets with certain gear sets/ traits because otherwise they would lose to much of their stats.

My idea was that every type of pet has a certain amount of base stats (50% was just a number) for instance the cat has X% of their stats like a zerker speck (more complex stat combinations can be used), the rest (100%-X%) will scale with the user but equally. Now about the tank issue, the cat will still do a higher amount of damage but it will not be ridiculous depending on the value of X.

Doesnt that end in taking a cat for defensive builds, because it deals the most damage and a bear/dog/whatever for offensive builds, because it scales with my offensive stats?

whyme.3281:

Doesnt that end in taking a cat for defensive builds, because it deals the most damage and a bear/dog/whatever for offensive builds, because it scales with my offensive stats?

I think you miss the idea of what I said. Let’s say you have 6000 stat points to give to a pet and X is 50% so the pet will have 3000 stat points spend depending on their type (cats in power/pre/critd, bears in power/ vit/tough,….). The ohter 3000 points will depend on the range. If the ranger ranger equips/trait zerker then the pet will gain power/pre/critd.

So A cat while equiping soldier gear will have more vitality and toughness but less precision and crit damage if you would wear berserker gear because 100%-X% of the stats scale with gear. A cat will always do more damage then a bear if you equip the same gear because of the preset X% percent of the stats.

Now I got it, sounds not that bad. But I’m not sure if this would fix the bunker build issue.
If cats base damage is decent without scaling, they can still lead to this balancing issue.

The idea is good, but it needs some testing by Anet. They have to decide whats the best solution, but as it is right now, it is a bad situation for the rangers.

So either:

• same base values for every pet, special scaling
• special base values, every stat scales
• special base values, special scaling

Whats the best solution, needs to be tested, but all three should be better balance wise, than current system.

I generally agree with the OP.
-Ascended gear needs to enter pvp.
-Food needs to enter pvp. (Maybe they’ll realize that the +/- condi food %s are ridiculous compared to the others then!)
-Skill splits need to end. (This leads to unbalanced things in one game mode but not others.)
-Ranger pets are stupid/slow and need an update.
-PVE in general is slow and mindless. It can be extremely monotonous when you can approach every enemy in practically the same way. Dodge the big slow obvious attacks and dps them down. All of the slow big attacks are the reason berserker gear is so popular.
-I would like to add that PVE should mirror PVP more. Down states should be added for all enemies to force people to stomp them.
-All PVE enemies should start dodging out of AOE, or big attacks (if they haven’t already used their dodges).
-All PVE enemies need a full skill bar with 5 weapon skills, 1 heal skill, and 3 utility skills. Champs should all have an elite skill. Enemies in GW1 used skills well, much better than they do in GW2 anyways. They actually had builds, that made you adjust your strategy to effectively fight them. If PVE taught players how to fight other classes and builds more effectively I bet we’d see way less whining on every profession’s forums.
-Defiant needs to go. It makes control pointless in PVE. I liked the OP’s suggestion to prevent people from completely stunlocking a boss.
-Condition cap in PVE also needs to go. I don’t really care how, but it does. I’m sure they could come up with something. Afterall, this is only a problem in PVE where bosses have crazy high HP. Any player with 25 stacks of anything is a deadman.

I can only agree, there are to many design flaws in GW2, that impact the whole balancing process and make it impossible.

You will never get change with this idea. The fact of the matter is that balance would take way too long to do this way.

I would much prefer they simply acknowledge where players actually spend their time and balance accordingly.

sPvP is to be balanced by equipment.
WvW is to be balanced on abilities.

Bombsaway.7198:

You will never get change with this idea. The fact of the matter is that balance would take way too long to do this way.

Please define “way to long”, because the game is out for 1,5 years now and nothing is balanced.

• The whole condition System isn’t balanced in PvE since launch!
• Game modes are drifting away from each other, making them even harder to balance or compare (ascended gear)
• Mobs are dumb like hell
• control is impossible in PvE
• tanks/support are useless in PvE
• Classes lack of viable builds
• Some classes aren’t even close to be balanced.
• and more

Take the ranger for example, he wont get balanced until it’s pets scale with his stats. Without this change rangers will always take condi-damage and/or defensive stats. Why? because those stats are the only independent stats of the ranger. Direct damage/weapon damage is reduced due to the fact, that there is a pet around

You can go through nearly every class and will find some broken core-mechanic, that prevents the class from being (ever) balanced or get more viable builds.

The only exception is the warrior*, he has a lot of good builds that can be used for nearly every situation. Every other class has one probably two viable builds available.

*well his adrenalin system is kinda broken, because there you can’t do anything wrong. Miss your target? Well, try again in 3sec, that’s all. Why should he lose adrenalin therefor?

Bombsaway.7198:

I would much prefer they simply acknowledge where players actually spend their time and balance accordingly.

If you want to say, that everyone is playing sPvP and WvW and no one is playing PvE, then you are wrong. There are a lot of PvE players around and they deserve balancing, too. Probably even more then the rest of the game, because PvE only consists of berserker gear and the ability to dodge. Here are even less good builds available then in the rest of the game, because tanks, conditions, support and control is completely useless here. It’s all about brute forcing right now.

Bombsaway.7198:

sPvP is to be balanced by equipment.
WvW is to be balanced on abilities.

You use the same abilities in WvW and sPvP, the only differences are the maximum achievable stats, you can get there, The number of players and the fact, that there is PvE involved. That’s all. Or you are going to split every skill between those game-modes.

And let me ask you a question:
How do you balance PvE? Or do you really like that zerker-fest that is going on there?

unleashed.8679:

If you want to say, that everyone is playing sPvP and WvW and no one is playing PvE, then you are wrong.

I suspect if they had such a census, the sPvP players especially best look for a new game.
Because I’d ballpark sPvP as a tiny tiny playerbase, considering number of open games, number of players standing in the hearts etc, versus just the visual sea of players in WvW, and much less the insane amounts of players in PvE.

Now I got time testing the engineer, he lacks some scalings in his kits and turrets, that needs to be addressed.

I wonder if ele weapons work the same? let’s test it

E: Tested it, its the same…..

However, I will not include unfitting or useless skills in here, because every class has a lot of them. I know, that they also belong to the core of the game, but with examples, I would need at least 5 more posts, which I simply don’t have.
They should be addressed with the point “fix broken/bugged/unfitting skills:”

@Bombsaway: I completely agree with unleashed here. Balancing 3 different gamemodes has to stop.

Carighan.6758:

unleashed.8679:

If you want to say, that everyone is playing sPvP and WvW and no one is playing PvE, then you are wrong.

I suspect if they had such a census, the sPvP players especially best look for a new game.
Because I’d ballpark sPvP as a tiny tiny playerbase, considering number of open games, number of players standing in the hearts etc, versus just the visual sea of players in WvW, and much less the insane amounts of players in PvE.

I didn’t say, that anet is balancing around the highest populated gamemode. And i doubt it, because then PvE wouldn’t be all about zerkers. The condition cap would have been raised, …

Right now they are balancing most skills in PvP and most of the time forget about the rest of the game. There are only few exceptions, with split skills, that wouldn’t be needed, if PvP and PvE would be closer together. (using all the suggestions of the TO).

I mean, you can’t balance skills in a gamemode, where you miss half of the stat-combination, have >30% less stats, not every rune/sigil, no buff-food and completely different enemies. It just won’t work and will lead into the mess. The logic consequence would be to split every skill into 2 different versions (one for PvE and sPvP) and include a query in WvW, whether your target is a Player or a NPC and use the specific skill.

Even then, I’m not sure WvW wouldn’t be better off just functioning like a PvE system. WvW’s balance doesn’t need to balance character vs character. That doesn’t scale.

It needs to balance green vs red. In total. That is to say, if red’s zerg has the advantage in direct combat versus green’s zerg, as a result of having +5 Guardians but -5 Rangers, but green’s zerg in turn can evade red better and capture objectives while keeping green running circles, then that can be balanced.

Basing the balance on individual performance in a large-scale material warfare setup won’t work, I think. You end up with balanced 1v1 and entirely unbalanced zerg vs zerg or material warfare depending on each side’s daily composition.
Large-scale balance sadly often relies on individual elements of individual classes being intentionally overpowered. That’s what they “add” to their side. Those overpowered elements. And then the sides get balanced based on their sum total.

I think you are right in some way, but in WvW the enemies you are dealing with the most time are Players with less then 30k hp. If you attack them with skills designed to deal damage vs. 1Mio. hp bosses you probably will unintentionally implement one-shot skills, that in PvE don’t look that strong or are even balanced.

On the other hand, the keeplords, Guards, dolyaks, … are still NPCs, with their huge healthbar, slow attacks, stupid AI, etc. You wont 1v1 a keeploard, but the smaller units for sure. Fighting them with sPvP kills would probably also lead to some problems.

There are about 12-15 other things wrong with the Guardian and thats just with weapons. Trait lines are FUBAR, Symbols and Consecration aren’t that good in wvw and are OK in spvp, spirit weapons are a joke, mediocre condi removal, ZERO soft CC, long cooldowns on hard CC, stupidly low HP pool, etc, etc, etc…

I think the TO knows that, but writing down all bugs/design flaws of every class would probably need the full first page of this thread. This are only the fundamental problems in GW2 that make balancing impossible and should have been looked at, before starting the balancing process.

- Added guardians spirit weapons
- changed title

I wonder right now, why the mesmer is the only “pet-class” which has scaling pets.

whyme.3281:

I wonder right now, why the mesmer is the only “pet-class” which has scaling pets.

I think it’s because the pets need to be fundemental different from the user.
“Why would you take a pet if you can do the same?”
“Why sacrifice 30% of your damage so your bad ai can do the 30%?”
…

That’s one of the reason why I suggested semi scaling ranger pets.

Food in PvP? Please no. It should be forbidden on WvW too imho. Those things are made for PvE.
Stat combinations of PvE/WvW ported over PvP? God, NO.

Unless they don’t completely rework stat combos, which will cause an insane uproar from the PvE/WvW community, there is no way to port stat combos of PvE in PvP without completely messing the already pretty bad balance of the game.

whyme.3281:

condition cap:
People claim about it since beta and it was never touched. I can understand, that there are technical limitations, but there are also numbers of useless calculations, that are done every tick.

• Get rid of this kittening condition cap. It makes absolutely no sense at all that conditions are capped. If there are any engine limitations, I would love to hear from a dev, where the limitations are. Probably the community has a good solution you probably didnt imagine, where everyone could live with. please devs talk to us
• If there are performance issues, then make conditions fire and forget. Right now conditions gets recalculated every second. I dont care that if I get 1 stack of might, then my bleeds deal 1 more damage. The conditions I will apply while I have those might stacks, will deal the same damage a few seconds later.
• If it is a problem of visibility, than screw it. If you die to 20 conditions, you will die to 40 or 60 aswell. right now condition builds lose alot of their damage if there are more than one other player around, sometimes it doesnt even need to be a condition build.

Just a thought.

The way some conditions work, stacking in intensity, would need to be countered with some intensity stacking defensive boons, like regen for instance.

If conditions from different sources should stack, shouldn’t act likewise the boons coming from different sources? In my opinion, both examples lead to either overkill or godmode, and maybe that’s the reason for a cap.

The impact of this in PvE wouldn’t be a big deal, but I can’t say the same for WvW or PvP.

sorrow.2364:

Food in PvP? Please no. It should be forbidden on WvW too imho. Those things are made for PvE.
Stat combinations of PvE/WvW ported over PvP? God, NO.

Unless they don’t completely rework stat combos, which will cause an insane uproar from the PvE/WvW community, there is no way to port stat combos of PvE in PvP without completely messing the already pretty bad balance of the game.

Why? Food and stats in PvP would a) add more depth and b) make it possible to balance all 3 gamemodes at once, without splitting of skills (which in the end requires more manpower than introducing food and stats)

Right now, the main focus of balancing is sPvP. The rest of the game is getting unbalanced due to the stat imbalance (food, ascended). Yes, it would maybe mess up sPvP balance at the beginning (as imbalanced as WvW is right now), but in the end balancing would be made easier.

I dont understand, why you think Food is only for PvE? because its even more imbalanced than WvW? (slow attacking, not moving enemies)

@Herio: Good point, I have to look at boons. But damaging conditions work the same as direct damage, the only difference is the damage dealt is not direct, it needs time to deal his full damage. If 5 people with conditions or direct damage focus one, this one will die. Some skills like epedemic needs to be looked at (how many conditions can be spread) or some conditions like burning. But if you have 20 or 30 or even 100 bleeds on you, you will die anyways.

whyme.3281:

Why? Food and stats in PvP would a) add more depth and b) make it possible to balance all 3 gamemodes at once, without splitting of skills (which in the end requires more manpower than introducing food and stats)

Right now, the main focus of balancing is sPvP. The rest of the game is getting unbalanced due to the stat imbalance (food, ascended). Yes, it would maybe mess up sPvP balance at the beginning (as imbalanced as WvW is right now), but in the end balancing would be made easier.

I dont understand, why you think Food is only for PvE? because its even more imbalanced than WvW? (slow attacking, not moving enemies)

Because food buffs, along WvW/PvE gear system, creates for a massive power creep.

Just think about that: right now, the maximum amount of Crit Damage achievable with berserker gear in PvP is about 60% with about 2000 power max with no survivability whatsoever and still people are getting one-shotter by thieves and fresh air elementalists. Now, imagine if PvE gear is ported over PvP along with food buffs, doubling the max amount crit damage achievable and increasing by far the max power of those builds…

Same applies to condition duration food buffs. Fear chains right now are just insane. Imagine food buffs on top of the current fear duration on condition necros. No, just no.

To port the PvE/WvW stat system over PvP without messing the somewhat fragile balance, they need to do an huge rework that will cause massive anger from the PvE/WvW crowd.

And people already complain about WvW/PvE being influenced by PvP balance because of just a couple of skills modified in both PvP and PvE.
Do you remember what the elementalist staff and ranger longbow changes?

This mess you are talking about is the same mess, we have right now in PvE/WvW. Have you even read my first paragraph? I never said, that balance would be fine, if food and stats would be introduced in PvP…. I said, it would allow balancing of the game as one.

whyme.3281:

This mess you are talking about is the same mess, we have right now in PvE/WvW. Have you even read my first paragraph? I never said, that balance would be fine, if food and stats would be introduced in PvP…. I said, it would allow balancing of the game as one.

Yeah, but they should take the sPvP balance as start point, not WvW/PvE.
And, by the way, not every WvW/PvE player share your opinion, actually pretty much none does.

sorrow.2364:

Yeah, but they should take the sPvP balance as start point, not WvW/PvE.
And, by the way, not every WvW/PvE player share your opinion, actually pretty much none does.

It’s nearly impossible to use pvp balance as start point since, that would mean we have to nerf/remove gear and remove the craft chef from the game, make artificier almost meaningless, remove several runes from the game,… .

Tim.6450:

It’s nearly impossible to use pvp balance as start point since, that would mean we have to nerf/remove gear and remove the craft chef from the game, make artificier almost meaningless, remove several runes from the game,… .

That’s the point, so is porting WvW/PvE balance over sPvP will make it an huge imbalanced mess.

But that is what anet tries to achieve (balance the whole game with sPvP), well at least is seams to be that way. And there is the big problem of stat differences (available combinations and limits) the fact that you can’t use food in sPvP/use it in the rest of the game, …

No one said, that the game should be balanced due to PvE, but the current way it is done, leads to a huge imbalance in 2/3 of the game.
No one said, that this will balance every skill, there is still the difference in the kind of enemy behavior.
But it would make it easier for the devs to balance the game, because they don’t have to balance their skills for every game mode, right now they need to build some skills three times because of the different kind of enemies and the stat differences.

I can understand, that this is scary for some PvP’ers, because it will introduce the (in my opinion) unbalanced food into your half balanced world. And it will mess it up in the beginning. But on the long-term view it will lead to a (more) balanced game.

unleashed.8679:

But that is what anet tries to achieve (balance the whole game with sPvP), well at least is seams to be that way. And there is the big problem of stat differences (available combinations and limits) the fact that you can’t use food in sPvP/use it in the rest of the game, …

No one said, that the game should be balanced due to PvE, but the current way it is done, leads to a huge imbalance in 2/3 of the game.
No one said, that this will balance every skill, there is still the difference in the kind of enemy behavior.
But it would make it easier for the devs to balance the game, because they don’t have to balance their skills for every game mode, right now they need to build some skills three times because of the different kind of enemies and the stat differences.

I can understand, that this is scary for some PvP’ers, because it will introduce the (in my opinion) unbalanced food into your half balanced world. And it will mess it up in the beginning. But on the long-term view it will lead to a (more) balanced game.

Man, you have absolutely no clue.

I’ll give you an example to make that clear: ranger longbow.
Hunter Shot was changed to give Stealth to ranger. That was an HUGE buff in PvP to rangers because they now have some survivability added to that weapon set, while PvE players complained because they lost the instant 10 stacks of vulnerability.

What about Unsteady Ground change? Extremely good in PvP, while PvE players complained that it was worthless against champs or bosses with defiant.

So no. I’d say fix the WvW/PvE imbalances, but don’t bring that mess over sPvP.

sorrow, please read all three posts at the beginning. A lot of the things you address here are posted up there. And all together will make sense for some reason.

Both skills you mentioned will still have the same problem with food and increased stats. but if you would read post 3, the issue both skills have are addressed…..

Here is an example why the stats should be on the same level:
using the two builds in Post 1, with full might and sigil stacks.
Blood is power in PvP deals up to 15.600 damage while in WvW/PvE it can deal up to 23.500 damage. Thats 50% more damage for the same skill only in different game modes. And that counts for every other skill in this game too. And now tell me, which of these skills is balanced in PvP, WvW and PvE and why? Or should we split every skill (how many do we have? 500?) in the game, to balance them all?

Now you could say, in WvW/PvE defensive stats are higher too, but thats not the case, vitality and toughness stays the same everywhere (+-5%). And now tell me how can this game ever be balanced without readjusting stats or splitting every skill?

Edit: This calculation is not against condition damage, could do the same with power builds, conditions are just easier to calculate, because of the fixed damage. With power this could be even worse, because 3 stats that effect each other.

I have been thinking and I think that one thing needs to be added to the list :

AOE cap:

Right now we have a cap of 5 if I remember well. This is the maximum size of a group but with the addition of pets/minions/illusions/… ,this cap is immediately surpassed. This hinders support build immensily since the wrong targets could get the boons/buff/heal. There several solutions:
-remove the cap: this is ill advised since it will make aoe op in wvw.
-increase the cap to 10: This will not completely solve the problem if there are to many pets (like with a minion master) but it will increase the chances of hitting the right target.
-keep the cap at 5, make pets/illusions/minions/… the last one to receive aoe but if a player is hit then so are the pet/illusions/minions/…, if they are in range of course: this would be the most elegant and most prefered but it creates a lot of work and maybe it can create some work on the server.

Could have sworn that at launch, support was not capped at 5 and it turned WVW into a glorious mess…

Anyways, i could have sworn that ANet patched the support AOEs to have some sort of priority where minions and non-party friendlies were near the bottom.

digiowl.9620:

Could have sworn that at launch, support was not capped at 5 and it turned WVW into a glorious mess…

Anyways, i could have sworn that ANet patched the support AOEs to have some sort of priority where minions and non-party friendlies were near the bottom.

I know but I’v heard that WvW is still a mess. I know that removing the cap will be a bad idea but to increase it to 10 ? Or my other idea as well?

I also have seen pets buffed before other players but they were not party members. Party members do get priority but that doesn’t mean that you as an ally have no interest in keeping the pets alive. I just find it not good that support builds are less effective when pets/minions/illusions/… are involved, especially when some classes have no choice but to use them (ranger/mesmer). I fear it will make rangers and mesmers unwanted/inefficient when Anet makes support builds usefull in PVE.

some sort of soft cap could work. A skill could deal a maximum of 10 times is base damage in total and this damage is spread over all players it hits. But then the question would be, how to handle conditions, boons and heals.
Its a very risky point, that can mess up everything. I have heard, that TESO has such a problem, melee is nearly impossible, because you die within seconds in the aoe damage.