Guild Wars 2

Hweng.9475:

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

Why don’t you guys maybe… buff condi and different builds rather than nerfing the zerker builds?

I just today got the required guild commendation for the Ascended accessory. Threw all my gold+ Laurels yesterday for the zerker Armor, Weapons, amulet + Scholar Runes and sigils. I was so happy that I finally made the most optimal build to run with my friends in organized groups. I am just hoping you don’t nerf it too hard farming those gold and laurels again for the new “meta” build just isn’t fun for me.

Look at this thread maybe?
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/PvE-The-Problem-with-Conditions-A-Fix/first#post3477978

When your average mob dies in 5 seconds how are conditions supposed to work?

I think one of the things the game needs the least are aggro mechanics. I think it is counter-intuitive to the game and serves no purpose with how the combat plays out. It also lends itself to a “tank-aggro-hold” mentality and soon people will rely on it and cry that it’s too unforgiving and want a healer class. Then, BOOM! We’re back to the tank-healer-damage trinity mentality.

There are ways of handling the current meta that do not have to change the way combat unfolds that much, or alter the stats and builds of players, from what is currently present.

Don’t nerf, BUFF whatever you want but don’t nerf zerk !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Machupo.1095:

Don’t nerf, BUFF whatever you want but don’t nerf zerk !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I agree, but we DO need a revamp on how zerkers fit into PvE meta. We can’t simply let burst-dmg trains take over the whole meta, if it is to exist one…

It’s not zerker that is OP, it’s the dodge and block mechanics that are OP and other builds that are UP.
In PvE, that is.

Introduce a new, widely spread npc-only condition that degenerates endurance, and stacks in both power and duration, so that parties will need condition management. Make vigor a counterplay, rather than the only boon outside aegis you need to survive anything, because you can dodge even Grenth-Priest killshot debuff from Arah4 with a well timed dodge.
Introduce more immobilisation in fights, especially boss fights rather than trash which is skipped most of the time anyway; fixing that will come later.

Introduce condition overflow mechanic, through which bleeding will translate into direct damage when the target is already on 25 bleeding stacks. Do the same for burning and poison, and limit their duration stacks to 3.
Make 25+ vulnerability cause weakness, or take down a stack of defiance. Reduce the duration stacks of chill, weakness, blind and introduce a new effect on going higher than that – a 0,5s daze on fifth weakness stack, for example.

Decrease total hp on bosses, but introduce mechanics that would either limit their hp loss (can’t lose more than 1% hp in a single hit because of iron skin; increased toughness; immunity to vulnerability and weakness), or pop a new twist in a fight (when a specific boss loses more than 1% hp in a single hit, it becomes enraged, or summons minions, or deals pbaoe explosion).
This is NOT something to introduce on EVERY boss, but examples of something that might work.

Remove toughness from the aggro formula; make bosses pick targets more randomly or make damage generate actually more attention than simply proximity and toughness/armor level.

dutchiez.7502:

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

If you want to go through with this, please do not make Berserker’s setups weaker but make the other setups stronger/more useful. Nerfing the zerker gear will only end in dumbed down and more boring gameplay. Buffing everything else will likely have similar effects but there might be ways to avoid them more so than when nerfing zerker.

That won’t solve the problem because zerker elitists will still be QQing about how you’re not in zerker.

drkn.3429:

It’s not zerker that is OP, it’s the dodge and block mechanics that are OP and other builds that are UP.
In PvE, that is.

Introduce a new, widely spread npc-only condition that degenerates endurance, and stacks in both power and duration, so that parties will need condition management. Make vigor a counterplay, rather than the only boon outside aegis you need to survive anything, because you can dodge even Grenth-Priest killshot debuff from Arah4 with a well timed dodge.
Introduce more immobilisation in fights, especially boss fights rather than trash which is skipped most of the time anyway; fixing that will come later.

Introduce condition overflow mechanic, through which bleeding will translate into direct damage when the target is already on 25 bleeding stacks. Do the same for burning and poison, and limit their duration stacks to 3.
Make 25+ vulnerability cause weakness, or take down a stack of defiance. Reduce the duration stacks of chill, weakness, blind and introduce a new effect on going higher than that – a 0,5s daze on fifth weakness stack, for example.

Decrease total hp on bosses, but introduce mechanics that would either limit their hp loss (can’t lose more than 1% hp in a single hit because of iron skin; increased toughness; immunity to vulnerability and weakness), or pop a new twist in a fight (when a specific boss loses more than 1% hp in a single hit, it becomes enraged, or summons minions, or deals pbaoe explosion).
This is NOT something to introduce on EVERY boss, but examples of something that might work.

Remove toughness from the aggro formula; make bosses pick targets more randomly or make damage generate actually more attention than simply proximity and toughness/armor level.

Your Condition Overflow mechanic is awesome! If designed properly it would benefit some builds and add more variety to current existing metas. I was talking about Burning being more effective with some friends, as when you apply burning 5 times (current instances limit for some conditions/boons) the target would suffer a Fire Nova Strike causing massive damage or at least a decent damage, or a plausible damage while spreading its current burning (along with its duration) to nearby foes.

So long as dodging and blocking exist as the primary means of damage mitigation in the game, PvE will be dominated by dps builds. Look at Fractal level 40 and 50, passive unblockable damage that puts you in combat isnt even enough to get people to play healing builds unless they made that damage massive high.

They could easily make Condition Damage good. They can’t make direct damage bad without radically changing the game design.

One thing I theorized, is Defiant stacks giving bosses direct damage reduction, say 5% per stack to a max of 25%. That would lead to some interesting choices, but who knows.

One thing I theorized, is Defiant stacks giving bosses direct damage reduction, say 5% per stack to a max of 25%. That would lead to some interesting choices, but who knows.

Run in on m/m warrior, drop all CC to take defiance stacks down, run out and get OOC (possible in most fights, even the Lupi’s arena is big enough to go OOC), swap to your usual dps setup, run back into the fight.
Nope nope nope.

I actually am not for any fix for Berserker armor and stats before a fix for Condition damage.

The current meta is there because the other form of damage, Conditions, are broken in PVE.

So before we talk about removing the ability to dodge, making creatures take less damage (basically reducing Power and Crit damage to the level of current condition damage) I think we need to fix conditions.

Also, any reduction in effectiveness for Berserker Armor is going to be doing a disservice towards the player base who took time and effort to gather their current sets of Berserker Armor in the first place.

I think there needs to be the addition of attack options and damage options rather than the reduction, or removal of the existing state of affairs.

Point is, dodge/block is all you need to survive (especially with vigor, aegis, protection for those moments when you’re out of endurance/blocks or make a mistake), occassional CC can save the whole party (Kholer – take down defiance, save a stun for Kholer to interrupt his pull when someone shouts they’re out of dodges or would eat the pull any other way; etc), and there’s absolutely no need for anything else, be it defensive stats, or controlling conditions, or even massive CC to remove defiance in no time and keep bosses on the ground – sacrificing dps, that is.

To buff conditions, just go with condition overflow described above, or similar mechanic. To level out dps builds (be it power or condition) and make support/control/whatever more useful, PvE would need more changes in vigor/endurance/dodging, aegis/blocking, protection uptime, aggro mechanic, AI scripts, conditions from enemies (even as far as boss-unique conditions in explorable dungeons or high level FotM, because those things should be meant to be complex and demanding, even if available for everyone, so complicating them with extra mechanics is ok, while introducing too many different things in open PvE or personal story wouldn’t be fine), and so on.

~2k hours on PTV/zerk hybrid shout/dps guardian, 600+ hours on PTV/cleric support staff ele, ~500 hours and ticking on full glass zerker dps warrior, ~100h on condimancer.
Talking about PvE only, mainly exp dungeons and fractals. I certainly wouldn’t mind bringing my necro out for a walk more often, nor would i mind seeing lower numbers on my warrior, or being pushed to need to attune my playstyle to any new mechanics.

Sawnic.6795:

That won’t solve the problem because zerker elitists will still be QQing about how you’re not in zerker.

PvE content is designed so that non glass cannon stats are worthless, of course your defensive stats and abilities are going to get you kicked out of parties. It is not the gear that needs to change, it is the PvE content itself. There is plenty of build diversity in PvP modes, because that’s what the player abilities and gear are designed for, not for punching bags with too many HP that sometimes punch back… in that case defensive stats will ALWAYS be worthless, just as a previous poster pointed out (that +2% damage is more valuable than +100% effective HP in GW2 PvE).

That’s why pve mobs should auto-attack. Zerkers won’t be able to dodge every single little auto-attack, forcing them to take some damage. And when that happens, everything will change. Zerkers will require more support or control team mates to help them out, or they’ll need some defensive stats, or they’ll need a more balancing trait setup. They’ll need to escape more often, and condition damage will indirectly get better due to having more defensive stats available and due to being able to tick the enemy’s health away even while escaping.

In addition to auto-attacks, giving to enemies the right boons or conditions can make a difference. Retaliation, Protection, Weakness and Confusion can greatly tone down zerker bursting.

Sawnic.6795:

dutchiez.7502:

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

If you want to go through with this, please do not make Berserker’s setups weaker but make the other setups stronger/more useful. Nerfing the zerker gear will only end in dumbed down and more boring gameplay. Buffing everything else will likely have similar effects but there might be ways to avoid them more so than when nerfing zerker.

That won’t solve the problem because zerker elitists will still be QQing about how you’re not in zerker.

Not if you don’t join their groups.

You are allowed to play how you want, so should we.

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

Don’t make PVE content harder. It will end up ppl never do it after once. Like aetherblade path in TA. I haven’t seen an lfg post that says “Daily dungeon run TA aetherblade path” It was a good dungeon but…

Just make standard build of dungeon like..
PART 1- many low hp trash mobs that can’t be skipped make it on start of every dungeon to make ppl stack bloodlust,accuracy or corruption on start of dungeons
PART 2 – 1st boss not too much to say here just a boss with cool mechanics will be good
PART 3 – event. any event will do like killing some stuff protecting some stuff, make it fun
PART 4 – 2nd boss yeap another boss with some cheesy stuff it defends on ur creativity
PART 5 – puzzle we need cool puzzle in every dungeon, not so hard but really fun and creative. this is critical here because it will solve the issue of ppl soloing dungeon and selling
PART 6 – trash mobs that super easy to kill becoz it meant really for just stacking sigil before final boss.
PART 7 – final boss and then reward according to length and difficulty try to play it yourself to make a good decision on deciding how much reward this dungeon worth because if its not it will be worthless. if the reward is lower than i should be, ppl never run it. if higher than it should be, ppl will focus on it causing other dungeon to be ignored

If you really want to get rid of dps dominance, REMOVE berserker. oh wait, ppl will rage at me wanting to remove berserker. but listen, power build need to invest on power, precision,crit damage to maximize its full potential. this make ppl that want to min/max stats to take berserker other than anything, While on the other hand, condition only need condition damage but they nerf condition damage in pve really hard to make it worthless.Make precision stat increase both crit chance and crit damage. But you can never combine it with power introducing a new type of build that focus on crit. precision build can be lower or higher than damage on power builds because it basically base on “chance” or luck. But it can proc some sigils. And all conditions that requires crits chance will change to % damage on attack thus no presicion needed to proc. If you don’t want mmo trinity, you need to put all of them in one, and make every character bring dps, tankiness and heal/buff and all set of gear should have that

DPS = Power, Condition Damage,Presision
Tankiness = Vitality,Toughness,Condition Resist
Support = Healing power,Boon duration,Condition duration

Then Remake the amor’s stats by the variety of those 1 at DPS stat 1 at Tank stat and 1 at support stat
ex. PVH,PVB,PTH,PTB,PCH,PCB etc, etc, for what build u’ll like

Condition Resist will be a new stat that will reduce the damage of condition and reduce duration of non damage conditions because condition’s damage defends on time so -condition duration stats will make them useless.

Condition vs pve – remove the limitation of stacking conditions there’s no limit putting direct damage so there should be no limit on conditions
CC vs pve remove defiance or reduce it so CC builds are now welcome
AI npc/pets etc. make them smarter pls.. and fix bugs give them ability to dodge too

TL:DR
Bad NERFS are bad. It will lead the players to quit. Players only want BUFFS that’s what make players excited to patches but always getting disappointed by nerfs that sometimes doesn’t really need a nerf. Only nerf what are deserving to nerf

When they can’t nerf something, they buff the opposite and change mechanics, therefore nerfing what we initially thought hadn’t been nerfed.

DiogoSilva.7089:

That’s why pve mobs should auto-attack. Zerkers won’t be able to dodge every single little auto-attack, forcing them to take some damage. And when that happens, everything will change. Zerkers will require more support or control team mates to help them out, or they’ll need some defensive stats, or they’ll need a more balancing trait setup. They’ll need to escape more often, and condition damage will indirectly get better due to having more defensive stats available and due to being able to tick the enemy’s health away even while escaping.

In addition to auto-attacks, giving to enemies the right boons or conditions can make a difference. Retaliation, Protection, Weakness and Confusion can greatly tone down zerker bursting.

Mobs autoattack and even if they would autoattack more frequent, say hi to black powder or just requirement of more guardians. Squishy professions like eles would be non welcomed because warrior’s innate survivability is stronger than probably sentinel’s or cleric’s ele.

Retaliation isn’t antiburst condi, it’s anti-fastattacks condi.

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

Pls Jon make us a favor, stop ruining this game.

We dont need to farm another ascendent set because after 1,5 year you realized that pve is zerk based.

There’s no difference between a zerk meta or a cond meta in a game where you require months to farm a full set.

We need that anet allows players to switch easily gear, build and class in way to be always perfomant and we need anet to introduce NEW CONTENT and these NEW CONTENT should be made in way to push people on switching gear\build on demand (and not by default like you’re telling)

In other words we need you to play gw1 for a while and then just copy cantha here.

Sometime is better to copy than having idea.

Regards

“PvE would need more changes in vigor/endurance/dodging, aegis/blocking, protection uptime, aggro mechanic, AI scripts, conditions from enemies (even as far as boss-unique conditions in explorable dungeons or high level FotM, because those things should be meant to be complex and demanding, even if available for everyone, so complicating them with extra mechanics is ok, while introducing too many different things in open PvE or personal story wouldn’t be fine)”

I definitely agree that if such revision would be made it must be taken with utmost care.
Simply making current dungeons harder with the express intent of combating zerker meta and stacking would be foolish to say the least thanks to the current economy.
In the end these changes would just shift the zerker meta to a more defensive meta but at the cost of making the dungeon paths longer (thanks to the lower dps), annoying, dangerous, possible failure of completing it and even and even excluding some classes completely from the meta. In other words you ultimately changed nothing.
If you push too far it’ll just be too much work for its rewards, and players will go with the path of least resistance and go do something more profitable and easier.

Don’t forget that thanks to the kneejerk nerfs that farming, etc sustained from Anet and the large amounts of gold needed for crafting, etc, many of these easy dungeons are now one of the main ways to make gold fast and easy, hence their popularity.

Also upping the rewards of harder, more demanding content also doesn’t seem to work in the slightest as evidenced by the reaction the community had to something like the aetherbalde path added in TA, aka very few ppl run it anymore despite having better loot than the other ones and all of this can be attributed to it’s difficulty and annoying mechanics.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

So long as dodging and blocking exist as the primary means of damage mitigation in the game, PvE will be dominated by dps builds. Look at Fractal level 40 and 50, passive unblockable damage that puts you in combat isnt even enough to get people to play healing builds unless they made that damage massive high.

They could easily make Condition Damage good. They can’t make direct damage bad without radically changing the game design.

One thing I theorized, is Defiant stacks giving bosses direct damage reduction, say 5% per stack to a max of 25%. That would lead to some interesting choices, but who knows.

I’m not sure I’m following you Nike. Wouldn’t that just end up with players reducing the boss Defiant’s stacks to 0 (0% reduction), and then proceed to DPS normally? The only thing this would effectively nerf is the opening Mesmer “Into The Void” pull into a corner to dps.

Is that your only goal with that change?

Carighan.6758:

dutchiez.7502:

If you want to go through with this, please do not make Berserker’s setups weaker but make the other setups stronger/more useful. Nerfing the zerker gear will only end in dumbed down and more boring gameplay. Buffing everything else will likely have similar effects but there might be ways to avoid them more so than when nerfing zerker.

As PvE feels way too easy currently, I don’t see how a buff is the way to go, sorry. We (the player chars) need to be weaker, not stronger. On pretty screwy setups I tried for sheer curiosity, PvE even felt… balanced. Challenging at times. :O

- PvE

- Challenging

You really managed to merge these two together. I see the reddit herd has arrived to this thread.

How could you even make other setups more useful?
If zerker will be viable there is no way that PVT will ever be on par with zerker in terms of usefulness.

I liked the suggestion of increasing the attack speed of bosses and general mobs. That way staying alive with zerker would be difficult at least, as you couldn’t just rely on dodges and vigor.
And lol to those who consider pve challenging

For Ventari’s Tablet’s sake, I pray to you ANet, don’t destroy the berserkers. Thieves will be COMPLETELY useless both in WvW (close to, already), PvE (almost completely now) and PvP too (well… it’s dead already).

mahariel.4981:

Sawnic.6795:

dutchiez.7502:

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

If you want to go through with this, please do not make Berserker’s setups weaker but make the other setups stronger/more useful. Nerfing the zerker gear will only end in dumbed down and more boring gameplay. Buffing everything else will likely have similar effects but there might be ways to avoid them more so than when nerfing zerker.

That won’t solve the problem because zerker elitists will still be QQing about how you’re not in zerker.

Not if you don’t join their groups.

You are allowed to play how you want, so should we.

And this is exactly what I’m talking about.

Also, not every “zerker run” advertises as a “zerker run”.

There are only two ways in which ANet can stop the dominance of berserker builds.

- nerf their damage output to be in line with other specs – that would be ridiculous, seeing as THE dps spec should have the highest dps, otherwise it would stop having any place in the game altogether

- make it so that berserker specs cannot beat the content alone, invalidating their statement that any group composition can beat any content, which would make a LOT of people VERY angry

There is no solution to the zerker meta other than removing the gear type altogether, which would mean everyone is going to run assassin’s, which would have to be removed as well, which in turn would make everyone run cavalier’s/knights mix, and this would continue on and on until power specs would be no longer capable of dealing more damage than condition specs.

Also, implementing mechanics that would limit damage per second on bosses would kill the game completely. The dungeons are only bearable to run, because you can do them quickly with a decent party. If they change that they need to increase the difficulty, but most importantly increase the rewards. As it stands champion farming is already the way to go if you want to earn money, which is just ridiculous.

Don’t make this game completely casual please.

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

After most have already gone through the time gated ascended crafting and have used their laurels…if it suddenly becomes ineffective rather than bringing other specs up you’ll likely see a mass exodus due to messing around your player base by wasted time gated materials.

Soooo reflects will be gone too along with the FGS bug?

I wouldn’t expect a direct nerf to zerk, since that wouldn’t change zerk’s relative position to the other gearsets: all stats geared towards offense is still preferable to only one or two towards offense.

I guess what I’m expecting is less vitality, more toughness for mobs in order to improve condition builds. Even then, I don’t think direct damage and cond damage are on equal terms, since there’s no CONDAMpowerprecision gear (not to mention the 25 conditions cap).

It offers no solution either to the gaping hole problem that is vitality and toughness gear. If you introduce weak auto attacks on mobs: is it not so that if you “counter” that with vitality and toughness, the fights take longer (because less offensive stats), which means you take more hits, which means there was no justification for taking more defensive gear? I can’t imagine any scenario where V or T is optimal for a dungeon run.

Not quite so with Healing Power, still hope for this one. I can envision a future where e.g. a cleric (more accurate: a HPpowerprecision which doesnt exist atm) Guardian is included in an optimal dungeon party. Inevitable in this scenario is however “LF1M support guard”, which is against the original premise of GW2.

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

So long as dodging and blocking exist as the primary means of damage mitigation in the game, PvE will be dominated by dps builds. Look at Fractal level 40 and 50, passive unblockable damage that puts you in combat isnt even enough to get people to play healing builds unless they made that damage massive high.

They could easily make Condition Damage good. They can’t make direct damage bad without radically changing the game design.

One thing I theorized, is Defiant stacks giving bosses direct damage reduction, say 5% per stack to a max of 25%. That would lead to some interesting choices, but who knows.

I’m not sure I’m following you Nike. Wouldn’t that just end up with players reducing the boss Defiant’s stacks to 0 (0% reduction), and then proceed to DPS normally? The only thing this would effectively nerf is the opening Mesmer “Into The Void” pull into a corner to dps.

Is that your only goal with that change?

That would slow the initial burst of dps after the opening CC and also help condition damage ramp up faster. It would get worked off as the fight went on, but by then the condi build is fully ramped up.

I’m not saying what I think will happen or what I want to happen, just throwing out a possibility that wouldnt require massive changes.

I think we can rule out anything major like revamping the boss mechanics of every boss in the game. Something like that would be extremely unlikely.

Next most likely, but still unlikely in my opinion, would be nerfing Precision so its 28 Precision per crit chance instead of the current 21. This would definitely slow down direct dps but I dont think its super likely since a lot of condi builds rely on crits too, especially any that would ever be pve meta. Or they could reduce Fury to 10%.

Next would be a way to make bosses more resistant to physical damage or less resistant to condi, and I offered one example of how they could do it.

Another possibility would be to have Might add 50 condition damage instead of 35 per stack, which would give a shot in the arm to condition builds in pve without nerfing direct damage. However, it wouldnt work well in pvp since it would make HGH engineers insanely OP. But right now 1 power = 1 condition damage in the game engine and I could easily see it decoupled a little bit to make them a bit more comparable. 1:1.15 would make condition damage much more competitive in pve.

What I do not see them doing is revamping all the encounters in the game or adding passive unblockable damage in all existing dungeons or fractals. I don’t see them revamping the game engine. I don’t see them changing the fundamental design philosophy of “dodge = invuln.” So when those are your limits you can start coming up with possibilities that make sense.

That’s why pve mobs should auto-attack.
…

Quicker autoattack that would hit low-toughness targets more noticeably is one of the ways to go, but it would only increase the disparity between the heavy classes and everyone else. Zerk hammer guards with high toughness and protection uptime wouldn’t feel it much, while everything else would feel far greater impact than guards or wars.

I definitely agree that if such revision would be made it must be taken with utmost care.

I am actually not saying i am advocating such changes – i wouldn’t mind them, i wouldn’t mind upholding the current status quo. As a player, in general, i am adaptive, and if needed i can focus on playing a different profession if one of the patches on the way to balance wrecks my current ‘main’. I am well aware that any changes upset the current balance, even if they are a step closer to the ideal Balance we all want in the end.
I merely am identifying the mechanics that would need to be tackled and should be ‘blamed’ for the raw (power) dps meta – PvE needs nothing else simply because of dodging, blocking, protection, kiting. Any manipulation with those mechanics per se would also affect WvW, and that is far from being wanted, so instead reworking dungeons – path by path, or boss by boss – sounds much more reasonable, so that PvE may actually become challenging, and not just a dps check based on hp punchbags.

Also upping the rewards of harder, more demanding content also doesn’t seem to work in the slightest as evidenced by the reaction the community had to something like the aetherbalde path added in TA, aka very few ppl run it anymore despite having better loot than the other ones and all of this can be attributed to it’s difficulty and annoying mechanics.

Tbh if TA aetherblade rewards were a bit better (either something really nice with low rng chance, like a chance for an ascended weapon chest from the daily TA aetherpath bonus chest, or simply the loot tables granting more exotics in general) and/or more reliable (a guaranteed ‘something’ at the end, be it guaranteed stuff that’s useful in legendary crafting, or considerably more TA tokens, or something aether-path specific), i would run it more often. I already can do it in ~50 min with pretty much a random guild group, thanks to a guildie who showed me the ropes my first time around, so it’s not that bad.
As it is, though, it really only rewards gold – which i can get more doing the usual short paths of other dungeons in the same time – and the same amount of TA tokens as TA up.
The path itself isn’t bad, arguably it’s one of the more fun dungeon paths in the game, but after getting all achievements, there’s no reason to revisit it unless for taking guildies through.

I liked the suggestion of increasing the attack speed of bosses and general mobs. That way staying alive with zerker would be difficult at least, as you couldn’t just rely on dodges and vigor.

New meta: heavy armor melee train under protection from zerker hammer guardians.
Oh wait.

Also, implementing mechanics that would limit damage per second on bosses would kill the game completely. The dungeons are only bearable to run, because you can do them quickly with a decent party.

Not on all bosses, not the same new mechanics on all bosses (so actually some – perhaps most – would be killable in roughly the same time but would require paying more attention to what’s happening rather than just dodging once every two minutes or flash reviving, like TA up or CoF1), not all changed at once.

As it stands champion farming is already the way to go if you want to earn money, which is just ridiculous.

Mining outshines champion farming, unless you get really lucky with rng.

Jesus kittening Christ what have you done ?
Instead of buffing something else, of course they will just nerf zerk.
Moaaaar invulnerable to bosses, moaaaaar “hey hit me if you can you’ll be OS” and moaaaar lame immune to crit and kitten of the same kind “hello I’m immune to crit trolololololol you can’t even kill me fast !”

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

So long as dodging and blocking exist as the primary means of damage mitigation in the game, PvE will be dominated by dps builds. Look at Fractal level 40 and 50, passive unblockable damage that puts you in combat isnt even enough to get people to play healing builds unless they made that damage massive high.

They could easily make Condition Damage good. They can’t make direct damage bad without radically changing the game design.

One thing I theorized, is Defiant stacks giving bosses direct damage reduction, say 5% per stack to a max of 25%. That would lead to some interesting choices, but who knows.

I’m not sure I’m following you Nike. Wouldn’t that just end up with players reducing the boss Defiant’s stacks to 0 (0% reduction), and then proceed to DPS normally? The only thing this would effectively nerf is the opening Mesmer “Into The Void” pull into a corner to dps.

Is that your only goal with that change?

That would slow the initial burst of dps after the opening CC and also help condition damage ramp up faster. It would get worked off as the fight went on, but by then the condi build is fully ramped up.

I’m not saying what I think will happen or what I want to happen, just throwing out a possibility that wouldnt require massive changes.

I think we can rule out anything major like revamping the boss mechanics of every boss in the game. Something like that would be extremely unlikely.

Next most likely, but still unlikely in my opinion, would be nerfing Precision so its 28 Precision per crit chance instead of the current 21. This would definitely slow down direct dps but I dont think its super likely since a lot of condi builds rely on crits too, especially any that would ever be pve meta. Or they could reduce Fury to 10%.

Next would be a way to make bosses more resistant to physical damage or less resistant to condi, and I offered one example of how they could do it.

Another possibility would be to have Might add 50 condition damage instead of 35 per stack, which would give a shot in the arm to condition builds in pve without nerfing direct damage. However, it wouldnt work well in pvp since it would make HGH engineers insanely OP. But right now 1 power = 1 condition damage in the game engine and I could easily see it decoupled a little bit to make them a bit more comparable. 1:1.15 would make condition damage much more competitive in pve.

What I do not see them doing is revamping all the encounters in the game or adding passive unblockable damage in all existing dungeons or fractals. I don’t see them revamping the game engine. I don’t see them changing the fundamental design philosophy of “dodge = invuln.” So when those are your limits you can start coming up with possibilities that make sense.

I’m sure it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to implement a “boss aura” type mechanic that just passively hits players for minor damage, like 200-300 per second reduced by armor. You wouldn’t even have to give the boss an animation for it, just call it “Boss Aura” or something silly like that and have it tick passive damage. Or make it pick one character based on aggro for 500~ per second so your party doesn’t just stack regen to negate it.

Of course that’d still mean that it’d just be better to go full zerk and just DPS the boss down before it even has the chance to do any significant damage, hence why I still think having DR on damage received is a good idea. That way zerk is still relevant (cause it’s still adding damage) but the tradeoffs for getting extreme high levels of DPS looks more attractive. It also makes it relatively easy to scale down boss HP/armor across the board so you don’t NEED zerk to kill it.

So what you end up with is:
1) Defensive stats/abilities are somewhat more useful/desirable because bosses will be relatively more dangerous.
2) Full zerk doesn’t just blow up everything instantly because you won’t be able to instakill the boss.
3) Non-zerk doesn’t take quite so long to slog through content because bosses have less health.

Seriously, we’re all mostly DPS proponents here, but I don’t think any one of us really thinks that being able to massacre a boss like Lupicus in 30 seconds by just stacking on him and popping a reflect is good design.

This is a terrible idea. First of all, everyone’s been spending hundreds of gold making new Zerker Ascended armor. Changing the balance now is a giant screw you to the player base.

Second, people don’t want long and boring fights.

>Seriously, we’re all mostly DPS proponents here, but I don’t think any one of us really thinks that being able to massacre a boss like Lupicus in 30 seconds by just stacking on him and popping a reflect is good design.

Lupi is just fine. Best boss fight in game.

NoTrigger.8396:

if you want to address the dominance of berserker/dps players, then give us more difficult content so only REALLY GOOD players and REALLY GOOD groups will be able to survive in berserker gear.

we are asking for difficult pve content for a very long time now.
dont nerf what i feel is fun to play, because you are not capable of delivering challenging and difficult content.

If you want challenging PvE, you’re really in the wrong game. The entire PvE system in GW2 is set up in a way that encourages an inverse skill progression, where to be really “good” you actually have to run with a group setup that melts everything so fast you don’t even have to dodge anything.

Furthermore, any shortcut in encounter mechanics (like reflecting projectiles on Lupicus) is used to bypass as much of the fight as possible, and of course any mobs that can be skipped (particularly ones that actually may pose some kind of threat) are indeed skipped. Glitches and bugs are used liberally to avoid having to do anything, with the ultimate goal being to get everything as close to the point of “press one button and the boss instantly dies” as humanly possible. (I’m not talking about your guild, but rather the general philosophy of conquering PvE in GW2.)

No, this isn’t a game for those who are interested in an end-game that demands skill from its players. Unless ArenaNet makes some serious changes to the game, this will always be the case and players will always find a way to make it faceroll again.

Anet’s default solution is to nerf and nerf hard. Depending on how they do this, they could lose a lot of players. The Ascended grind was bearable to many only because they knew they needed only one set: zerkers.

If not a direct nerf to zerker gear, they’ll probably introduce really cheesy mechanics designed specifically to counter zerker gear. For example, make all bosses “structures” that can’t be critical’d.

Considering the direction this game has been moving, I have very little faith they will come up with a good solution.

So after people have gone out and bought ascended armor and weapons for their characters best possible builds, Anet now wants to change the meta completely? That’s completely unfair.

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

Don’t nerf zerk gear, make other builds more viable like so many have said here! Sure zerk will still be the fastest, but other builds will no longer be a drag on the group. That is the biggest problem right now; Condi, CC, Support builds offer 0 advantages to the group because of Defiance and Condi limits and thus are just making everything slower for everyone and increasing the risk of getting hit by the 1 shot mechanics of bosses. Also, make most support skills (blast finisher effects, heals, buffs) have way larger range (~1200-1500 in dungeons only (to prevent abuse in other content) so that ranged players and their groups are not punished for them not stacking. This would help reduce the stack on X and face-roll meta as well. Sure some mobs stacking would still be beneficial (like Alpha, when he traps you in a crystal), but it would make it so stacking is not the default option for every encounter.

The player base has clearly shown (via what is popular in LFG tool and the fact that people pay for Arah bosses) that it is annoyed that so many paths of dungeons take 45+ minutes with a decent groups (think of your avg. casual player), not to mention bad ones just end up quitting after an hour of frustration. People love bite sized entertainment. I’ve run COF 1/2, hundreds of times because it is fun, different mechanics along the way and it fits in the perfect amount of time. Good group is ~20-30 mins total for 2 paths, even bad groups can even succeed after an hour.

Get rid of trash mobs, no one likes to do them, they just waste time for you to implement and us to skip. Unless the trash mobs (like burrows in AC) have a interesting sequence or mechanic, get rid of them. For the interesting ones that are kept, make them mandatory. Alternatively, make them drop the dungeon reward (tokens) and better money/gear/mats than non-dungeon mobs. This would encourage groups to clear them for the rewards. To offset the increase in loot, marginally reduce the end reward for dungeons (further penalizing skipping content). And to prevent excess dungeon runs for farming, reduce rewards back to normal for doing the path more than once per day (just like now by not getting bonus chests).

The hardcore people can have the high level fractals, I’m sure they would appreciate build diversity as well but whatever you do, it should not be about making the base content of the game more PITA for the casual player.

Lamir.6702:

So after people have gone out and bought ascended armor and weapons for their characters best possible builds, Anet now wants to change the meta completely? That’s completely unfair.

I just completed my Ascended (Assassin) Armor on my Guardiakittengnificant expense.

After making an Ascended (Berserker):
Staff
Scepter
Focus
Sword
Greatsword

So yeah, just shake up the meta, I can just do it all over again.

Lamir.6702:

So after people have gone out and bought ascended armor and weapons for their characters best possible builds, Anet now wants to change the meta completely? That’s completely unfair.

I smell a NGE level catastrophe coming our way !
be careful what you do here a.net, it might be the beginning of the end for the game

- after going through all the time gates and all the laurels.
- after spending considerable time figuring out what works and what works best.
- I’ve been playing since beta and if suddenly all my gear for all my 8 characters is made obsolete.

I’D QUIT
and so would a lot of people !
GW2 NGE No thank you, we don’t need that mistake coming our way ever !

Latinkuro.9420:

Lamir.6702:

So after people have gone out and bought ascended armor and weapons for their characters best possible builds, Anet now wants to change the meta completely? That’s completely unfair.

I smell a NGE level catastrophe coming our way !
be careful what you do here a.net, it might be the beginning of the end for the game

- after going through all the time gates and all the laurels.
- after spending considerable time figuring out what works and what works best.
- I’ve been playing since beta and if suddenly all my gear for all my 8 characters is made obsolete.

I’D QUIT
and so would a lot of people !
GW2 NGE No thank you, we don’t need that mistake coming our way ever !

/seconded

ANET: If you mess up the zerker meta, and my zerker ascended gear, I’ll just quit this game. I own 50+ games on Steam I could be playing.

Don’t. Mess. With the Zerker.

I find myself wanting to rebadge “skill” as “player agency”.

This in that a high “agency” game would allow player actions and decisions have a higher impact on the game than the gear equipped.

A low “agency” game on the other hand the outcome will be the same no matter who plays, as long as the character played have set X equipped and rotation Y is continually pressed.

The thing is to not confuse agency with APM or reaction time. Meaning that a defensive build would still allow for high agency, in that the player could hunker down and gain time to observe and plan.

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

I really hope you’re not just going to do some artificial or bandaid fix. The cause of the “DPS meta” has to do with the mechanics of monsters themselves, so the solution has to be applied there.

Also, something important is being missed here.
Of course, when you know perfectly the game, with full zerk and a few dodges, you can faceroll the content.
So what ?
What bad is it when good players faceroll content ?
That’s called risk/reward ratio : you take higher risks but when you know your opponents and what to do, you’re very successful, that’s only natural !

The opposite would be insanley stupid and has very high chances of happening : it definitely seems like Anet wants PVT to be kings everywhere. So players just don’t have to learn mechanics, they just go with PVT and facetank everything ? How exciting ! …..

You guys don’t even realize your huge mistake. Anet will never buff other gears, Anet will crush zerk either directly by nerfing the stuff or more likely indirectly my making just about everything immune to crit or spamming OS undodgeable attacks etc … (kitten of the kind).

I love this game despite the serious lack of comprehensive updates (that correspond to what players want) like terrible fractals but honestly, if they ruin zerk, I’ll also consider quitting the game.
There would be no point in a game rewarding everything that is lame.

No one is forcing you to stack.
I’m sure there are guilds out there that do dungeons without abusing dumb AI.

I apologize in advance if i had not the time to read all the previous posts of this thread but read it halfway till the urge to post overwhelmed my will to keep readin.
I dont’ understand why you have to punish ppl ’’capable’’ to run zerk gear in high contexts (where the dmg tends to oneshot you) when the zerk setup is actually the more suitable compared to all the other fail setup out there.
Some of you said whoever can play zerk with no problem. How about NOT AT ALL?
Seriously bad wars are bad, no matter how you try to put it down. I’ve seen people dying like no tomorrow in ptv gear. I’ve kicked people running cleric/ptv/condition setup all the way down in any pve content i’ve ran with. Simply because they were not able to:
1) Deal dmg properly >>> understand theyr own class.
2) Playing like a group>>> having group utilities and not running it like ’’I’m the solo hero’’ mode on.
3) Lack of knowledge about mobs mecchanics and even if getting told about, totally ignoring what been said.
Even the ‘’stacking in a corner’‘.. Do you think in certain pulls if you dont have stability or remove conditions like a goddes or spread ccs accordingly – eg Definace: if ppl dont understand it, all you need is a capable mesmer/thief/war to deal with and comunication with teammates., for some class it’s the funniest part into dungeons – you can just survive smashing bottons?
Seriously GET REAL. Some ppl need just to improve themselves and there is no spech that can save the story.
I don’t think its the case to nerf zerk for such reason.
Nerfing it for those that have a clue is huge smash in the face expecially now with Ascended Gear and all the golds spent in there.
Let’s pick up Condition Dmg. Since the condition meta higly infuelnced the pvp and still dominating against the non-burst classes and this is prolly the reason why they wanted to reworking it for pve purposes.
I know all the Necros been QQing crying alaud ‘’nobody wants us in pve because our strenght is Condition based mainly and these are weak into pve". To each one his own. In almost 5 years of GW1, havent heard of any mesmer crying about nobody willing to take them for pve contents. Enough said.
And again, I dont think its the case to nerf zerk for such reason.
PvE meta needs to be changed to please such? Personally I dont’ understand the issue into asking for more conditions value into pve. Easiest to just rework the necro class a bit better or assigning conditions to a scenary rather than another. Claiming a rework of the most effective pve spech because some spare soul stomps feet is just depressing.
But again, if it’s really so wanted, then make Condition Dmg valuable exactly as Power stat (e.g they sharing the same output end), and making NO items having together Power and Condition dmg upon themselves and perhaps toning down a bit precision on full stack of 25 conds. – dependig how much conditions are toned up and how much mobs and bosses are susceptible to them and IF the conditions are supposed to crit obviously. Considering Direct Dmg scale on Power, Precision and Critical Dmg., Condition one should scale as well in the same way to avoid that who goes for Dire deals the same dmg as Berserk gear -.
This for a start. Toning the whole zerk spech down is imo very wrong.
Dear Anet, balance sometimes takes years but dont’ make players pay for your own mistakes.

The optimal way of instigating the change would be to allow dynamic stat change on Ascended gear, then make the changes.

My worry is it’ll be nerf first then a ’don’t worry your ascended gear will still be valid followed up by a ‘At some time in the future you’ll be able to change the stats on your ascended gear’

Tbh it was a daft idea to have your build so dependent on gear stats in the first place but there we go..

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

How about you don’t ruin your own game, again.

I think the goal should be that berserker is still viable but not the best choice for all encounters regarding to speed. There should be a large variety of encounters covering the whole bandwidth from zerker-friendly over condition-friendly to bunker-friendly.

For me it would be important that a path does not favor a certain build in each single encounter. If one boss is zerker-friendly the next one should be bunker-friendly for instance.

Belenwyn.8674:

I think the goal should be that berserker is still viable but not the best choice for all encounters regarding to speed. There should be a large variety of encounters covering the whole bandwidth from zerker-friendly over condition-friendly to bunker-friendly.

For me it would be important that a path does not favor a certain build in each single encounter. If one boss is zerker-friendly the next one should be bunker-friendly for instance.

Which forces people to carry totally different sets of gear, and is especially kitten those who have ascended items as a core part of their builds..

I know what will happen if they do that. People will only do the berserker paths and forget the others.

Brutal Arts.6307:

JonPeters.5630:

We are trying to take steps to address some of the dominance of Berserker/DPS players. More info next week, I think.

Jon

How about you don’t ruin your own game, again.

They can’t ruin what’s already broken.

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

Which forces people to carry totally different sets of gear, and is especially kitten those who have ascended items as a core part of their builds..

I know what will happen if they do that. People will only do the berserker paths and forget the others.

There would not be any berserker path, only berserker bosses. There could be some paths that can be completed faster with berserker. There would be also paths, that can be completed faster with other builds. Important would be that the most zerker-friendly path requires the same time as the most bunker-friendly path.