Guild Wars 2

So yeah, most people here think that all those things are not needed outside of certain situations, and it’s usually all melee damage, zerker gear, and anything different will not be looked.

So what changes need to be made to those roles to be on equal footing to today’s meta and be more widely accepted.

I suppose I have to ask: What do you think is wrong about the only, all melee, zerker meta?

There’s a lot of variety to players, I only have one Zerker (My ranger, go figure)

My warrior is in PTV gear to withstand damage, my necro might be a hybrid Daggermancer/Survival, and I plan to build my Guardian to be able to solo and do some good party support.

Not everyone sticks to only Zerker, some people don’t even play Zerkers.

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

I suppose I have to ask: What do you think is wrong about the only, all melee, zerker meta?

It makes the supposedly hard content easy. The opportunity cost to run max direct-damage is pretty much non-existent in PvE as long as you can survive. Since survival is a function of talent and skill, not build, direct damage, especially in melee, is not in balance with the non-options.

Having about 2/3rds the character building options fall off to the wayside is pretty unacceptable in an RPG, considering how much the genre revolves around character building.

I didn’t know Control wasn’t needed. Temporal Curtain and Binding Blades are two of the most powerful, and most commonly used, skills in the game in terms of PVE dungeons. Those are the epitome of control, and the sign of a good group is being able to coordinate it properly.

Your mistaken assumption that Control is irrelevant probably comes from a pug meta where you can’t count on the mesmer pull or guardian pull to be used effectively so people just deal with it and have a lot of downs or rough trash pulls or fight bosses away from walls.

As far as “Support” goes, I don’t even know what that means. If that means condition removal, reflects, blind fields, stealth, portals, and boon buffing; well then the zerker meta does that too. These are all integral concepts to organized group speed clears. My guess is you mean “Support” to be some mid line type of character who can be lazy and get carried through content by casting party buffs. Sorry, pal. In this MMO the classes that bring a lot of support (mesmer, guardian, thief) are also expected to do their fair share of dps. If you long for the days of bad players getting carried through content by being buffbots this isn’t the game for you.

Switching in a reflection utility for a fight is not really the same thing as saying the content has a satisfactory level of reward for support as a character building direction.

Maybe read what I wrote again since you clearly missed the point. If you want to play a ‘hang out in the back casting party buffs while getting carried through combat’ support character, I suggest you try a different MMO.

What I’m saying we’re missing out on is sufficient reward for building characters in a support and control directions with current existing options that conform to overarching design fundamentals. I’m not saying they should add additional options that breaks their own rules and alter play to conform to trinity ideals.

I see, so you’re just stating a fact without taking a pro or con position about it. Fair enough.

@The Mexican Cookie, with what indigo and vox said, imo it just dumbs down everything and doesn’t allow for variety of play, tho with the current design of the game, i not really hating on it, and understand it’s just better, just asking what could be improved.

@Nike Porphyrogentia, My question wasn’t asking whether back/midline dps/support was efficient (i already know that it isn’t), I was asking how to make it just as efficient has a zerker, what would it take to get those roles more accepted.

BobbyT.7192:

So what changes need to be made to those roles to be on equal footing to today’s meta and be more widely accepted.

There’s a lot of reasons.

Defiant makes control near useless. Support is useful right now for harder content like high level Fractals of the Mists. Condition damage can be made useful by making creatures with high Toughness.

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

I suppose I have to ask: What do you think is wrong about the only, all melee, zerker meta?

It’s boring as hell.

It’s just the way the game is designed. It is much safer to hit monster/boss at range so people who melee should be rewarded more(more dmg).

Another problem is class are designed to do everything. Just because Im’ a berserker warrrior I can still use knockdown with mace 5, I can weapon switch to rifle, and I can use 1 or 2 utility slot for condition removal.

Maybe give people specing into support “more utility”. Since specing in to dps dont’ make you any less of a support.

BobbyT.7192:

@The Mexican Cookie, with what indigo and vox said, imo it just dumbs down everything and doesn’t allow for variety of play, tho with the current design of the game, i not really hating on it, and understand it’s just better, just asking what could be improved.

@Nike Porphyrogentia, My question wasn’t asking whether back/midline dps/support was efficient (i already know that it isn’t), I was asking how to make it just as efficient has a zerker, what would it take to get those roles more accepted.

There are no way. Because anyone using range and wearing soldier gear have a much easier time. So how could you not give the people taking risk more efficiency.

Unless you pretty much make the dungeon so difficult that it is impossible for people to melee and wear berserker to survive. Than it’s pretty much range kite zerg fest.

AndrewSX.3794:

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

I suppose I have to ask: What do you think is wrong about the only, all melee, zerker meta?

It’s boring as hell.

pretty much, i’d like to see future dungeons have fights that aren’t solely based on how much damage you can do and how quickly it can be done, but until that time comes i’ll still be playing in zerker armor with a fairly glassy build

edit: i think the reason a lot of people are sick of zerker melee everything is because it ends up feeling like everyone’s only purpose is to be a damage dealer, instead of being a supporter that sacrifices damage to supplement their group, or being an attrition fighter with high toughness and condition damage, i think ranged is mostly fine as is, but it’d be nice if there were mechanics that made it beneficial to actively switch between ranged and melee instead of staying as one or the other 90%

It’s a really fine line they have to walk here….
If you make some fights take too long b/c their conclusions are dependent on the spawn rate of enemy waves (like Thunderhead Keep was) … then better players just feel punished by the “Time Padding” mechanic. If it’s too dependent on some jump puzzle mechanics like the last AetherBlade rotating ForceField Blender of Mad Scientist Doom or the Jade-Maw … then other classes like Ranger just get artificial difficulty stacked on top of an already punishing PvE-Reality. I could go on here, but I’d rather wait for other people to bring up more examples first….

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

I suppose I have to ask: What do you think is wrong about the only, all melee, zerker meta?

It crowds everything else out, and does the Exact OPPOSITE of what the Latest Blog Post from Colin says they want Dungeons doing: IE: Rewards commensurate with Time.

…which I think Ironically… would Demand that their STORY modes actually gave better rewards than their Explorables b/c so many of the Explorables can be completed in 15 minutes or less

I guess I’m just not seeing a great argument that supports the idea of using healers/prots to mitigate damage so that people can faceroll, as opposed to people having to hit their dodge key. I’m not claiming that there aren’t instances where a Zerker party will just faceroll (CoE, CoF), but I don’t think it’s as bad as people claim it is.

I guess I’m just not seeing a great argument that supports the idea of using healers/prots to mitigate damage so that people can faceroll, as opposed to people having to hit their dodge key.

Why can’t we have both?

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

I guess I’m just not seeing a great argument that supports the idea of using healers/prots to mitigate damage so that people can faceroll, as opposed to people having to hit their dodge key. I’m not claiming that there aren’t instances where a Zerker party will just faceroll (CoE, CoF), but I don’t think it’s as bad as people claim it is.

Well… it’s a problem b/c if it goes on TOO long… and keeps bypassing Colin’s latest blog post about HOW they want Rewards doled out… then guess what?… Anet will just cheese their Encounter design by making most Boss Cleaves and PbAOE’s simply IGNORE DODGE or Punish It … Or they’ll introduce some other bull kitten that makes torment & the A.R. grind look like Peewee’s Playhouse …thereby even punishing those of us who are constantly alternating between Ranged and Melee…

This “meta” is most useful on a few paths of a few dungeons. Some paths are difficult to make work that way. There is plenty of room for all of what you mention elsewhere. Also, what Nike said.

Now, what people mean by “efficiency” is the key question. I can say that 3 guardians and a wells + condition damage necromancer stacking up running support and drawing enemies to corners are nigh invincible in most situations. Invincibility is pretty efficient in that your encounters have 100% success. It is not as FAST as all-out DPS. However, if you want speed, then you must either skip content and/or go all out DPS because DPS causes enemies to drop faster.

DPS run perfectly will always result in faster runs in any game because high rate of damage = enemies drop faster = shorter battles. That does not make other strategies inviable or useless. If something goes really wrong on an encounter for an all-out DPS party, it is unlikely to survive like a heavy support and condition damage party will survive things going wrong.

Vox Hollow.2736:

I guess I’m just not seeing a great argument that supports the idea of using healers/prots to mitigate damage so that people can faceroll, as opposed to people having to hit their dodge key.

Why can’t we have both?

I’m not opposed to that, I just don’t agree with some of the above posters way of wording things. i.e. “This meta makes content faceroll easy”. Well, if I’m understanding this correctly, wouldn’t MORE support/control also lead to that conclusion?

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

Well, if I’m understanding this correctly, wouldn’t MORE support/control also lead to that conclusion?

Pretty much ^

Couple of thoughts and ideas.

Premise: The simplest way of thinking of a fight in this game is to kill the enemy while minimizing costs. Costs would be things like Time and Money.

We already know why zerk is the meta. You maximize your damage output. Survival (minimizing your repair costs) is based on your team’s ability to dodge/evade/block/blind.

Compared to being in a zerker build, putting emphasis on Support, Control, Healing, Ranged, what-have-you, means giving up some of your DPS. Simple opportunity cost. Some instances, it just makes sense. (Again, that falls back to maximizing your damage while minimizing your cost.)

e.g. Assuming I have FGJ and a Banner (str or disc), I could either slot Shake It Off or a second banner. I might choose SIO to make sure I can cleanse conditions and people standing, overall increasing damage by keeping the team alive compared to having the 2nd banner.

So using this idea of maximizing damage while minimizing cost, you have to consider all the other options. Why is 4war1mes better at running CoFp1 over 5war? By giving up the direct damage of that 1 warrior for that mesmer, you save time in critical places (boulders), plus you Multiply the damage that the other warriors do, resulting in a net DPS increase. (Time Warp, focus pull to group up mobs, SoI to max out boons)

If you wanted to incentivize other options, you have to carefully consider how to increase DPS directly or indirectly with those options.

If I were to think of something for range, I’d do this: While the target is standing still and while the attacker is standing still, ranged deals an addition % of damage.

If I were to do something for healing builds, I’d say this: HP that is healed over the target’s max health (through direct healing powers, not through the heal skill, nor through regen) provide a damage % increase based on the amount that was healed over max health.

Hmmm. For conditions, I might make a new condition called lethargy. Based on the amount of condition damage your character has, it increases the potency of lethargy. Lethargy reduces the target’s attack frequency by a % of speed.

Eh, just some ideas off the top of my head.

hamsteak.1368:

it ends up feeling like everyone’s only purpose is to be a damage dealer, instead of being a supporter that sacrifices damage to supplement their group

The problem is support don’t actaully sacrifice damage. Just because your wearing PVT dont’ make you a better support.

ANd you dont’ need to sacrifice much of any damage to get good support ability. (eg warrior sacrificing little damage to use warhorn, or elementist sacrifice little damage and get super healing from specing in water"

Dodge rolling is OP. Change it to something like 50% damage taken from hits when evading and the current Meta would collapse. Then you’d start seeing more build variety, more pure support guardians, etc etc.
Not saying I recommend this course of action as there’s a thin line before it becomes a WoW ripoff.

laokoko.7403:

hamsteak.1368:

it ends up feeling like everyone’s only purpose is to be a damage dealer, instead of being a supporter that sacrifices damage to supplement their group

The problem is support don’t actaully sacrifice damage. Just because your wearing PVT dont’ make you a better support.

Agreed.

Another way of looking at it is like this:

Blind from a person using full zerker is the same blind as the person using Carrion.
Aegis from a person using full zerker is the same aegis as the person using Soldier’s.
Chill, same.
Protection, same.
Weakness, same.
Vulnerability, same.

By going with something like Cleric’s, you might have better healing. But if a zerk group is able to kill a mob without needing that healing because they can dodge, blind, block, etc. then you’ve actually lost more than you’ve gained from going cleric’s.

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

I suppose I have to ask: What do you think is wrong about the only, all melee, zerker meta?

Because it is boring.

Dolan.3071:

Dodge rolling is OP. Change it to something like 50% damage taken from hits when evading and the current Meta would collapse. Then you’d start seeing more build variety, more pure support guardians, etc etc.
Not saying I recommend this course of action as there’s a thin line before it becomes a WoW ripoff.

Aswell as me never eating dinner again because dungeons will take too long.

DigitalKirin.9714:

laokoko.7403:

hamsteak.1368:

it ends up feeling like everyone’s only purpose is to be a damage dealer, instead of being a supporter that sacrifices damage to supplement their group

The problem is support don’t actaully sacrifice damage. Just because your wearing PVT dont’ make you a better support.

Agreed.

Another way of looking at it is like this:

Blind from a person using full zerker is the same blind as the person using Carrion.
Aegis from a person using full zerker is the same aegis as the person using Soldier’s.
Chill, same.
Protection, same.
Weakness, same.
Vulnerability, same.

By going with something like Cleric’s, you might have better healing. But if a zerk group is able to kill a mob without needing that healing because they can dodge, blind, block, etc. then you’ve actually lost more than you’ve gained from going cleric’s.

that’s one of the issues with the game imo, even as a zerker whatever, with all damage related traits and traitlines, you still have access to the same skills that a support spec does, and the difference is marginal

GW1 also had some other creative mechanics along these lines… such as:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Battle_Scars
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Ward_of_Weakness
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Tainted_Flesh
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Shield_of_Fire

Range can already do well. Sometimes there are bosses you just don’t want to get close to.. Support is kind of a gray area, and conditions suffer from lolfunding issues. Right now, the big weak link in the chain is control.

There are two big problems with control:

#1: You end up getting swarmed with Silver mobs, and nearly every control skill is single target, short duration, long cooldown. It was designed like this due to the fact that in PVP, players hate neverending control chains, so they designed the game to limit as much control as possible. The problem is that when you have a pack of 4 or 5 silver mobs, each one can take away half of your health, and in a gigantic flashing gfx ball you have to pick out one that is going into an animation and quickly interrupt him.

It just isn’t practical. Nearly every control in the game should have an AoE component, or a much shorter recharge. That way you can either stun the whole group, or lay down meaningful stuns very quickly.

#2: Unshakeable. Half the people who play the game don’t know how it works. The other half who do know how it works think it is a stupid mechanic. It was put into the game in order to avoid chain-stunning a boss, and the result is that stuns (again, short duration on long cooldown) just bounce feebly off of the boss and make it so control heavy specs and builds are utterly useless against bosses.

It is bad enough in dungeons, but in the overworld you’ll end up with a champion getting 20 stacks of defiant after being dazed for half a second. This mechanic exists to completely shut down one of the many facets that a player can base their character around, and it is ridiculous. I’m going to borrow from another person’s suggestion here, and just say that Defiant should decay naturally. Maybe, one stack every 3 seconds or so. That way akittens worst Defiant is a hard timer for when you can use control again and akittens best it is much more quickly stripped away in a control heavy group.

Support suffers from a problem where no one actually knows what support is. When a thief uses smoke screen, is that support? Is that control? What do we classify these things as? For now, I’ll divide support into 3 different aspects, and touch on each of them.

Aspect 1: Disabling conditions. These are conditions that are put on the opponent not to inflict damage, but to otherwise inhibit their actions. Cripple, Chill, Immobilize, Blind, Weakness, Vulnerability. Cripple, Chill, and Immobilize are pretty good on their own, capable of slowing own dangerous enemies. There is a problem with the other ones, though: Blind, Weakness, and Vulnerability are all disabled by Unshakeable, working only half as well. With weakness now having short durations on long cooldowns, and vulnerability needing stacks to really contribute, it all but neutralizes the positive effects from these abilities. So basically, condition support is useless on any mob where you don’t have oodles of space to kite them.

Aspect 2: Boons and Buffs. This includes things like stacking might, layering protection, grating fury, etc. For the most part, these are fine if not difficult to build towards.

Aspect 3: Field manipulation. AKA the “others” category. Here I include things like healing, boon removal, condition cleansing, projectile stopping. These are often unsung, since they are only done well by a few classes, and are often hard to do in these classes. In general, healing and group cleansing tends to be a bit weak, requiring full build dedication for little payout in PVE. This can be remedied by making player to player healing more potent, and things are slowly going this way. Boon removal is rarely used, and it is rarely needed, so it ends up being one of those things where its never around when you need it, and when you need it you aren’t specced for boon removal, so making it universally more useful (AKA give enemies more boons) will make them more potent. Projectile manipulation is fine where it is.

The biggest problem with conditions in dungeons is definitely the cap. Each condition that is not a support condition (as above, have their own massive problems) that does damage does so in an incredibly limiting way.

#1:Bleeding. This is the go-to damage condition, dealing out the most damage that any condition can reasonably inflict. The problem with bleeding is that everyone and their grandmother causes bleeding. Literally. every single class in the game is good at stacking bleeds. This makes any two condition classes redundant, no matter what spectrum they come form.

#2: Poison. This skill is only available to half the classes in the game, and they do it well: If you have a class that inflicts poison, than it is guaranteed that the target will have poison on them permanently. It only does damage equal to 2 stacks of bleeding, so for the few classes that have it, the skill is nigh useless in dungeons. In PVP the purpose of poison is to cover bleeds, and also to reduce the effectiveness of healing. Problem is, dungeon mobs don’t heal. So… it is basically useless. And also redundant if you have two classes that inflict poison.

#3: Confusion. Confusion causes a high amount of damage whenever an enemy takes action. It hits pretty hard in the right circumstances, but the right circumstances are rare. This is because all enemy attacks in the game are channels, slow to execute, spaced far apart, and do really high damage. Even with an 8 second duration, confusion rarely ticks more than twice against a standard mob, often ticking only once. Therein lies the other rub: all confusion is extremely short duration, making it so anything but the most tactical use results in a waste of trait and utility space. The longest base duration for confusion is 5 seconds, seriously.

#4: Burning. Burning is a high damage and low investment condition that stacks in duration. This suffers from a big problem in that, unlike poison, you actually care about the damage it inflicts. This is an issue because every class in the game except thief causes burning. If you use burning as an engineer, or mesmer, or ranger, your high damage burns are constantly overwritten by low damage burns from any of the above using an attack that causes burning. Guardians and Elementalists are the big offender, regularly overwriting every burn you place and doing it really quickly. This makes using burning as a form of condition damage moot, since it is highly unreliable.

Torment: This is a strange answer arenanet has to bleeds for the necromancer that was tacked on to thieves and mesmers to make other classes not feel left out. There is nothing inherently wrong with torment. Sure, most of the time enemies aren’t moving so it does only 75% of the damage as a bleed, but some enemies are movin so then it does more. The biggest issue with torment is that there’s no way to reliably inflict it. Torment is incredibly rare, meaning that even on classes it is in, torment is just a smidgen of ancillary damage on the whole condition damage pie.

So, how to solve this problem? Well… that’s actually quite simple.

Bleeding: Make less classes do bleeds, and more classes do other conditions. New conditions are welcome, however torment is an excellent option. I think that Mesmers and Necromancers should inflict bleeding much more rarely, instead inflicting torment as their primary source of condition damage.

Poison: Make enemy mobs heal themselves more often. Decrease the top HP of every silver mob, but give them a healing skill they can use. This makes it so control has an offensive use to stop the heal, and poison being on the target degrades the heal into nothing.

Confusion: Make enemies attack more. Anet is already going this direction, but it makes sense. Since players have attack chains, why don’t enemies? You can easily reduce the front-loading of damage into single big hits and give enemies stable forms of offense that do a good some of steady damage, while also letting confusion work much better. Also, as always, more access to confusion would be welcomed.

Burning: Make it so burning only goes off the condition damage of the highest malice user. If I apply a 10 second burn at 1600 condition damage, a guardian who applies an additional burn shouldn’t overwrite that with a 0 condition damage burn. It should stay akittens peak hotness, letting burning users maintain an offense no matter the group composition.

Torment: Simply more access to torment.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

long but articulate post

hide spoiler

Range can already do well. Sometimes there are bosses you just don’t want to get close to.. Support is kind of a gray area, and conditions suffer from lolfunding issues. Right now, the big weak link in the chain is control.

There are two big problems with control:

#1: You end up getting swarmed with Silver mobs, and nearly every control skill is single target, short duration, long cooldown. It was designed like this due to the fact that in PVP, players hate neverending control chains, so they designed the game to limit as much control as possible. The problem is that when you have a pack of 4 or 5 silver mobs, each one can take away half of your health, and in a gigantic flashing gfx ball you have to pick out one that is going into an animation and quickly interrupt him.

It just isn’t practical. Nearly every control in the game should have an AoE component, or a much shorter recharge. That way you can either stun the whole group, or lay down meaningful stuns very quickly.

#2: Unshakeable. Half the people who play the game don’t know how it works. The other half who do know how it works think it is a stupid mechanic. It was put into the game in order to avoid chain-stunning a boss, and the result is that stuns (again, short duration on long cooldown) just bounce feebly off of the boss and make it so control heavy specs and builds are utterly useless against bosses.

It is bad enough in dungeons, but in the overworld you’ll end up with a champion getting 20 stacks of defiant after being dazed for half a second. This mechanic exists to completely shut down one of the many facets that a player can base their character around, and it is ridiculous. I’m going to borrow from another person’s suggestion here, and just say that Defiant should decay naturally. Maybe, one stack every 3 seconds or so. That way akittens worst Defiant is a hard timer for when you can use control again and akittens best it is much more quickly stripped away in a control heavy group.

Support suffers from a problem where no one actually knows what support is. When a thief uses smoke screen, is that support? Is that control? What do we classify these things as? For now, I’ll divide support into 3 different aspects, and touch on each of them.

Aspect 1: Disabling conditions. These are conditions that are put on the opponent not to inflict damage, but to otherwise inhibit their actions. Cripple, Chill, Immobilize, Blind, Weakness, Vulnerability. Cripple, Chill, and Immobilize are pretty good on their own, capable of slowing own dangerous enemies. There is a problem with the other ones, though: Blind, Weakness, and Vulnerability are all disabled by Unshakeable, working only half as well. With weakness now having short durations on long cooldowns, and vulnerability needing stacks to really contribute, it all but neutralizes the positive effects from these abilities. So basically, condition support is useless on any mob where you don’t have oodles of space to kite them.

Aspect 2: Boons and Buffs. This includes things like stacking might, layering protection, grating fury, etc. For the most part, these are fine if not difficult to build towards.

Aspect 3: Field manipulation. AKA the “others” category. Here I include things like healing, boon removal, condition cleansing, projectile stopping. These are often unsung, since they are only done well by a few classes, and are often hard to do in these classes. In general, healing and group cleansing tends to be a bit weak, requiring full build dedication for little payout in PVE. This can be remedied by making player to player healing more potent, and things are slowly going this way. Boon removal is rarely used, and it is rarely needed, so it ends up being one of those things where its never around when you need it, and when you need it you aren’t specced for boon removal, so making it universally more useful (AKA give enemies more boons) will make them more potent. Projectile manipulation is fine where it is.

A good write up on every thing going on… tho I think you left out Combos even if your “fields” section implies them. Infact I have a theory their general weak nature & short duration is the leading reason that Rangers & Engies are so low on the Totem pole.

Combo fields do a lot of different things. The poison field and the dark field cause weakness and blinds, making them disabling. The fire field and the light field give might and retaliation, making them boons and buffs. The smoke field and the water field give stealth and heal, putting them into the “others” category.

All in all, combo fields are complex, and each field should be categorized individually.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

I didn’t know Control wasn’t needed. Temporal Curtain and Binding Blades are two of the most powerful, and most commonly used, skills in the game in terms of PVE dungeons. Those are the epitome of control, and the sign of a good group is being able to coordinate it properly.

Your mistaken assumption that Control is irrelevant probably comes from a pug meta where you can’t count on the mesmer pull or guardian pull to be used effectively so people just deal with it and have a lot of downs or rough trash pulls or fight bosses away from walls.

As far as “Support” goes, I don’t even know what that means. If that means condition removal, reflects, blind fields, stealth, portals, and boon buffing; well then the zerker meta does that too. These are all integral concepts to organized group speed clears. My guess is you mean “Support” to be some mid line type of character who can be lazy and get carried through content by casting party buffs. Sorry, pal. In this MMO the classes that bring a lot of support (mesmer, guardian, thief) are also expected to do their fair share of dps. If you long for the days of bad players getting carried through content by being buffbots this isn’t the game for you.

Reflect and guardian/mesmer pulls are OP and you know it. They far outclass the CC/support tools of other classes.

The fact is nobody wants the necro’s chills, nobody needs poison because mobs don’t heal, nobody needs conditions because mobs don’t have high armor, nobody needs boon stripping because outside a specific type of dredge no mobs or bosses suddenly spike boons to lethal levels, and nobody needs the engineers turrets or cripple fields.

All you do is sit on a reflection wall while the guardian puts prot and aegis up for people and the warriors kill a boss in under 2 minutes.

I’d love to see one boss in this game that actually took more than a day to figure out and kill.

2 part problem-

-Boss mechanics are predictable and boring. When the whole or the majority of a fight relies heavily on reflects as a counter, that’s not very creative or fun.

-It’s not that some classes are Over Powered. It’s that other classes are Under powered.

Zenith.7301:

Reflect and guardian/mesmer pulls are OP and you know it. They far outclass the CC/support tools of other classes.

The fact is nobody wants the necro’s chills, nobody needs poison because mobs don’t heal, nobody needs conditions because mobs don’t have high armor, nobody needs boon stripping because outside a specific type of dredge no mobs or bosses suddenly spike boons to lethal levels, and nobody needs the engineers turrets or cripple fields.

I thought we were talking about the need for control and support, not class balance. Ofcourse wall and curtain are OP, thats why they get used. But thats the point, they ARE a “control” element that is extremely important and the fact that they exist means that posters saying “this game doesn’t require control or support” is a shallow comment. It does require them, but people don’t like that two classes are better at it than anyone else.

swiftpaw.6397:

2 part problem-

-Boss mechanics are predictable and boring. When the whole or the majority of a fight relies heavily on reflects as a counter, that’s not very creative or fun.

-It’s not that some classes are Over Powered. It’s that other classes are Under powered.

More like unfinished lol.
If you know the mechanics and have quick reflexes there’s usually no point in using anything other than zerk gear.
Healing=useless when the bosses usually 1-2shot anyone.
Toughness/vitality is kinda useless since you can’t really keep up your high HP. It also slows you down which makes you take more damage. Evading/blocking is much more effective.
Condition damage… Yeah… They need to do something about condition stacks in PvE.
Also you can support in zero gear. Support!=healing. You can apply boons and conditions just as well with full berserker gear.

Boons are far superior to conditions. Boons scale well for the number of enemies and provide full effect when fighting champions. As long as the is game is balanced for SPvP the PvE imbalance of boons vs conditions will persist.

If they want to discourage Berserker they have to force sustainability. Instead of one powerful attack every 5-10 seconds enemies could attack every 0.5-1 seconds.
And fights have to last long enough

Wethospu.6437:

If they want to discourage Berserker they have to force sustainability. Instead of one powerful attack every 5-10 seconds enemies could attack every 0.5-1 seconds.
And fights have to last long enough

And rework Defiant – i agree that bosses needs some sort of resilience against CC’s to prevent them to be locked all the time, but current design feels just wrong.

Wethospu.6437:

If they want to discourage Berserker they have to force sustainability. Instead of one powerful attack every 5-10 seconds enemies could attack every 0.5-1 seconds.
And fights have to last long enough

Then instead of berserker melee trains people would just run ptv melee trains, which would be even more boring

JohnLShannonhouse.1820:

This “meta” is most useful on a few paths of a few dungeons. Some paths are difficult to make work that way. There is plenty of room for all of what you mention elsewhere. Also, what Nike said.

Now, what people mean by “efficiency” is the key question. I can say that 3 guardians and a wells + condition damage necromancer stacking up running support and drawing enemies to corners are nigh invincible in most situations. Invincibility is pretty efficient in that your encounters have 100% success. It is not as FAST as all-out DPS. However, if you want speed, then you must either skip content and/or go all out DPS because DPS causes enemies to drop faster.

DPS run perfectly will always result in faster runs in any game because high rate of damage = enemies drop faster = shorter battles. That does not make other strategies inviable or useless. If something goes really wrong on an encounter for an all-out DPS party, it is unlikely to survive like a heavy support and condition damage party will survive things going wrong.

It’s a problem when those few paths of those few dungeons are the only content being played because of the design. This isn’t as simple as saying “oh, it’s only the meta”

It’s not the meta. The design of the game, where every encounter mechanic is “move out of the way” is not healthy for a game this ambitious. Even with the new reards system for playing diverse dungeons will still most likely not be as efficient as running the current speed clears 20-30 times before a single path of these other dungeons would be completed.

Blix.8021:

Wethospu.6437:

If they want to discourage Berserker they have to force sustainability. Instead of one powerful attack every 5-10 seconds enemies could attack every 0.5-1 seconds.
And fights have to last long enough

Then instead of berserker melee trains people would just run ptv melee trains, which would be even more boring

Or use defensive utilities. Or actually play well and use the high risk/high reward set.

Wethospu.6437:

Blix.8021:

Wethospu.6437:

If they want to discourage Berserker they have to force sustainability. Instead of one powerful attack every 5-10 seconds enemies could attack every 0.5-1 seconds.
And fights have to last long enough

Then instead of berserker melee trains people would just run ptv melee trains, which would be even more boring

Or use defensive utilities. Or actually play well and use the high risk/high reward set.

People already think they need guardians to do pve, if they made bosses hit everyone every HALF A SECOND, then every group would just have 4 ah/em shout guardians instead of 4 berserker warriors. People will use whichever team composition is most faceroll

Good for them. I will then clear dungeons faster for actually playing skillfully.

Wethospu.6437:

Good for them. I will then clear dungeons faster for actually playing skillfully.

how do you intend to be skillful against something that attacks every half a second? face tank and spam protection? you can’t dodge every half a second.

Avoiding its big attacks (enemies often have more than one attack) and having just enough defense to kill it before it kills me.

Wethospu.6437:

Avoiding its big attacks (enemies often have more than one attack) and having just enough defense to kill it before it kills me.

You just described exactly how dungeons are now, which is why I said if you made bosses attack faster, people would just build tankier and continue to do boring melee trains in dungeons