Guild Wars 2

There has been a recent consumables nerf to the fire ele powder and the ogre pet whistles requiring a 30 min cooldown. Many people used these for the world bosses, map complete, or helping in dungeons. Do you guys think this will hurt build viability of support and conditions builds because it removes a source of DPS available to all professions and builds and will force people more into the zerker meta?

It seems as if every consumable which might be used to help build variability has been changed to the point where it can not anymore and I feel this is harmful to the state of the game. Anything that helps players find more ways to play the game should be supported rather than nerfed into uselessness.

? I know arena net wanted to help balance the zerker meta out with other options such as better conditions and support options, but this change seems like it will make a lot of these builds less appealing to play because that option for contributing more DPS is now essentially gone with the fragility of the summons.

With world bosses that require a lot of preparation time it was always nice to take players to get these consumables. People appreciated it and it make them feel as if they were learning some extra secrets as to how to be useful in the game. Also it created a sense of greater contribution to the group because they went the extra mile to make sure we had every chance to succeed and it was a community builder.

It was argued that the consumables caused skill lag but that also occurs in big zergs even without the consumables. So at least with the consumables popped the job was still getting done DPS wise which resulted in more successful events and it boosted server morale.

So for example on the phase 2 part of the marionette fight, If people has embers with them when they go through the portal and they were in the loading screen for a long time, the chance of them getting downed and dead would be lessened until they could join the fight. This could also be used to counter the problems on less populated servers where you get an uneven distribution of players on the phase 2 platforms. it would still give you a fighting chance rather than have the whole event wipe. The Marionette fight is one of the coolest additions of content I have seen thus far and I think that would make it even better.

What changes would you guys make to the consumables to try to address some of these concerns? I think a reduction in the cooldown time would make it more viable say even like 5 min instead of 30, then if you play well and can keep your ember alive you could have a consistent up time with it without having players spam them creating extra stress on the server.

TLDR: Do you think the consumables nerf hurts the game by reducing the amount of viable builds and pushes people towards a zerker meta?

A build should not rely on summoning items. They are more like an emergency button, e. g. if Tequatl is at 10% but there are only 2 minutes left. That said I like the last change insofar that it prevents spamming those items. Although I would have preferred a global 10 minutes cooldown for summoning items (like in GW 1) instead of separate 30 minutes cooldowns per type. But it is still better than before.

As Ignavia said, a build does not get more ‘diverse’ by having the ability to fall back on consumeables.
Wes, you say if ‘hurts’ the game by pushing people towards the ‘omgfullzerk’ meta. I say that is actually was a pillar of said meta. Since a fullzerker only has 2 dodges, and eventual other evades on hand (Aegis), once these ‘run out’, a zerker has no buffer that could take a hit (this is why fullzerk on dungeon bosses works, you beat the bosses to death before they can fire more than 2 or 3 abilities, because the bosses only have the casttimed oneshots, no ‘anytimer’ autoattacks).
With a consumeable item, the time to kill shrinks, thus enabling the fullzerker to rely even less on exhaustible resources (Endurance, Aegis, other evasion abilities).
Also, every single summoned creature counts for the pool of possible Area Effect hits. Now imagine this: A group of 50 characters assault boss X. Boss X activates his Death Gaze, which is subject to the usual 5-Target-Rule for Aoe. If it hits, 5 characters are down, removing (for now) 10% of the attack force.
Now, same boss, same ability. Just instead of 50 characters, you have 50 characters plus 50 embers. The offensive capability of the whole group rises. Not double, because the attack palette of an Ember is most likely not on the same level than a player character can produce, but it is higher (this is the intended use!). Only now, the boss uses Death Gaze again. Either you are unlucky and you still have 5 players eaten (and their Embers going poof with them, I believe), or the ability wrecks up to 5 Embers instead. Each Ember, before the patch, was instantly replaced. A player would need a resurrection, double resurrection, or a WP resurrection including a walk back.
TL;DR of my defense of the change: Summon items more or less served as sacrificial lamb to eat AoE hits for players, so the player did not need to exhaust ‘active’ defenses.

You guys make some really good points that I have not thought about before. I agree that a build shouldn’t have to rely on consumables to be functional in the game and if it does you could essentially call it a bad build but I do feel consumables enhance enjoyment of the game and gives people more ways to play so it is worthwhile having a discussion on how to have them viable but not broken. Variety keeps people’s interest so if they can find a way to keep them relevant I think that would be the best solution for the game. I would rather have everyone’s play experience enhanced rather than hamper the zerker build and force them into a play style they don’t enjoy either because they can no longer burn down their targets. That could be done through a buff to certain professions/skills/traits rather than bringing something that is good down to other build’s level. The goal should be making more things viable rather than less.

If they reduced consumables to that 10 min cooldown it would bring it in line with how the guild wars 1 summoning stones were. They had a good balance where it was like the emergency button and you weren’t able to spam them but it wasn’t such a long cool down that people don’t want to pop them when needed. That would go a long way to helping this nerf.

Another thing they could do to help if have the debuff timer still run when you are offline. Right now it works like food that it retains the amount of time you are on cooldown even if you are offline which stinks. I hate coming back online and still seeing like a 10 min debuff on me.

I also never knew about the 5 target rule for aoe, I was always under the impression that if you were in an aoe ring for a boss a whole zerg could be wiped if they didn’t dodge properly. I never saw it working like that in like the Teq fight and I saw tons of embers there when they were spammable. I knew for players it worked like that like on an elementalist meteor shower would only hit so many and I knew an arrow cart would have a player limit it would affect but never knew it worked the same for bosses. You learn something new every day A solution might be somewhere along the lines of making it so something like this would not happen and having the boss aoe affect all the consumables but not in combination with the cooldown or that would be just kill consumable use completely.

Never even knew they existed before the nerf, neither did anyone in my Guild. I wonder how many people realistically used them.

Remember, they nerfed them for technical reasons as well. The 30min cooldown was considered preferable to any alternatives – there was a very detailed response from one of the Devs about it on the forums.

Most people on our server had and used them to some extent at least in all the larger guilds. We really enjoyed them for dungeon runs and fractals. I wonder if it still affects the server the same if it is instanced like a dungeon or if the problem just is where its the world boss encounter where you have 100 of them in the same place. Because if so they could just code it in somewhere that you only get the cooldown or a longer cooldown at world events but during dungeons they could forego it or have a shorter cooldown if it does not have the same detrimental effect when a 5 man team is in an instance.

“build diversity,” should never take priority over balance. If something is broken OP, it needs to get nerfed/removed.

There should be a happy medium with the two, games can be ruined in the name of balance as well. I can think of games where people so much preferred the original state of the game compared to after a balance patch came out and it caused people to leave the game.

The question I think should be, will this balance improve or harm the quality of life and experience for the majority of players in the game. And there is where the debates can occur as to where that line is drawn. This is where everyone tries to do their best to figure that out through feedback and a variety of opinions. When you can see things from multiple perspectives the overall picture often becomes clearer and we can help give constructive feedback to help improve the game overall.