Guild Wars 2

With the upcoming changes to account bound ascended armor and critical damage, there should be some sort of compensation to players who worked extremely hard to get all of their ascended gear, and especially weapons and armor. Compensation that would be acceptable would be similar to that of the magic find armor change: a one time stat swap for all ascended gear, or at least armor, given the recent release of ascended armor. I understand that the point behind the critical damage nerf was to open up more options for players in high level PvE content concerning builds, as well as generally increasing the difficulty of said PvE content, although it will still be easy enough to lull a baby quaggan to sleep. For PvE, the critical damage change is a step in the right direction. However, the critical damage change has enormous implications to a very large part of the playerbase and a very large part of the game: WvW.

For zerg fighting, with current critical damage values, zerg fights are very balanced between conditions and direct damage. Melee direct damage is the group that pounces on groups that fall out of position, while ranged condition damage pressures enemy players to fall out of position. The nerf to critical damage will cause these fights to drag out longer and longer and longer. If every frontline kept their current builds with their mixed in critical damage, fights would last pretty long. But with these changes, most frontline are going to change their builds to be tankier, since the damage gain will no longer be worth the sacrifice of survivability. This will cause fights to last extremely long. With the current mechanics in WvW, defenders are already heavily favored, even if you only look at the lord room mechanics and waypoint system in keeps. The changes will make it near impossible to take a waypointed keep, since everyone and their mother will be running bunker builds. This causes WvW to very quickly become extremely stale, as the excitement of taking objectives become completely eliminated, and only further increases the already terrible system where the server with the higher overnight population wins the matchups.

For small scale fights, conditions are already far and away the king of the castle. The builds that exploit conditions are very passive playstyles where all you need to do is get a few conditions loaded up on your target, then hide behind LoS while your target melts for 3k+ damage per second. Not to mention, condition builds often have passive access to conditions like cripple, chill, and immobilize. Other builds have very simple access to conditions like fear, such as a necro simply hitting Death Shroud, then three. Boom, your target is running the opposite direction for 3+ seconds, during which you can load up your target with insane numbers of conditions without any penalty to personal survivabilty. There are many many more issues with conditions in small scale fights that I won’t go into, but the point is that the changes to critical damage further solidifies the condition’s position on the throne.

Now, for the issues with WvWers who dumped their hard earned gold into ascended armor. Most of us crafted our critical damage gear very recently, and it set us back most of our gold. I personally dumped over 800g for my knights/cavalier ascended armor set, which was all of the gold I had saved up from 8+ months of playing. Now, less than 3 months after I make this armor set, the meta is drastically changing, and my gear is no longer anywhere near optimal for WvW. I sacrificed my survivabilty for my damage. Now the damage is no longer anywhere near worth the drop in survivabilty. So now I have this 800g, 8 months of hard work doing PvE (which I despise taking part in, as many hardcore WvWers do) pile of 6 pieces of gear that will sit in my bags to collect dust, alongside the ascended trinkets and weapons that I have crafted and run fractals (dear Balthazar I HATE fractals) for.

With that said: I propose 2 solutions. I know one of them is not going to happen, but it is the solution I prefer. I am willing to settle for the second solution.

Solution One: Don’t Nerf Critical Damage, Buff PvE Bosses and Encounters Instead
This solution will make PvE more difficult, while completely leaving WvW as is. Increasing PvE difficulty could include actually adding meaningful mechanics to bosses (gasp), creating an infinite aggro radius for monsters in dungeons, and making monsters and mini bosses unable to be skipped (CoE Champion Risen Abomination comes to mind). This way, Anet is happy with increased difficulty in dungeons, and more supportive builds start to show up, WvW players are happy as balance is maintained, and hell, some WvWers may even give PvE a chance if it actually posed some sort of challenge.

Solution Two: One-Time Stat Swap on Ascended
Since all of the gear we recently crafted is being drastically changed, and we had no warning of this change prior to crafting this gear, ascended gear should have a one-time stat swap, just like how magic find gear was given a stat swap when magic find was removed from gear. PvE players will still take their full berserker, but WvW players will be able to properly adjust the gear to their needs, since WvW is being the most impacted by this change. For most of us WvWers, it will take another 6+ months of saving up materials for another ascended set, not to mention the requirement to do PvE for the necessary crafting materials and gold, since, let’s be honest, WvW hardly gives any relevant rewards.

I know Anet refuses to make a rational decision about this, so I don’t expect either of these soltutions, especially solution one, to even come into consideration. However, many WvWers, myself included, are likely to leave the game given these changes, alongside the continued dismissal and ignoring of WvW players.

EDIT: I should have started by saying that I do really like most of the upcoming changes, especially the wardrobe and the account bound wxp. However, these changes don’t change how the game will be played, but the critical damage change does change how the game will be played, and for WvW, the change is for the worse.

“defenders are heavily favored”
you must be playing a different game than I am lol

Nothing against you personally but, I’ve been playing gw2 constantly for over a 1.5 years & I don’t understand why everyone keeps asking to be compensated for game changes that are made…
We don’t even know how bad it will or won’t be in game play yet until it hits.

I do, however, like your Solution 2. That sounds like fair ‘compensation’.

Welp, I crafted everything for my full set of ascended beserker gear, which is a total of 24 days for armor +…. 12 days for weapons (something like that). And 100s of gold worth of material.

I feel a bit bad. And I feel less likely to invest heavily time wise into something that may just be taken or modified in a way that negates my expenditure.

Is there a TLDR?

Kincaidia.3192:

Welp, I crafted everything for my full set of ascended beserker gear, which is a total of 24 days for armor +…. 12 days for weapons (something like that). And 100s of gold worth of material.

I feel a bit bad. And I feel less likely to invest heavily time wise into something that may just be taken or modified in a way that negates my expenditure.

Quit the game then. By your own words, you have no reason to invest time into the game because it’s going to be taken or modified in a way you perceive affects you adversely.

All I keep reading on these threads is “oh noes, I no can has insta-kill on people with my GC”. Dude, you’re not being neutered. You will be doing a LITTLE less damage and support/tank builds are getting a SMALL buff to help counter the errybody just ZERK mentality in this game. This means more actual strategic play and not stackstackstackPUUUUUSHbombbombbombbomb. Seriously. Wait for the patch and actually see how the numbers drop before your come to the boards to complain.

Defenders are only heavily favoured if the brain power level of the attakers is cumulatively -9001.