Guild Wars 2

Guys, please help me understand.

In a game where there is no “healers”, no tanking, no significant crowd control or positional control, what “different” types of builds is Arena Net trying to promote with the recent nerf to critical damage and castration of Celestial Gear?

In a game where conditional damage is an afterthought what other builds need to be promoted? Damage is king in GW2. That’s what they wanted right? I understand there is a build meta in PvP and WvWvW but can you guys explain to me what are these different builds that needed to be promoted for PvE?

Can anybody describe these builds, and how they benefit from this new change? Thanks.

None until they answer the issue that armor and trait allocations that don’t focus 100% towards dps in pve are woefully under compensated for their attempt to live a little longer

Would anybody else like to contribute to a list of these builds that benefit from this change? I’m completely lost.

MrDmajor.7084:

Guys, please help me understand.

In a game where there is no “healers”, no tanking, no significant crowd control or positional control, what “different” types of builds is Arena Net trying to promote with the recent nerf to critical damage and castration of Celestial Gear?

In a game where conditional damage is an afterthought what other builds need to be promoted? Damage is king in GW2. That’s what they wanted right? I understand there is a build meta in PvP and WvWvW but can you guys explain to me what are these different builds that needed to be promoted for PvE?

Can anybody describe these builds, and how they benefit from this new change? Thanks.

the core designs of professions are basic, shallow and extremely limited. “builds” and “build diversity” come from grinding out, crafting or buying new sets of gear to support # and % changes. there is nothing special or notable to see here, this game is one big economic playground designed to drain gold from players so they buy gems from the cash shop.

Nobody can even understand what’s going on anymore.

All we can do is watch this ship sink.

Gw2 was not suppose to be a pure dps game. How it was suppose to work is instead of the trinities tank/healer/dps, gw2 will have its own type of trinity, support/control/dps. Why people dont support or control in pve is because it is useless. Dynamic events rewards you based on the amount of dmg you done, 99% of dungeon bosses’s attacks can be evade without taking a single hit of dmg and defiance is a horrible mechanic. Why would someone want to use a hammer on a boss that gets 5 stack of defiance?

Like I said, gw2 was suppose to have its own type of trinity but it was just not viable in pve at all so no one uses it. Nerfing crit gear wasnt the solution clearly since pvp is fine with the dmg as is. The real problem is the 10000000 hp on bosses and that you can avoid almost all attacks with the 2 dodges available.

What needs to be done imo is that all bosses should have their health lowered, they should attack much more often, and defiance should not be in game. This would make control and support a big part of dungeons since control will actually be able to stop the boss from doing a certain attack, dps wont be king since you wont need to burst down that 10000000 hp as fast as possible and support will actually be needed.

MrDmajor.7084:

Castration of Celestial Gear.

I literally laughed out loud after reading this.

Castration Gear = Hey we will give you +6% more stats, but we’ll cut off your…

GG Anet!

It doesn’t have the trinity in the sense that one player doesn’t stand still holding all the aggro, one player does not stand still blasting all the heals, and the remaining three players aren’t reduced to role-less DPS-machines.

Granted the push towards the zerker meta goes against this, and exemplifies the fact that people will go for the easiest possible options. What is mind-boggling is that they will then blame the developers for their choice to stick eight characters on one gearset, play every dungeon identically, and then wonder where the fun went.

In the current game, it is 100% viable to make a team of offensive, defensive, and support hybrid roles. This game does an -amazing- job with well-built hybrids, and they are necessary towards completing dungeons without skipping, stacking, or abusing other broken mechanics. The common problem is players try to go all or nothing; all DPS, all Support, or all Heals/Survivability. Of those three, only One is viable consistently in every dungeon in the game; All-DPS. Naturally players would gravitate towards it. It’s easy to gear for, has predictably repeatable role in every dungeon (think back to other MMOs, specifically the disproportionate amount of DPS players to tanks/healers. The concept isn’t much different), and is the epitome of speed clears which a large portion of the playerbase prefers over full dungeon clears.

The problem with this, as exemplified many times by many people on the forums, is that it was not -easy-. It’s not easy to retrain yourself to play a mace/shield Guardian in active, non-stacking combat, leaping in front of your allies to shield them from large attacks, or constantly switching weapons to keep up Protection stacks on allies while still using your higher-than-average Toughness to keep the majority of the mobs on you and off your allies.

This game does have aggro mechanics; Wiki them, and learn to use them correctly. Healing is viable, but not as one sole healer keeping bars up for the whole team; multiclass, learn to deal suitable DPS while still watching out for your team. With a few players doing this, healing turns out to be surprisingly powerful. In getting rid of trinities, the game did not mean that we could throw all ideas of teamwork and strategy out the window and focus one one archetypical build over three. It meant we need to learn to use a multitude of skills and abilities, be able to actively engage in multiple ‘roles’ at once while participating in active combat.

It boils down to no one player should be standing around doing just one thing to win the game. Sadly, this happened with the Zerker meta. ANet is not trying to eliminate DPS roles, they are toning them down so there is more value in keeping the party alive longer. Whether or not this will work as intended is yet to be seen. There will still be speed clears, there will still be a majority of players who do dungeons to get money as fast as possible and have absolutely zero desire to learn any other aspect of their classes or team play. With the current reward system, that is unavoidable.

But there are players who embrace the current hybrid-class system. We get in groups, coordinate our classes, builds, and gear, and run dungeon after dungeon without stacking, skipping, or exploiting anything. It’s a ton of fun, and we pretty much never die. Are we ever going to race a group of speed-clearing Zerkers stacking in a corner? NOPE! But we’re certainly not going to resign to one repetitive playstyle and blame ANet for an unwillingness to learn anything different.

the pve mob/dungeons combat is NOT set up for holy trinity combat system.

While classes have different options for combat, healing skills, buff skills, burst, condition, debuff/control, the community has decided the most efficient way to clear the pve content is to go full power/crit/crit dmg.

IMO, the ideal “fix” anet is trying to figure out would be the combat system of neverwinter.

while different classes have a lot of different skills with different spells to pick from, they are only able to have a limited number of them in combat.

Its action packed, and there is in fact tank/dps/support/controll, and when i say control its not just a few stuns ,knocks backs and interupts that have 30-1min cd and you wait for the right time to use them…

The one thing people keep forgetting about this whole holy trinity idea coming to gw2 is that gw2 pve/dungeon mob combat system is NOT designed for a holy trinity system….and then theres also wvw and spvp

You can make a guardian survive more than 1-2 shots from a boss that he keeps agro on, and you can make a ele a fast reliable healer to keep the tank and the rest of the group up… but the community will still go full zerker and rely on their own healing skills and dodges and finish the dungeon in 15minutes instead of 45…

How is toning down critical damage on zerker builds going promote the health of other builds though? People will simply play the same and the SAME fights will take longer. People will still want optimal damage builds for their dungeon speed runs. The bosses will still do 1 hit kills, there will still be defiance, there will be still invisible aoe rings that people can’t see because of all the clutter. There wills till be stacking. How does THIS change anything.

I don’t understand the logic of the people in control at ArenaNet and they do contrived jobs at explaining themselves. The entire explanation was kitten. It read like a statement written by general counsel for a greasy politician.

If they feel there is any thing fundamentally wrong with the game play it was 100% their own doing despite the countless amounts of feedback and suggestions provided by the player base. They eliminated the trinity completely and did not provide the challenges to offer anything else more than what you could get from an arcade styled hack and slasher. I’m old school. FINE. I liked Gauntlet. I liked Double Dragon and Golden Axe.

I play an Engineer. When I first started I wanted to go for a condition build. I was new and naive to the game. I worked HARD for my gear. I grinded through badly designed dungeons countless times until I got my look and build. Then I was smacked in the face with the reality that my build didn’t mean anything if there were a couple other people using conditions. “Technical limitations” they said. I worked to get my zerker pieces so I could play DPS Wars 2 now I’m getting smacked in the face again for doing that.

I want to understand FOR WHAT. What is this for? What builds is Arena Net talking about? I don’t want vague beating around the bush with all types of semantics. I want specifics. The player base deserves to know. The people who worked hard for their exotic gear deserve to know. Those same people who grinded and grinded and crafted against their will THEN upgraded their gear to Ascended deserve to know.

WHAT builds benefit? Condition Damage? Healing? Bunker builds?

I’ll tell you how anet promoted my hybrid build (dd ele). Firstly I got 35% on crit dmg removed, secondly boon duration mix of runes removed and thirdly on swap sigils and stacking sigils is going to work better on other classes (4 sigils with 4 cooldowns is better then 2). Now I can destroy my celestial set (worth 800 gold) with runes and make totally different build or stop playing.

It’s because the balance team consists of seemingly two people. There is no public test server, and updates have to be massive affairs rather than iterative. So the only way they do thing is adding via subtraction. Nerf one thing to promote another.

Which is why the horizontal progression through traits will either slip back towards Trinity or leave us with a lot of traits that don’t ‘step on the toes’ of other traits (see: rather useless). We have a mix of these coming in the feature pack…ex: Elementalists trait that heals others (traditional monk mechanic) and then a bunch of ‘meh’ traits (most Ranger ones).

In short, nerfing critical damage to them means promoting support builds. The content itself currently has nothing where this will actually matter, so the community gets outraged.

No build will see any benefit. Actually, more builds will become more useless in my opinion. They know well what’s the only thing they can do to make more builds viable, and it has to do with fixing mobs’ AI, they keep “running in circles around that” because meaningless nerf are easier and quicker and will make all the “ZERK RUINS GAME” QQers uber happy for about 10 minutes until they’ll log in in game and see that nothing changed.

Trait line 1: offensive sustain
Trait line 2: offensive burst
Trait line 3: defensive sustain
Trait line 4: defensive burst
Trait line 5: control

Wouldn’t it be ideal?

Abellus.2615:

It doesn’t have the trinity in the sense that one player doesn’t stand still holding all the aggro, one player does not stand still blasting all the heals, and the remaining three players aren’t reduced to role-less DPS-machines.

Granted the push towards the zerker meta goes against this, and exemplifies the fact that people will go for the easiest possible options. What is mind-boggling is that they will then blame the developers for their choice to stick eight characters on one gearset, play every dungeon identically, and then wonder where the fun went.

In the current game, it is 100% viable to make a team of offensive, defensive, and support hybrid roles. This game does an -amazing- job with well-built hybrids, and they are necessary towards completing dungeons without skipping, stacking, or abusing other broken mechanics. The common problem is players try to go all or nothing; all DPS, all Support, or all Heals/Survivability. Of those three, only One is viable consistently in every dungeon in the game; All-DPS. Naturally players would gravitate towards it. It’s easy to gear for, has predictably repeatable role in every dungeon (think back to other MMOs, specifically the disproportionate amount of DPS players to tanks/healers. The concept isn’t much different), and is the epitome of speed clears which a large portion of the playerbase prefers over full dungeon clears.

The problem with this, as exemplified many times by many people on the forums, is that it was not -easy-. It’s not easy to retrain yourself to play a mace/shield Guardian in active, non-stacking combat, leaping in front of your allies to shield them from large attacks, or constantly switching weapons to keep up Protection stacks on allies while still using your higher-than-average Toughness to keep the majority of the mobs on you and off your allies.

This game does have aggro mechanics; Wiki them, and learn to use them correctly. Healing is viable, but not as one sole healer keeping bars up for the whole team; multiclass, learn to deal suitable DPS while still watching out for your team. With a few players doing this, healing turns out to be surprisingly powerful. In getting rid of trinities, the game did not mean that we could throw all ideas of teamwork and strategy out the window and focus one one archetypical build over three. It meant we need to learn to use a multitude of skills and abilities, be able to actively engage in multiple ‘roles’ at once while participating in active combat.

It boils down to no one player should be standing around doing just one thing to win the game. Sadly, this happened with the Zerker meta. ANet is not trying to eliminate DPS roles, they are toning them down so there is more value in keeping the party alive longer. Whether or not this will work as intended is yet to be seen. There will still be speed clears, there will still be a majority of players who do dungeons to get money as fast as possible and have absolutely zero desire to learn any other aspect of their classes or team play. With the current reward system, that is unavoidable.

But there are players who embrace the current hybrid-class system. We get in groups, coordinate our classes, builds, and gear, and run dungeon after dungeon without stacking, skipping, or exploiting anything. It’s a ton of fun, and we pretty much never die. Are we ever going to race a group of speed-clearing Zerkers stacking in a corner? NOPE! But we’re certainly not going to resign to one repetitive playstyle and blame ANet for an unwillingness to learn anything different.

This is the exact wall of text that goes through my head each time I see one of these topics.

Abellus.2615:

snip.

So the players are wrong for playing for optimal damage in a damage game? High risk high reward. Condition damage is useless. There’s no “healing”. There’s no real crowd control or positional control. There is no holy trinity, there isn’t even a soft roles system. There is absolutely no combat mechanic that check for these other mystical hybrid roles (of which no one has yet to specify). How does lowering damage 10% on optimal damage builds and completely destroying celestial gear fix anything and WHAT BUILDS are benefiting?

No more walls of text and semantics. Can somebody anybody please list what builds benefit from the nerf of zerker gear and explain how? Forgive my ignorance.

You must be forgetting or just being plain ignorant of the rest of the feature patch and what it will do. Celestial gear is getting a 6% buff so healing, condi, base power, toughness etc will be increased……

Builds are not reliant on just stats…. Runes, sigils,weapon selection, utility skill and traits contribute to the build. You could have full cleric armor and run your typical berserker warrior build and do fine. Is it uber effective? nope, but at least you won’t be completely useless.

PvEasy builds??? No such thing since the open world is meant to be a relaxing experience IMO. FotM, dungeons, dragons, and shrines can benefit from having some players that run support , aoe healing/regen, or CC(fotm and dungeons).

Though GW2 has PvEasy, the real challenge is in PvP. If you are too scared to challenge yourself and play pvp then GW2 isn’t your game. GW1 PvE was easy , but the Pvp was in-depth. GW2 will follow with the coming feature patch with the several changes to the game.

Soooo does this mean that my PVT Mace Shield guardian will get more use in dungeons and PVE? Probably not.
Does this mean that my full zerker will take about 5 more minutes to complete a dungeon or event in PVE? Probably.
I am just glad that the amount of time and effort invested in that full ascended zerker is not completely useless, but then again who knows what will happen with a future patch.

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

You must be forgetting or just being plain ignorant of the rest of the feature patch and what it will do. Celestial gear is getting a 6% buff so healing, condi, base power, toughness etc will be increased……

The only thing that made Celestial interesting to a small fraction of playerbase was the over-budget critical damage. Which will get halved. (oh, and previously the magic find stat, that got removed with no compensation to the rest of stats) The 6% increase in stats does not even come close to cover the value this stat set will lose with the introduction of Ferocity.
Basically, celestial gear was never worth having beyond some niche uses. One of those niches got removed long ago, and the Ferocity change was aimed at the other. In no other case celestial is good enough that a hybrid mix of other stat sets would not do better.

I thought we just been doing the duality one person does Reflects and occational condi removal and dps everyone else DPS RACE and learned to dodge and remove own conditions, I like it that way.

MrDmajor.7084:

Guys, please help me understand.

In a game where there is no “healers”, no tanking, no significant crowd control or positional control, what “different” types of builds is Arena Net trying to promote with the recent nerf to critical damage and castration of Celestial Gear?

In a game where conditional damage is an afterthought what other builds need to be promoted? Damage is king in GW2. That’s what they wanted right? I understand there is a build meta in PvP and WvWvW but can you guys explain to me what are these different builds that needed to be promoted for PvE?

Can anybody describe these builds, and how they benefit from this new change? Thanks.

You can’t make support palpably effective without defined, deliberate roles. If they brought back a trinity-like system as seen in the skill system of GW1 along with elite skill capping and templates, this game would actually be the number 1 MMO in my eyes. There’s just no depth to the skill system. It’s all directed into traits so they can hyper balance everything. PvP can’t have new modes when the combat system doesn’t promote anything beyond running, gunning, and zerging. I’m sorry, but I really think GW2 should try re-inventing itself and if not by bringing a new healer class to the table, then by making support and healing a better option for classes like Elementalist, Guardian, Engineer, and then balancing encounters, damage, and mechanics around it.

Lets say I’m a greatsword guardian and I want to change the build.
I change my armor, I change my traits, but the skills still remain the same.
What build diversity?

Nick.6972:

Lets say I’m a greatsword guardian and I want to change the build.
I change my armor, I change my traits, but the skills still remain the same.
What build diversity?

That was a stupid reference.

Otherwise, we have to sit and watch I guess if ArenaNet is planning something bigger, as in the changes will be the introduction of a bigger change to the mechanics of the game. If not, they are useless, as there is nothing called classes aren’t balanced but the gameplay rewards pure dps more than anything else.

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

You must be forgetting or just being plain ignorant of the rest of the feature patch and what it will do. Celestial gear is getting a 6% buff so healing, condi, base power, toughness etc will be increased……

Builds are not reliant on just stats…. Runes, sigils,weapon selection, utility skill and traits contribute to the build. You could have full cleric armor and run your typical berserker warrior build and do fine. Is it uber effective? nope, but at least you won’t be completely useless.

PvEasy builds??? No such thing since the open world is meant to be a relaxing experience IMO. FotM, dungeons, dragons, and shrines can benefit from having some players that run support , aoe healing/regen, or CC(fotm and dungeons).

Though GW2 has PvEasy, the real challenge is in PvP. If you are too scared to challenge yourself and play pvp then GW2 isn’t your game. GW1 PvE was easy , but the Pvp was in-depth. GW2 will follow with the coming feature patch with the several changes to the game.

So no specific builds, and no explanation of how these changes make those builds more effective or “needed”. Just vague statements, baseless assumptions, and retorts to things nobody said. Anybody else?

MrDmajor.7084:

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

You must be forgetting or just being plain ignorant of the rest of the feature patch and what it will do. Celestial gear is getting a 6% buff so healing, condi, base power, toughness etc will be increased……

Builds are not reliant on just stats…. Runes, sigils,weapon selection, utility skill and traits contribute to the build. You could have full cleric armor and run your typical berserker warrior build and do fine. Is it uber effective? nope, but at least you won’t be completely useless.

PvEasy builds??? No such thing since the open world is meant to be a relaxing experience IMO. FotM, dungeons, dragons, and shrines can benefit from having some players that run support , aoe healing/regen, or CC(fotm and dungeons).

Though GW2 has PvEasy, the real challenge is in PvP. If you are too scared to challenge yourself and play pvp then GW2 isn’t your game. GW1 PvE was easy , but the Pvp was in-depth. GW2 will follow with the coming feature patch with the several changes to the game.

So no specific builds, and no explanation of how these changes make those builds more effective or “needed”. Just vague statements, baseless assumptions, and retorts to things nobody said. Anybody else?

you should be respectful if you want any valid answers on your threads. This isn’t kindergarden anylonger.

nGumball.1283:

MrDmajor.7084:

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

You must be forgetting or just being plain ignorant of the rest of the feature patch and what it will do. Celestial gear is getting a 6% buff so healing, condi, base power, toughness etc will be increased……

Builds are not reliant on just stats…. Runes, sigils,weapon selection, utility skill and traits contribute to the build. You could have full cleric armor and run your typical berserker warrior build and do fine. Is it uber effective? nope, but at least you won’t be completely useless.

PvEasy builds??? No such thing since the open world is meant to be a relaxing experience IMO. FotM, dungeons, dragons, and shrines can benefit from having some players that run support , aoe healing/regen, or CC(fotm and dungeons).

Though GW2 has PvEasy, the real challenge is in PvP. If you are too scared to challenge yourself and play pvp then GW2 isn’t your game. GW1 PvE was easy , but the Pvp was in-depth. GW2 will follow with the coming feature patch with the several changes to the game.

So no specific builds, and no explanation of how these changes make those builds more effective or “needed”. Just vague statements, baseless assumptions, and retorts to things nobody said. Anybody else?

you should be respectful if you want any valid answers on your threads. This isn’t kindergarden anylonger.

I respectfully told you your response had nothing to do with my questions. How much more respectful do you need?

Back on topic. Thanks.