Guild Wars 2

LittleLepton.8915:

This is an entirely different thing from a trait change here or a skill change there. It’s changing an entire stat. Learn how to scale.

How is it different though?

If they change a skill that is “required” for lets say my Condition Based build, and suddenly make it “useless”, I wouldn’t want to have my Condition gear anymore, and thus I should, following your logic, be allowed to change it for free.

lordkrall.7241:

LittleLepton.8915:

This is an entirely different thing from a trait change here or a skill change there. It’s changing an entire stat. Learn how to scale.

How is it different though?

If they change a skill that is “required” for lets say my Condition Based build, and suddenly make it “useless”, I wouldn’t want to have my Condition gear anymore, and thus I should, following your logic, be allowed to change it for free.

Lets make this clear. If they change a build in most cases it is completely possible to build a dps build around your dps armor and simply change the build. What they are doing is nerfing a stat across the board all builds and in WvW also. That is the main issue. A 10% reduction in PvE could have been done by adjusting the way mobs take crit damage. Conversely what they did was nerf zerker in the the least zerker friendly arena and basically didn’t give 2 kittens about the. The additional loss to sets like cavalier, valkyrie, and worst of all celestial are just worth a head shake. It is a major investment lost for lots of players not because the build is necessarily changing but a stat. If you look at the number of player affected and the game modes you would be a real ***hole not to offer all them the option to switch stats.

noname.4231:

this game does not make sense…

Hell it’s good they nerf dps gear, but the problem is not with the gear, the problem is with the fact that stats are bound to gear. Why the hell do we need 5 different sets if they always nerf one to make another better?

Just let us change our stats out of combat on ANY armour, not just on stupid legendaries.

People don’t seem to get it.
During the livestream the dev team said they will rework critical damage for ALL sets. Yes – this includes berserker which means the " top dps uber build" will get an overall reduction in dps of about 10%.
But with the new Critical Damage → Ferocity ALL stats are getting a critical damage nerf. This means that there is no reason to allow for a stat change.

If only zerker gear would receive less ferocity then let’s say Cavalier’s or other sets that have crit damage then yes – A stat change like with magic find would be an option, but since the conversion rate of Crit Damage into ferocity is the same for ALL sets – I don’t really see why.

TBH it takes a LOT more work to buff all the other builds, gears etc than it does to nerf something clearly far too overpowered. Apart from that 10% is not really that much, you will still be 2-3 hitting most mobs, you wont see ANY effect/difference on bosses.

There are 10000 other threads like this. Go reply to one of those. Why make a pointless new one? Merge please.

Harper.4173:

People don’t seem to get it.
During the livestream the dev team said they will rework critical damage for ALL sets. Yes – this includes berserker which means the " top dps uber build" will get an overall reduction in dps of about 10%.
But with the new Critical Damage -> Ferocity ALL stats are getting a critical damage nerf. This means that there is no reason to allow for a stat change.

If only zerker gear would receive less ferocity then let’s say Cavalier’s or other sets that have crit damage then yes – A stat change like with magic find would be an option, but since the conversion rate of Crit Damage into ferocity is the same for ALL sets – I don’t really see why.

What you said is true if all players are geared related to crit damage.
But there are pure condition or pure power build with better survivability than power+crit build that need to sacrifice survivability. So it become more disadvantage for especially zerker build when facing such opponent in WvW.

I would like that option. The whole reason I got a berserker/assassin mix is because it was optimal, that is likely no longer the case. I didn’t make my ascended gear for this ferocity crap.

I don’t understand why people want a stat swap. It’s not like berserker won’t be the best gear anymore. Most people will continue to use it, as long as there’s a shared cap on conditions and the boss/combat mechanics will be still “dodge or die” (so basically any defensive stat is useless).
Arenanet is just trying to hide the problem, not fixing it. This change will only make already long and boring bossfights even longer and more boring, so imo it’s a really bad change.

Also, this:

And after that 10% nerf? Nothing changes. And then what? Another 10%?

DaliIndica.9041:

So when they added ascended gear (something most people were against and it went against the core ideals of the game), it has caused an issue in which too much damage is being done with crit gear, so now they need to undo the damage that everyone pointed out long before it became one.

Yep, sounds like a typical ANet patch. Lets see all the mistakes they make this time, so we know what will be “fixed” this time next year.

So, you’re saying a typical ANet patch is to be aware of the community’s concerns regarding damage getting too high with new gear, watch how things play out with the new gear for about a month, and then implement a change reflecting the community’s concerns as well as their own observations?

How dare they!

Just buff ?

If A.net just buff everything, after some patch you will faceroll every content without doing anything because you will do 999 999 damages per hit.

Also, it’s easy to decrease one spell instead of increase the 999 others.

Notes taken from the Livestream:

• Crit Damage as a percentage stat will go away
• Replaced by a numeric stat called Ferocity
• Balanced to be about 10% less damage overall
• Numeric amount same as “secondary stat” on gear (e.g. 90 power/60 prec/60 fero for berserker)

So for example an Exotic Berserker Coat which is currently
Power: 101
Precision: 72
Critical Damage: 5%

Would become
Power: 101
Precision: 72
Ferocity: 72

Based on this (and the other armor pieces), 1 Critical damage is roughly ~14 Ferocity in terms of conversion of Berserker stats. This according to them, will result in a roughly 10% less overall damage.

Now if we go to Exotic Celestial coat:
Stats to others: 45
Critical Damage 6%
Would turn to 45 Ferocity

So in terms of Ferocity for Celestial, it would be 7.5 Ferocity for every Critical damage on the Coat piece. Overall with all pieces this would result in ~7.3 Ferocity per Critical damage.
This is roughly half and an effective 20% damage reducement on Celestial stats compared to other pieces. Which is HUGE and far away from the 10% less damage overall as stated.

tl;dr Celestial is getting 20% reduced damage compared to all other stat combinations with Critical Damage which will be getting ~10% reduced damage.

yeah if they do that. i would like to get my rabid gear refund as after the 50% plus bb nerf of confusion for mes. my entire build was made useless. it was nerfed so hard it was completely un viable. so id like that refund then too.
u guys are dealing with 10% imaging about 60%.

If celestial gets nerfed that would suck. I remember A-net saying replace they would replace the magic find stat that they removed from all celestial gear with something esle. Hopefully A-net will do that this coming patch.

OP so kittening true, BUFF other builds you CAN’T take away a year of game to player who played like this since the beta!!!!! I was always a supporter of anet and the changes they makes but now they totally kittened up!!!!! I’m in rage and i want to quit and maybe i will after this.

It’s like swatting flies. If your fly swatter doesn’t do the job, grab a shotgun. Keep a rocket launcher handy just in case.

Buffing stuff is always harder than nerfing.
When nerfing something you don’t need to take other things into consideration as much as if you buff.

If you on the other hand buff something, you need to change the rest of the game to accommodate said buffs, in order to stop everything from being trivial due to players being stronger but content not harder.

Vayne.8563:

So, instead of debuffing one profession they should raise all the stats to that, and make all the content in the entire game trivial and meaningless to everyone?

If something is out of whack by being two powerful, it’s not only less work to debuff that one thing, but think about it.

If you increase everything you also have to increase the power of all the enemies. Do you know how much work that would be?

Actually no. They should just encourage players to add less full damage people to their group. What if a full zerk group was a guaranteed wipe? What if you needed at least 1/2 people with a little more backbone and maybe someone providing group heals?

That’s mostly the way it is in small scale for World vs. World. We run roles and try to balance our teams around them. For example, we have 2 thieves, that run a mostly zerk build. They try to stay out of AoE as much as possible and pick off enemies from the rear, the flanks. I sometimes run my tanky guardian, holding off 2-3 people while another runs a hybrid healing engineer and yet another a tanky warrior with conditions and control.

That’s what PvE needs… tactical encounters. It needs bosses that require you to work together, not dps dps dps. It needs to revolve less around damage and killing things, and more about puzzling things out, supporting eachother, using your brains.

The solution given by ArenaNet is horrible.

Unfortunately, they decided to take the lazy path. As I see it, there were two ways to fixing this Berserker nonsense.

First we have the easy path. Simply nerfing the stats.

Secondly we have the hard path. Reworking mobs / mechanics / dungeons so going full damage would no longer be as beneficial and a combination of support, attacking and skill would be necessary to accomplish maximum dps.

The less damage you do, the longer it takes to complete content, the less rewards you recieve.

Ferocity is just a raw 10% increase in grind throughout the entire game. They want you buying those gems and converting to gold.

It’s not about nerfing zerkers, it’s about normalizing it.

Everyone is comparing apples to oranges here with nerfed condi builds & nerfing crit damage. Their condi gear will still give the max numbers for a condi build whereas assassin/cavalier/celestial won’t(given a specific amount of other stats they want as tradeoff for Effective Power).

A stat swap is proposed because after the change, certain combinations will give lower Effective Power compared to others, and this is kinda the point about min maxing your gear.

Berserkers is totally fine, what you need to look at is Assassin, Cavalier & Celestial.

Here’s a couple of hypothetical examples:

Lets say WvW player John wants the highest Effective Power while having 1.8k toughness & 40% crit rate for his toon. He then calculates that Cavalier is best for his ring slot, but with the 10% nerf to crit damage weight, Knights will give him a higher Effective Power post patch. He doesn’t do fractals and he had to spend 50 days worth of his laurels for those rings and now they are sub-optimal.

PvE Player James wants to have highest Effective Power for his organized group and he comes up with Assassins Helm, Chest, Lower. After patch Berserkers will yield him a higher Effective Power. Those 3 parts amounts to roughly 200g and he only gets 10g a day.

Why waste people’s time/gold to only end up with sub-optimal numbers?

I agree 100% with the OP.

Since release its been a overall a endless downward spiral of nerfs…

All players characters were way, way more powerful in the first 3 months of the game then now.

Even the so called Ele buffs in this latest update are a % reversal of previous nerfs.

The devs don’t want powercreep but do we really want a permanent downward spiral with fewer options, less builds, less diversity, lots of useless skills/traits?

Zerker doesn’t need to be nerfed. The gameplay needs to become more demanding and diverse, and roles other than DPS need to be buffed.

Why use a fine tooth comb when you can use a sledgehammer though I guess.

If you look at the numbers that are in the ballpark of the 10% they mentioned, you’re looking at something like 14:1 on ferocity:critical damage (this comes out to almost exactly a 10% damage nerf at 100% critical chance with maximum critical damage).

If you look at the effect that has on ascended weapons and armor alone, on the whole it’s a whopping -0.64% critical damage at 14:1. What a massive nerf! The change is not hitting your ascended weapons and armor. It is hitting two things specifically – the huge amount of critical damage you get from ascended trinkets, and the critical damage you get from traits.

The critical damage bonus you get from ascended jewels has been really unbalanced for some time – you give up 18 stat points for 4% critical damage in the jewel portion, which is way way out of whack with everything else in the game to the point of warping what you can run in those slots. Those jewels are getting nerfed significantly to be in line with what you get from every other piece of gear in the game; at a 14:1 ratio a full set of ascended crit damage jewels will lose 16% critical damage.

The critical damage from traits is also taking a significant hit; if you are currently getting 30% critical bonus damage from traits, you’ll be getting 21% after the change, for a loss of another 9%.

Again, the change has essentially no effect on any other gear in the game; the difference in potency is a rounding error at 14:1 for everything except jewels and traits.

They may have explained what they are doing really badly (which tends to happen in these developer livestreams), but that is what looks like is going on – a clean up of how the stat functions to put it in line with everything else in the game, alongside a nerf to a couple critical damage sources that were way out of line with everything else in the game. That’s all.

So glad I avoided the ascended crafting zerg…

The next few months will be so fun on this forum!

JVJD.4912:

Oh so my 125% critic damage gets reduced to 115% yeah i will be so changing my setup /sarcasm

You did not understand. It does not mean you’ll have 10% less crit damage. It means your DPS will be 10% lower than it is currently. So it probably means a loss of something like 30-40% crit damage.

I lol’d so much over the zerker “nerf”

Fix one leg by breaking the other.

Sirendor.1394:

That’s what PvE needs… tactical encounters. It needs bosses that require you to work together, not dps dps dps. It needs to revolve less around damage and killing things, and more about puzzling things out, supporting eachother, using your brains.

The solution given by ArenaNet is horrible.

Because the new Teq is such a smashing success. No one does the champ trains any more because it’s nothing but mindless “press 1 and collect the loot” stuff.

The game, particularly the PVE aspect of it, is weighted towards casual players, and the ability to pick up and put down the game at any time. The higher the bar is set for PVE encounters, the less casual players can enjoy the game.

It’s catch-22 here, the more casual the focus, the easier it is for experienced players to walk around blindfolded and collect their loot. The harder the encounters become, the more frustrated the casual players become with the game, and eventually leave to play something where they don’t spend most of their time waiting for someone to rez them.

One guess allowed: which group gives more money to Anet? As a business their purpose is to satisfy as many customers as possible.

Izaya.2906:

Why waste people’s time/gold to only end up with sub-optimal numbers?

It’s not a problem with crit damage changes, and the solution is not to give one-time stat change option. The problem here is (and always was, this is not the first time rebalancing resulted in people changing builds) that ascended gear is simply too costly/tedious to acquire. The solution (which would work not only for this single case, but for all the future ones – and there will be future ones) is to make ascended gear much easier to acquire. Or to make the stat change ability inherent to the gear (like it currently is with legendaries).

Giving people free stat changes after each rebalancing is simply not viable in the long term.

Zerkers were op in pve, and now they are fixing it. It is a fix, not nerf. As some guys said above, if everything gets buffed then the game starts to be too easy. Most people want challenging content to stay in game, not easy speedruns. Bunker, Condition and Healing power builds must be a part of pve too. Not everyone wants to do speed runs with warriors, don’t forget this. People want challenging content in pve. This isn’t even a proper fix, they have to improve mob ai in great amount to allow build/class diversity. For example, to defeat evading, running, stealthing, cc’ing mobs you would need different classes/different builds. They currently stay in front of you without even moving, this makes them to be killed with zerkers and zerker gs warriors easily.

I don´t like gearchecks. But i will do them now. Always, even people with ruby orbs will get kicked.

I´ll need complete new gear for my engineer, 10% nerf will make rampager brainless nadespam superior compared to a rifle-3kit-zerk-rotation.

GG Anet

Meglobob.8620:

The devs don’t want powercreep but do we really want a permanent downward spiral with fewer options, less builds, less diversity, lots of useless skills/traits?

Doesn’t matter what we want, they’ve given us this already.

If you only buff and not nerf, then power creep starts to happen.

Vayne.8563:

So, instead of debuffing one profession they should raise all the stats to that, and make all the content in the entire game trivial and meaningless to everyone?

If something is out of whack by being two powerful, it’s not only less work to debuff that one thing, but think about it.

If you increase everything you also have to increase the power of all the enemies. Do you know how much work that would be?

I’m not sure it being hard, or taking work is much of an excuse really. They either have to do it right and put the effort in, or they can take the easy option and ultimately do little to nothing to resolve the issue.

Sometimes it is clear that a nerf/tweak is the optimal option.

But when you are trying to address major issues (like changing the pve dps meta), then you need to be putting the effort in an making the changes that are needed and not simply take the “oh we will just nerf some stats” easy option.

Why does this kind of threads always gets started by people who aren’t capable of seeing big picture, lack informations to base their opinions, and only thinks in subjective way from perspective of individual player?

Fenrir.3609:

I’m not sure it being hard, or taking work is much of an excuse really. They either have to do it right and put the effort in, or they can take the easy option and ultimately do little to nothing to resolve the issue.

Sometimes it is clear that a nerf/tweak is the optimal option.

But when you are trying to address major issues (like changing the pve dps meta), then you need to be putting the effort in an making the changes that are needed and not simply take the “oh we will just nerf some stats” easy option.

It’s an easy decision to make, when you’re not the one signing the paychecks.

kRiza krimos.1637:

Why does this kind of threads always gets started by people who aren’t capable of seeing big picture, lack informations to base their opinions, and only thinks in subjective way from perspective of individual player?

Because those who can see the big picture, have the information and can look at the issue from other perspectives understand why things happen the way they do. We don’t need to start threads about it.

For example, I know why someone reskinned the T3 cultural armor for use in the gem shop a while back, I understand how it got past management and into the game, and I know why they had to remove it when players complained. More than one employee was surely disciplined for that, and some may have lost their jobs because of it. But I don’t feel the need to argue about the situation in the forums because I understand what happened.

tolunart.2095:

Fenrir.3609:

I’m not sure it being hard, or taking work is much of an excuse really. They either have to do it right and put the effort in, or they can take the easy option and ultimately do little to nothing to resolve the issue.

Sometimes it is clear that a nerf/tweak is the optimal option.

But when you are trying to address major issues (like changing the pve dps meta), then you need to be putting the effort in an making the changes that are needed and not simply take the “oh we will just nerf some stats” easy option.

It’s an easy decision to make, when you’re not the one signing the paychecks.

What?

Why not buff instead of nerf? Because the principle way to keep a game environment from dissolving under endless power creep is to have target levels of performance and then keep the players near them.

The game is already trivially easy. Just handing out buffs to chase after the absolute peak performers is madness. Fact is you hammer the over-performers back into line.

If you got hit, odds are you were playing a build that outstrips many other builds… and odds are you knew that, which is why you chose that build. Unless they wildly over corrected, its still be good, just not extremely good.

Destroying the progress involved in obtaining top level gear is that part that’s bugging me. Crafting an ascended set of anything is not trivial, but Anet just blows it off.

They did the same thing with fractals progress, with no compensation there either.

I can hardly wait for Cantha. It’ll be a level 60 zone and they’ll role all our characters back to level 60 so “we can experience the content as it was meant to be”.

People need to listen to the podcast instead of just reading a post. This is only the first step to balancing the builds, not a complete solution. They can’t make more changes till they see how this one goes down. This isn’t a zerker solution only a single step.

Astralporing.1957:

Giving people free stat changes after each rebalancing is simply not viable in the long term.

Is dropping a nuclear bomb on the community more viable?

Look, it really doesnt matter what kind of nerf it is. If we buy a piece of gear ingame, be it for gold or gems, then we’d like to get what we buy. Many people invest alot of gold into gear, especially now with ascended and all that junk. And then Anet just decide to change everything? No. That is not acceptable. If they do that, then the very least they should offer is refunds for the changed gear.

Of course its never going to happen because Anet will keep saying “oh but its good for you, trust us, the game is better now!” while we bleed out to condi-tanks.

So my ascended gets downgraded to the exotic I had before? Is that the progression you intended? Pls let us change statcombinations, especially for WvW its a massive disadvantage…

tolunart.2095:

kRiza krimos.1637:

Why does this kind of threads always gets started by people who aren’t capable of seeing big picture, lack informations to base their opinions, and only thinks in subjective way from perspective of individual player?

Because those who can see the big picture, have the information and can look at the issue from other perspectives understand why things happen the way they do. We don’t need to start threads about it.

For example, I know why someone reskinned the T3 cultural armor for use in the gem shop a while back, I understand how it got past management and into the game, and I know why they had to remove it when players complained. More than one employee was surely disciplined for that, and some may have lost their jobs because of it. But I don’t feel the need to argue about the situation in the forums because I understand what happened.

So you don’t understand why there was need to work on critical dmg issue that was most powerful stat in game to extent that it trivialized half of game modes?

Oh wait, you answered my question. It was rethorical question tho.

Fenrir.3609:

tolunart.2095:

It’s an easy decision to make, when you’re not the one signing the paychecks.

What?

As a consumer, you lack the perspective that the management of a business needs. Your focus is on what you want from the product (the game, in this case), while management needs to balance what their customers want with what the staff can deliver.

If there are two proposed solutions, and one requires many times more resources (money, staff, time) than the other, it’s a manager’s job to decide whether the results justify spending more resources than the simpler solution. The devs do not just come to work and do whatever they want to do, they have to follow the orders given to them by their bosses. When someone above the devs tells them that they have three weeks for a team of four to work on a project, they can’t just decide to take six weeks and draft two more members to work on it.

It’s management’s job to make these kinds of decisions, not the devs’ nor the players’.

I think they will nerf the berserker meta, but it will still be better than condis, support, (…), at least in PvE to the eyes of the majority of players.
So the thing is, the meta will be worse, and the other builds will still be less viable than going full berserker (in PvE)…
Wouldn’t it be better if they made condis/support/… more viable?

Also, i feel really kitten sorry for all the people who crafted all those zerker ascendeds. Best luck if you want to keep playing…

kRiza krimos.1637:

So you don’t understand why there was need to work on critical dmg issue that was most powerful stat in game to extent that it trivialized half of game modes?

Oh wait, you answered my question. It was rethorical question tho.

I do that a lot. I’ve never quite been able to understand why someone would ask a question he doesn’t want answered.

Know what I mean?

Anyway, glad I could help even though I have no idea what you’re trying to say. But it doesn’t matter because I’m pretty sure I don’t give a kitten.