Guild Wars 2

And yet you all think that you are in a worse spot because you’re getting nerfed worse on this update? Nah. Thief has been needed every single update since the beginning of time. Its in need for a buff and maybe some more weapons. Has no diversity at all and the only one handed weapon it has is the short bow so the whole 2 sigils is almost worthless for thief. I understand that you guys are getting nerfed as well but thief has just been getting worse and worse since launch and its extremely dissapointing and is in need in a buff. I hope that what they haven’t announced yet regarding this new patch includes some helpful variety and such for thief to make it more fun to play.

Nike.2631:

Out of curiosity, if you were given a stat-swap on your gear, what would people be changing TO? Berserker is still the pinnacle of Power-based damage.

This change while has little effect to pve but means more to wvw.
As for me, I will be changing from power build to condi build on my main necro. Because it worth more than sacrifice defense for damage after the change.

Frankly, I don’t think this is a bad change. It’s rather obvious that the synergy between those three stats is too strong (the growth curve is more hyperbolic with less diminishing returns), which made Zerker objectively superior with regard to ‘bang for buck’. Plus, ‘Ferocity’ just sounds better than ‘Crit Damage’. I wish they’d do that with all the secondary stats.

Encounter design definitely shares part of the blame, but Zerker still needed to be toned down. I hope they continue working on polishing encounters and improving the ‘soft’ role system.

Einlanzer.1627:

Frankly, I don’t think this is a bad change. It’s rather obvious that the synergy between those three stats is too strong (the growth curve is more hyperbolic with less diminishing returns), which made Zerker objectively superior with regard to ‘bang for buck’. Plus, ‘Ferocity’ just sounds better than ‘Crit Damage’. I wish they’d do that with all the secondary stats.

Encounter design definitely shares part of the blame, but Zerker still needed to be toned down. I hope they continue working on polishing encounters and improving the ‘soft’ role system.

Zerker gear isn’t the problem. The problem is the game and it’s mechanics. Aswell as their flawed attempts at “fixing” encounters thus far… Defiant/10x the HP with extremely drawn out stand in place combat(wurm,golem,maw,etc)/condition caps not player based but encounter based and even if they were player based still make conditions in pve worthless… To name a few…

Also along those lines the way every dungeon is set up there’s no reason to run anything aside from DD(direct dmg) DPS builds.

-> We have no need for support outside of our own utilities.
-> We have no group synergy outside of measely combo fields.
-> We have no need for defensive gear for any encounter since we have built in defenses with our heals/utilities/dodges.
-> We have no encounters that require actual tactics outside of just dodging “X” attack. Stand in place AI falls into this too.

We could go on and on about this. But the problem will always exist in gw2. Remove zerker gear… Knights or pvt becomes the next hot topic, then that gets nerfed because constant qq because they’ve yet to address the actual problem, their game/core mechanics. It’s an on going cycle that will not be fixed. Especially if they keep going about using “duct tape” to fix a broken weld.

Plus everyone who doesn’t understand what every zerker/celestial user is so upset about… It’s wvw. Pve and wvw are 2 completely different beasts yet they feel the need to keep them on the same “balance” updates. The loss of dmg for burst/DD power builds vs other players is huge and makes everyone who spent all their time and gold crafting their gear now worthless.

Treborlavok.3504:

Zerker gear isn’t the problem. The problem is the game and it’s mechanics. Aswell as their flawed attempts at “fixing” encounters thus far… Defiant/10x the HP with extremely drawn out stand in place combat(wurm,golem,maw,etc)/condition caps not player based but encounter based and even if they were player based still make conditions in pve worthless… To name a few…

Also along those lines the way every dungeon is set up there’s no reason to run anything aside from DD(direct dmg) DPS builds.

-> We have no need for support outside of our own utilities.
-> We have no group synergy outside of measely combo fields.
-> We have no need for defensive gear for any encounter since we have built in defenses with our heals/utilities/dodges.
-> We have no encounters that require actual tactics outside of just dodging “X” attack. Stand in place AI falls into this too.

We could go on and on about this. But the problem will always exist in gw2. Remove zerker gear… Knights or pvt becomes the next hot topic, then that gets nerfed because constant qq because they’ve yet to address the actual problem, their game/core mechanics. It’s an on going cycle that will not be fixed. Especially if they keep going about using “duct tape” to fix a broken weld.

Plus everyone who doesn’t understand what every zerker/celestial user is so upset about… It’s wvw. Pve and wvw are 2 completely different beasts yet they feel the need to keep them on the same “balance” updates. The loss of dmg for burst/DD power builds vs other players is huge and makes everyone who spent all their time and gold crafting their gear now worthless.

Well said.

Ensign.2189:

Yes, critical damage trinkets are going to take a bigger hit. A much bigger hit.

In fact, when you run the numbers based on what has been said, critical damage trinkets are going to take more or less the entire hit.

Weapons and armor aren’t going to move much at all. Trinkets are going to lose 2-3% critical damage each.

I’m curious to know how you know this? As far as I know anet hasn’t released any specifics on the change but you talk like you know what they are.

However I can’t help but notice that you don’t provide any links to some facts to back up your claim.

Not that it really matters, really.

Now it would be interesting to know if they are thinking of offering a replacement for zerker trinkets/armor as they did with MF gear. I know is not the same as the MF stat was completely removed while the critical damage one is being replaced but still it would fair for people like me who invested hundreds of laurels into getting zerker trinkets just because of the critical damage stat.

Treborlavok.3504:

Einlanzer.1627:

Frankly, I don’t think this is a bad change. It’s rather obvious that the synergy between those three stats is too strong (the growth curve is more hyperbolic with less diminishing returns), which made Zerker objectively superior with regard to ‘bang for buck’. Plus, ‘Ferocity’ just sounds better than ‘Crit Damage’. I wish they’d do that with all the secondary stats.

Encounter design definitely shares part of the blame, but Zerker still needed to be toned down. I hope they continue working on polishing encounters and improving the ‘soft’ role system.

Zerker gear isn’t the problem. The problem is the game and it’s mechanics. Aswell as their flawed attempts at “fixing” encounters thus far… Defiant/10x the HP with extremely drawn out stand in place combat(wurm,golem,maw,etc)/condition caps not player based but encounter based and even if they were player based still make conditions in pve worthless… To name a few…

Also along those lines the way every dungeon is set up there’s no reason to run anything aside from DD(direct dmg) DPS builds.

-> We have no need for support outside of our own utilities.
-> We have no group synergy outside of measely combo fields.
-> We have no need for defensive gear for any encounter since we have built in defenses with our heals/utilities/dodges.
-> We have no encounters that require actual tactics outside of just dodging “X” attack. Stand in place AI falls into this too.

We could go on and on about this. But the problem will always exist in gw2. Remove zerker gear… Knights or pvt becomes the next hot topic, then that gets nerfed because constant qq because they’ve yet to address the actual problem, their game/core mechanics. It’s an on going cycle that will not be fixed. Especially if they keep going about using “duct tape” to fix a broken weld.

Plus everyone who doesn’t understand what every zerker/celestial user is so upset about… It’s wvw. Pve and wvw are 2 completely different beasts yet they feel the need to keep them on the same “balance” updates. The loss of dmg for burst/DD power builds vs other players is huge and makes everyone who spent all their time and gold crafting their gear now worthless.

The problem is both Zerker gear and encounter design, as I said. Zerker is still very likely to be dominant in meta; this only serves to close the gap some.

fellyn.5083:

Ensign.2189:

Yes, critical damage trinkets are going to take a bigger hit. A much bigger hit.

In fact, when you run the numbers based on what has been said, critical damage trinkets are going to take more or less the entire hit.

Weapons and armor aren’t going to move much at all. Trinkets are going to lose 2-3% critical damage each.

I’m curious to know how you know this? As far as I know anet hasn’t released any specifics on the change but you talk like you know what they are.

It can be easily reasoned from the fact, that crit damage on trinkets is over budget compared to armor. Since the conversion will even that out (there will be no more any “over-” and “under-budget” gear pieces) it will either nerf trinkets (and celestial armor pieces), or it will buff non-celestial armor. Since we also already know that the conversion will be an overall nerf, we can easily guess which of the two it will be.

Justice.3608:

I understand that overall Zerker stats will be decreased by 10%. But in terms of trinkets specifically, are they going to take an even bigger hit than armour and weapon pieces?

Yes.

Cause right now I’m using a combination of Soldier’s/Knight’s armour pieces and all Zerker trinkets. But if Zeker trinkets take a bigger nerf, I may have to go Zerker/Knights armour and Soldiers trinkets or something like that.

Who doesn’t
But in the new setup it will not matter which pieces you keep berserker and which not as none of them give any particular advantages. You might as well keep the setup as it is. If you need more Ferocity then your current mix gives you have to replace non-berserker with berserker, not switch everything around.

Ozoug.4158:

Fix the content not the gear.

This nerf changes nothing

+1 indeed

Einlanzer.1627:

Treborlavok.3504:

Einlanzer.1627:

Frankly, I don’t think this is a bad change. It’s rather obvious that the synergy between those three stats is too strong (the growth curve is more hyperbolic with less diminishing returns), which made Zerker objectively superior with regard to ‘bang for buck’. Plus, ‘Ferocity’ just sounds better than ‘Crit Damage’. I wish they’d do that with all the secondary stats.

Encounter design definitely shares part of the blame, but Zerker still needed to be toned down. I hope they continue working on polishing encounters and improving the ‘soft’ role system.

Zerker gear isn’t the problem. The problem is the game and it’s mechanics. Aswell as their flawed attempts at “fixing” encounters thus far… Defiant/10x the HP with extremely drawn out stand in place combat(wurm,golem,maw,etc)/condition caps not player based but encounter based and even if they were player based still make conditions in pve worthless… To name a few…

Also along those lines the way every dungeon is set up there’s no reason to run anything aside from DD(direct dmg) DPS builds.

-> We have no need for support outside of our own utilities.
-> We have no group synergy outside of measely combo fields.
-> We have no need for defensive gear for any encounter since we have built in defenses with our heals/utilities/dodges.
-> We have no encounters that require actual tactics outside of just dodging “X” attack. Stand in place AI falls into this too.

We could go on and on about this. But the problem will always exist in gw2. Remove zerker gear… Knights or pvt becomes the next hot topic, then that gets nerfed because constant qq because they’ve yet to address the actual problem, their game/core mechanics. It’s an on going cycle that will not be fixed. Especially if they keep going about using “duct tape” to fix a broken weld.

Plus everyone who doesn’t understand what every zerker/celestial user is so upset about… It’s wvw. Pve and wvw are 2 completely different beasts yet they feel the need to keep them on the same “balance” updates. The loss of dmg for burst/DD power builds vs other players is huge and makes everyone who spent all their time and gold crafting their gear now worthless.

The problem is both Zerker gear and encounter design, as I said. Zerker is still very likely to be dominant in meta; this only serves to close the gap some.

Zerker gear isn’t the problem. It’s the core mechanics of the game and it’s encounters.
Why do you think in wvw against an actual player it’s not who’s wearing zerker gear but who plays better, for the most part.

It’s the pve side they’re trying to balance and in balancing the pve side they’re going to destroy the wvw side.

They need to leave zerker/celestial/cavalier and any other +CD gear alone. What they need to fix is their broken PVE AI. And not by adding more hit points or adding gimmicks like Defiance/having to stomp AI.

You want to fix encounters then make the AI smarter. Give us a reason to run something other than zerker gear. Make other gear sets actually viable/needed in group make ups. Again, don’t fix it with tape, fix the broken weld.

/all I have to say.

fellyn.5083:

I’m curious to know how you know this?

Take a full set of ascended gear with critical damage on every single piece (zerk, assassins, cavalier); ignore runes since all that is getting changed, and maximize your traits to get the full +30% critical damage. You should get 101% critical damage across all pieces.

If you do the same for the bonus to a secondary stat, you’ll get +1045 to that stat.

Set your critical chance to 100% since we’re talking about a maxed out PvE build. That means every swing is dealing 251% base damage: 100% base + 50% critical base damage + 101% critical bonus damage.

A 10% damage hit to that is going from ~250% damage to ~225% damage, which means dropping from 101% critical bonus damage to ~75% critical bonus damage.

1045 / 75 is really close to 14, which implies a 14:1 ratio.

You can play with that model by adding other stuff in (food, banners, etc), but those point in different directions and the result tends to hold; all critical damage items switching to the regular stat with a 14:1 ratio is very consistent with what they mentioned in stream.

Then you can go through and look at each individual piece of gear and see how it would be affected by this change (all ascended, numbers are the change in critical damage after computing the effect of ferocity at 14:1):

1H Weapon: -0.214
2H Weapon: -0.429
Helm: 0.429
Shoulder: -0.214
Chest: 0.429
Gloves: -0.214
Pants: -0.429
Boots: -0.214
Amulet: -2.929
Ring: -3.143
Accessory: -2.714
Backpack: -2.5

Jewel: -2.714

So when you look at simply swapping from critical damage to ferocity at the same ratio items currently get for every other stat – and then looking at the ratio implied from the stream – it comes out that it has essentially no effect on weapons and armor (it’s around -0.6% critical damage when you add up both your weapons and your armor). How convenient!

But the change to the jewel would be huge, since you’re going from +4% critical damage to +18 ferocity.

Which is where my argument came from.

There’s also a lot of other tweaks you can make to the model – add Ruby Orbs into all your armor slots, ignore traits, etc – and you’ll get slightly different ratios on what they implied in the stream – maybe they meant 13:1, maybe 15:1. It’s not going to be too far off from that.

I’m also extremely confident that Ruby Orbs are going to read “+20 Power +14 Precision +14 Ferocity” after this patch, and not have a giant chunk of ferocity on them to keep them way over budget like they are now. I’d really like to know what you’re thinking if you don’t think it’ll play out that way.

When you put it together it is abundantly clear that critical damage jewelry is going to get nerfed, hard, from going from its current stat budgeting to ferocity. Under some really simple models you can see that this change alone will account for roughly 70% of the damage reduction mentioned in the stream.

This is just scribbling on a napkin figuring out the ramifications of exactly what they said they were going to do. While I don’t claim to know exactly what numbers they will use, I cannot imagine another way of implementing Ferocity that makes anywhere near as much sense – and after thousands of posts on the subject between here and reddit, no one else has either.

If you have a substantially different model in mind, I’d love to see it.

Overall the Zerker looses 10% damage as mentioned by the devs wich means a rough 20% crit damage reduction wich is pretty ok imo.

Treborlavok.3504:

Einlanzer.1627:

Treborlavok.3504:

Einlanzer.1627:

Frankly, I don’t think this is a bad change. It’s rather obvious that the synergy between those three stats is too strong (the growth curve is more hyperbolic with less diminishing returns), which made Zerker objectively superior with regard to ‘bang for buck’. Plus, ‘Ferocity’ just sounds better than ‘Crit Damage’. I wish they’d do that with all the secondary stats.

Encounter design definitely shares part of the blame, but Zerker still needed to be toned down. I hope they continue working on polishing encounters and improving the ‘soft’ role system.

Zerker gear isn’t the problem. The problem is the game and it’s mechanics. Aswell as their flawed attempts at “fixing” encounters thus far… Defiant/10x the HP with extremely drawn out stand in place combat(wurm,golem,maw,etc)/condition caps not player based but encounter based and even if they were player based still make conditions in pve worthless… To name a few…

Also along those lines the way every dungeon is set up there’s no reason to run anything aside from DD(direct dmg) DPS builds.

-> We have no need for support outside of our own utilities.
-> We have no group synergy outside of measely combo fields.
-> We have no need for defensive gear for any encounter since we have built in defenses with our heals/utilities/dodges.
-> We have no encounters that require actual tactics outside of just dodging “X” attack. Stand in place AI falls into this too.

We could go on and on about this. But the problem will always exist in gw2. Remove zerker gear… Knights or pvt becomes the next hot topic, then that gets nerfed because constant qq because they’ve yet to address the actual problem, their game/core mechanics. It’s an on going cycle that will not be fixed. Especially if they keep going about using “duct tape” to fix a broken weld.

Plus everyone who doesn’t understand what every zerker/celestial user is so upset about… It’s wvw. Pve and wvw are 2 completely different beasts yet they feel the need to keep them on the same “balance” updates. The loss of dmg for burst/DD power builds vs other players is huge and makes everyone who spent all their time and gold crafting their gear now worthless.

The problem is both Zerker gear and encounter design, as I said. Zerker is still very likely to be dominant in meta; this only serves to close the gap some.

Zerker gear isn’t the problem. It’s the core mechanics of the game and it’s encounters.
Why do you think in wvw against an actual player it’s not who’s wearing zerker gear but who plays better, for the most part.

It’s the pve side they’re trying to balance and in balancing the pve side they’re going to destroy the wvw side.

They need to leave zerker/celestial/cavalier and any other +CD gear alone. What they need to fix is their broken PVE AI. And not by adding more hit points or adding gimmicks like Defiance/having to stomp AI.

You want to fix encounters then make the AI smarter. Give us a reason to run something other than zerker gear. Make other gear sets actually viable/needed in group make ups. Again, don’t fix it with tape, fix the broken weld.

/all I have to say.

agree 100%

While i whole heartedly agree that the main issue is not yet fixed with the CritDamage/Ferocity change (neither does Anet think that actually), and while i would be glad to have better mob AI in PvE, players crying on about demanding a stat swap option due to this change are just ridiculous.

Magic find was obliterated from a character-bound system to account-bound system. Magic find as a stat disappeared entirely, so stat swap was the most sensible thing. Crit damage is about to transform into Ferocity. Still character-bound. The stat is not disappearing. Its changing. There will be no better Direct Damage gear in the game than what you have already. Your spent effort and imaginery money remains the same value.

Cry when you have to upgrade your computer to keep on playing the game. Even then you cannot demand anything, becasue its all in the user agreement. They can change whatever they think is best.

They are making this change for pve but they are going to nerf nearly every WvW player who doesn’t run condi in the process while zerker will still be the best set for pve. A lot of us just finished spending hundreds of gold that we had saved up for a long time now (WvW doesn’t give you very much money) on perfectly min-maxed ascended gear sets and now we are going to have to regear AGAIN? Sorry but this is the same thing as a gear treadmill. You get your perfect gear set and then they force you to grind for a new one.

lakdav.3694:

While i whole heartedly agree that the main issue is not yet fixed with the CritDamage/Ferocity change (neither does Anet think that actually), and while i would be glad to have better mob AI in PvE, players crying on about demanding a stat swap option due to this change are just ridiculous.

Magic find was obliterated from a character-bound system to account-bound system. Magic find as a stat disappeared entirely, so stat swap was the most sensible thing. Crit damage is about to transform into Ferocity. Still character-bound. The stat is not disappearing. Its changing. There will be no better Direct Damage gear in the game than what you have already. Your spent effort and imaginery money remains the same value.

Cry when you have to upgrade your computer to keep on playing the game. Even then you cannot demand anything, becasue its all in the user agreement. They can change whatever they think is best.

Celestial gear is no longer viable/worth it in regards to crit dmg. It now becomes an entirely in the middle gear set that used to be viable with the crit dmg % it had on it. Since it will now get a ferocity stat instead, on line with the other celestial stats, it’s effective which in crit dmg was on par with zerk/cavalier etc is now nearly 40-50% less effective. Someone had the exact math on it in the other thread before it was merged… That’s a huge loss for people who spent their time and yea imaginary monies(which also equals time) to have built these sets now to have them become garbage.

These are the people demanding a stat change and it’s rightfully so.

This change makes about as sense as wealth/poverty disparity. By lowering how much the rich has doesn’t make the poor any better off. You can lower zerker to make the leap between zerker and anything else “more in line” but it does nothing to lift up equipment that is fundamentally lacking for what the game currently has with its in game content encounter system. A beautiful thread has already outlined this. Some enemies need toughness over larger health pools and their AI needs to be entirely different. A-net stacked their accomplishments with gw2 earlier in the year, and it was an impressive list. I do think though that it is time to see scarlett go away and living story take a backseat for awhile and the talented staff work on encounter design over new content.

They should once and for all make every single ascended ittem stat swappable and use the different T6 for different skins.

The equip with stats had sense when equipment was easy to obtain…with an ascended full set requiring 4+ months to obtain they should either STOP nerfing profession/skills/traits/stats

or just find a way to not make players have to trash 4 months of grinding when they get up with a new “balancing” idea

I agree with nerfing berserk gear. True they should change content as well but it’ll take much longer. Nerfing zerk is first aid that they can do now. And no i don’t think they would make it useless they will only make other options also acceptable. And even if it’s just result of anets mistakes many of zerker guys are partially blamed for it too bc of your discriminations against other gears especially in dungs which are doable with mostly all types of gear.

As for free change to other gear… Why? They will not make it useless, they will make other option viable as well what’s the problem stay with zerker and be burst dps others will play more like they want = all are happy.

Zerker gear was clearly a problem, you can complain that the content is severely messed up, and rightfully so, but zerker was clearly a problem.

I don’t know how anyone can defend the fact that zerker gained a 17% DPS boost from the Exotic→ Ascended upgrade while the next best set only gained a 5.2% increase in DPS. Defensive stats hit diminishing returns while offensive stats hit exponential growth, scaling was just downright broken, now they are fixing it.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Zerker gear was clearly a problem, you can complain that the content is severely messed up, and rightfully so, but zerker was clearly a problem.

I don’t know how anyone can defend the fact that zerker gained a 17% DPS boost from the Exotic-> Ascended upgrade while the next best set only gained a 5.2% increase in DPS. Defensive stats hit diminishing returns while offensive stats hit exponential growth, scaling was just downright broken, now they are fixing it.

Exo facto, The game was never intended to have ascended items!!!

\0_0/

Shocking I know. But it’s the truth. Yet they implemented them and their grind and have continually attempted to fix content for balance and continually screw ppl over and out of our time out into getting said items. Who’s problem/fault is it?.. Theirs but yet again they make it ours.

I honestly don’t know if your numbers are true. But if they are that’s hilarious! And back when ppl were kittening about ascended armor saying now they have to get ascended gear because you’ll be outmatched… Yep!

Fix the game not the tools. They hastily put in ascended armor without crunching numbers and doing math. So why should the people who spend countless hours upon hours attaining gold and mats be punished for crafting something Anet implemented?

#celestialarmorstatswap!!!

they should just make celestial and wup wup ferocity, equals zerk/zojjia ferocity….

Its still an underpowered set that is slightly viable in FEW builds and Professions.

Not to mention celestial is almost only a WWW set….and never was a balancing issue to require a nerf..

When you nerf weak things you just ruin fun, without getting anything useful from it.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

This change makes about as sense as wealth/poverty disparity. By lowering how much the rich has doesn’t make the poor any better off. You can lower zerker to make the leap between zerker and anything else “more in line” but it does nothing to lift up equipment that is fundamentally lacking for what the game currently has with its in game content encounter system. A beautiful thread has already outlined this. Some enemies need toughness over larger health pools and their AI needs to be entirely different. A-net stacked their accomplishments with gw2 earlier in the year, and it was an impressive list. I do think though that it is time to see scarlett go away and living story take a backseat for awhile and the talented staff work on encounter design over new content.

You’re wrong. In a wealthy society, that’s the exact effect it has. The reason the US is so out of whack right now is entirely because wealth has concentrated at the top too much while the middle class has been pathetically manipulated into seeing the poor as the bad guys. In reality, 40% of this country is stuck in relative poverty, living well below the standard for other developed countries, simply because their wealthy employers are not made to pay them a livable wage.

On topic, Zerker stats are too good compared to other stat combinations just by pure math. It needs retuning.

Treborlavok.3504:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Zerker gear was clearly a problem, you can complain that the content is severely messed up, and rightfully so, but zerker was clearly a problem.

I don’t know how anyone can defend the fact that zerker gained a 17% DPS boost from the Exotic-> Ascended upgrade while the next best set only gained a 5.2% increase in DPS. Defensive stats hit diminishing returns while offensive stats hit exponential growth, scaling was just downright broken, now they are fixing it.

Exo facto, The game was never intended to have ascended items!!!

\0_0/

Shocking I know. But it’s the truth. Yet they implemented them and their grind and have continually attempted to fix content for balance and continually screw ppl over and out of our time out into getting said items. Who’s problem/fault is it?.. Theirs but yet again they make it ours.

I honestly don’t know if your numbers are true. But if they are that’s hilarious! And back when ppl were kittening about ascended armor saying now they have to get ascended gear because you’ll be outmatched… Yep!

Fix the game not the tools. They hastily put in ascended armor without crunching numbers and doing math. So why should the people who spend countless hours upon hours attaining gold and mats be punished for crafting something Anet implemented?

#celestialarmorstatswap!!!

How exactly are you being punished? What a hilarious hyperbole. It was a problem before Ascended, too. Power, Crit %, and Crit damage just scaled too well relative to other combinations from the get go. You can tell it’s a problem right off the bat, because in lower levels condition and defensive stats are more effective than zerker stats, then by 80 it completely reverses.

In case you didn’t notice, the baseline for non-condition skills was set very low (presumably) in an attempt to accommodate the hyperbolic growth curve of the zerker stat combo and make sure they weren’t brokenly OP by level 80.

What they need to do, though, is ensure that zerker stats are now on a more linear curve, but buff the baseline for direct damage skills so that they aren’t pitifully weak from 1-79.

Going to spend more time on my other hobbies than GW2. Anet Devs have been trying really hard the last six months to make me hate them. They are succeeding.

Don’t care if they give me the ability to swap stats. It is still going to take longer to kill the same things I’ve already killed 1000s of times before. No. Just… no.

Einlanzer.1627:

On topic, Zerker stats are too good compared to other stat combinations just by pure math. It needs retuning.

I wish people would stop perpetuating this myth.

Warrior with soldier gear, force sigil, scholar runes. 25 might, 100% fury, magic find food, sharpening stone, banner of discipline.
4800 ep
40393 ehp

Warrior with zerker gear, force sigil, scholar runes. 25 might, 100% fury, magic find food, sharpening stone, banner of discipline.
7500 ep
21284 ehp

So pvt has almost 90% more effective hp, but zerker has only 56% more damage?
Before taking into consideration heals on a high toughness character improve effective HP by more than they would do for a low toughness character?
Show me where zerker is statistically better?

“Oh but zerker gear scales better with boons and stuff”
Let’s add full bloodlust, add spotter, 10% dmg potion, power/crit damage food…

Soldier
6000 ep
40393 ehp

Zerker
9734 ep
21284 ehp

So pvt has almost 90% more effective hp, but zerker has only 62% more damage?
Before taking into consideration heals on a high toughness character improve effective HP by more than they would do for a low toughness character?
Show me where zerker is statistically better?

“Oh but zerker gear scales better with traits as well!”
Add traits to the above plethora of boons…

Full offensive traits (30/25/0/0/15)
Soldier
10599 ep
43281 ehp

Zerker
17398 ep
23423 ehp

So pvt has almost 85% more effective hp, but zerker has only 64% more damage?
Before taking into consideration heals on a high toughness character improve effective HP by more than they would do for a low toughness character?
Show me where zerker is statistically better?

Defensive trait setups only serve to magnify the dominance of pvt from a statistical viewpoint.

I’ve been saying for over a year now – PVT is the holy trinity of bang for your buck. You gain more survivability with pvt than you gain in dps with zerker. The amount of survivability healing will add to pvt compared to zerker is also ridiculous.

Sad fact is though, you don’t need to mitigate damage and you don’t need survivability when you can dodge/block/reflect/blind almost all incoming damage.
The gear is performing exactly as advertised. A player made choice to drastically reduce your expected survival time in exchange for higher dps.
The problem has always been the game mechanics.

The joy some people take in this nerf is embarrassing. It’s like admitting you’re not good enough to time your active defenses properly yet you still want to do as much damage and clear content as fast as people who are willing and able to succesfully ditch their defensive gear for offensive. I see a lot of people saying it is zerker faceroll easy, but not many people actually running pug 5 zerker fotm49s & meleeing bosses like the archdiviner.

Einlanzer.1627:

Treborlavok.3504:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Zerker gear was clearly a problem, you can complain that the content is severely messed up, and rightfully so, but zerker was clearly a problem.

I don’t know how anyone can defend the fact that zerker gained a 17% DPS boost from the Exotic-> Ascended upgrade while the next best set only gained a 5.2% increase in DPS. Defensive stats hit diminishing returns while offensive stats hit exponential growth, scaling was just downright broken, now they are fixing it.

Exo facto, The game was never intended to have ascended items!!!

\0_0/

Shocking I know. But it’s the truth. Yet they implemented them and their grind and have continually attempted to fix content for balance and continually screw ppl over and out of our time out into getting said items. Who’s problem/fault is it?.. Theirs but yet again they make it ours.

I honestly don’t know if your numbers are true. But if they are that’s hilarious! And back when ppl were kittening about ascended armor saying now they have to get ascended gear because you’ll be outmatched… Yep!

Fix the game not the tools. They hastily put in ascended armor without crunching numbers and doing math. So why should the people who spend countless hours upon hours attaining gold and mats be punished for crafting something Anet implemented?

#celestialarmorstatswap!!!

How exactly are you being punished? What a hilarious hyperbole. It was a problem before Ascended, too. Power, Crit %, and Crit damage just scaled too well relative to other combinations from the get go. You can tell it’s a problem right off the bat, because in lower levels condition and defensive stats are more effective than zerker stats, then by 80 it completely reverses.

In case you didn’t notice, the baseline for non-condition skills was set very low (presumably) in an attempt to accommodate the hyperbolic growth curve of the zerker stat combo and make sure they weren’t brokenly OP by level 80.

What they need to do, though, is ensure that zerker stats are now on a more linear curve, but buff the baseline for direct damage skills so that they aren’t pitifully weak from 1-79.

We are being punished in WvW not in PvE. Zerker builds are never op in wvw. This nerf make it less effective compared to other builds now. Celestial users will be worthless now in WvW. If BiS only exotic, we won’t care much because we can easily change build but with ascended it’s a different story.

Anyway regardless of how small the percentage it is, that’s not what we order.
For us It’s like we like to eat apple or watermelon. Some of us decided to order apple but it’s out of stock so Anet give us pear instead saying pear is tasty. In that case isn’t it natural for us to want to switch to watermelon? We never order pear ><
At the very least we should get refund for apple.

fadeaway.2807:

Einlanzer.1627:

On topic, Zerker stats are too good compared to other stat combinations just by pure math. It needs retuning.

I wish people would stop perpetuating this myth.

Warrior with soldier gear, force sigil, scholar runes. 25 might, 100% fury, magic find food, sharpening stone, banner of discipline.
4800 ep
40393 ehp

Warrior with zerker gear, force sigil, scholar runes. 25 might, 100% fury, magic find food, sharpening stone, banner of discipline.
7500 ep
21284 ehp

So pvt has almost 90% more effective hp, but zerker has only 56% more damage?
Before taking into consideration heals on a high toughness character improve effective HP by more than they would do for a low toughness character?
Show me where zerker is statistically better?

“Oh but zerker gear scales better with boons and stuff”
Let’s add full bloodlust, add spotter, 10% dmg potion, power/crit damage food…

Soldier
6000 ep
40393 ehp

Zerker
9734 ep
21284 ehp

So pvt has almost 90% more effective hp, but zerker has only 62% more damage?
Before taking into consideration heals on a high toughness character improve effective HP by more than they would do for a low toughness character?
Show me where zerker is statistically better?

“Oh but zerker gear scales better with traits as well!”
Add traits to the above plethora of boons…

Full offensive traits (30/25/0/0/15)
Soldier
10599 ep
43281 ehp

Zerker
17398 ep
23423 ehp

So pvt has almost 85% more effective hp, but zerker has only 64% more damage?
Before taking into consideration heals on a high toughness character improve effective HP by more than they would do for a low toughness character?
Show me where zerker is statistically better?

Defensive trait setups only serve to magnify the dominance of pvt from a statistical viewpoint.

I’ve been saying for over a year now – PVT is the holy trinity of bang for your buck. You gain more survivability with pvt than you gain in dps with zerker. The amount of survivability healing will add to pvt compared to zerker is also ridiculous.

Sad fact is though, you don’t need to mitigate damage and you don’t need survivability when you can dodge/block/reflect/blind almost all incoming damage.
The gear is performing exactly as advertised. A player made choice to drastically reduce your expected survival time in exchange for higher dps.
The problem has always been the game mechanics.

The joy some people take in this nerf is embarrassing. It’s like admitting you’re not good enough to time your active defenses properly yet you still want to do as much damage and clear content as fast as people who are willing and able to succesfully ditch their defensive gear for offensive. I see a lot of people saying it is zerker faceroll easy, but not many people actually running pug 5 zerker fotm49s & meleeing bosses like the archdiviner.

owned by math

I haven’t really had a reason to login since mid-december. Hearing this news, and knowing that the majority of my ascended gear across 5 characters will be updated, I can say without a doubt I will not return if I can’t re-choose my stats on those ascended items. There is no way I’m going back through all the trouble of acquiring ascended gear, when Anet changes the “meta” every 2 months. I’d been under the suspicion that this was their endgame all along to keep people playing, but, this time, I’ve had enough. There are too many good games coming in the next couple of months for me to spend any more time with this one if the end game is just re-farming gear every 2 months.

lakdav.3694:

While i whole heartedly agree that the main issue is not yet fixed with the CritDamage/Ferocity change (neither does Anet think that actually), and while i would be glad to have better mob AI in PvE, players crying on about demanding a stat swap option due to this change are just ridiculous.

Magic find was obliterated from a character-bound system to account-bound system. Magic find as a stat disappeared entirely, so stat swap was the most sensible thing. Crit damage is about to transform into Ferocity. Still character-bound. The stat is not disappearing. Its changing. There will be no better Direct Damage gear in the game than what you have already. Your spent effort and imaginery money remains the same value.

Cry when you have to upgrade your computer to keep on playing the game. Even then you cannot demand anything, becasue its all in the user agreement. They can change whatever they think is best.

About “demanding” stats change. I have a full ascended celestial light armor set with full wvw infusions, and without the mats its already 60 laurels on it. So if they are going to change critical damage to ferocity i dont really care, but if they change to ferocity with the same numbers as the others stats on a celestial piece of armor, this is going to be alot more than 10% intended nerf. I really hope they dont screw up with celestial set without allowing us to swap stats ( and without losing upgrades ).

If you are an Anet dev please please skip down to the end and review my suggestion; otherwise, you may quit reading before you get there. (indicated by >>>>) I have spent months crafting Ascended Celes gear. My main is a gaurd and I have found that it is the best way to balance my survivability with decent dps. Honestly, I had a lot of fun crafting my gear despite the fact that it was all time blocked. This is my biggest issue with what Anet is doing. I have acquired items that have not soaked up my gold, rather it has soaked up my gold and time. If it were a matter of replacing my set by spending a few gold I would just buy a gem card and not feel like I had been treated too underhandedly. However, Anet is nerfing items that they time blocked, thus infringing upon the months I have spent trudging through their content. They could very easily refund my gold, but can they refund my time? I think not. >>>>Why not give the qq’ers an armor set to stand against Zerk more effectively? Better yet, why not develop a new stat that certain armor sets have access to whereby they can opt to trade it for a stat they already had? Another idea would be to add a stat on to every other armor set except zerk….How about a max of 15% chance of glancing blow? You could call this new stat FAVOR. That is all I have to say at the moment regardless of the fact that Anet will probably never read this.

Rupture.7683:

If you are an Anet dev please please skip down to the end and review my suggestion; otherwise, you may quit reading before you get there. (indicated by >>>>) I have spent months crafting Ascended Celes gear. My main is a gaurd and I have found that it is the best way to balance my survivability with decent dps. Honestly, I had a lot of fun crafting my gear despite the fact that it was all time blocked. This is my biggest issue with what Anet is doing. I have acquired items that have not soaked up my gold, rather it has soaked up my gold and time. If it were a matter of replacing my set by spending a few gold I would just buy a gem card and not feel like I had been treated too underhandedly. However, Anet is nerfing items that they time blocked, thus infringing upon the months I have spent trudging through their content. They could very easily refund my gold, but can they refund my time? I think not. >>>>Why not give the qq’ers an armor set to stand against Zerk more effectively? Better yet, why not develop a new stat that certain armor sets have access to whereby they can opt to trade it for a stat they already had? Another idea would be to add a stat on to every other armor set except zerk….How about a max of 15% chance of glancing blow? You could call this new stat FAVOR. That is all I have to say at the moment regardless of the fact that Anet will probably never read this.

You could try using the enter key, too.

Like this.

Ozoug.4158:

fadeaway.2807:

Einlanzer.1627:

On topic, Zerker stats are too good compared to other stat combinations just by pure math. It needs retuning.

I wish people would stop perpetuating this myth.

Warrior with soldier gear, force sigil, scholar runes. 25 might, 100% fury, magic find food, sharpening stone, banner of discipline.
4800 ep
40393 ehp

Warrior with zerker gear, force sigil, scholar runes. 25 might, 100% fury, magic find food, sharpening stone, banner of discipline.
7500 ep
21284 ehp

So pvt has almost 90% more effective hp, but zerker has only 56% more damage?
Before taking into consideration heals on a high toughness character improve effective HP by more than they would do for a low toughness character?
Show me where zerker is statistically better?

“Oh but zerker gear scales better with boons and stuff”
Let’s add full bloodlust, add spotter, 10% dmg potion, power/crit damage food…

Soldier
6000 ep
40393 ehp

Zerker
9734 ep
21284 ehp

So pvt has almost 90% more effective hp, but zerker has only 62% more damage?
Before taking into consideration heals on a high toughness character improve effective HP by more than they would do for a low toughness character?
Show me where zerker is statistically better?

“Oh but zerker gear scales better with traits as well!”
Add traits to the above plethora of boons…

Full offensive traits (30/25/0/0/15)
Soldier
10599 ep
43281 ehp

Zerker
17398 ep
23423 ehp

So pvt has almost 85% more effective hp, but zerker has only 64% more damage?
Before taking into consideration heals on a high toughness character improve effective HP by more than they would do for a low toughness character?
Show me where zerker is statistically better?

Defensive trait setups only serve to magnify the dominance of pvt from a statistical viewpoint.

I’ve been saying for over a year now – PVT is the holy trinity of bang for your buck. You gain more survivability with pvt than you gain in dps with zerker. The amount of survivability healing will add to pvt compared to zerker is also ridiculous.

Sad fact is though, you don’t need to mitigate damage and you don’t need survivability when you can dodge/block/reflect/blind almost all incoming damage.
The gear is performing exactly as advertised. A player made choice to drastically reduce your expected survival time in exchange for higher dps.
The problem has always been the game mechanics.

The joy some people take in this nerf is embarrassing. It’s like admitting you’re not good enough to time your active defenses properly yet you still want to do as much damage and clear content as fast as people who are willing and able to succesfully ditch their defensive gear for offensive. I see a lot of people saying it is zerker faceroll easy, but not many people actually running pug 5 zerker fotm49s & meleeing bosses like the archdiviner.

owned by math

Wait, wait, are you seriously attempting to demonstrate offense vs. defense by looking only at power and HP, and expecting me to concede your argument? Or is ‘ep’ supposed to mean DPS? edit: I’m genuinely curious what these numbers represent and how you concocted them.

Also:

The joy some people take in this nerf is embarrassing. It’s like admitting you’re not good enough to time your active defenses properly yet you still want to do as much damage and clear content as fast as people who are willing and able to succesfully ditch their defensive gear for offensive. I see a lot of people saying it is zerker faceroll easy, but not many people actually running pug 5 zerker fotm49s & meleeing bosses like the archdiviner

This interpretation is hilarious. Whatever makes you feel more elite, I suppose.

HP != EHP
Hmm you don’t know EP either?
Bleh.

fadeaway.2807:

HP != EHP
Hmm you don’t know EP either?
Bleh.

Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t graduate from the university of made-up MMO gaming jargon with a degree in useless theorycrafting. Instead of conveying your disdain at my ‘inferiority’, how about you enlighten me?

edit: you referred to them as “effective HP” (which I had already inferred) and “damage” in the body of your post.

Well, apologies for the disdain.

EP means effective power and is a way of describing how much damage a character will do.

For example a naked character with 916 power and 0% crit chance (I know you start at 4% but I’m keeping it simple) and is said to have an effective power of 916.

For example a character with double his base power, 10% crit chance and 150% crit damage would have 1832 base power. 10% crit chance and 150% crit damage mean that 10% of the time you deal 150% damage and 90% of the time you deal 100% damage. This averages out 105% damage, or your crit chance and crit damage is giving you +5% average damage. This would mean that overall you have 1923.6 effective power, or EP.

Scale that up to the likes of my example above:
Warrior with zerker gear, force sigil, scholar runes. 25 might, 100% fury, magic find food, sharpening stone, banner of discipline.
You get 3135 power, 94% + the basic 150% crit damage, 67.57% crit chance (1831 precision). The crit modifier averages out at 1.973008.
3135 * 1.973008 = 6185.
You have scholar 10%, force 5% and natural ascended weapon 5%
for a total of 1.21275.
1.21275 * 6185 = the 7500 effective power I mentioned earlier.

EHP, or effective health points, is a little more complicated but essentially it describes how much damage you can actually take before you die. In my earlier posts I assumed no heals.
If you have 100hp but 0 resists/mitigation, your effective hp is 100.
If you have 100hp but say.. 20% resist.. that 100 damage hit will only deal 80 damage to you. It would now take a 125 damage hit to reduce you to 0hp. Thanks to your 20% resist, we can say your effective hp is 125. And every 100hp I heal, I get 125 more effective hp from.
If I have 40% resist? It will now take 166.6 damage to kill me! And every 100hp I heal, I get 166.6 more effective hp from. See how it’s returning more effective health the more mitigation I get?

It is difficult to describe EHP in a large, heals flying everywhere scenario (other than to say mitigation plus healing is extremely effective, thus why you see it in WvW). What is most useful about EHP from a PvE point of view is to show how easily you will be oneshotted or burst down by a failed dodge. (Which for many players is the only threatening thing in PvE – A mossyman axe to the face, an archdiviner hammer to the face.

This is a good website for playing around with EP and EHP:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/
And that website is based on a forum post which I had a hand in (Lilitu) on gw2guru back in 2012.
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/60838-math-damage-reduction-toughness-and-vitality/

I do concede that zerker is the best gear set. I encourage people to use it (and to learn how to actively mitigate damage) but only because the fights aren’t challenging enough to require mitigation and heals. I strongly feel zerker gear is doing what it is supposed to do, deliver high damage at reduced survivability. The problem is nothing threatens your survival anyway. Once things actually start threatening you consistently and you cannot rely on active mitigation to avoid everything (WvW? World bosses? PvP?) mitigation becomes very useful.

One last thing I note about current PvE scenarios – the Mai Trin fotm 49 fight can be very dangerous for zerkers who can’t quite dodge the shadowstep (myself included, I struggle) – the incoming damage becomes simply too much over time and they lose the fight of attrition. Damage mitigation and (because of the close proximity of other players) group heals/symbols etc become incredibly useful. A group of 5 average/poor zerkers can go from a nightmare fight to a cakewalk simply by adding a cleric here.

Hope that helps.

fadeaway.2807:

Well, apologies for the disdain.

EP means effective power and is a way of describing how much damage a character will do.

For example a naked character with 916 power and 0% crit chance (I know you start at 4% but I’m keeping it simple) and is said to have an effective power of 916.

For example a character with double his base power, 10% crit chance and 150% crit damage would have 1832 base power. 10% crit chance and 150% crit damage mean that 10% of the time you deal 150% damage and 90% of the time you deal 100% damage. This averages out 105% damage, or your crit chance and crit damage is giving you +5% average damage. This would mean that overall you have 1923.6 effective power, or EP.

Scale that up to the likes of my example above:
Warrior with zerker gear, force sigil, scholar runes. 25 might, 100% fury, magic find food, sharpening stone, banner of discipline.
You get 3135 power, 94% + the basic 150% crit damage, 67.57% crit chance (1831 precision). The crit modifier averages out at 1.973008.
3135 * 1.973008 = 6185.
You have scholar 10%, force 5% and natural ascended weapon 5%
for a total of 1.21275.
1.21275 * 6185 = the 7500 effective power I mentioned earlier.

EHP, or effective health points, is a little more complicated but essentially it describes how much damage you can actually take before you die. In my earlier posts I assumed no heals.
If you have 100hp but 0 resists/mitigation, your effective hp is 100.
If you have 100hp but say.. 20% resist.. that 100 damage hit will only deal 80 damage to you. It would now take a 125 damage hit to reduce you to 0hp. Thanks to your 20% resist, we can say your effective hp is 125. And every 100hp I heal, I get 125 more effective hp from.
If I have 40% resist? It will now take 166.6 damage to kill me! And every 100hp I heal, I get 166.6 more effective hp from. See how it’s returning more effective health the more mitigation I get?

It is difficult to describe EHP in a large, heals flying everywhere scenario (other than to say mitigation plus healing is extremely effective, thus why you see it in WvW). What is most useful about EHP from a PvE point of view is to show how easily you will be oneshotted or burst down by a failed dodge.

This is a good website for playing around with EP and EHP:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/
And that website is based on a forum post which I had a hand in (Lilitu) on gw2guru back in 2012.
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/60838-math-damage-reduction-toughness-and-vitality/

I do concede that zerker is the best gear set. I encourage people to use it (and to learn how to actively mitigate damage) but only because the fights aren’t challenging enough to require mitigation and heals. I strongly feel zerker gear is doing what it is supposed to do, deliver high damage at reduced survivability. The problem is nothing threatens your survival anyway. Once things actually start threatening you consistently and you cannot rely on active mitigation to avoid everything (WvW? World bosses? PvP?) mitigation becomes very useful.

Hope that helps.

It does, thanks. While I’m not quite ready to admit there’s nothing statistically off about Zerker relative to other sets, it helps to see the numbers.

One of the big kinks in evaluating is, of course, the dodge mechanic. The simple fact that, particularly in PvE, offense is largely persistent & passive while defense is intermittent & reactive plays a huge role in skewing the reality compared to what you see on paper, which is why the ‘zerker problem’ is much more pronounced in PvE than it is in WvW or PvP, and why there’s also a clear issue with game/encounter design.

However, where I will argue from is that I don’t think there’s any way to fully address this (though they can certainly take steps to improve it) with PvE encounter design, nor is even attempting to fix it a simple endeavor. There is also the issue of how direct damage competes against condition damage. All in all, I think I still feel that a modest nerf was warranted, but they definitely need to ‘meet in the middle’ with changes to encounter design and reevaluate it from there.

I was going to make a full set of zerk ascended armor for my Warrior for FOTM & dungeons, but all the talk on the forums about a possible nerf is getting me worried about making them.

Can anyone help me out?

Serker/Assassin still going to be the best DPS armor types for PvE unless they radically change how conditions work in PvE. Just because it won’t be as good as before doesn’t mean it isn’t the best.

It will still be fine for PvE despite the decreased damage. In WvW however its going to have more trouble competing with other sets (which it already has issues with), but since you’re getting it for dungeons it shouldn’t be an issue for you.

I would wait if I were you. I have the feeling that their “about 10%” is hiding something, that perhaps for people with above 100% critical the nerf will be more than 10%.

If that is the case you might want to invest into power and other stats instead.

It sounds like there isn’t too much of a change. -10% dmg from crits?

I guess my Thief will do 95% instead of 105% and it will be measured by a numeric formula that I won’t understand how to determine anything from.

I’d get an exotic set and wait. The way it could go is mob has same health + group does less damage = group taking more damage per encounter. But who knows I’d just hate to spend all that gold if there will be more efficient options later plus the prices of the ascended materials will drop unless of course everyone waits.

Doggie.3184:

I guess my Thief will do 95% instead of 105% and it will be measured by a numeric formula that I won’t understand how to determine anything from.

That’s one thing 100% is a clear value, 1749 is like: ???
How will that translate precisely into damage? In the livestream they didn’t see to know.

The nerf will not only affect pure zerkers but even more people using balanced celestial sets.

Sirendor.1394:

Ozoug.4158:

Fix the content not the gear.

This nerf changes nothing

+1 indeed

No, fix the grind, not the gear.

Why do people wear zerker anyway? To clear dungeons fast. Why do we clear dungeons fast? To make money as quick as possible. Why do we so that? Because we need to grind for absurd material requirements to craft Ascended and Legendary gear.

Stop making us grind, and the speed run culture will probably stop.

Might be too late now, though.

Treborlavok.3504:

Einlanzer.1627:

Frankly, I don’t think this is a bad change. It’s rather obvious that the synergy between those three stats is too strong (the growth curve is more hyperbolic with less diminishing returns), which made Zerker objectively superior with regard to ‘bang for buck’. Plus, ‘Ferocity’ just sounds better than ‘Crit Damage’. I wish they’d do that with all the secondary stats.

Encounter design definitely shares part of the blame, but Zerker still needed to be toned down. I hope they continue working on polishing encounters and improving the ‘soft’ role system.

Zerker gear isn’t the problem. The problem is the game and it’s mechanics. Aswell as their flawed attempts at “fixing” encounters thus far… Defiant/10x the HP with extremely drawn out stand in place combat(wurm,golem,maw,etc)/condition caps not player based but encounter based and even if they were player based still make conditions in pve worthless… To name a few…

Also along those lines the way every dungeon is set up there’s no reason to run anything aside from DD(direct dmg) DPS builds.

-> We have no need for support outside of our own utilities.
-> We have no group synergy outside of measely combo fields.
-> We have no need for defensive gear for any encounter since we have built in defenses with our heals/utilities/dodges.
-> We have no encounters that require actual tactics outside of just dodging “X” attack. Stand in place AI falls into this too.

We could go on and on about this. But the problem will always exist in gw2. Remove zerker gear… Knights or pvt becomes the next hot topic, then that gets nerfed because constant qq because they’ve yet to address the actual problem, their game/core mechanics. It’s an on going cycle that will not be fixed. Especially if they keep going about using “duct tape” to fix a broken weld.

Plus everyone who doesn’t understand what every zerker/celestial user is so upset about… It’s wvw. Pve and wvw are 2 completely different beasts yet they feel the need to keep them on the same “balance” updates. The loss of dmg for burst/DD power builds vs other players is huge and makes everyone who spent all their time and gold crafting their gear now worthless.

This is almost exactly what I think, spot on. Zerker isn’t the problem. It’s the basic game design philosophy Gw2 follows. Until that changes — and it probably never will — these problems aren’t going to go away no matter how many duct tape/bandaid patches Anet applies.

As mentioned, we don’t need to do anything but DPS because everyone has their own heals, their own support, and limited group synergy (though their is more than combo fields, like group buffs, but that’s really more like group support, whatever). And the reason that is the case, is because Anet adamantly thinks a game Without The Trinity is the way to go. Because Anet didn’t want healers or tanks or DPS, and wanted e done to be able to do everything, they designed classes to be ale to do everything with the rigid skill setups we currently have.

Too bad, though, that that naturally means players will eventually gravitate to DPS against a stupid AI. This is inevitable. The more a player plays and learns the ins and outs of enemy AI behavior, the less the need for other stats other than DPS. This is only the natural, inevitable course for this choice Anet made in the game design.

Oh how sort sighted! And now they try to fix it with a stupid nerf like this, when the real problem is the core design that made everyone into an uberman capable of doing everything on their own! You want diversity ? Break out of this ridiculousness about No Trinity and design a game where players need to specialize to help each other out, where players help compensate for each other’s weaknesses. Then people will have incentive not to run just min-maxed DPS builds.

You brought this DPS plague on yourself with your game design choice.

Mochann.5298:

Sirendor.1394:

Ozoug.4158:

Fix the content not the gear.

This nerf changes nothing

+1 indeed

No, fix the grind, not the gear.

Why do people wear zerker anyway? To clear dungeons fast. Why do we clear dungeons fast? To make money as quick as possible. Why do we so that? Because we need to grind for absurd material requirements to craft Ascended and Legendary gear.

Stop making us grind, and the speed run culture will probably stop.

Might be too late now, though.

I’m pretty sure that some of the speed runners like speed running because they like pushing the envelope, not because they’re grinding. Your point is valid for you but probably doesn’t apply universally.

Sylv.5324:

Folks who claim that zerker is high risk = high reward are kidding just about everyone: they only run in groups that minimise the risk, because that is a low-risk, high-reward strategy. Playing in a mixed-stat group is much more high-risk, which is why they hate it.

Change the AIs and other things to make it high-risk and make glass cannons actually play like glass, and the complaints will flood in, but at least you can quote right back at them: high risk = high reward, right?

You’re not playing. zerker Ele, so you have absolutely no right to talk about this, you hard to kill mesmer.