Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone! WALL OF TEXT WARNING. Let me just quickly introduce myself, I’m “Asura Ele”, and these are just some thoughts I’ve had regarding the new ferocity changes.
TLDR at the bottom.

Critical damage\Ferocity changes
Ferocity, new stat, 15ferocity=1% critdmg.

The main issue I see with ferocity is that it’s a PvE centered “nerf” that also affects WvW.
From the official blog post: One of the main goals for balance in Guild Wars 2 is to support a wide variety of builds that cater to different play styles. The current implementation of critical damage works against this. Put simply, if critical damage-stacked builds are more effective than other approaches, the build diversity decreases...
That statement is correct… Exclusively for PvE.
Critdmg stacked builds (power specs) aren’t more effective in a PvP environment such as WvW, which creates conflict between the goal of ferocity and its potential results.

In WvW, playing glassy with a lot of berserker gear is high risk high reward play.
If you get caught, you die. The tradeoff is that if you DON’T get caught, you can do a lot of damage.
Large scale WvW will largely stay the same considering it doesn’t matter if 40 or 70 people hit you- You will die. Which is why really big zergs and blob fights wouldn’t be overly influenced by this change, in my opinion.

What Ferocity will change drastically is roaming, and smaller scale fights (10~25).
Roaming is already highly condition based, since conditions inherently are “safer” to play with- Yes they can get cleansed but you get 1 (arguably 2) more defensive stats you get- Without losing on the effectiveness of your condis!

I’ll explain: To do damage in a power setup, one needs to have three components: Power, Precision, Ferocity (critdmg). This means you trade off survivability (Toughness, Vit, Healing Power) to get those three offensive stats that you require.
Conditions, on the other hand, only require two (arguably 1) stats to do damage Condition damage, condition duration. This is fair, considering you don’t have as much spike ability as a power setup, but that also means you will be much, much more durable and survivable (because you aim for 1\2 offensive stats rather than 3).

Ferocity will dishearten players from playing the already weaker power specs, promoting condition play in small scale WvW and roaming, creating an even bigger focus on sustainability- Which as I mentioned earlier, is easier to achieve on a condition based setup than a power setup.

Counters- A counter to conditions is burst- Kill them fast before they wear you down. But what if 15-20% lower damage on power specs lowers your damage by so much, you can no longer realistically spike down and defeat a condition based enemy?

Medium-scale fights-Another point that needs to be addressed is organized larger scale WvW. 15-25 people raiding against 35-70 man blobs is hard enough already when facing server lag and fps drops, but now the risk reward will be reduced even more! Playing necro and ele effectively will simply NOT be as effective…
Playing at 2100-2300 armor is already risky enough, and as it is right now it’s also rewarding enough- You do damage. With ferocity, you’ll have to either give up more survivability to reach the same amount of damage, or simply lose damage.

In my opinion the current setup is balanced, and introducing ferocity to WvW as it is right now will break the balance in medium-scaled combat as well as small scale.

The main changes in PvE IMO will be:
All dungeons will now take 10% longer to complete.

As I said, the issue with ferocity is that it’s a PvE oriented balance change (to discourage the fullzerk meta and shift condis into viability, I guess?) and yet it ends up affecting WvW’s balance more than anything.

_TLDR: Ferocity will shift WvW meta towards condis, power will become high risk low reward in WvW. Balance breaking. Ferocity won’t introduce more build variety into WvW but in fact lower build variety, completely negating the original goal of ferocity. _

This is all WvW related, I’ve no complaints or issues with Ferocity change in PvE.

I’m looking at all the reasons to love this patch, but I just cannot get over thinking about roaming and fighting in WvW post patch.. I hope ferocity in practice proves me wrong!

Disclaimer: These are my own personal opinions that represent the way I perceive game balance. I don’t claim to speak for anyone or represent anyone else’s opinions.
Also this was written pretty late at night so please excuse any grammatical mistakes and typos.

We already in the condi meta.

sephiroth.4217:

We already in the condi meta.

Yes! Which is why this is an issue. Introduction of ferocity will push us even deeper into this condition meta by reducing the effectiveness of power specs, which are bad enough as it is.

Agreed, and to be perfectly honest crit damage in dungeons didn’t need to get hit all that much. Conditions in PvE and support needed to be looked at. Because as you said, the only change in pve is that it will take longer to finish. Mobs will still one shot you if you mistime a dodge, conditions will still be overwritten to be worthless.

Feandro.5264:

Agreed, and to be perfectly honest crit damage in dungeons didn’t need to get hit all that much. Conditions in PvE and support needed to be looked at. Because as you said, the only change in pve is that it will take longer to finish. Mobs will still one shot you if you mistime a dodge, conditions will still be overwritten to be worthless.

I agree.
Simply lowering the damage will do nothing in regards to PvE build variety.. ANet don’t seem to realize this. If they want more build diversity in PvE they need to rework encounters to encourage usage of support (boons\condi cleanses) and conditions.

Understandably this might be difficult server side, but buffing conditions in PvE to do say, +x% damage and removing the AoE cap on conditions in PvE might go a long way in introducing conditions into PvE.

There’s no balance in WvW, so how can it have balance problems?

Balance between classes, should strictly be limited to spvp. WvW is for fun. PvE is for earning gold.

To balance you have to start somewhere. Simple as that.

• Reduce power/crit spike
• Players can reduce reliance on toughness to counter
• Players can swap toughness for other stats (vit or healing or hybrid damage)
• Other stats help to counter condi meta
• Build Diversity opens up
• Anet continues to balance, possibly altering condi damage etc etc bla bla bla

OR

• Change nothing
• Nothing changes
• Players continue to whine on and on about the stupid meta

The only way I can see this Ferocity change positively affecting build diversity is if what Ross says occurs.

i.e.
People will not feel like 1600+ Toughness is mandatory on a roaming build, to stand a chance when inevitably the full zerk Thief one-shots you out of nowhere.
If you remove (or tone down) very high bursts, it’s possible that some builds using new combinations of gear/stats will emerge.

We will have to wait and see.

There is no need to reduce spike damage.
And seeing how they are affecting balanced builds (celestial, valkyrie, cavalier etc) more than glass builds seems they are making a “lore” change or preparing the system for a new tier.

From a balance point of view this change will hurt every part of the game with absolutely no benefit.

I agree with the OP,

changing so many things and leaving Conditions untouched is a bad idea.

GW2 combat is ideal when you have 2 semi-offensive Power builds fighting each other. Something like 50% Berserker, 50% Soldier. That’s when combat is most fun.

Spaming nigh unavoidable Conditions at your enemy that can only be countered by traits you may or may not have is the pinnacle of bad passive play. It’s a horrible thing to encourage as it emphasizes all the bad aspects of GW2 combat.

The least they could do is nerf the grossly overpowered Rare Veggie Pizza. It does after all have 4-times the stat-budget of any other food in game.

It’s never been a cond meta in WvW. Ever.

Anything bigger than a handful of players and the conds get wiped too fast.

Just about everyone uses power other than very small groups where it’s still about even.

PVT does more damage than Dire.

+cond duration doesn’t add too much damage because of how fast conds are wiped + no damage added unless you get it up past the next second. 3.5s of bleed is the same as 3s of bleed (etc). Power/pre/crit dmg stuff add it equally to every attack.

You can avoid conditions the same as you can other attacks, plus cleanse them.

Dear holy kitten people… it’s not going to change much, it’s just a rebalance post-ascended stat increases which heavily favors power. You’re still not going to see conds outside of small groups.

I really don’t see the point of feroicty change. There is like 2-3 skills in game that hit to hard with to short of a cd or no cooldown at all that just needed to be tweaked. First one is backstab. It hits to hard still and can come out of nowhere and the thief can go right back into stealth and do it again. An internal cooldown would have fixed it. Second is warrior earthshaker and just hammer in general. It needed its dmg reduced further to be used as a cc weapon and not a cc weapon that does tons of dmg as well. Other than that I have never had any problem with any other classes using glass cannon builds. They all are taking the trade off of being squishy to do good dmg. Thief has stealth which is near impossible to balance the way it is and warrior is not squishy at all going full zerk due to healing singet. Those were the only problems I saw.

The ferocity nerf looks like a bad change. There were maybe two power builds in the entire game that needed to be looked at (backstab thief, destroyer war), but instead of tweaking those specific builds, ferocity is a sweeping change that negatively affects nearly every power build.

The PvE rationale for the change does not make sense either, as after the change zerk will still be the most effective choice. Dungeons will just take slightly longer to complete. Big improvement!

Still, ferocity will probably not lead to a large paradigm shift for melees. It will reduce melee damage output, but much of that damage can be replenished with the 2nd sigil coming to two-handed weapons. Many players will feel safe to replace some tankish gear with zerky gear, replenishing even more lost damage. Conditions will still be ineffective against melee balls with nearly unlimited group cleanse, so the overall dynamic of melee play is unlikely to change.

However, several specific condition builds (blackwater mesmer, perp thief) already have the edge in peripheral/roaming/dueling situations. It is difficult to see how the small numbers meta won’t devolve into a dot/hot passive spam war. So conditions are going to be “balanced” by being clearly superior in one situation in exchange for being nearly useless in another. Perhaps that’s a fair trade, but it’s clearly not a desirable situation.

I totally agree with the OP.

And would add:
WvW is balanced through PVE, condis do not affect PVE (since most play power), therefore condis won’t get balanced until 3/5 threads in this forum are QQing about condis.

sephiroth.4217:

We already in the condi meta.

The vast majority of builds, both roaming and zerging, rely on direct-damage above all. If anything it is and always has been a direct-damage meta.

Zerker gear isnt balanced at all, this “high risk” the OP speaks of simply doesnt apply to a couple of professions.
Thief is never easy to kill. Purely thanks to blinds, blinks and stealth, killing a Thief will always be challenging. So there is little risk going for an all-out damage build. Either you kill someone instantly with that absurd damage, or you run away and no one is going to stop you. No risk involved.

And Warriors get such amounts of free survivability in the form of free toughness and vitality, they are never ever glassy. But they do get the absurd damage from going full zerker. Yet even a full zerker Warrior with 20pts in Defense is hard to kill, that is if you can even catch one.

So for roaming its a good change to nerf zerker gear. Give other professions a chance aswell without getting instagibbed by the zerkercheesers, and you might see more variety.
For zergs nothing changes, thats just guardians and warriors, and this nerf wont change a kitten thing because they dont use zerker to begin with.

In the end this change will do very little. The people who run zerker now will continue to do it because its free zero-risk damage. But instead of an 11k backstab itll “just” be 10k.

Terrahero.9358:

sephiroth.4217:

We already in the condi meta.

The vast majority of builds, both roaming and zerging, rely on direct-damage above all. If anything it is and always has been a direct-damage meta.

You are completely wrong. It is all about bunkers who try to mitigate damage and clear condis fast. I’m speaking about zerging here because that is what the majority of people play.

style.6173:

Terrahero.9358:

sephiroth.4217:

We already in the condi meta.

The vast majority of builds, both roaming and zerging, rely on direct-damage above all. If anything it is and always has been a direct-damage meta.

You are completely wrong. It is all about bunkers who try to mitigate damage and clear condis fast. I’m speaking about zerging here because that is what the majority of people play.

Nah, he’s right. Even if they are bunker or support, they are power based.

Hardly anyone is running dire, settler’s, etc. in a zerg.

I’m gonna just put this out there for the OP and I hope he sees this.

1. The developers have already released the notes for the patch so it will be inevitable.

2. PvE drives the balance patches. Look at living story.

3. This is the wrong forum to post this on because developers barely respond to the complaints here. If anything you’ll have this page locked because a moderator (not developer) will see something he/she doesn’t like.

4. People aren’t bothering to read your original post as it is with a lot of these forum topics. I’ve tried making coherent arguments in the forums in the past but you need to think of the forum posters as having the reading attention of a mouse. Just look at people talking about zerging, when in the original post you already talked about how the zerging meta isn’t affected by the changes and are instead talking about the roaming meta.

5. While some people will mention thieves or warriors as the main reason why ferocity needs to be implemented, it is really only the thief that can do complete one shots. Guardian burst will hurt with these changes along with some roaming ele and power mesmer builds.

6. People don’t want to get better at the game. Period. If you offer to help someone learn how to fight burst classes they will most likely decline, then continue to complain how overpowered or underpowered classes are.

I only make this long post because it is obvious you want developers to think about the changes before they implement them but I’m going to warn you that you will be sorely disappointed by the responses you will get around here.

It’s pretty easy to compare as it is now and will have a lot more sense when patch comes out. You can’t go full soldier’s or sentinel’s on a power build and be effective, you will have a lot of survivavility but you wont be able to finish your enemy. Now I can go full dire and be as tanky as with soldier’s but have 2k condi damage and be able to kill other ppl.

Critical damage was too high in WvW roaming. The amount of burst some power specs put out, especially thieves which could reset fights, was just too high. The Ferocity change will do well to reign that in. Players that weren’t running heavy damage builds will need to adjust gear a little, but they won’t see as big of a change because they never relied on huge burst.

The Ferocity change also won’t significantly impact the performance of 20-25 vs 40+, as ggroups didn’t rely on heavy crit chance and damage to the extent that a damage-heavy roamer would. They have other means like might stacking, etc to increase damage.

The condition damage roaming problem in WvW has little to do with how powerful or weak power damage is. It exists because of powerful condition damage runes and sigils, +40% condition duration food, and overall class balance. Instead of saying “Don’t nerf Ferocity because condi damage is strong”, what should be said is “If you’re nerfing ferocity, also nerf condi damage builds in WvW”.

Here’s the condition damage problem in a nutshell: Each type of condition does significant damage. But when the number of types of conditions is restricted, the overall DPS is capped and only slowly increasing with condition damage. Adding a new type of condition to a profession, which can tick at the same time as its current ones, significantly increasing their DPS over just adding more condition damage stats. Perplexity Runes are the biggest offender, but so are traits like Dhuumfire and Incendiary Powder that grant condition types that are applied fairly frequently.

40% increase in condition duration is also roughly a 40% increase in damage (not exactly because of tick rounding, but close). Other foods don’t come close for power damage. Combined with many condition types, if a condi player can land a good volley and you don’t have condition removal, you’ll take a huge chunk of damage. It also makes their CC conditions last far longer, giving them another advantage.

Terrahero.9358:

sephiroth.4217:

We already in the condi meta.

The vast majority of builds, both roaming and zerging, rely on direct-damage above all. If anything it is and always has been a direct-damage meta.

Zerker gear isnt balanced at all, this “high risk” the OP speaks of simply doesnt apply to a couple of professions.
Thief is never easy to kill. Purely thanks to blinds, blinks and stealth, killing a Thief will always be challenging. So there is little risk going for an all-out damage build. Either you kill someone instantly with that absurd damage, or you run away and no one is going to stop you. No risk involved.

And Warriors get such amounts of free survivability in the form of free toughness and vitality, they are never ever glassy. But they do get the absurd damage from going full zerker. Yet even a full zerker Warrior with 20pts in Defense is hard to kill, that is if you can even catch one.

So for roaming its a good change to nerf zerker gear. Give other professions a chance aswell without getting instagibbed by the zerkercheesers, and you might see more variety.
For zergs nothing changes, thats just guardians and warriors, and this nerf wont change a kitten thing because they dont use zerker to begin with.

In the end this change will do very little. The people who run zerker now will continue to do it because its free zero-risk damage. But instead of an 11k backstab itll “just” be 10k.

I agree with most of what you’ve written. But isn’t that just a problem with Warrior and Thief, more than a problem with zerker gear? Playing meditation spike guard, scepter ele\dd ele, necro?, static discharge engi, ranger, shatter\glass phantasm mesmer – Playing any of those “zerker” specs if you get caught, you DIE. End of.
But you also do a lot of damage. As I said, high risk high reward.

The only exception is Warrior and Thief as you said, but why should all zerker\power specs be nerfed because of imba warrior and stealth thieves?

thefirstlazydude.2408:

I’m gonna just put this out there for the OP and I hope he sees this.

1. The developers have already released the notes for the patch so it will be inevitable.

2. PvE drives the balance patches. Look at living story.

3. This is the wrong forum to post this on because developers barely respond to the complaints here. If anything you’ll have this page locked because a moderator (not developer) will see something he/she doesn’t like.

4. People aren’t bothering to read your original post as it is with a lot of these forum topics. I’ve tried making coherent arguments in the forums in the past but you need to think of the forum posters as having the reading attention of a mouse. Just look at people talking about zerging, when in the original post you already talked about how the zerging meta isn’t affected by the changes and are instead talking about the roaming meta.

5. While some people will mention thieves or warriors as the main reason why ferocity needs to be implemented, it is really only the thief that can do complete one shots. Guardian burst will hurt with these changes along with some roaming ele and power mesmer builds.

6. People don’t want to get better at the game. Period. If you offer to help someone learn how to fight burst classes they will most likely decline, then continue to complain how overpowered or underpowered classes are.

I only make this long post because it is obvious you want developers to think about the changes before they implement them but I’m going to warn you that you will be sorely disappointed by the responses you will get around here.

Thanks, I appreciate it. I don’t post many threads on the forums and I mostly lurk around. Maybe it’d be worth posting this somewhere else?

Also as to point 1): I never really thought this post would “stop” ferocity.. I’m just trying to get other people to understand why IMO it’s a bad change that shouldn’t be welcomed and possibly make some noise on the forums.

I’m sure ANet have considered everything I’ve said, I just honestly don’t think they care about what little balance WvW already has.

We know its a bad change…
Also we learned that CDI works only on minor stuff..they never accept counterarguments about big changes and when they break the game they start thinking about it about 1 year after.

This is gw2 history.

One of the many reasons i will be moving over to ESO soon

Aiden.6483:

Counters- A counter to conditions is burst- Kill them fast before they wear you down. But what if 15-20% lower damage on power specs lowers your damage by so much, you can no longer realistically spike down and defeat a condition based enemy?

In my opinion the current setup is balanced, and introducing ferocity to WvW as it is right now will break the balance in medium-scaled combat as well as small scale.

Finally someone who plays power gets it. You kill them before they kill you! I could go on about this particular part but this is something many people are missing when they fight a condition spec.

I don’t think the change will make people move to condition builds. I feel like roamers fall into 3 categories:

You like condition builds
You like direct damage builds
You like both depending on what your playing.

The majority of the roamer/small scale builds are direct damage. If you are solo roaming then your basically looking for 1v2’s or 1v1’s if you are group roaming with voice comms then you are either roaming but not really thinking about your comp or you adjust your comp.

When we go out in WvW we small scale roam either as all solo builds together semi organized or we actually run good group comp setups. In our focused group comps conditions are rarely a problem and we focus fire any necro from the opposing team anyway or send a specific class to take it out.

This is the same thing that applies in sPvP you have your roles and builds have counters in place and if your specific build can’t tackle something specific you send a teammate to handle it or group effort.

Many people go out small/scale group roaming with whatever they have or 1v1 dueling builds if you are organized then usually conditions aren’t a problem. Most condition builds are weak to conditions themselves except a P/D thief and a Necro, you could possibly throw a warrior in there but he has to have a bow to drop condis with cleansing ire with no target acquired.

If small scale meta actually became totally condition dominate direct damage players would just shift builds that make conditions irrelevant. Every class that I have which is all except ranger can put a build together that makes condition builds irrelevant. The problem is that those builds aren’t explored enough nobody is taking a mesmer with 30 inspiration putting it in zerk gear with shattered conditions trait because it forces them to give up traits they love. Mesmer is notoriously weak against conditions but not if you take that with menders purity.

If meta of WvW became conditions overall then you would see direct damage users running totally different builds because why worry about direct damage if everyone is running condis? In reality power rules so people still prioritize running and defending against power builds because that is what most people like and that is what most people run.

I personally think the positives of Ferocity will benefit Guild Wars 2. The Beserker Build is ALL people ever use in PvE Dungeon Milling, and World Vs World. I devote majority of my Gold and Time in World Versus World, and this Ferocity Change is welcomed. All I ever see anymore is Beserker Builds left and right, and this isn’t just a Small Scale encounter, this goes all the way up to Massive Group Busting.

Honestly, I am sick and tired of people simply JUST using one Build, pertaining to Group Composition. Not sure how many of you are sick and tired of Thieves butt kitten you, or that Elementalist melting you before you land a shot or two, or that kitten Warrior blasting you with Greatsword. The problem with Beserker Builds is that you only SPAM one or two abilities, where’s the combination or coordinated attacks?

With the Ferocity Stat, we will see people build new combinations and explore damage dealing once again.

100% agree with OP. Although I feel like this is going to hurt players using some zerk / some knight even harder then those in full zerk. Dropping 10% critical damage when initially lower will cause serious problems. Maybe implement this change in PvE, but keep the current WvW situation constant.

We’ve told ANET to separate balances between WvW and PvE since the beginning of the game.

We’ve told them nerfing crit damage just pushes the already overpowered pvp Condi meta even further ahead.

We can tell them a hundred times, a thousand times, a million times.

Fact is, they just don’t care.

PvE = truck loads of $$$$$$ for them, it is all they will ever focus on.

WvW has no community representative. (Someone who actually plays WvW let alone GW2. While we all appreciate Allie for engaging with the community, we need someone who actually plays WvW let alone the game)

WvW has no development team.

WvW has no balance team.

We can kick and scream and ask for PvE balance changes to not break WvW all we want, but they will NEVER listen, because they don’t have any staff strictly devoted to WvW. Fact.

Why not just cap crit dmg 100% and armor 3k.

The more I’ve thought about, the more annoyed I with the upcoming crit nerf.

First of all, many of us who only play WvW are quite poor and wouldn’t be caught dead farming whatever the ridiculous PvE event of the month is. If you play a power build with all or mostly berserker gear, the only reason to invest time and effort into ascended weapons and trinkets is for the slightly higher attack power and crit damage. So if the changeover to ferocity is a 10% nerf to damage like anet says, all it’s really doing is taking ascended stat creep back down to exotic. Exotics become weaker than they were (comparatively) before ascended was inflicted on us.

Second, we all already know how OP some of the condi builds out there are. The blackwater mesmer and p/d thief are almost unbeatable 1v1 if the player is at all competent, and it doesn’t take much. Condi engis and necros can also be unbeatable, but are a bit more susceptible to control and have less combat movement. There is no talk of changing the +40% condi duration food, and if you read the thread inquiring players about new stat combos, a lot of them are primary condi damage. Oh boy, more bunker stats please! Dire has been such a smashing success. More new PvE only, condition inflicting runes and sigils are hopefully in the works too.

Lastly, nothing changes in PvE or WvW zerg warfare. Condis will still suck in PvE, and they will still suck in most organized zerging that has endless purging. No one is going to experiment with new builds and new ways to play as the blog post implies. If power builds fall out of favor for roaming, the only experimenting will be new ways to be a dire perplexity moron.

Even though I have a thief, mesmer, and engi, and can play them all reasonably well, I refuse to use condi builds with them. I tried it with my mesmer and it was the most boring roaming of all time, and condi vs. condi is the most boring duel imaginable. May as well just use an RNG to determine the winner and skip the fighting, it’s that stupid.