Guild Wars 2

Is ANET looking at this at all? With Chronomancers it’s possible to stack it up to ~50 seconds of quickness in a group of 25-30 and then share it to all in the group. I can deal with all the other boons, even resistance is annoying but not a huge deal, but Quickness just seems like way too strong of a boon to be able to stack that high of a duration. You can corrupt all you want but even Necro Corrupt Boon only rips 3 of the 11 boons on at any time. Is this going to be addressed in the “seperate balancing of all game modes?”

Quickness could be reverted to an “effect” (or whatever you want to consider Alacrity) so that it does not get shared by using skills that share boons. Quickness and Alacrity seem to be on another level of utility compared to Might, Fury, Swiftness, Regen, Aegis, Retal, Stability, Vigor and Protection, so the change would make sense.

+1

Its been argued for a while now but I’m not even sure Anet acknowledge it as a problem. Nothing related to insane boonstacking has been nerfed.

Seems a little desperate. Get used to the meta and fight the blobs already.

No top fight guild (GS, TW, etc) would ever run boonsharing against anything more than a 50 man pug blob. Not even in a GvG against a new guild.

Honestly no need to point fingers at classes in HoT, the whole expansion promotes spamming of everything ><
Boons, conditions, stealth, and at some point even reveal but not sure since I rarely do anything these days other than log in and gather and then logout “I do remember having 22seconds of reveal on me at some point from more than one player” =p

I don’t think OP’s intention was to point a finger at Chronomancer. More to point out that quickness is being stacked up to 50 seconds on entire groups and that it should be addressed.

Yeah, sorry @Heartpains. This wasn’t meant as a witch hunt for chronomancers. I just want how this boon is shared to be addressed!

It’s okay, and I was talking in generally about classes pointing hehe, and I hope they take a look at things fast =)

I am pretty sure some people came up with good ideas in one of the other posts about boons, but I don’t think Anet are doing anything any time soon, good luck though, hope for some good changes =)

Thanks Teej for bringing this issue to the light. Hopefully Anet can circle back on this issue. No need to cut down the whole forest, just focus on the individual trees. Net net this would be a great change for the game. But we need to figure out what’s on Anets plate for WvW. The better we can understand their capacity the better we can asess what’s the longest pole in the tent here. After all, we are all just tools in a tool box trying to figure out what is mission critical.

good point, its on the table

Get ready for a kittenstorm if this happens. Boonsharing is what gives Mesmer a place in PVE.

@Jerus I get that. ANET previously stated that their intentions are to balance the 3 game modes separately (sPvP, PvE and WvW). That’s what I also said in the OP. I know boon sharing is a part of both game modes, but quickness sharing the way it’s currently happening in WvW can’t be what they had in mind. PvE would be balanced separately (I’d hope).

Teej.9241:

@Jerus I get that. ANET previously stated that their intentions are to balance the 3 game modes separately (sPvP, PvE and WvW). That’s what I also said in the OP. I know boon sharing is a part of both game modes, but quickness sharing the way it’s currently happening in WvW can’t be what they had in mind. PvE would be balanced separately (I’d hope).

Yeah, just seems a pretty big difference between the two modes, one a boon one just a buff. It’d also reduce counter play for quickness in general. I wonder if they could just cap the duration you can share in WvW? Or, have it scale so you get say 25% duration on anything shared in WvW.

Honestly I’m impartial but seeing kitten many people do not like certain areas of the new meta would the easiest fix not be to just add hard caps to certain boons? Make is so Quickness or any other problematic boon can not be stacked beyond say 25 sec (random number). I don’t know seems like an easy quick fix.

About time this issue is aired out. I agree 100%. Here’s hoping Anet can make this a priority action item for the balance team. I’d like to see this cake get baked.

Why don’t they make certain boons cap like certain condis?

Zero.4935:

Why don’t they make certain boons cap like certain condis?

One would think this would be the easiest fix, I’m no programmer but it certainly sounds like it would take almost no time at all.

Nuzt.7894:

Zero.4935:

Why don’t they make certain boons cap like certain condis?

One would think this would be the easiest fix, I’m no programmer but it certainly sounds like it would take almost no time at all.

The sad thing is they already do. I think swiftness caps at 2mins?

Zero.4935:

Nuzt.7894:

Zero.4935:

Why don’t they make certain boons cap like certain condis?

One would think this would be the easiest fix, I’m no programmer but it certainly sounds like it would take almost no time at all.

The sad thing is they already do. I think swiftness caps at 2mins?

I thought it was a stack cap not a time cap. So say stacking Symbol of Swiftness would net you a lower swiftness duration at cap than using swiftness from blasting lightning fields. I believe Quickness works the same way, I just don’t know how many stacks that is, or if my memory is just way off

While we believe this issue is important to both us and our player base, there are other things coming up the pipeline that require our foremost attention. Let’s circle back to this issue once we’ve solved the pressing matters of repair hammers and mobile cannons.

He sayed it.

Yes they know about it and no they likely won’t do anything about it for months. Boon sharing is yet another crappy meta direction WvW has taken.

+1. Decently large WvW issue that needs attention. ANet, pls.

Just touching base with this thread and Anet so we can put this one to bed.

Robin Hood.3850:

Just touching base with this thread and Anet so we can put this one to bed.

? ? ?_? ?? ANET TAKE MY ENERGY ? ? ?_? ??

How about just making a new condition that functions like resistance for boons – i.e. As long as you have the condi (let’s call it Misfortune), boons have no affect and/or cannot be applied to you.

Never let it be sayed that he did not sayed it.

PS:

No top fight guild (GS, TW, etc) would ever run boonsharing against anything more than a 50 man pug blob. Not even in a GvG against a new guild.

LOL

I think we should be glad this wasn’t a problem when people GvG’d two years ago.

We won’t be having this kind of problem if the game balancing was separate.

PVE – Quickness sharing is essential in raids.
WvW/PvP – Remove quickness (and resistance) from boonshare list.

@Chris.2390, It wasn’t a problem when everyone GvG’d two years ago because if you ran it no GvG guild would fight you. Considering there isn’t much of a scene anymore, the few who prefer winning over having fun, enjoyable fights and are wanting to run it can do so with little repercussions.

I was in the guild that first used quickness in a GvG v Hymn and when we saw what it did we stopped running it and the community shunned it. It then progressed so that there was no pre-buffing and all boons had to be obtained after the round started.

Thinking ANet is going to listen or care about profession/skill balance is unfortunately a waste of time.

+1

I think quickness stacking illustrates the need to split skill balance among game modes. Much like with stability, boons in these large WvW groups end up “playing out” quite differently than they would in PvE and PvP. When stability was changed to stacks that could be stripped instantly, melee in WvW groups suffered immensely as elementalists and necros blindly spammed CC. The resulting “pirate ship” meta made melee roles very boring and ineffective as they had little recourse for incessant cc. Now that there is an ICD in place (thanks to developer attention to WvW), melee are able to more or less push with their groups.

With quickness stacking in WvW, a small number of chronomancers (say 2-4) are able to rapidly stack and share the quickness boon so that a group of 25-40 can attain 40+ seconds of quickness, giving groups the opportunity to hit with the damage of a group twice its size. And keep in mind that it is not particularly difficult for a chronomancer to perform the quickness stacking rotation.

As a result, this one boon provides a disproportionate advantage to groups willing to run it, despite the negative effect that quickness stacking has on public perception of the group’s level. Additionally, it’s possible that a guild who would choose to run quickness stacking may even come to rely on this “broken” mechanic too much—if they ever find themselves unable to stack quickness, they could go from being a threat to little more than an average zerg. In effect, quickness stacking seems to artificially inflate a guild’s competence when, in reality, the guild is exceedingly average.

I think addressing this boon’s overpowered nature in WvW would do a great deal to restore parity to the current meta.

MrFluffy.9307:

jajajajjajajaaj

^

What about limiting various boons to specific maximum durations only in WvW? That way you could still share boons, but it would restrict prebuffing to a certain degree.

ArchonWing.9480:

MrFluffy.9307:

jajajajjajajaaj

^

What about limiting various boons to specific maximum durations only in WvW? That way you could still share boons, but it would restrict prebuffing to a certain degree.

Yeah, that’s a solid option. I believe others have suggested that as well

Quickness isn’t the only boon that needs addressing.

Resistance, stability and protection are also very overpowered when shared.

Joseph.7213:

While we believe this issue is important to both us and our player base, there are other things coming up the pipeline that require our foremost attention. Let’s circle back to this issue once we’ve solved the pressing matters of repair hammers and mobile cannons.

lol, and perhaps revamp the shatterer again, just for good measure

The boonstacking is completely out of control and does need to be addressed by appropriate limiting of how many sources of each boon you can stack. Perma stacking of every boon just promotes a lot of passive gameplay which unfortunately seems to be anets pattern since hot. But expecting balance…well I wont hold my breath…power creep, ridiculous condi spam and disgusting siege wars that wvw has become. Maybe they will nerf swiftness or a rune that was bad for pvp esports and call it a day.

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

Quickness isn’t the only boon that needs addressing.

Resistance, stability and protection are also very overpowered when shared.

Stability? Really?
Why don’t we just back to the Pirate Ship meta that was sooooo exciting half the population left.

hehe think I had 40 stacks of stab the other day was kinda nice

X T D.6458:

The boonstacking is completely out of control and does need to be addressed by appropriate limiting of how many sources of each boon you can stack. Perma stacking of every boon just promotes a lot of passive gameplay which unfortunately seems to be anets pattern since hot. But expecting balance…well I wont hold my breath…power creep, ridiculous condi spam and disgusting siege wars that wvw has become. Maybe they will nerf swiftness or a rune that was bad for pvp esports and call it a day.

Balance in WvW isn’t a pie in the sky concept. Anet has been building up the core competency of the architecture, first with the separation of WvW and PvE values for retaliation and confusion, then with PvP and PvE skills. As a forward-looking company, Anet has been reaching out to fully leverage the existing customer base for the ideation process. Even with lots of moving parts, this crowdsourcing enables improved buy-in of future iterations, which facilitate more accurate sales projections.

So it is not unrealistic to cheer lead for balance of WvW skills. It may seem like boiling an ocean, which is why we start with concrete deliverables such as getting quickness stacking fixed.

Nuzt.7894:

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

Quickness isn’t the only boon that needs addressing.

Resistance, stability and protection are also very overpowered when shared.

Stability? Really?
Why don’t we just back to the Pirate Ship meta that was sooooo exciting half the population left.

This is one thing I find funny. I quit playing about the time the Pirate Ship meta came into being. I didn’t play much of it, and I didn’t quit because of it, but I knew and experienced some of it. I quit for 8-9 months, came back, and it honestly feels much the same overall. I laugh because it seems like they made WvW overly convoluted just to create a similar result. It’s pretty significant that they then nerfed that stability change to not allow further interrupts for a short term. In the end though it feels much the same, WvW bursts things, that’s kind fo the playstile in a nutshell, burst heals, burst damage, burst boons. But, with that change to Stability stacking and usage, well you have an almost identical play style. So waht’s the kittening point?

It really feels like they’ve just played with things, not knowing their full implication, then instead of reverting they just created more mechanics to counter that change… god, it’s just plain dumb.

In the end you still want 2 guardians for stability per frontline group. Now you want 1 rev for resistance per group (the only real change, war=rev), where you used to want condi cleanses. Then you have Water fields (the same) and well/damage field bombs (the same).

I’m just failing to see the effective difference in the meta from back when I loved WvW before and what we have now. It’s in simply changed from GWEN to GREN, which is just… why?

But then I realize why, these changes weren’t done in any regard for WvW and the changes back towards it again werent’ done for WvW but in effect ‘fixing’ WvW to get back to the status quo it was once at.

I don’t know, I just look at the history of WvW that I missed and laugh because it overall made little to no difference in how it’s played today vs before these things. So I guess thank you sPvP for taking a solid system and making it a convoluted system with the same result.

Jerus.4350:

Nuzt.7894:

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

Quickness isn’t the only boon that needs addressing.

Resistance, stability and protection are also very overpowered when shared.

Stability? Really?
Why don’t we just back to the Pirate Ship meta that was sooooo exciting half the population left.

This is one thing I find funny. I quit playing about the time the Pirate Ship meta came into being. I didn’t play much of it, and I didn’t quit because of it, but I knew and experienced some of it. I quit for 8-9 months, came back, and it honestly feels much the same overall. I laugh because it seems like they made WvW overly convoluted just to create a similar result. It’s pretty significant that they then nerfed that stability change to not allow further interrupts for a short term. In the end though it feels much the same, WvW bursts things, that’s kind fo the playstile in a nutshell, burst heals, burst damage, burst boons. But, with that change to Stability stacking and usage, well you have an almost identical play style. So waht’s the kittening point?

It really feels like they’ve just played with things, not knowing their full implication, then instead of reverting they just created more mechanics to counter that change… god, it’s just plain dumb.

In the end you still want 2 guardians for stability per frontline group. Now you want 1 rev for resistance per group (the only real change, war=rev), where you used to want condi cleanses. Then you have Water fields (the same) and well/damage field bombs (the same).

I’m just failing to see the effective difference in the meta from back when I loved WvW before and what we have now. It’s in simply changed from GWEN to GREN, which is just… why?

But then I realize why, these changes weren’t done in any regard for WvW and the changes back towards it again werent’ done for WvW but in effect ‘fixing’ WvW to get back to the status quo it was once at.

I don’t know, I just look at the history of WvW that I missed and laugh because it overall made little to no difference in how it’s played today vs before these things. So I guess thank you sPvP for taking a solid system and making it a convoluted system with the same result.

I feel like Anet needs to go back and fix builds across the board. Power creep has definitely affected WvW, and things just simply need to be nerfed. Groups were a lot squishier back then but it was fine because skilled groups could sustain even when massively outnumbered. Currently it’s almost impossible to kill larger groups because of mechanics like damage reduction and resistance.

I’m looping back in my $.02 for Anet to take a concrete look at this and develop some possible avenues we can travel down. Again, we aren’t asking to stop global warming just to stop one iceberg from melting.

lol

MrFluffy.9307:

Jerus.4350:

Nuzt.7894:

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

Quickness isn’t the only boon that needs addressing.

Resistance, stability and protection are also very overpowered when shared.

Stability? Really?
Why don’t we just back to the Pirate Ship meta that was sooooo exciting half the population left.

This is one thing I find funny. I quit playing about the time the Pirate Ship meta came into being. I didn’t play much of it, and I didn’t quit because of it, but I knew and experienced some of it. I quit for 8-9 months, came back, and it honestly feels much the same overall. I laugh because it seems like they made WvW overly convoluted just to create a similar result. It’s pretty significant that they then nerfed that stability change to not allow further interrupts for a short term. In the end though it feels much the same, WvW bursts things, that’s kind fo the playstile in a nutshell, burst heals, burst damage, burst boons. But, with that change to Stability stacking and usage, well you have an almost identical play style. So waht’s the kittening point?

It really feels like they’ve just played with things, not knowing their full implication, then instead of reverting they just created more mechanics to counter that change… god, it’s just plain dumb.

In the end you still want 2 guardians for stability per frontline group. Now you want 1 rev for resistance per group (the only real change, war=rev), where you used to want condi cleanses. Then you have Water fields (the same) and well/damage field bombs (the same).

I’m just failing to see the effective difference in the meta from back when I loved WvW before and what we have now. It’s in simply changed from GWEN to GREN, which is just… why?

But then I realize why, these changes weren’t done in any regard for WvW and the changes back towards it again werent’ done for WvW but in effect ‘fixing’ WvW to get back to the status quo it was once at.

I don’t know, I just look at the history of WvW that I missed and laugh because it overall made little to no difference in how it’s played today vs before these things. So I guess thank you sPvP for taking a solid system and making it a convoluted system with the same result.

I feel like Anet needs to go back and fix builds across the board. Power creep has definitely affected WvW, and things just simply need to be nerfed. Groups were a lot squishier back then but it was fine because skilled groups could sustain even when massively outnumbered. Currently it’s almost impossible to kill larger groups because of mechanics like damage reduction and resistance.

Power creep is insane, I was worried before the expansion seeing some of the stuff, but seeing it in game now, just… wow.

But, I’ve still seen 20-30 man groups take down 50+man blobs when the smaller group is organized and the larger one isn’t. It just takes a lot more to do it, you have to utilize the power creep. That small force comes in booned to the teeth, drops bombs on the large group taking out a large chunk of their numbers then pulls out with superspeed to avoid the retaliatory bomb. Drop water fields and regroup, and push again to take out a few more, rinse and repeat.

It just feels the same, but with different tools. A convoluted mess to get the same result.

Jerus.4350:

But, I’ve still seen 20-30 man groups take down 50+man blobs when the smaller group is organized and the larger one isn’t.

idk man I see a lot of groups claim that, but when you watch their vids it turns out they had 20-30 in squad but were running with like 10-20 green names against a group of similar size.

MrFluffy.9307:

Jerus.4350:

But, I’ve still seen 20-30 man groups take down 50+man blobs when the smaller group is organized and the larger one isn’t.

idk man I see a lot of groups claim that, but when you watch their vids it turns out they had 20-30 in squad but were running with like 10-20 green names against a group of similar size.

I hear you, and you’re right, it usually is. I’m thinking of a few incidents specifically. The first was embarrassing because I was in the large group and we got taken out by a much smaller guild group because we apparently sucked.

The next was a few weeks back, a little before the normal prime time we try to defend WC, squad of a dozen forms up in TS and there were probably half a dozen additional green names, but we kited this much larger force around that tower and eventually wiped them. Pretty sure everyone involved didn’t believe what had just happened, but it did.

Then a couple times we’ve gone up against what are obviously pug blobs (you can see the disorganization) and taken them out with 20-30man squads (probably a few green names too you’re right but I doubt more than 5)

Either way, I’m not saying a great 20-30 man force can beat a half decent 50+, just that the 50+ have to be at least half decent and can’t just be a full blob of rally bait. But, that’s how I remember it being before as well.

Nuzt.7894:

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

Quickness isn’t the only boon that needs addressing.

Resistance, stability and protection are also very overpowered when shared.

Stability? Really?
Why don’t we just back to the Pirate Ship meta that was sooooo exciting half the population left.

No, I would prefer they revert stability to the way it worked previously.

Stab really isn’t the focus of this thread, folks.

Teej.9241:

Stab really isn’t the focus of this thread, folks.

Not true.

You said:

Teej.9241:

I can deal with all the other boons, even resistance is annoying but not a huge deal, but Quickness just seems like way too strong of a boon to be able to stack that high of a duration.

So I’m disagreeing with you that quickness is the main problem.

It’s boon sharing in general that is the problem not just quickness sharing.

So stability and other boons are just as on topic as quickness.