Guild Wars 2

Greetings.

My favorite character is a minion necromancer. My build provides me with above average bruiser capabilities and exceptional damage is extremely specific situations – for example, I’ve had Germans desperately playing around with online translators to ask how I get that gate controller in CoF path 1 down near instantly.

Regardless of what I think of my necromancer though, pure zerkers are clearly more efficient at clearing dungeons and fractals both. In my endless grinding of dungeons, I’ve landed up playing a full zerker warrior . The full zerker approach shaves minutes off of every run as well as helping me clear bosses before the less “experienced” grinders can succumb to silly mistakes.

So how does one promote different builds when your 3 stat equipment can be piled completely into straight up damage potential – in a game where defensive capabilities either don’t matter or don’t scale off stats? Simple. Simple yet brutal. We should never have been allowed to obtain equipment dedicated to [Power, Precision and Ferocity]. The number of stats dedicated to straight up damage should have been 2. At most, [Power and Precision] or [Precision and Power] plus one of those other “undesirable stats”.

How does this help? Well the exceedingly obvious answer is that if full bezerker builds don’t exist, the bezerker build is no longer the most powerful in game. kitten .

Looking a bit more in depth, the ability to doll our extreme amounts of damage nullifies the mechanics of nearly every boss fight. By decreasing the absolute speed at which bosses can be burst down, you force parties to engage with those mechanics for longer – and thus prolong the period of time in which stats like boon duration, condition, healing and defense are useful.

Lastly, if only two stats can be put into damage, you are forcing people to use a third of their stats in a more creative way. Everyone in your party is going to have maxed Power and Precision, as each of you has a third stat which isn’t damage related, each of you are forced to think of what unique benefit you want to bring to the table with that third stat. Full knight gear for your warrior? Fair enough, but will that really increase your party’s clear time over dedicating that third stat to healing, conditions or boons?

To achieve this, I’d suggest allowing equipment stat combinations including the illusive “Boon Duration” and “Condition Duration” into circulation. You’d have to replace the Beserker stats [Power, precision, ferocity] and the Assasin stats [Precision, Power, Ferocity] with combinations like [Power, precision, Boon Duration] and [Precision, Power, Condition Duration]. The Rampager stats [Power, Precision, Condition Damage] are fine in my personal opinion as weapons which do Condition damage suffer a loss to normal damage anyway – plus the lunacy of Condition caps on enemies renders 5 Rampager parties pointless.

The last change to enforce this mindset would be replacing Ferocity with a “Magic Duration” effect. Admittedly if you can’t major in power, precision and ferocity at the same time, ferocity becomes an exceeding weak stat – useful only in specific builds which can force continual crit procs. Precision would have to include a secondary effect of slowly increasing critical damage, making main Precision builds have higher crit damage the main Power builds . Talking of “Magic Duration” this new stat would be tied to the duration of all effects “magical”. What is a magical effect? Any ability which counts as a magic buff or has a timer not tied to condition or boon duration. This stat should thus control the duration of “Reflect walls”, “Time warps” and “Absorption bubbles” as well as increasing the length of circles that various classes put on the ground. For the ground circles, this should be a straight up buff, defensive reflect skills like “Reflection walls” however should not last nearly as long without a character actively speccing into it – but possibly 50% longer if your prime stat is dedicated to “Magic Duration”. You want 2 Guardians in a fractal to reflect all incoming projectiles? Fine, but they should be forced to dedicate a third of their stat points to achieve that effect.

These changes would be brutal, the masses would feel robbed. I feel it is too late to make these changes anyway. That said, I like theorizing on this sort of thing. If you’ve read this far and can get over the revulsion of having your ascended zerker gear taken from you, I’d like to know if you think this would increase build diversity and allow game developers to build a wider variety of boss encounter mechanics. If you don’t think this would work, I’d like to know why as well ^^

Although it is appreciable that a lot of people think about these things, what is overlooked here is that the zerk gear mentality isn’t a GW2 community demand. It’s a community response to what is missing; solid mob AI that synergise themselves appropriately to produce the sorts of encounters that require mixed or more defensive gear. Rather than nerfing the gear, the AI needs improving (difficult ask, but it is what it is) to the point that penalises reliance on zerk gear. This isn’t to say, “moar mob hp!”, but better mob mechanics.

OP, here is what will happen:

1. People will be angry their gear was basically removed
2. People will find the next highest DPS option(s)
3. People will follow the new meta
4. No “varied playstyles”, just a meta like there has and always will be

Please, i won’t have money to craft my zealot ascended set. Ok, so wor lasts half the time, meaning you need to go full dps before it ends. The meta is still about max damage, dungeons take a bit longer. Now you’re forced to take 3 eles at least to compensate that lack of damage with fgs. Result: lfg will be “ping gear, zealot meta build only”, ele will dominate even more, halving boon duration will make offensive buffer class mandatory, so no necros or anything with less dps than a conjure ele. Yay.

Boon duration and Magic duration would be the only viable options in the situations where zerker is king. Condition issues you already acknowledged so I won’t go into it. Boon duration could be interested in niche situations, but, are they willing to give us something htat powerful? they just nerfed the boon duration rune sets.

Magic duration sounds downright overpowered, longer time warps and longer reflect walls… pretty amazing if you ask me.

I have a feeling you’d just be swapping the current meta of Zerker/Sin gear for a meta of Magic duration/boon duration.

Don’t feel like it’d give us any more variety.

@Azrael: Better AI, always good. The flanking Mordred Wolves introduced in the last two releases shows its possible. I’ve been grinding Sorrow’s Embrace and if Dredge bombers were given the AI to back off a few meters from their targets, to AoE locations which would hit enemies not in Line-of-sight (or even to keep chasing the intruders no matter how far they ran), then the dungeon would be much healthier.

The problem with trying to introduce situations where more tanky stats are necessary is that I can’t think of a single situation where non-zerker classes would not suffer them worse then zerker characters. Zerkers can kill the source of damage quicker, therefor they take less damage. Without dedicated healers its very hard to balance these situations so the right people suffer.

Also, while I hope they do come up with mechanics to discourage full zerker approaches, the approach seems akin to trying to treat symptoms instead of causes. Anet has introduced some novel ways to deal with Zerkers recently (Teq being a structure, Clockwork sentinel’s condition shield) and some simple boss mechanics would be possible to punish people for stacking. Still, this seems to narrow the job of developers to developing a set of scenarios which would punish zerkers instead of developing as varied a range of scenarios as possible – which I i find disheartening.

@Maha: I agree that the faceless masses will always gravitate to the most OP build to come up in a google search (My warrior would be a near decent example of this). Two things though:

1) Without triple damage equipment, I believe the gap between the most OP builds and viable party builds will be much smaller then they are currently. I guarantee that maxing Power and Crit will still provide the most damage, what to dump into the third stat though will likely differ from build to abilities to weapon.

2) “FULLZERK” is so wide spread because its easy for pugs to muster. If 5 different specific builds are required to achieve top meta (each with a different class) then they will not be viable in pug groups. Currently we have “Zerk warrior or WE KICK”, if the required LFG message is “Knight Warrior, Magi Guardian, Boon Engineer, Assassin Hunter and 1 Bezerker Elementalist or WE KICK” it will never even show up in the lfg finder.

Will a new preferred meta emerge for organised guild parties? Possibly. Without Assassin and Bezerker gear though I truly believe there will be far more experimentation for optimization per specific dungeon instance.

@oxtred: Halving Boon duration would be bad, I dont think I said that. I was talking about non-boon spells like “Reflect” being shortened if not stated into. Boon durations could actually increase dramatically if people were able to spec fully into boon duration. Dungeons will take longer, FGS will probably do less damage (not sure how it’s damage mechanics are calculated), I’m not sure that this will make necromancers obsolete though – we provide odd things to longer fights, efficiently ^^

@Jerus: Let me start with Magic Duration being overpowered. This is a matter of balance. If you specced fully into Magic duration you losing an entire stat slot for it – a hefty price. If your zerker guardian uses his third slot for prolonging “Reflect”, he is going to be extremely squishy during the longer boss fights. If your Guardian is more cleric oriented, which of it’s 3 stats can it sacrifice for “Magic Duration”: Power, Healing or Toughness? An Auto-downed melee Guardian isn’t that useful after all.

Even a mesmer with a +50% duration Time warp. Time warp used to increase attack speed by 100% instead of 50%, you back to 75% of the original efficiency. You now getting about 17 seconds of +50% speed boost instead of 11 seconds – this once per 2 consecutive boss fights tricks has depleted a third of your mesmer’s stats, you sure its worth it?

I’ll concede that fully specced “Magic Duration” giving +50% duration may be overpowered. Someone with math would need to calculate how much shorter reflect walls should be without it (as this is the purpose of this stat, making people pay for the epic utility of non-scaling reflect stuff) and how much longer reflect walls should be with Magic Duration fully specced.

As to Boon Duration being the other only viable option, note that if everyone is providng the same boons you going to run into the same problem as conditions. If an elementalist can provide a constant 25 stacks of might, having another 2 characters providing extra might is wasted stats. I’ve seen warriors getting shouted at for specking into Phallanx. Without knowing if your next group will prefer a warrior booner or a Warrior zealot, who knows what ascended gear each warrior will lock themselves into?

@All: These are all valid points. I think many people have forgotten what dungeon bosses can be like without the use of full zerker parties or line-of-sight exploitation though. Stacking only works until a point, after that point the idea of zerking breaks down completely. Hard bosses are still a dps race between the zerker parties and the boss. The moment your zerk is not sufficient to kill the boss quickly, you forced to dance to the tune of mechanics. Pure healing builds are strong in stacks, the moment you forced to break that stack, the healing you receive is not enough to continue fighting on indefinitely. Trade offs have to be made between durability, damage and utility. In the abscense of full zerker gear, i do believe these trade offs with become more meaningful with far more varied responses.

People don’t run zerker because zerker is inherently the most fun. People run zerker because of Anet’s abysmal gold generation design and content releases. We get 2 new dungeons in 2 years, fractal and aetherpath. Both offer no benefit over the old easy explorables for making money, and are in fact quite significantly slower money even though they are significantly harder and significantly longer. In a game with no other focus besides economics and cosmetics as progression, this doesn’t fly with the seeming majority of players. We need a steady schedule of new explorables that don’t have intense mechanics checks and have a reasonable length and pay out for the zerk drama to go away. You can tune the stats a thousand times, you still wont change the mentality behind the need for those stats. If you address the problem of all the gold being in the old stale content you don’t need band aid stat fixes.

Indeed, everything will do less damage. So the only way to compensate that will be stacking the highest damaging class, and luckily enough eles are also the best offensive buffers even without boon duration, and they have access to projectile defense with focus air 4. Your last point about full berserker denying some bosses abilities makes me wonder about solos : When i solo any boss/dungeon in my full berserker gear, i clearly have to face the mechanics. People didn’t forget what it’s like to fight a boss for forever, they just developed a strat where all that difficulty is put into the shortest time possible: one mistake and you’re dead, no mistakes and it’s dead, to put it simply. What i meant by halving boon duration is, making a gear set mandatory to support ( Power/prec/ Boon duration/ reflect/anything duration) would further lock people into a role. For speedruns, we’ll use the second best damaging set, so anything with power/prec/ and then condi damage if that’s the only thing we can take. No matter how you put it, gw2 dungeons ( speaking mainly of speedruns and records here) will be a dps race. Having a 5 berserker party or a 5 power/prec/ something party will just lower the time by something around 50% ( random number here), and lock a certain comp. Pugs don’t care about max dps comp for now, since it’s mainly for records or fast runs, but if you lower the overall damage, class discrimination will be stronger, imo.
Personal opinion here but i really like the fact that support isn’t tied to your gear in gw2, my guardian boosts the survivability of my team by a lot, and i still contribute to the group damage, i don’t want that to change and be a healbot while the tank uses a taunt skill and gather the mobs so our dps aoe cleave them down. Also, it wouldn’t be fair for berserker users, they have to be extra careful to not be one shotted, they can’t really do a no dodge arah run, it’s only fair to gain time over people stacking personal stats.

I think you underestimate the degree in which people have mastered the content. Bosses have decent tells and people know what to do. I’d suggest looking up some of the solos people have done, that’s sacrificing roughly 80% of the groups damage. I really doubt people would feel the need to go with anything other than the new current highest damage, especially considering your idea is just getting rid of most of the effect of ferocity.

I’m curouis what bosses you think are just a DPS race? I can think of one that we approach that way and it’s Frost, but we only do it that way because we know we can win. I have no doubt we could come up with more well thought out strategies if that ever broke down. Spider Queen is another we DPS race, but again only because we can, she’s quite easy in the middle of the room as well, I suggest you look up Wethospu’s man mode kill if you haven’t ever seen it.

I’m actually not against nerfing Zerk gear, I think some fights being longer could be nice, and I think decreasing the difference between it and other gear would be a good thing. But I just think that the meta will always be whatever is the highest damage, and htat’s what people will want at the high end, and it’s just a natural thing. I feel that people who oppose it are just being silly. It’s been that way in every game I’ve played, you eventually cap out on the need for defense and utility, but you never have too much damage, at least not really (you’d have to have so much damage that some people never get the chance to attack because it dies too quickly).

Yet another attempt to solve a people issue with a game mechanics solution. The real question that should be asked is, “Is the berserker prefix better than other prefixes.” Since the answer is not an unequivocal, “Yes, in every situation.” then the answer is, “No, it isn’t better.”

There is nothing wrong with bulkier gear being used by those who prefer more survivability in WvW or sPvP, ergo there is nothing wrong with bulkier gear being used for the same purpose in PvE. What’s that you say? “The dungeons are too easy and this promotes only one play style?” They weren’t when we didn’t know the mobs’ moves in our sleep. They aren’t too easy for a lot of players who to this day participate in “anything goes” runs.

Destroying a build is not a way to increase build diversity. It will just move the meta to the next best build.

And it punishes players who play the build because they like it, not because it is meta.

It doesn’t matter what you change the meta to, people will still end up converging on the First Order Optimal Strategies, because alternate builds are usually either 1. not as efficient or 2. above an average player’s ability to use. Should specific bosses be weak to diff mechanics (for instance, epic rank bosses that cannot be critted always results in Soldier metas and super high defense targets like Champion Husks (triple wurm) always results in Dire/Rabid metas), it changes the meta for that one boss, but doesn’t increase diversity. It doesn’t change the fact that using that same Dire on Golem Mark II would be a horrendous idea, or that using a full berserker set on Tequatl melee is a horrendous idea. Varying bosses will increase the number of ascended/exotic sets people will need to hold, but doesn’t really change diversity in any given fight. If a dungeon has diff type bosses, players would simply swap gear between them.

Unless there are bosses that change their weaknesses and characteristics mid-fight, all you can do is move a meta to another meta, but the boredom of a meta existence will pretty much never disappear.

First let me say one thing: If you want to talk about removing offensive stats, at least make it only apply to your armor. Your weapon is meant to deal damage.

As for removing all offensive stats, that’s a pretty big deal. This means complete removal of +Power, +Precision, +Ferocity, +Condition Damage, +Condition Duration%. Looking at the list, I’m counting 22 stat combinations total, of which 20 have one of the aforementioned stats. You’d be left with just Nomad’s and Giver’s.

And yes, if you’re going to be removing offensive stats, you remove them all, not just the ones that you perceive to be a “problem”.

And no, that still wouldn’t fix anything. The new meta would be Giver’s, because Boon Duration% can be used to gain DPS via increasing uptime on Fury and Might.

Why should the difference between berserker and other sets be lower? Why should people be rewarded with similar clear times if they are stacking defensive stats? I’ve soloed lupicus in 4:58 in berserker and 5:11 in rabid gear. How is it fair that I can wear a gear stat which gives me like 3k armour and get a kill time on par with a gear stat that has no defensive stat?

maha.7902:

Why should the difference between berserker and other sets be lower? Why should people be rewarded with similar clear times if they are stacking defensive stats? I’ve soloed lupicus in 4:58 in berserker and 5:11 in rabid gear. How is it fair that I can wear a gear stat which gives me like 3k armour and get a kill time on par with a gear stat that has no defensive stat?

Conditions don’t translate well to the group game… 5 rabid vs 5 zerker what’s the difference?

As to the rest, well, there’s no good fair reason. I just think those using defensive gear could obviously use the help and maybe it’d get them off our backs if they didn’t feel at such a loss. of course that would cause issues in WvW. And I’m not really advocating any change as much as saying my personal opinion is that.

“Change the game and force people to play my way because I feel I’m right and others are wrong”.
“I enjoy playing a certain way so people shouldn’t be allowed to play in any other way”.

Do you realize people have put time and effort into their gear?
Do you realize that people don’t want longer and more tedious runs?
Do you realize that nobody is stopping you from playing your necromancer and/or other classes and enjoying them any way you like?

Do you realize that it’s completely against what they’re doing with the game to take zerker out?
Zerker is full offensive? Wow – great.
They’ve put NOMAD gear in the game – which is full defensive – 3 stats in a full defense direction.
I doubt your hypothesis of “3 stats in one direction isn’t something good” is correct since the game devs are going in a completely different direction.

Also I like the word “enforce”.
Currently nobody is forcing anyone into any gear set to be able to complete content in GW2. Why would we change that? Anyone can play whatever they like with similar people and that’s it.
You don’t need to force anyone into anything.

There’s already a meta.
Take zerker out? Congratulations – you’ve invented the Knight’s/Cavalier/Valkyre meta ( whichever one ends up dealing most dps) for power users.

Nothing will change – efficient players will still enforce gear checks and ask for builds.

2) “FULLZERK” is so wide spread because its easy for pugs to muster. If 5 different specific builds are required to achieve top meta (each with a different class) then they will not be viable in pug groups. Currently we have “Zerk warrior or WE KICK”, if the required LFG message is “Knight Warrior, Magi Guardian, Boon Engineer, Assassin Hunter and 1 Bezerker Elementalist or WE KICK” it will never even show up in the lfg finder.

Congratulations on this splendid idea – now every class can be forced into a gear set/role in which they perform “best”.
Superb, ideal variety right there.

I thought it would be relevant as an example rather than purely speaking in hypotheticals – what the OP wants already exists to an extent (berserker vs. rabid soloing) and it’s kind of dumb that you can stack toughness and deal damage equivalent to a glass cannon. People using defensive gear already get help – they can miss dodges and not lose a large chunk of their hp (look up no dodge arah p2). Here’s the reality – if you want to do damage, trait and gear for it. You should not be allowed to trait and gear tanky and have dps on par with glass cannons, the whole idea of that is insane and throws risk/reward in the trash can since it just wouldn’t exist.

Gerrand.3085:

@All: These are all valid points. I think many people have forgotten what dungeon bosses can be like without the use of full zerker parties or line-of-sight exploitation though. Stacking only works until a point, after that point the idea of zerking breaks down completely. Hard bosses are still a dps race between the zerker parties and the boss. The moment your zerk is not sufficient to kill the boss quickly, you forced to dance to the tune of mechanics. Pure healing builds are strong in stacks, the moment you forced to break that stack, the healing you receive is not enough to continue fighting on indefinitely. Trade offs have to be made between durability, damage and utility. In the abscense of full zerker gear, i do believe these trade offs with become more meaningful with far more varied responses.

I think you fail to realize that the majority of players doing dungeons don’t care what bosses used to be like.
I don’t think they care about the boss fight or the dungeon at all – they care about the reward.

I’ve been running dungeons daily – for a long time – why? For the rewards.
The vast majority of players off the LFG I’ve run with do it for the rewards. My friends and guildies do it for the rewards.

If you think people do dungeons for the challenging experience of a nifty boss fight you’re wrong.
You’ll want to do that once/twice and never touch it again.

You mention varied responses – but you have to realize the responses coming from the player base would be responses coming from players who do content primarily for the rewards.
The response would be :

1)Identify what gear set produces best results now that zerker has been removed.
2)Begin using that gear and enforce its use establishing a new meta.
3)Repeat the same content endlessly for the gold/tokens/whatnots you were doing it for in the first place.

maha.7902:

I thought it would be relevant as an example rather than purely speaking in hypotheticals – what the OP wants already exists to an extent (berserker vs. rabid soloing) and it’s kind of dumb that you can stack toughness and deal damage equivalent to a glass cannon. People using defensive gear already get help – they can miss dodges and not lose a large chunk of their hp (look up no dodge arah p2). Here’s the reality – if you want to do damage, trait and gear for it. You should not be allowed to trait and gear tanky and have dps on par with glass cannons, the whole idea of that is insane and throws risk/reward in the trash can since it just wouldn’t exist.

Not really interested in argueing about it, but I gotta say something

Is comparing a niche situation of warrior solo vs warrior solo really enough to say rabid vs zerker is a small difference in damage?What about for guardian vs guardian solo? 5man team vs 5 man team?

And I’m not saying on par with glass cannons, just IMO it wouldn’t hurt to reduce the gap a bit.

Thanks to guys like you I’ve gone full zerk (a while ago) and it just seems kinda silly to even think about going back to my soldier set in most situations it just isn’t worth the damage loss. Maybe one person in a group who’s learning or if you’re doing some interesting tactics with toughness pulling agro or something, but in general it just doesn’t seem worthwhile.

Azrael.4960:

Although it is appreciable that a lot of people think about these things, what is overlooked here is that the zerk gear mentality isn’t a GW2 community demand. It’s a community response to what is missing; solid mob AI that synergise themselves appropriately to produce the sorts of encounters that require mixed or more defensive gear. Rather than nerfing the gear, the AI needs improving (difficult ask, but it is what it is) to the point that penalises reliance on zerk gear. This isn’t to say, “moar mob hp!”, but better mob mechanics.

I was going to say this, but then this person already did it for me. Thank you, kind sir.

Won’t solve much. The most efficient way will still be stack with the highest dps gear (will just take people a day to figure out the new best stat combos) and the core of the problem will not be resolved. It’s the fact that AI in this game is just… bad…

Well, I managed to achieve universal disapproval. Delivered in great detail. Yay me.

I’ll start off with things said against me which are correct:

- Denying people hard earned Zerker gear is unfair. I agree, I said it would be unfair to take this gear way from anyone and so it would be too late to try something like this anyway.

- Dungeons being solo-able. Yes. This is not an area I know in detail and I’m assuming everything people have said about this (against my idea) is correct. Most MMO dungeons require some level of mastery to beat, GW2 is odd in that with enough mastery you can negate the need for any defensive stuff. There is probably a competency curve in what most people are capable of – and I assume that soloing dungeons without exploiting really dubious mechanic deficiencies is above most people. What level one should set the bar at is probably a matter of personal opinion.

- People don’t care about the boss fights, they care about the rewards. Correct. In most other MMO’s I’ve played though, there was a certain amount of prestige attatched to equipment obtained from really hard boss fights. Though in this game the trade house and buying completed dungeons probably mitigate that sense of achievement anyway.

Then the things I found funny:
- Olba’s claim that by my logic all offensive stats should be removed. The scenario I was proposing would render ferocity an extremely weak stat. This was a discrepancy between how I would see things working and the game as it is – an issue with my own plan I was trying to point out. By all means leave it in, and then dont use it.

- Olba saying the new meta would definitely be Givers while Harper stated it would be either Knight’s, Cavalier or Valkyre. I like the debate, its what I was hoping a change like this would be able to achieve.

- The idea that removing Beserker and Assassin would force everyone into support roles. Someone stated that there are tanky builds which give bonuses damage. I know that necromancers have traits that give a percentage of toughness to power – and that identical trait exists on other classes. Just because you not a beserker, doesn’t mean you being forced into a stat combination which renders you a support.

- The idea that support builds would somehow be doing the same damage as glass cannon builds. I promise you that stating into healing will still provide less damage then stating into “magic duration” or some secondary stat that synergies into damage. The difference comes in with what skills you choose, whether they are self serving or party serving, nothing more.

Going to finish off with the first half of Hayashi’s post because that was at the core of what I was trying to tackle when I made this post. People gravitate to the most efficient builds and the builds which aren’t too complicated to use. GW2 is a very movement oriented MMO. Most MMOs I’ve played forced mages to stand still while casting spells, not hop over shock waves or golf with holographic pirates. Different people find different types of combat easier to approach. In this situation I feel that killing things should come down to personal style over gear builds. I guarantee that people who can master more complex rotations will always deal more damage, people who master the mechanics of bosses will also deal more damage.

The ends of this exercise was not nerfing damage potential, it was to decrease the gap between the different ways of dealing damage so that all would be as viable. Someone stated that this game is about cosmetics and economics. If some builds clear events much slower then others, I believe they’ve been rendered economically unviable – which is a problem when all that’s left to an intent PvE player is grinding for stuff.

Everything is already viable, just not optimal. The gap between damage output on gear stats does not need to be decreased. If you have trouble dodging or want to RP as a tank/healer you shouldn’t have damage even close to a glass cannon, you should have to gear and trait ‘properly’ if you want to output good dps otherwise there is no risk/reward.

maha.7902:

Everything is already viable, just not optimal. The gap between damage output on gear stats does not need to be decreased. If you have trouble dodging or want to RP as a tank/healer you shouldn’t have damage even close to a glass cannon, you should have to gear and trait ‘properly’ if you want to output good dps otherwise there is no risk/reward.

Unfortunately being viable in this game just isn’t enough in party gameplay, thanks to the game’s community. The only way non-meta players get slots in parties in this game is if they’re lucky or make their own party (And even then I’ve heard of party leaders being kicked from their own runs for not adhering to the meta), and the community doesn’t even let them take pride in their build. They only care if they “think” your build is useful to them.

Given the style of boss fights so far in LS2, i think ANet has gone from ignoring the issue to pretty much building for zerker only.

Just about every major battle so far have had stages that either involve stopping a mob before it resets your progress on the big bad, or knock over a bunch of mobs to get the big bad back on the field, while the big bad spams AOEs everywhere that will tear a new one on even the tankiest of builds.

The fights felt like i was playing DMC or Ninja Gaiden, not a MMORPG.

Dual.8953:

maha.7902:

Everything is already viable, just not optimal. The gap between damage output on gear stats does not need to be decreased. If you have trouble dodging or want to RP as a tank/healer you shouldn’t have damage even close to a glass cannon, you should have to gear and trait ‘properly’ if you want to output good dps otherwise there is no risk/reward.

Unfortunately being viable in this game just isn’t enough in party gameplay, thanks to the game’s community. The only way non-meta players get slots in parties in this game is if they’re lucky or make their own party (And even then I’ve heard of party leaders being kicked from their own runs for not adhering to the meta), and the community doesn’t even let them take pride in their build. They only care if they “think” your build is useful to them.

And guess how meta players get slots? Making their own parties.

Do you think “zerk only ping gear” lfgs just appear by mandate of god or something? Of course not.

Anet should add a new stat: critical damage reduction. With a hard cap, of course.

Interesting discussion. But I believe you are overthinking it.
The problem atm is, that defensive stats dont matter. They may let you take a hit or two more, but you do siginificantly less damage.

Of course, improving AI and making fights more interesting by introducing more mobs-skills/moves is always a good thing, but this wont happen. Lets face it. Its too much work.

The solution could be a lot simpler. Increase player damage/defense scaling, lower both base attack and defense. Also increase defence effectiveness overall.

You wont do much more damage than you do now with full zerker, but take a much larger beating due to the naturally lower base defense. Your attack stays the same due to lower base attack but better scaling.
Now if you go defensive, you’d deal significantly less damage but can take 10 times the beating you can now with full defense gear.

Basically running full zerker remains with same damage output as it is now but it would be atleast 3 times more risky, you’d even risk getting oneshotted by a few attacks.
Going 100% defensive you’d be able to face tank an average dungeon elite for a good 30 seconds without dropping under 80% HP. It takes you 3 times as long to kill a mob compared to your zerker friend though.

It would certainly open things up for more build diverstiy and maybe even other weaponsets.
In example Warrior mace+shield for extra blocks but with full zerker gear to deal decent damage.

maha.7902:

Dual.8953:

maha.7902:

Everything is already viable, just not optimal. The gap between damage output on gear stats does not need to be decreased. If you have trouble dodging or want to RP as a tank/healer you shouldn’t have damage even close to a glass cannon, you should have to gear and trait ‘properly’ if you want to output good dps otherwise there is no risk/reward.

Unfortunately being viable in this game just isn’t enough in party gameplay, thanks to the game’s community. The only way non-meta players get slots in parties in this game is if they’re lucky or make their own party (And even then I’ve heard of party leaders being kicked from their own runs for not adhering to the meta), and the community doesn’t even let them take pride in their build. They only care if they “think” your build is useful to them.

And guess how meta players get slots? Making their own parties.

Do you think “zerk only ping gear” lfgs just appear by mandate of god or something? Of course not.

The difference is Meta built players are allowed virtually everywhere. No Zerk allowed parties are practically non-existant. Zerk only parties are dime a dozen.
Unmarked parties can even be assumed to be zerk parties.

Dual.8953:

maha.7902:

Everything is already viable, just not optimal. The gap between damage output on gear stats does not need to be decreased. If you have trouble dodging or want to RP as a tank/healer you shouldn’t have damage even close to a glass cannon, you should have to gear and trait ‘properly’ if you want to output good dps otherwise there is no risk/reward.

Unfortunately being viable in this game just isn’t enough in party gameplay, thanks to the game’s community. The only way non-meta players get slots in parties in this game is if they’re lucky or make their own party (And even then I’ve heard of party leaders being kicked from their own runs for not adhering to the meta), and the community doesn’t even let them take pride in their build. They only care if they “think” your build is useful to them.

The problem with OP’s post and people who think similarly is that under the guise of being “viable” they actually want to be closer to optimal without putting in as much time and effort as the people who run highly optimized builds.

They want the game to change so builds they like or feel are cool are closer to what is top notch efficiency which in my opinion is plain wrong.

If you can complete the content your build is viable.

Non-meta players find slots if they make their own parties because those parties are aimed at similar people : other non-meta players.

Meta players make parties for other meta players. Of course I’m not going to want to play with a non-meta player if I’m a meta player.
People want to play with similar people. There’s nothing wrong with that.

In a game where time is money there’s no pride to be taken in a build that’s slow. That’s just plain and simple.

For meta players all that matters is how fast you get your rewards. Nobody cares about anything else – you could have a superbly theoricrafted build that does all sorts of whatnots and gimmicks but at the end of the day if it doesn’t get rewards fast what’s there to be proud about?

Dual.8953:

maha.7902:

Dual.8953:

maha.7902:

Everything is already viable, just not optimal. The gap between damage output on gear stats does not need to be decreased. If you have trouble dodging or want to RP as a tank/healer you shouldn’t have damage even close to a glass cannon, you should have to gear and trait ‘properly’ if you want to output good dps otherwise there is no risk/reward.

Unfortunately being viable in this game just isn’t enough in party gameplay, thanks to the game’s community. The only way non-meta players get slots in parties in this game is if they’re lucky or make their own party (And even then I’ve heard of party leaders being kicked from their own runs for not adhering to the meta), and the community doesn’t even let them take pride in their build. They only care if they “think” your build is useful to them.

And guess how meta players get slots? Making their own parties.

Do you think “zerk only ping gear” lfgs just appear by mandate of god or something? Of course not.

The difference is Meta built players are allowed virtually everywhere. No Zerk allowed parties are practically non-existant. Zerk only parties are dime a dozen.
Unmarked parties can even be assumed to be zerk parties.

Because there are more people who care and adhere to the meta then those who are “non-meta”.
Do you really want to rework the game to favor a minority?

I’ve seen plenty of non-meta parties, I don’t really think it’s as bad as you make it seem.

Let me put it this way:

1) Dungeon content after roughly two runs is predictable and easy. Everyone knows what parts to skip and how to most efficiently pull off the rest, and content plays exactly the same from run to run, meaning that it’s pretty simple to literally make everything go as planned.

2) The meta is and always will be what clears content the fastest, especially with repeated content. Anyone with item goals will try to optimize to find the way to get rewards as soon as possible.

3) Because content is predictable, the meta becomes simply to run whatever deals the most damage. While with challenging and unpredictable dungeons this is not the case (you run dungeons slower if you wipe every three seconds), glass cannons become the norm when you have no reason to spec into survivability.

4) Healing power sucks horribly, which pretty much makes all support ever irrelevant outside of boons, and you don’t need stats for those so you still run full zerker. Part of this is that damage, critical chance, and critical damage have multiplicative synergy, which healing power, toughness, and vitality do not. That is to say, healing power and vitality don’t have any synergy at all. While toughness and vitality do have multiplicative synergy, this becomes irrelevant when conditions are considered, which still makes the synergy worse than PPF.

Some of this could be solved by making boons scale with healing power, while reducing their minimum and increasing their maximum effectiveness, but the meta would simply become one character have maxed healing power and secondary power, precision, and ferocity, while the rest are still zerker.

Removing zerker would just make the meta some other max damage potential mix, which someone would take five minutes to optimize and everyone would immediately switch over their gear to that.

Dual.8953:

maha.7902:

Dual.8953:

maha.7902:

Everything is already viable, just not optimal. The gap between damage output on gear stats does not need to be decreased. If you have trouble dodging or want to RP as a tank/healer you shouldn’t have damage even close to a glass cannon, you should have to gear and trait ‘properly’ if you want to output good dps otherwise there is no risk/reward.

Unfortunately being viable in this game just isn’t enough in party gameplay, thanks to the game’s community. The only way non-meta players get slots in parties in this game is if they’re lucky or make their own party (And even then I’ve heard of party leaders being kicked from their own runs for not adhering to the meta), and the community doesn’t even let them take pride in their build. They only care if they “think” your build is useful to them.

And guess how meta players get slots? Making their own parties.

Do you think “zerk only ping gear” lfgs just appear by mandate of god or something? Of course not.

The difference is Meta built players are allowed virtually everywhere. No Zerk allowed parties are practically non-existant. Zerk only parties are dime a dozen.
Unmarked parties can even be assumed to be zerk parties.

How is a non-berserker user not being allowed in a berserker party a problem?

This is like saying (now I’m not saying meta = good, but bear with me …)

“The difference is good players are allowed virtually everywhere. Casual run parties are practically non-existent. Parties asking for good players are dime a dozen. Unmarked parties can even be assumed to be wanting good players”.

So of course players who play and gear for efficiency are allowed anywhere, and players who don’t aren’t allowed in efficiency-oriented parties. How is this even a problem? Isn’t incompatible players staying away from each other good? It prevents conflict. I don’t run condition warrior in “zerk only” groups, I just make nondescript lfgs and run it there.

Azrael.4960:

Although it is appreciable that a lot of people think about these things, what is overlooked here is that the zerk gear mentality isn’t a GW2 community demand. It’s a community response to what is missing; solid mob AI that synergise themselves appropriately to produce the sorts of encounters that require mixed or more defensive gear. Rather than nerfing the gear, the AI needs improving (difficult ask, but it is what it is) to the point that penalises reliance on zerk gear. This isn’t to say, “moar mob hp!”, but better mob mechanics.

This is literally what I’ve been saying since forever. Make dungeon mobs act like mobs in GW1 with player skills and dodge mechanics.

Dirame.8521:

Azrael.4960:

Although it is appreciable that a lot of people think about these things, what is overlooked here is that the zerk gear mentality isn’t a GW2 community demand. It’s a community response to what is missing; solid mob AI that synergise themselves appropriately to produce the sorts of encounters that require mixed or more defensive gear. Rather than nerfing the gear, the AI needs improving (difficult ask, but it is what it is) to the point that penalises reliance on zerk gear. This isn’t to say, “moar mob hp!”, but better mob mechanics.

This is literally what I’ve been saying since forever. Make dungeon mobs act like mobs in GW1 with player skills and dodge mechanics.

And watch as the casual masses flood the forums with complaints and take their money from the gem store elsewhere.

There’s a reason this game is pretty easy mode when it comes to content and that reason is they don’t want to alienate players that might not be so hardcore or invested to really improve themselves and master difficult content but who do invest regularly in gems on the gem store.

You can’t have your cake and eat it.

The best they can do is add more hardcore content on top of the casual-oriented content to try to keep the hardcore players happy too.

But they don’t really care about their hardcore-oriented players that much and there have been plenty of examples of that – I’ll just mention one :

Harper.4173:

Dirame.8521:

Azrael.4960:

Although it is appreciable that a lot of people think about these things, what is overlooked here is that the zerk gear mentality isn’t a GW2 community demand. It’s a community response to what is missing; solid mob AI that synergise themselves appropriately to produce the sorts of encounters that require mixed or more defensive gear. Rather than nerfing the gear, the AI needs improving (difficult ask, but it is what it is) to the point that penalises reliance on zerk gear. This isn’t to say, “moar mob hp!”, but better mob mechanics.

This is literally what I’ve been saying since forever. Make dungeon mobs act like mobs in GW1 with player skills and dodge mechanics.

And watch as the casual masses flood the forums with complaints and take their money from the gem store elsewhere.

There’s a reason this game is pretty easy mode when it comes to content and that reason is they don’t want to alienate players that might not be so hardcore or invested to really improve themselves and master difficult content but who do invest regularly in gems on the gem store.

You can’t have your cake and eat it.

The best they can do is add more hardcore content on top of the casual-oriented content to try to keep the hardcore players happy too.

But they don’t really care about their hardcore-oriented players that much and there have been plenty of examples of that – I’ll just mention one :

Dunno about that. You love to use that excuse a lot but Anet has made changes that are “bad for the player but good for the game before” (See the trait change). Also this is isolated to dungeon. The vast majority of the casuals stay in the open world.

Harper.4173:

Dirame.8521:

Azrael.4960:

Although it is appreciable that a lot of people think about these things, what is overlooked here is that the zerk gear mentality isn’t a GW2 community demand. It’s a community response to what is missing; solid mob AI that synergise themselves appropriately to produce the sorts of encounters that require mixed or more defensive gear. Rather than nerfing the gear, the AI needs improving (difficult ask, but it is what it is) to the point that penalises reliance on zerk gear. This isn’t to say, “moar mob hp!”, but better mob mechanics.

This is literally what I’ve been saying since forever. Make dungeon mobs act like mobs in GW1 with player skills and dodge mechanics.

And watch as the casual masses flood the forums with complaints and take their money from the gem store elsewhere.

There’s a reason this game is pretty easy mode when it comes to content and that reason is they don’t want to alienate players that might not be so hardcore or invested to really improve themselves and master difficult content but who do invest regularly in gems on the gem store.

You can’t have your cake and eat it.

The best they can do is add more hardcore content on top of the casual-oriented content to try to keep the hardcore players happy too.

But they don’t really care about their hardcore-oriented players that much and there have been plenty of examples of that – I’ll just mention one :

I’ll say the reason they haven’t done it is because it would take a long time. I’m pretty sure they don’t like stacking either.

They or you?

They acknowledge that stacking and speed clearing are a part of the game and people who choose to play that way are free to do it.
Sure they’d rather we didn’t – but from what they’ve said they’re not going to force people to play a certain way.

They’d also like it if people played more of the other races and not just humans, but they can’t force you into it.

Maybe bring back the beta ai. I remember a time where mobs did try to run out of my aoes.

I think part of a good solution would to have mobs move more, and to use skills while running, as well as have more of the mechanics that are currently only available to players. I imagine PBAoE boon strips would put a damper on most meta stacking groups (oh, you liked having permanent protection and 25 stacks of might? Whoops), as would stealth kiting.

Not only that, but just adding more random elements to dungeon runs (even if it’s just variations to paths that the players have no control over) would make it much harder to memorize where to stand in each path. Even if it’s something as simple as the Mossman from the swamp fractal appearing with no leash range randomly in twilight arbor until you kill him, it would at the very least require you to mix up your stacking spot a bit.