Guild Wars 2

Alacrity from 66% to 33%. Last I heard the balance objective was to shave, not hammer. What gives? Couldn’t you see that nerfing alacrity would help solve the mesmer bunker issues but in turn decimate any other potential build using chronomancer?

We’re sorry.
We only communicate on the forums through news posts, and UDIs.

- ANet

The worst part is that the game needs a hammer approach to balance, shaving won’t do anything.

But what it needs, assuming we only get 4 balance patches a year, is ~100-150 balance changes of hammer-size per class, not 10-20. We have so many skills and so many traits and so many skill/trait/item combinations which are under-/over-/off-/un-/im-balanced, nothing but extensive reworks of entire skills, traits and traitlines could do the trick.

Which either the devs seem to lack manpower for (this is my explanation as it fits with everything else they’re doing), or their management or planning team lacks perspective for. The latter would be odd, as it doesn’t really take a genius to figure out that GW2 at present has too many combinations of effects to be balanced given the current design of classes.

ANet has no idea how to balance stuff.

They also got their focus wrong: eSports for the win! As if anyone cares. They try so hard to be something they are not that they make GW2 even more of a niche it already is.

Meanwhile in the real world:

B&S drains players for vastly superior PvP. While PvE is a bit old-fashioned, it is at least something new to toy around with.

Black Desert around the corner: Awesome PvE and a home for WvW people.

Other titles in the making (mainly for the WvW and PvP crowd).

What do the GW2 players get again? A patch with minor PvE stuff every three monthes that destroys professions for an unpredictable time every time.

Are you nuts ANet? Do you think people will support this model by buying your next expansion?

This must be the worst business plan in computer gaming history. You must be living in an ivory tower over there…

Just quoting myself from two monthes ago on this topic:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Shaving you said?

This is how it works for rangers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlhdIR0sGyc

Not any different for mesmers…

Kaiyanwan.8521:

They also got their focus wrong: eSports for the win! As if anyone cares. They try so hard to be something they are not that they make GW2 even more of a niche it already is.

But eSports! It’s liek, ze future!

Or so I heard. I think some managers at ANet might actually still believe this. So much time and effort wasted on stuff so unrelated to how the game is actually being played. :S

I would be fine with the alacrity nerf if they apply the same standard to all other professions.

The precog well change is inexcusable, laziest change ever.

Too much Sweeney Todd.

Shave? This is our regular cut!
- Prior to the 26th March 2013 update, quickness would boost attack and action speed by 100% instead of the current 50%.
- Prismatic Understanding now boosts stealth duration by 50%, and not 100%.
- Alacrity 66% to 33% CD reduction

The thing is, I, and a few other people, would be fine with a 50% cut with alacrity IF they rebalanced everything around that.
And took a kittening hammer to the whole slew of mesmer skills and traits that are never used.

The people on every profession specific forum, have suggested a whole slew of major changes that would actually make everyone interested in this kittening game again.

The problem is, that the player base is “happy” with a less-than-kitten patch.

“I’m happy with most of the changes”

I’m not.

The power creep is so kittening unreal in this game, it’s not even funny. And all they’ve succeeded in doing, is pushing it further.

Should a normal thief auto attack deal 4200 damage crits on a class with 17k HP?

Is this not absurd to anyone else? Because idk if you guys have noticed, thief dagger auto attacks are kittening fast.

Those nerfs are behaving inefficiently and wrongly, as a result of
an inefficient and wrong work. There was an attempt to fix something , but handed the task into the wrong hands.

No no.. shave only counts on other classes. Mesmers & chrono’s always get’s the Nerf Axe!

I also agree that the Alacrity nerf was uncalled for, did it help it get it rid of bunker chrono? yes it did, but at the same it also ruin or lower other build performance.

I’m sad to say I kinda saw this coming when Pyro first revealed the 100% uptime in PvE videos. I even stated that this was clearly not as intended, and was berated for saying it.
So instead of doing the logical thing and greatly nerfing the ability to share out Alacrity ,which Anet said from the beginning it wanted to greatly limit, they blanket nerfed Alacrity itself; screwing Mesmers doubly in the process.

Funny thing is, there weren’t that many complaints about Alacrity itself, but rather it’s impact on team play in both PvE and PvP.

Smarter devs would have first chosen to nerf the ability to share out Alacrity, and leave self-Alacrity where it is. Since —ya know-- the entire Chrono line was balanced around it.

This nerf didn’t set out to “shave” anything, it clearly set out to destroy 2 Mesmer build types; Bunkers because the kool kidz have deemed the entire bunker meta to be unKoOl, and any Alacrity focused builds because in the current Anet eSports centered patching model there is no place/time for a “fine tune and see” approach to balance. They wanted to be darned sure that Alacrity was fixed and bunkers gone. It was just a bit of bad luck that both of those hit the Mesmer especially hard due to no real alternative builds that could keep up with the huge offensive power-creep of the other Elites.

The double-standard is most sickening though. Leaving clearly OPd offensive crap, even building more of it (Thieves), but leaving Mesmers out to dry when clearly you can see that Chronomancy offers absolutely zero offensive improvements aside from the ability to chain two bursts in a row once within 90 seconds. (Using an awkward and unreliable mechanic with a long CD on an already button intensive “twitchy” class…while others can literally bang away at 2 or 3 of their keys and yet deliver substantially higher damage in either Direct or Condition damage, while also having more sustain. In short EZ mode.)

I will be berated for this two, but I said pre-HoT that Elites should be excluded from the F5 mechanic as it’s difficult to balance it while keeping Elites in the picture. Instead we get continual chipping away at F5 leaving it as NOTHING BUT a means to double up on Elites. SAD! This was such a neat idea, but honestly how often do you feel you get the original intended feeling while using this ability? You know, as a time manipulator? All I see is that you’re forced to rush through as many buttons as you can manage to mash in before the ability ends, and that it’s usually not productive to F5 shatter 3 Clones when you can do most everything you need with just 1.

I think it should have a much longer duration without factoring in illusions, and make the added duration from illusions much smaller. Then you would be able to use it to juke people in interesting ways, and not just double up on your Elite.

Of course at this poor state of the Chrono, that would be devastating and only add insult to injury. It would require a significant overhaul to rebalance the line, so it’s not gonna happen. It’s just sad to see the original concept so poorly implemented a few months down the road.

Exciton.8942:

I would be fine with the alacrity nerf if they apply the same standard to all other professions.

The precog well change is inexcusable, laziest change ever.

If they would at least change chill to actually be the opposite of alacrity (instead of increasing cooldown and movement reduction 66% as it is now) and remove the movement speed reduction OR remove it’s cooldown and go back to only movement, the nerf to alacrity wouldn’t feel as severe. (expected (hoped?) alacrity reduced to 50% not by 50%). But I guess that change was for raids?

The precognition change was because of pvp afaik. Anet really needs to split skills between wvw/pve/pvp but that isn’t going to happen. These kinds of balances were things we saw in GW1 as well…

Of course I’d also like something done about immob in midair, reapplication of immob constantly (or at least allow us to turn in place while immob like mobs can), shadowsteps to be reliable, attacks to not randomly obstruct, to not be hit by ghost attacks when combat ends even hit by skills you were nowhere near when they were activated, skills to actually activate when you hit the key, being able to actually dodge an attack you see coming, instead of the dodge not activating or animated dodge in place lose endurance and still get hit. and wvw back to what it was more like 2 years ago. But back to point

idk wtf is the idea or intention behind some of the decisions. (and to address another post, 100% on PU was ridiculous. When they did that, I felt it should have just been a flat 2s instead. At least they didn’t change it back to a flat 1s duration like it used to be so I guess there’s that?)

Windwalker.7421:

I’m sad to say I kinda saw this coming when Pyro first revealed the 100% uptime in PvE videos. I even stated that this was clearly not as intended, and was berated for saying it.

This is what I posted 4 months ago in the BWE3 Feedback thread-

“I have some changes I’d like to see that will probably be unpopular…

I’m not liking how ‘alls well that ends well’ influences my utility bar. Its powerful, but in the wrong way. Alacrity has a very potent effect, so i find myself filling my utility bar with wells for the alacrity and not for the actual effects of the individual wells…

I also feel like the amount of alacrity we can stack through well spamming is begging for future nerfs, and we all know those nerfs will be to our OTHER traits, before its determined that ‘alls well’ is the actual problem.

So, I’d like to propose a few adjustments to our traits-

Alls well- The final effect of your wells is 25% more potent.

Flow of time- 1s again

Improved alacrity- Your alacrity effects last 25% longer. (so now it affects your well of recall and shield phantasm)

Well of recall- bumped up to 6 secs, about 9s if double traited.

Well of Eternity- Might have to shift more of the heal to the Initial cast so the AoE heal isnt too strong.

Well of calamity and eternity- get the damage boost (I think) they need, especially with how highly telegraphed and delayed the final damge is.

well of action- now can be traited for a bit more quickness

So now, if we choose to use a well, its for the effects they provide individually and those effects are now enhanced. This also opens up utility slots in group content so we’re more than just alacrity bots (because thats all I feel like…). This change does reduce the amt of potential alacrity we can provide to a group though, which is why I’m sure there will be people that wont like this."

I think it was pretty obvious to most of us not riding the ‘hype train’.

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

The thing is, I, and a few other people, would be fine with a 50% cut with alacrity IF they rebalanced everything around that.
And took a kittening hammer to the whole slew of mesmer skills and traits that are never used.

The people on every profession specific forum, have suggested a whole slew of major changes that would actually make everyone interested in this kittening game again.

The problem is, that the player base is “happy” with a less-than-kitten patch.

“I’m happy with most of the changes”

I’m not.

The power creep is so kittening unreal in this game, it’s not even funny. And all they’ve succeeded in doing, is pushing it further.

Should a normal thief auto attack deal 4200 damage crits on a class with 17k HP?

Is this not absurd to anyone else? Because idk if you guys have noticed, thief dagger auto attacks are kittening fast.

I remember reading that in pve, without buffs or anything, the thief’s dagger AA has the highest DPS in game compared to any other weapon and any other class.

but I read that over a year ago, so they must’ve forgotten about it

Windwalker.7421:

I’m sad to say I kinda saw this coming when Pyro first revealed the 100% uptime in PvE videos. I even stated that this was clearly not as intended, and was berated for saying it.
So instead of doing the logical thing and greatly nerfing the ability to share out Alacrity ,which Anet said from the beginning it wanted to greatly limit, they blanket nerfed Alacrity itself; screwing Mesmers doubly in the process.

Funny thing is, there weren’t that many complaints about Alacrity itself, but rather it’s impact on team play in both PvE and PvP.

Smarter devs would have first chosen to nerf the ability to share out Alacrity, and leave self-Alacrity where it is. Since —ya know-- the entire Chrono line was balanced around it.

This nerf didn’t set out to “shave” anything, it clearly set out to destroy 2 Mesmer build types; Bunkers because the kool kidz have deemed the entire bunker meta to be unKoOl, and any Alacrity focused builds because in the current Anet eSports centered patching model there is no place/time for a “fine tune and see” approach to balance. They wanted to be darned sure that Alacrity was fixed and bunkers gone. It was just a bit of bad luck that both of those hit the Mesmer especially hard due to no real alternative builds that could keep up with the huge offensive power-creep of the other Elites.

The double-standard is most sickening though. Leaving clearly OPd offensive crap, even building more of it (Thieves), but leaving Mesmers out to dry when clearly you can see that Chronomancy offers absolutely zero offensive improvements aside from the ability to chain two bursts in a row once within 90 seconds. (Using an awkward and unreliable mechanic with a long CD on an already button intensive “twitchy” class…while others can literally bang away at 2 or 3 of their keys and yet deliver substantially higher damage in either Direct or Condition damage, while also having more sustain. In short EZ mode.)

I will be berated for this two, but I said pre-HoT that Elites should be excluded from the F5 mechanic as it’s difficult to balance it while keeping Elites in the picture. Instead we get continual chipping away at F5 leaving it as NOTHING BUT a means to double up on Elites. SAD! This was such a neat idea, but honestly how often do you feel you get the original intended feeling while using this ability? You know, as a time manipulator? All I see is that you’re forced to rush through as many buttons as you can manage to mash in before the ability ends, and that it’s usually not productive to F5 shatter 3 Clones when you can do most everything you need with just 1.

I think it should have a much longer duration without factoring in illusions, and make the added duration from illusions much smaller. Then you would be able to use it to juke people in interesting ways, and not just double up on your Elite.

Of course at this poor state of the Chrono, that would be devastating and only add insult to injury. It would require a significant overhaul to rebalance the line, so it’s not gonna happen. It’s just sad to see the original concept so poorly implemented a few months down the road.

and would you mind linking me to that video you mentioned pyro was in?

Spanny.9256:

and would you mind linking me to that video you mentioned pyro was in?

Was it not a video? I thought I remembered him posting a video, but maybe it was just the build. He was the one who (once again) made public a build that became pretty much standard in PvE, and showed the rotations needed to get 100% Alacrity uptime for your team.

Are you disputing this, or why do you ask? I have no interest in digging out the post or video, but if what I say isn’t true, I’m sure Pyro will point out the errors of my ways. ;-)

Windwalker.7421:

Spanny.9256:

and would you mind linking me to that video you mentioned pyro was in?

Was it not a video? I thought I remembered him posting a video, but maybe it was just the build. He was the one who (once again) made public a build that became pretty much standard in PvE, and showed the rotations needed to get 100% Alacrity uptime for your team.

Are you disputing this, or why do you ask? I have no interest in digging out the post or video, but if what I say isn’t true, I’m sure Pyro will point out the errors of my ways. ;-)

no i was literally just asking for the video because i wanted to watch it for entertainment purposes..
what’s with people overanalyzing everthing i say lately

Here is the original thread from 4 months ago-

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/PvE-The-New-Chronomancer-Dungeon-Rotation/first#post5517768

Video is posted by Chaos A., but it is Fay doing the rotation.

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

The thing is, I, and a few other people, would be fine with a 50% cut with alacrity IF they rebalanced everything around that.
And took a kittening hammer to the whole slew of mesmer skills and traits that are never used.

I honestly would have been ok with the 50% cut if they just didn’t toss in all those extra nerfs. The well of precog and that alacrity change would have been the “shave” needed to balance bunker chrono. There were still FIVE more nerfs to bunker chrono that went into the patch.

I think what is more disturbing is that this IS the balance for all game modes but coming from disjointed Devs on different teams. PvE raid dev says nerf alacrity. Ok it happens. No one knows what to do with Precog because it messed with both raid mechanics and point capture mechanics → end result. Several different devs think about how to nerf bunker chrono… none of them think about how all 7 shaves, which to be fair, most were, would affect the class as a whole.

WELL at least mesmer is still a profession… I mean… they didn’t take it out of the game entirely
GOTTA MEAN SOMETHING, RIGHT?

Spanny.9256:

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

The thing is, I, and a few other people, would be fine with a 50% cut with alacrity IF they rebalanced everything around that.
And took a kittening hammer to the whole slew of mesmer skills and traits that are never used.

The people on every profession specific forum, have suggested a whole slew of major changes that would actually make everyone interested in this kittening game again.

The problem is, that the player base is “happy” with a less-than-kitten patch.

“I’m happy with most of the changes”

I’m not.

The power creep is so kittening unreal in this game, it’s not even funny. And all they’ve succeeded in doing, is pushing it further.

Should a normal thief auto attack deal 4200 damage crits on a class with 17k HP?

Is this not absurd to anyone else? Because idk if you guys have noticed, thief dagger auto attacks are kittening fast.

I remember reading that in pve, without buffs or anything, the thief’s dagger AA has the highest DPS in game compared to any other weapon and any other class.

but I read that over a year ago, so they must’ve forgotten about it

Blatantly untrue. Thief sword AA out-damaged dagger AA. What pushed dagger into being better for dungeons/speed runs was heartseeker spam letting it out-damage the sword AA chain by enough of a margin when the boss was at low health when calculated for the fight as a whole.

And then they released the revenant, which put out almost 50% better DPS than the old sword on its AA chain alone and around 40% more than the entire dagger’s potential. And this was just from AA damage from revs hitting for 10k+ per hit.

So they nerfed rev sword and bumped the thief’s weapons because the sword was already slow on its animations for PvP (so dagger would nee love to compensate or be obsolete in PvE by a large margin, and because EXPANSION!!!!1! they buffed staff accordingly.

For PvE/raids it makes sense because the thief has zero group support in raids and was pre-patch in a worse position than mesmer and necro used to be in for dungeons due to the competitive nature/requirement of raids while offering quite literally nothing to the group. Of course, defending these buffs in the name of the PvP formats makes no sense and quite frankly no thief in recent history asked about AA damage buffs at all. Most just wanted nerfs to the absurd power-creep damage coming out from HoT on other classes, like DH/War/Scrapper/Rev/Druid/Chrono/Reaper one-shotting the thief while boasting ridiculous invuln/block uptime, AoE CC, and more AOE reveal than ever.

The issue stems from class design more than balancing. There’s no diversity because everything is tailor-made for the meta and ANet is very unwilling to really re-design classes and mechanics because the community doesn’t know what it wants. Tons of people playing different builds wanting different things to happen from those builds with huge power disparities between builds makes substantial changes impossible without huge backlash, but makes numbers tweaks really not fix any of the problems.

DeceiverX.8361:

The issue stems from class design more than balancing. There’s no diversity because everything is tailor-made for the meta and ANet is very unwilling to really re-design classes and mechanics because the community doesn’t know what it wants. Tons of people playing different builds wanting different things to happen from those builds with huge power disparities between builds makes substantial changes impossible without huge backlash, but makes numbers tweaks really not fix any of the problems.

Sorry, I just have to point this one thing out. kitten the rest!

This paragraph reminds me of runescape.

Edit:
Although, to counter this paragraph.
A game development studio needs to have 3 basic tenants.

1. You cannot be bullied by your playerbase.
2. You cannot please everyone.
3. Trying to please everyone, will not please anyone.

Additional:
4. Not trying anything, will also not please anyone.

Ofc, this isn’t always true. But I think it’s fairly good rules to develop by.

Unfortunately, runescape is a good example of the above tenants failing as well.

GEE GEE!

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

A game development studio needs to have 3 basic tenants.

1. You cannot be bullied by your playerbase.
2. You cannot please everyone.
3. Trying to please everyone, will not please anyone.

Additional:
4. Not trying anything, will also not please anyone.

Yeah this is absolutely true. And where ANet really needs to improve. They seem to be stuck in the middle with no idea where to go, no concept for their classes beyond “esportslulz”, and that’S it.

I’d very much take a traditional “Only Warriors can withstand incoming damage the rest of you cannot period” over that, tbh. Yes I don’t like it but hey, it’s a concept and you can design for it. As other games have.

Now ofc, it wouldn’t be difficult to think of concepts for the GW2 classes, and in some parts they show that. Problem is that the balance team never went with the idea of even attempting to make classes intentionally overpowered in limited areas so as to facilitate a class concept.

Carighan.6758:

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

A game development studio needs to have 3 basic tenants.

1. You cannot be bullied by your playerbase.
2. You cannot please everyone.
3. Trying to please everyone, will not please anyone.

Additional:
4. Not trying anything, will also not please anyone.

Yeah this is absolutely true. And where ANet really needs to improve. They seem to be stuck in the middle with no idea where to go, no concept for their classes beyond “esportslulz”, and that’S it.

This is the primary problem with Anet balancing. They have no vision, no overarching idea of how they’d like classes to perform, roles they’d like to see, general tenets to abide by. Every single new balance patch that comes out is just random adjustments made on the spot to try and whack-a-mole the balance problems that came from the last set of random adjustments .

The evidence of this is in the notes themselves. In one breath, they discuss how reliance on autoattacks for damage is a bad thing, and nerf rev autos. In the next breath, they say that thieves don’t do enough damage, and buff their autoattacks.

There’s other stuff too. Instead of trying to balance bunker builds, they try to remove the very concept from the game through the manipulation of amulets. Just think about that for a moment. One of the most basic tenets of game PvP, the tanky bruiser, is an archetype that they’ve conceded ‘we have no idea what we’re doing with this’, and have tried to completely purge it from the game. Now, obviously this won’t work. People will still figure out how to make bruisers, and until Anet figures out how to balance bruisers (hint: look at LoL), they’ll still manage to make them op, but the very fact that they even tried to do this belies a basic lack of understanding and intelligence about what’s even possible or reasonable to do when balancing a game.

How about something like when they added torment to the scepter auto? We as mesmers had been complaining about how bad it was for a long time. Additionally, the PvP community as a whole had expressed a displeasure with spammy conditions. This displeasure was even echoed by the devs, who proceeded to show their resolve at lowering the amount of spammy conditions in the game by adding another spammable condition. Not only does that show a total lack of vision, it also shows another basic failure to grasp what’s needed to make this game healthy. We weren’t complaining about the scepter auto because it didn’t spam conditions, we were and still ARE complaining because it feels awful to use and is incredibly mechanically clunky. The devs would have known this if they took the time to actually play the class and experience the very game they’re balancing, and so the fact that they completely misunderstood this really simple problem is something that shows how totally out of touch they are with the game they’re supposed to have control over.

Anyway…this sorta grew into a bit of a rant. Tl;dr: Balance in this game has the vision and resolve of twitch plays pokemon.

As far as the thief auto being buffed, it wasn’t really unheard of as even the necromancer pumped out better DPS on its MH dagger AA than the thief. Initiative makes long fights really painful for the thief (as low init means a ~20% damage loss on top of this) and so a small tweak upwards in its AA damage would make sense to keep it able to stay competitive with the rest

Is the margins to which it was buffed okay? Only in the scope of the new power creep. I think it goes without saying the elite specs pretty much boost core spec damage well over 30% for everyone. While it’s great to see the shift in power be pushed back into the core specs, it’s disheartening to see the power creep still keep going when right now we need to see a LOT of toning down on elite spec bonuses and general power creep to keep the core specs competitive. Yes, the changes to sword were big and much-needed and would have made it universally better than the dagger without downward pushes in damage, but this is what should be the intent of design for everyone; the game is out of whack because everything’s just seeing buffs over core, which weren’t design to handle all of this, and weren’t subsequently adjusted.

I like to believe that power reaper is the most successful elite spec released in HoT; it’s very counter-able but with AoE and PvE roots which the core necromancer couldn’t compete with, and even on the condi side, made Dhuumfire a good trait choice. It’s fair to play both as and against and packs a lot less utility or defense or burst damage than core necro. Obviously condi Reaper performs a bit too well at the moment, but the point is this spec actually did its job in changing the style of play for the class entirely, and for the power build, kept the balance pretty intact.

We really haven’t seen that elsewhere on the others. It’s pretty much just all buffs and numbers increases to different builds, deeming the “new thing” as objectively better than the rest. Clunkiness and mechanics haven’t really improved, just the numbers themselves, and that’s an issue.

Fay.2357:

Anyway…this sorta grew into a bit of a rant. Tl;dr: Balance in this game has the vision and resolve of twitch plays pokemon.

i… i dont think i could ever think of a more apt analogy of anet’s balance team, or just anet in general.

i love you.

At this point Anet needs to focus on either

• Increasing alacrity higher than 33% (not gonna happen) or …
• Start looking at decreasing CD’s of so many of our skills to even mention, from weapons, utilities to traits.

I think they can salvage this to some degree while still keeping alacrity firmly in the controlled place they seem to want it for all game modes. They just need to give us something.