Guild Wars 2

Quickness doesn’t reduce DPS during quickness by the amount it reduces speed, and doesn’t reduce overall DPS by finding out how often you have quickness up.

This logic assumes every shot is a guaranteed hit. Maybe that is the correct math to use for PvE logic, in PvP it really isn’t. So many people seem unable to grasp this concept I thought it was deserving of it’s own thread.

The quickness nerf hits so hard in PvP because it means animations are much slower and are therefore much more easily blocked or evaded. If you’re using 10 attacks, hitting a dumb PvE mob 50% slower with quickness, that’s 50% less DPS during quickness, 6% less overall or whatever it was worked out to be for most people.

In PvP if 7 of those 10 attacks are blocked, evaded or otherwise negated (anyone who plays PvP well knows this is totally reasonable to assume) then your DPS is massively lowered both during quickness, and overall as you’ve burned your high-damage skills/condition-stacking skills during quickness like any good player would, and have to wait for their CDs so you’re basically just auto-attacking most of the time, with probably one more skill rotation until zephyr’s speed is up again.

As any good PvP player will tell you, this decimates the effectiveness of any build that relies on ranger weapon skills for a main source of damage – berserker builds, condition builds, hybrids etc. I am not commenting on whether this was good for balance or not, but it was a huge nerf to rangers (and others – let’s have a moment of silence for warriors) in PvP.

I don’t see any math. All I see are insults to NPCs, and anecdotes about PvP.

want me to create a thread named “the real real math of the quickness change” now?

Anet should really lower some attack animation times on ranger.
But quickness is fine. 100% was bs.

jubskie.3152:

I don’t see any math. All I see are insults to NPCs, and anecdotes about PvP.

You totally missed the point of the thread: you can’t apply such math to pvp because you can’t count on how many attacks will land!

However you can make estimations, i’m sorry for assuming that you could work out that 7/10 attacks no longer landing during quickness = 70% , but no i can’t work out how much dps lost that is because it depends what weapons you’re using with what stats, which attacks missed etc etc etc. Get the point? However it is clear (to some) that it is a significant reduction in damage.

naphack.9346:

want me to create a thread named “the real real math of the quickness change” now?

Anet should really lower some attack animation times on ranger.
But quickness is fine. 100% was bs.

I would read that thread! I agree they should lower the animation times on ranger weapons, i think they used to be fine because of the way quickness was and how often we got it but now they are far too slow.

I’m not sure if the quickness nerf was a good thing or not for balance, maybe we were OP before, but it is a huge nerf and i wanted to make that clear. Furthermore it kills build diversity at the top end of tpvp because soon no team will want you to run anything other than trap ranger.

It’s not that “we” were op.
It’s not even that most of the quickness abilities were op.
It’s that the friggin quickness effect was op.

100% faster activation time on EVERYTHING. They tried to offset it with huge drawbacks on the skills but it just made everything even more ridiculous.

Cutting it back to 50% was fine. The problem is, they made a superficial job of it and didn’t look at it enough. They now need to rebalance quite a bit of skills around the new quickness values, ESPECIALLY for ranger.

Wanderer.5471:

You totally missed the point of the thread: you can’t apply such math to pvp because you can’t count on how many attacks will land!

Then you should have named the thread “The Philosophy of the Quickness Change” or something. Factors like blocking and evading in PvP don’t matter as you can capitalize properly on Quickness via crowd control. That’s why CC in this game is so short, it’s boarderline useless in PvE because its purpose is to chisel an opening in on your opponent in PvP. Then, when the target is stunned, dazed etc, is when you push for the burst.

I’m not sure if the quickness nerf was a good thing or not for balance, maybe we were OP before, but it is a huge nerf and i wanted to make that clear. Furthermore it kills build diversity at the top end of tpvp because soon no team will want you to run anything other than trap ranger.

Ranger wasn’t OP because of quickness, players in general were OP because of quickness…it’s quickness that was too strong.

For relativity sake, take a look at the traits and equipment with quickness. If all the game had were those (no QZ, no Frenzy, no Time Warp, no Haste), I’d probably say everything was fine at 2x speed quickness…but when you start getting into 5-10seconds of 2x speed, now that’s out of bounds.

The way it is now, those quickness abilities are closer to being in-line but in order to do that, other things (such as Last Chance trait) are just somewhat alright to borderline useless (Orr and Balth runes as well as sigil of rage…they weren’t really worth a slot before and they definitely aren’t now).

Wanderer.5471:

Quickness doesn’t reduce DPS during quickness by the amount it reduces speed, and doesn’t reduce overall DPS by finding out how often you have quickness up.

This logic assumes every shot is a guaranteed hit. Maybe that is the correct math to use for PvE logic, in PvP it really isn’t. So many people seem unable to grasp this concept I thought it was deserving of it’s own thread.

The quickness nerf hits so hard in PvP because it means animations are much slower and are therefore much more easily blocked or evaded. If you’re using 10 attacks, hitting a dumb PvE mob 50% slower with quickness, that’s 50% less DPS during quickness, 6% less overall or whatever it was worked out to be for most people.

In PvP if 7 of those 10 attacks are blocked, evaded or otherwise negated (anyone who plays PvP well knows this is totally reasonable to assume) then your DPS is massively lowered both during quickness, and overall as you’ve burned your high-damage skills/condition-stacking skills during quickness like any good player would, and have to wait for their CDs so you’re basically just auto-attacking most of the time, with probably one more skill rotation until zephyr’s speed is up again.

As any good PvP player will tell you, this decimates the effectiveness of any build that relies on ranger weapon skills for a main source of damage – berserker builds, condition builds, hybrids etc. I am not commenting on whether this was good for balance or not, but it was a huge nerf to rangers (and others – let’s have a moment of silence for warriors) in PvP.

A good post. Good point too.

However in PVP, save the Rapid Fire till your oponent is downed/immobilized. it will, and never did perform at an efficient level when the enemy was moving. Take that from someone who has spendt 100+ hours in WvW with a longbow and QZ/petswap.

Wanderer.5471:

Quickness doesn’t reduce DPS during quickness by the amount it reduces speed, and doesn’t reduce overall DPS by finding out how often you have quickness up.

This logic assumes every shot is a guaranteed hit. Maybe that is the correct math to use for PvE logic, in PvP it really isn’t. So many people seem unable to grasp this concept I thought it was deserving of it’s own thread.

The quickness nerf hits so hard in PvP because it means animations are much slower and are therefore much more easily blocked or evaded. If you’re using 10 attacks, hitting a dumb PvE mob 50% slower with quickness, that’s 50% less DPS during quickness, 6% less overall or whatever it was worked out to be for most people.

In PvP if 7 of those 10 attacks are blocked, evaded or otherwise negated (anyone who plays PvP well knows this is totally reasonable to assume) then your DPS is massively lowered both during quickness, and overall as you’ve burned your high-damage skills/condition-stacking skills during quickness like any good player would, and have to wait for their CDs so you’re basically just auto-attacking most of the time, with probably one more skill rotation until zephyr’s speed is up again.

As any good PvP player will tell you, this decimates the effectiveness of any build that relies on ranger weapon skills for a main source of damage – berserker builds, condition builds, hybrids etc. I am not commenting on whether this was good for balance or not, but it was a huge nerf to rangers (and others – let’s have a moment of silence for warriors) in PvP.

Your example of PvE quickness isn’t a correct representation of how the math works. I’ll give an example:

Without quickness, you are attacking at 100% speed. This is your baseline speed.
With quickness, you attack at 150% speed. That’s a 50% dps increase during quickness.
The old quickness gave us 200% speed. That was a 100% dps increase during quickness.

The nerf brought quickness down from 200% dps to 150% dps. That’s a 25% decrease, not the 50% decrease you claimed.

Not sure if you understood this and accidentally mixed up the numbers, but I thought this deserved some clarity anyway.

naphack.9346:

Cutting it back to 50% was fine. The problem is, they made a superficial job of it and didn’t look at it enough. They now need to rebalance quite a bit of skills around the new quickness values, ESPECIALLY for ranger.

I agree, they didn’t even change quickness traits for crying out loud – this matters even more for other classes where they are higher up the trait trees.

Prysin.8542:

However in PVP, save the Rapid Fire till your oponent is downed/immobilized. it will, and never did perform at an efficient level when the enemy was moving. Take that from someone who has spendt 100+ hours in WvW with a longbow and QZ/petswap.

It’s true, i think CC is something rangers are gonna have to use more now to get safer landed hits without quickness.

@ Minibiskit yeah you’re totally right of course, just wasn’t thinking

Thread about math with no math in it. Nothing to see here?

naphack.9346:

They now need to rebalance quite a bit of skills around the new quickness values, ESPECIALLY for ranger.

Hahaha
Haha
Ha

Hahahaha

Implying they will ever buff ranger in any form. They are so kitten lazy they will just leave it as it is. You can bet your money on it.
No time to rebalance things, better get those ranger nerfs going for the next patch, this time, it will be trapper.

WhiteAndMilky.2514:

Thread about math with no math in it. Nothing to see here?

sigh “You totally missed the point of the thread: you can’t apply such math to pvp because you can’t count on how many attacks will land!”

instead of saying “nothing to see” (nice contribution by the way, you’re a credit to the ranger forums) you could have actually read the thread and you wouldn’t have made this mistake…

Arekai.5698:

naphack.9346:

They now need to rebalance quite a bit of skills around the new quickness values, ESPECIALLY for ranger.

Hahaha
Haha
Ha

Hahahaha

Implying they will ever buff ranger in any form. They are so kitten lazy they will just leave it as it is. You can bet your money on it.
No time to rebalance things, better get those ranger nerfs going for the next patch, this time, it will be trapper.

GS got a nice buff, it’s not all bad news.