Sixes – KUM – Maguuma
Showing Posts Upvoted By Adastra.9821:
Team Arena will provide the most gold, followed by Solo Queue, followed by hotjoin.
I believe we’ll be giving specific numbers on Friday’s livestream.
I understand that the team arena format is a higher competition format… but that leaves me lingering with a question.
Are the rewards for playing solo / tournament arenas going to be linked to your rating?
If not the whole argument of rewarding a more competitive scene kind of goes to waste, as really bad people would still get rewarded more in low rated matches.
Skill level is relative. Ten equally skilled players in the lower end of matchmaking are playing just as hard as the top ten players. Their game experiences are identical for their skill level.
This isn’t about rewarding people for being better at the game – that’s what the ladders are for.
It’s not that elementalists are OP…
It’s just that all elementalists are better players than you.
#ELEtism
Gasmic > Mic Gazzy
Leader of [GASM] #ELEtism
(Retired) Commander [2500+ tPvP Matches Won]
Leader of [GASM] #ELEtism
(Retired) Commander [2500+ tPvP Matches Won]
Going to make a list for my arguments, for a clearer presentation.
Change
Elementalist’s base Health,
10,805 -> 15,082
And
Mesmer’s base Health,
15,082 -> 10,805
Why:
- Eles have a hard time if not heavily specced in stronger passive defense;
- Mes have an easy time even while in berserker gear;
- Many of the eles active defenses are stat-biased. They rely on defensive stats to be strong enough. Examples: healing skills which rely on healing power, auras which require eles to get hit, boons.
- Most mes active defenses are stat-neutral. They excel at reflection, blocks, invulnerabilities, stuns, teleports, stealth etc. Some of them are already present in the core profession mechanic. Many of them are under low cooldowns, or are offered by very strong traits. In addition to all this, they have illusions.
- Eles were officially designed to rely less on passive defenses, and more on active defenses. However, the most neutral active defenses were given to mes, not to ele, alongside the higher health value too. It’s unfair that the “profession officially designed to rely on active defenses” has weaker or more restricting active defenses than another profession that also happens to get higher base health and equally strong burst/ damage potential.
- If Eles had higher health, builds with more offensive stats/ traits would become viable. However, players would still desire defensive stats because their active defenses depend a lot on them.
- If Mes had lower health, their offensive builds would come at a higher risk, but players would still have enough stat-neutral defenses to compensate for that. Meanwhile, defensive stats would be more desired, due to the risk of the low health.
(edited by DiogoSilva.7089)
http://ramzawolf.deviantart.com/art/A-certain-group-in-Guild-Wars-2-401226585
I’ve lost my Warband, became a Gladium. Until I met certain someone.
I’ve lost my Warband, became a Gladium. Until I met certain someone.
Summation of high risk concerns for elementalist.
Diamond Skin
We really love this trait as it opens up some very powerful potential in the earth line to run a defensive elementalist without relying on healing power. The strength of this build is going to be the ability to quickly string small heals together to maintain that condition resistance. I think it could see use in both high damage builds looking to avoid weakness and blind, as well as in defensive builds looking to tank condition heavy classes and condition heavy mobs. I think the big question here is the base health/armor of the elementalist. Of course if you are just an elementalist you just want us to raise these, but balance must work around some fixed things and profession health and armor are an important part of defining what a profession is so that we can create powerful tools that players can actively use to circumvent these weaknesses. In this case if this trait is not powerful enough to be a grandmaster, I believe the right answer is going to be to lower the threshold, not to increase elementalist base health.
Aquamancer’s Alacrity
We moved this trait because all profession cooldown traits are in master tier, and because that is a good investment for this type of improvement. That being said, they may all not be powerful enough to warrant a master level triat right now, but I would rather increase the cooldown to 25% to get people to consider them than to have them be adept tier and allow elementalists to run all four of them.
Cleansing Wave
This is the one I am most on the fence about of all of the elementalist changes. It is a borderline master level trait and I think a better solution would be to leave it at adept tier and instead of moving Soothing Wave (which is only moving because it is better to have a 100% worthless trait at adept tier rather than master tier) we would redesign Soothing Wave into something worthy of master level.
Arcane Abatement
This is moving to adept tier because all of the fall damage traits are in that tier and in our opinion it doesn’t feel good to have to spend 20 points in a line for this kind of trait. Alacrity was the first choice to swap with it here because of the reasons stated above.
Soothing Disruption vs Cantrip Mastery
This one was debated internally for a while as well. I think swapping these traits would also help build diversity as it would let you splash 10 points in water to get Cantrip recharge, but would make you really consider going into water magic for the Regen and Vigor which is much more flavorful. I would love to hear some elementalist thoughts on that potential change.
Last but definitely not least.
Arcana
I see the logic in not wanting the two changes in this line to counter each other. Moving good adept traits to master level is contrary to reducing the need to spec into this line. That being said, Elemental Attunement is just a beast of a trait and could honestly be compared with most grandmaster traits. I think a good compromise would be to place Renewing Stamina back in the adept tier, placing is where the other professions get this type of trait, and instead move Final Shielding to the master tier where it could live alongside Arcane Retribution as two good choices in arcane builds that take Arcane Mastery in the adept tier. That could leave some interesting builds such as: 0/30/30/0/10 for fresh air, diamond skin, and renewing stamina. It also still leaves builds that put only 10 points in Arcana a chance to gain Protection by going 30 air for Tempest Defense, and 10 Earth for Elemental Shielding and still have 30 points leftover.
I still believe there is work to be done at the grandmaster tier in Fire at the very minimum and that Air and Water are the only truly good grandmaster choice right now. There are also still a handful of just terrible traits that will still get looked at, but we felt like we were already bordering on changing too much.
Thanks,
Jon
P.S. bug fix for Lingering Elements is coming on Nov. 26th as well.
Elementalist:
This patch’s goal for the elementalist was to increase the power of the Earth, Air and Fire lines, while taking away some of the need to go into Arcane. This was done by bringing up the base cooldown of attunements so that elementalists aren’t forced to go as deep into Arcane in order to get the old attunement cooldown %’s. In doing so, we decided put some of the most powerful Adept tier traits in Water magic and Arcane to the Master tier to avoid power creep that would have occurred by letting players gain powerful effects in Master and Grandmaster tier of Fire, Air, and Earth and still get the extremely powerful traits in Water and Arcane by only splashing in 10 points.
- Fire II – Burning Fire – Use Cleansing Fire automatically when you have a number of conditions on you. 3 conditions. 40 second cooldown. Moved to Master tier.
- Fire VIII – Conjurer – Moved to Adept tier.
- Fire III – Ember’s Might. The effect of this trait has been changed to Burns you apply last longer. 25%.
- Burning Rage 25 – Increased damage dealt to burning foes: 5% to 10%.
- Air V – Soothing Winds. Increased conversion from 5% to 7%.
- Air XI – Tempest Defense. Decreased the cooldown from 60s to 25s.
- Earth 5 – Stone Flesh – Increased toughness while attuned to Earth Magic to 1.5/level (120 at level 80).
- Earth VII – Strength of Stone. Gain condition damage based on your Toughness. 10%.
- Earth XI – Diamond Skin. Conditions cannot be applied to you when your health is above the threshold. 90%.
- Water I – Aquamancer’s Alacrity. Moved to Master tier.
- Water V – Cleansing Wave. Moved to Master tier.
- Water VIII – Arcane Abatement. Moved to Adept tier.
- Water X – Soothing Wave. Moved to Adept tier. redesign: Gain Regeneration(3s) on incoming critical hits. 10s recharge.
- Soothing Disruption move to master tier.
- Cantrip Mastery move to adept tier.
- Arcane III – Arcane Retribution. Moved to Master tier. Decreased cooldown 90s to kitten .
- Arcane IV – Final Shielding. Decreased cooldown from 90s to 75s.
- Arcane V – Elemental Attunement. Moved to Master tier.
- Arcane VI – Arcane Resurrection. Moved to Master tier.
- Arcane VII – Vigorous Scepter. Moved to Adept tier.
- Arcane VIII – Blasting Staff. Moved to Adept tier.
- Arcane IX – Windborne Dagger. Moved to Adept tier. This trait will now function outside of combat.
The following changes were done to reduce the necessity of putting points into the Arcane trait line.
- The base cooldown of the attunement that you just left is now reduced from 16 seconds to 13 seconds. Attunement cooldown rate now increases by 1% per point in Arcane down from 2%. The end result is that now Attunements go from 13s to 10s instead of the old range of 16s to 10s.
- Base global attunement cooldown is now 1.625 seconds. Global attunement cooldown rate now decreases by 1% per point in Arcane down from 2%. The end result is that now global attunement cooldown goes from 1.625 to 1.25 instead of the old range of 2.0 to 1.25.
Engineer:
We wanted to maintain the engineer’s core roles while still increasing build diversity. We also wanted to take out some of the random effects for some of the class’s traits. The biggest change here is allowing Modified Ammunition to work with any skills so that an engineer, regardless of build, can look at putting 30 points into firearms. By increasing the swiftness duration on Speedy Kits, we hope to allow Swiftness to be maintained more reasonably without having to constantly be swapping between Kits. This change will also bring down the total up time for Vigor due to its interaction with Invigorating Speed. We don’t like classes having permanent Vigor, and this is one of the areas we needed to tone down the up time of the engineer’s Vigor.
- Explosives V – Incendiary Powder. Moved to Master tier.
- Explosives VI – Exploit Weakness. Increased the health threshold. 25% to 50%
- Explosives IX – Accelerant packed turrets. Moved to Adept tier.
- Firearms XI – Modified Ammunition. Now works regardless of equipped weapon.
- Inventions V – Energized Armor. Increased conversion: 5% to 7%.
- Inventions X – Autotool Installation. Increased healing percent from 1% to 5%. Decreased interval from 10s to 3s.
- Inventions XI – Elixir Infused bombs. Increased healing scaling by 50%.
- Power Shoes. Will now function outside of combat.
- Alchemy V – Blood Injection. Increased conversion from 5% to 7%.
- Alchemy 15 – Transmute. Increased % chance from 8% to 100%. This effect can now only trigger once every 15 seconds.
- Tools VI – Speedy Kits. Increased Swiftness duration to 10s. 10s recharge.
- Tools XI – Armor Mods. Changed this to now trigger on struck instead of on critical hit incoming. Reduced the cooldown from 25s to 15s.
- Blunderbuss. Updated the ranges on this skill so that it is at 100% effectivness with anyone in melee range. Increased range 200 units when using the trait.
(edited by JonPeters.5630)
Looking at recent patches gives me the impression that the balance team does not have a concrete path that they can follow to improve game play from a competitive perspective. Patches seem like a shot in the dark without no clear and definite goal competitive wise. Improvements are simple minded things like number tweaking, “blunt” augmentations like burning on proc, protection on proc, etc. Also, the use of the term “shaving” to me sounds like a developer afraid to do stuff, not necessarily because they don’t want to fix things but they don’t know what principles to follow in fixing stuff. I would like to point out a good principles that Anet can use to rethink their approach to balancing and the game in general.
Balance stuff by Introducing Mechanics, not number tweaking
To showcase this point, consider the case of the Infestor in SC2. Back in SC2: WOL, the infestor was considered to be very strong with regards to the ability “fungal growth”. It was instant cast, range AOE that did big damage to unit clumps. A lot of fixes were put out by the community such as reducing damage, reducing ticks, etc. However I was impressed by how Blizzard adjusted the skill in Heart of the Swarm. They added a “missile element” to the ability. Now it has a missile animation before the skill lands. This in my view is a very good fix because of two reasons.
1. It opens up a window where the player can react:
A player with better awareness and better response time can minimize the damage by microing his units away from the target zone. This way, a player with better awareness, experience and skill set is rewarded.
2. It places a “burden of skill” on the player attacking:
The player using infestors now need to think on their usage of the skill and not haphazardly use it. The better they plan ahead, the better they use the terrain to their advantage, the better reward they have.
In the current state, GW2 is plagued by too much straightforward skills and RNG based mechanics. Most of the “burden of skill” is on the receiving end and little to no execution is required on the player attacking. Mechanics such as Spirits, Marks, Berserker Stance, Block every 5 sec, Fresh air, Infiltrator strike, Cleanse every 10 sec are examples of stuff that have minimal burden of skill on the user and in the case of offensive skills, high burden of skill on the receiver. Notice that almost all of the stuff I mentioned came up in recent patches! This is not good from a competitive standpoint. That is not how you encourage a competitive scene! Taking from what Blizzard did, what is a good way we can fix this mess?
Case and point; skull crack. The skill is too straightforward to use. There is little to no execution and preparation required in using the skill. Very low cooldown and high reward. Suppose if we tweak this as follows
a. If skull crack hits the target at the front, it dazes for n seconds
b. If skull crack hits the target from the back, it stuns for n seconds
You can see here that a degree of execution is now required on the part of the player. If he executes well, he is rewarded with a better result. Not only that, the target, if he is skilled, can identify this execution pattern and mitigate the possible scenario by better positioning.
This approach, in my opinion, defines a game that has depth to it competitive wise. If you study games that have become successful in the e-sports scene, you will observe this trend. Skills in those games require a certain set of conditions, prerequisites and/or execution to be fully effective. Why? Because these developers know that having this pattern makes the game truly competitive. They reward players with better execution, better game sense and better practice . Finally, it divides the scrubs from the pros. This results in a higher skill cap, better competitive atmosphere and thus more players. GW2 has already some of these mechanics. For example Fire Grab, Back Stab, Tactical Strike. You guys should build more of mechanics like these and less of “blunt” stuff and number tweaking.
Asura Ele: Chibi Joon
Human Ele: Joonhyung Hiraishin
Theif: Joonhyung
Human Ele: Joonhyung Hiraishin
Theif: Joonhyung
(edited by Joon.8931)
Having the lowest HP among professions ( along the lowest armor) and the far too high burst are the reason why eles are “forced” in running a build whose survivability its’ the main focus.
By having a 10k base HP and with professions able to easily burst you down for the same amount within 3s, Anet has basically condamned this profession in running survival builds for the time being for as long as the burst of some professions does not get reduced by a lot.
Even though I never had more than 200 healing power in any of my builds, there are ele builds out there which bring the concept of “survival” to the extreme, by using gear which effectively change the ele into a self-healing cleric archetype, this is the opposite extreme in this game at the moment, where from one side you’ve got professions able to deal 12k dmg+ consistently by pressing 2-3 buttons max, you’ve then got “unkillable” builds from the other side which are a direct consequence of the absurd burst.
For Anet, I presume is much easier to address the burst problem over the more complicated bunker problem, in the first case you can simply play around with numbers to reach a level with more reasonable damage but in the second case you can’t simply lower the efficacy of mitigating skills while forgetting why they were there in the first place.
By reducing the need of having these “mitigating” skills, Anet would have a much easier way to balance bunkers, it is possible to reduce this need by increasing the HP of guardians and ele by 5k.
A 5k HP increase, less return from mitigating skills and more sustained dmg would benefit the ele greately, but for now survival based builds are necessary for the ele to remain competitive, all this could have been avoided if Anet would have kept the same system seen in GW1 where the HP difference between profession was less than 10% ..not over 40% as here in GW2 where a warrior here got a 18k base HP and ele with only 10k base HP.