Frankly, I don’t think this is a bad change. It’s rather obvious that the synergy between those three stats is too strong (the growth curve is more hyperbolic with less diminishing returns), which made Zerker objectively superior with regard to ‘bang for buck’. Plus, ‘Ferocity’ just sounds better than ‘Crit Damage’. I wish they’d do that with all the secondary stats.
Encounter design definitely shares part of the blame, but Zerker still needed to be toned down. I hope they continue working on polishing encounters and improving the ‘soft’ role system.
Zerker gear isn’t the problem. The problem is the game and it’s mechanics. Aswell as their flawed attempts at “fixing” encounters thus far… Defiant/10x the HP with extremely drawn out stand in place combat(wurm,golem,maw,etc)/condition caps not player based but encounter based and even if they were player based still make conditions in pve worthless… To name a few…
Also along those lines the way every dungeon is set up there’s no reason to run anything aside from DD(direct dmg) DPS builds.
-> We have no need for support outside of our own utilities.
-> We have no group synergy outside of measely combo fields.
-> We have no need for defensive gear for any encounter since we have built in defenses with our heals/utilities/dodges.
-> We have no encounters that require actual tactics outside of just dodging “X” attack. Stand in place AI falls into this too.We could go on and on about this. But the problem will always exist in gw2. Remove zerker gear… Knights or pvt becomes the next hot topic, then that gets nerfed because constant qq because they’ve yet to address the actual problem, their game/core mechanics. It’s an on going cycle that will not be fixed. Especially if they keep going about using “duct tape” to fix a broken weld.
Plus everyone who doesn’t understand what every zerker/celestial user is so upset about… It’s wvw. Pve and wvw are 2 completely different beasts yet they feel the need to keep them on the same “balance” updates. The loss of dmg for burst/DD power builds vs other players is huge and makes everyone who spent all their time and gold crafting their gear now worthless.
The problem is both Zerker gear and encounter design, as I said. Zerker is still very likely to be dominant in meta; this only serves to close the gap some.
Zerker gear isn’t the problem. It’s the core mechanics of the game and it’s encounters.
Why do you think in wvw against an actual player it’s not who’s wearing zerker gear but who plays better, for the most part.It’s the pve side they’re trying to balance and in balancing the pve side they’re going to destroy the wvw side.
They need to leave zerker/celestial/cavalier and any other +CD gear alone. What they need to fix is their broken PVE AI. And not by adding more hit points or adding gimmicks like Defiance/having to stomp AI.
You want to fix encounters then make the AI smarter. Give us a reason to run something other than zerker gear. Make other gear sets actually viable/needed in group make ups. Again, don’t fix it with tape, fix the broken weld.
/all I have to say.
agree 100%
