Guild Wars 2

The real question is : What is so difficult in the raid right now that needs an extra mode to overcome?
I mean the encounters are already ramping up in term of difficulty during the phases so normally once you get the basic mechanics of P1, you jump to P2 and learn the new added mechanics and so on.
Why have an easy mode to learn P3 if one is not able to go past P1?

Every new content is one of the best during the first 2 months after release. Then people start to see flaws or ways to abuse the mechanics….
LS1 had content lasting for one month, so people did not see the flaws before it disappeared, letting an impression of awesome. That is some rose tinted glass effect.

There are many people saying that Tower of Nightmares was a great content in the game, yet I am sure that if it was still a thing, it would be criticized like crazy for being a loot train without any purpose.
Let alone the shifting of players interest. Marionette was great if you could log in 30 minutes in advance to not be stuck alone in an overflow server. Today, if it would still exists player would be complaining about the lack of other players, or people exploring Lornar’s Pass feeling harassed for not wanting to join the event. With some work it could be included in WB schedule like TT…. but who does still find TT as an awesome fresh encounter?

I think it could be safe to change Harmonious mantra as well :

Drop the charge increase but decrease the channelling time by 20%. Increase the Mantra strength duration to 20-30 sec.

That way the 15% bonus is more easily maintained and renewed but still need to bring and activate 3 mantras minimum to be full power. the channel time reduction may also be beneficial for the restorative mantras trait.
If not enough, the mantra strength charge could be increased to 4 %.
Another change would be to make phantasm benefit from mantra strength.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Lazarus didn’t overcharge the Maguuma Bloodstone. That happened due to Zhaitan and Mordremoth’s deaths.

Well the amount of releasable magic was due to their death but the explosion and release of magic was due to the White Mantle harvesting activities and ritual. I think they had an idea of what they were doing : releasing the magic to feed Lazarus.
Now for a second stone they may not have to wait that much to do it…

But even in the case of dragon magic being the sole responsible of it, one part or Mordremoth magic went south, towards the Ring of Fire.
So in both cases I think there is a second Bloodstone ready to “hatch” and the process is actually detectable in the leyline network (like Taimi saw the Bloodstone reacting on her map).
So all in all, if Primordus is sensing it, no surprise he’s sending something in that direction.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

If Primordus was just after Bloodstone, he’d go to Bloodstone Cave which he literally passes by.

I don’t know if Elder Dragons can actually feel Bloodstone magic (because of why they were created). However I would not be surprised if Lazarus would be right now trying to overcharge a second Bloodstone to absorb its power like he seemingly did with the first one. The overcharging would actually redirect some magic through ley lines towards the Ring of Fire and that would be what Primordus or its champion would sense at the moment. Suspecting a an imminent surge of magic he could actually have a lot of interest in having some presence around in order to not miss it this time.

Concerning Purification, I would decrease the activation heal the further you are from the trap so that you have to stay in the center to get the full heal: wouldn’t it be risk=reward?

Aleksandar.1364:

That’s what i hope ! A new 1 wing raid with completely a new story(even a small one, where there is no impact on the world), with.. 4 or 5 boss !

At the beginning, they said they could do 4-6 wings per year ! We miss one

I think they said they can design a raid wing within 3 months. That does not mean they’ll release them as soon as they are ready. It has then to make sense in the game. Sometimes they also design an encounter without exactly knowing what the boss looks like, they just know what they want to give in a fight.
I don’t think they want to stick to a release frequency when it comes to raid. They will most probably release one wing or more when the legendary armours will be fully finished and when they feel they have a good story to tell on the side of LS3. Maybe there will be a wing related to the door of Komalie once we reach the Ring of Fire. Or they switch to something totally unrelated like the new hierarchy of Nightmare Court.

Josh Davis.6015:

• Adjust outlier revive skills (Function Gyro)

Ok I am biased here but please don’t smiter’s boon it. It is an outlier but it must remain one because function gyro is the profession mechanics of scrapper. By designed it is way more useful in PvP than in the rest of the game so while it can be toned down a bit (ICD of 40 sec maybe) it should still remain a strong option. Chrono is an outlier in skill availabitlity, DD is an outlier in dodges availability….

I like the downed penalty though, but in the context of PvP, the loss of points should be 30 sec rather than one minute and there should be a total reset upon death to limit the snowball effect.

I am more generally puzzled by how the PvP team tries to get rid of all support option one after the other while not trying to also act on the damage side. If the damages were not so high, support would not be that strong, at least not as mandatory as it is right now.

They could do a simple copy of the phantasm of the weapon you wear just to help to summon several phantasm of the same type rapidly, very useful for shatter build or long fights.
The based CD could be standardized to 25 – 30 sec so that it does not become better than the original skill.
I mean on engineer we have an elite kit which follows the same rules as regular kits and is not even stronger.

Xyonon.3987:

You won’t “majorly overreaching” anything by averaging. In fact, it gets more accurate the longer the fight goes. In 60s, (let’s assume shrapnel lasts 20s), 1/3 of the shrapnels will be cut off before running out of duration. In a 10 minute fight, only 1/30.

Damage multiplied with the chance to proc is totally legit.

I think this was the best answer so far, the accuracy of the calculations depends on the length of the fight compared to the ramp up time of said trait/skill. This is true for many condition trait for which the condi duration is smaller than the internal CD (or availability of application). If one is puzzled by shrapnel, then sharpshooter should also be considered, especially since depending on the rotation, the frequency of crits will be affected.

I have the impression that the debate is more about theory versus simulation here…. and personally I am an experimentalist

Ananeos.4587:

Every other class has gotten the multiple class treatment for every boss and by prominent raid guilds too.

Can you give some links of those videos?
I sadly only found Elementalist (which are also the ones breaking the length record), Guardian and Revenant. And most of them are VG only…
I remember someone wanting to organize a 10 thief and another one a 10 ranger (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Organizing-a-10-Ranger-VG) but never saw any results….

I think 10 mesmers vs VG should be doable by competent players since all other profession did it without perma quickness, and not necessarily perma 25 might. Also Mesmer is required in the 5 man VG for distortion to avoid green mechanism so 10 of them should do the trick. Lastly, there was a reddit user able to pull more than 20 k condi DPS on VG, which means Red Guard is not too problematic.
Mesmers are generally less present in the world, so gathering 10 good ones around one boss to try crazy challenge like this is already a challenge.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Technically they already began that with HoT via the lore behind the guild halls. The Guild Initiative is a (sub)guild (of Tyrian Explorers Society guild) that focuses on supporting guilds in the fights against the Elder Dragons, inspired by Destiny’s Edge’s effectiveness.

One theory that began with HoT’s release is that the Guild Initiative will be replacing the Pact, but then we saw that it’s not as destroyed as we thought (or as Anet/writing first claimed).

Strongly out of topic but I would really like to see Dougal, Ember and Gullik reunited and have them part of our next story

Zem.4139:

Ranael.6423 :
“This discussion reminds me the game launch where people found dungeons such an awful experience because it was way too hard (with the same arguments). "
-> exept now , player know perfectly game from 3 years and know perfectly their classe

Oh really?
Well after raiding a bit I tell you that the amount of player who have no clue about game mechanics is still huge.
Real examples:
“I put fire shield on people so that they burn with their attack”, “I rez during cannon phase in Mai Trin”, “I don’t dodge Kohler whirlwind”, “I use corrupter’s fervor to increase my condi damage”, “As a condi player you don’t need might since it only increases power”, “I am not responsible of dps loss because I stay Shiro… Glint is dps loss for me”, “I tell you that for fresh air rotation you have to switch to earth”

Everything in the last 6 months… sure people know their class and all their capacity in fights….

Dinks.2478:

The legendary team had 6 people on it, 6. 6 people aren’t making or breaking the new content.

It is the reason that was given. One can chose to not believe the game director (who is also head of the company) but, I know I should be more suspicious about human kind, I fail to see why he would just do this if 6 people would not make any difference to new content.
I really fail to see why he would have decided to cancel legendary weapons just to upset the player base and lie to us about the fact it would change how fast the production of new content is done. I mean do you really think his message was “Ahahah I robbed you all noobs who bought HoT only for new Legendary, you will never see them happen and I will make you pay gem for them. I will fire those 6 devs to gain even more money and tell you they are moved to living world. Bwahahaha I am that evil !!!!”
Why can’t we believe what developers say, especially when we are only players and have no clue of what lies behind the curtain?

Since launch, 2500 hours (says Efficiency….thought I spend more time than that) : 2 drops.
First one was mystic forging 3 gold weapons and a mystic stone : the Hunter (luckily I wanted it for my engi). Second one dropped in front of a blighting Tower during the event in DS : the Bard.

The only one I’ve ever liked was the Rit one, and somehow the Warrior one. The others looked either too simple or too awkward for me.

I think the real question is to know if, as player you would have preferred to have a new Legendary weapon, maybe 2, with last content update or if you prefer to have had a new map, and in the mean time these living world events (bandits, anomalies…).

Because the way it was presented was they made a trade-off between Legendary journeys and living world events. Of course as player, instant consumer of content, we demand both, but reason must sometimes win.
As for OP suggestion, I think the topic of legendary weapon has been too long debated between crafting and dropping precursors. Now it has been decided (I’d say tha majority of the community has) that one should earn precursor by himself and not simply buy it from TP. I’m sure that if they would have created this system since launch, all precursors would have been account bound since the beginning because that is what most players asked : a unique weapon that show your dedication to the game and all its activities rather than something you can get by using your credit card.
So in the end having unique awesome skins (chainwhip sword or stormbow) through gems and other through active gameplay (new Legendary) is a good middle option (I know nobody likes compromises) but now they should be careful not to release too much awesome gem skins in comparison to Legendary weapons….

Since a bit of time, healing builds are balanced through “outgoing healing” or “heal to other” facts. This is normally expressed as a percentage.
The same way, there is in traits and gear/food some “% damage increase” either conditional from caster point of view (moving, 90% health) or target point of view (health threshold, species of said target…).

One issue I have is to keep track of those modifiers to know what I could expect from my skills. At first I thought a simple summary in hero panel would be enough but I also thought these modifiers could also be turned into a new stat (maybe for expac 2) like having benevolence for which 15 points would convert into 1% outgoing healing and intensity having the same ratio for direct (one could also think about condi) damage.
I think it would make the character itemization clearer for everyone.
I know that having a stat like intensity would actually be a nerf since modifiers would then be additive rather than their actual multiplicative state but having such stat on gear for example would mean we could bring more overall. Yet, for the ratio I don’t know how it would compete with ferocity so intensity could actually be too hard to manage but benevolence would be a nice add.

Another suggestion would be to homogenize giver’s stats with concentration and expertise. It’s going to be a bit wonky since it will nerf weapons condi duration but will boost a lot the boon duration. Not sure it will destabilize balance though but at least it will create an homogeneous itemization environment. Of course don’t create a PvP Giver’s amulet with those stats.

What are your thoughts?

One thing I find funny with guardians (at least LB trap ones) is how predictive they are. I don’t know if this belongs also to balance but every finger they move, everytime they open their mouth or if their last meal was too spicy, there is a huge burst of light. You know what they’re doing without even watching them. If you compare with caster barely fidgeting their their finger in the air one can understand why the damages are big.

Tapioca.9062:

I tend to agree that Lazarus wants to take down the dragons. Although, I doubt it’s for any actually virtuous purpose. I think he just wants their magic. We know he’s capable of absorbing large amounts of magical energy and coming out unscathed, I think he wants to be standing right next to an Elder Dragon when one dies.

Well it depends on what Lazarus himself knows about the dragons. I mean in 1078, dwarves did not speak too much about elder dragons though their race fought them. The only living dwarf learned a lot during the last 3 centuries.
I don’t think we can be sure that the Mursaat alive in that time had better knowledge of the dragons in general, they may have lost some knowledge between the last rise of dragons and the 11th century AE.
For that reason, Lazarus getting out of his stasis may have very little knowledge on the Elder Dragon and could be more than surprised by the actual state of the world. Some kind of Austin Powers effect

Jourdelune.7456:

SneakyTouchy.6043:

The match quality in unranked is better.

It will be always the case. Pip range don’t show skill at all, except for the first week or two.

It would be better to match bads (1,2,3), average (4,5,6,7) and decent (8,9,10) together without the pip range for faster queue. A 10 Amber, is still a 10.

But wasn’t it the biggest issue for season 1? I mean the top players had actually more challenging fights than beginners improving so in the end the top players were climbing the league slower then average player. Hence the league was not displaying skills.
That is why they went to season 2 MM, that is all good players within a pip range were paired together against the worse so they could crush them and climb the league faster until they found a pip range where players were equally skilled. In that case there was frustration from both side because games were either to hard or not challenging enough.

Maybe a better solution would be to give more pips than one in case of victory, but contrary to season 1, not to players beating the odds but based on MMR compared to team rating or compared to the league you are in (for example top 20 % MMR in amber gain 5 pips then 4 in emerald…). In other word allow the good players to escape low levels more rapidly.

Wouldn’t arcane power instead of the glyph add a bit in term of burst damage and control?
I find the glyph too unreliable and I am a bit biased by my liking of arcane power+elemental surge combo so I am not sure if this would be a better solution.
Yet you’d lose a stun breaker…

Jourdelune.7456:

Ranael.6423:

Jourdelune.7456:

Actually, we are losing an archetype define by Grouch there:

It is just a matter of feeling but I had the impression that they were trying to decouple bunker and healer in order to create fragile strong support-healer and resilient selfish bunker. Not saying it is a good or bad thing but this is the impression I got from the last changes.

That would be a good idea, but there is none-bunker amulet that do the work, actually.

Bunker build that work where with class that heal and have toughness. Removing those two stats, make it way harder to work.

Probably Cleric was too high stats, so in real world, you simply lower the scaling of the skills that are OP with Cleric.

But in a poor world, where they are so cheap that they don’t give an alternative to Cleric… it’s not working like they want.

So, all meta now is a bruiser build. Different amulet because each build got traits or skills with more or less surv. The meta with DPS amulet, have strong defensive skills and traits. The meta with Condi amulet, have less defensive skills and traits than that.

A bunker that don’t do damge and can’t heal himself or anyone, or cleanse himself or anyone… simply don’t exist. Nobody will make a build only to stay on a point all game.

Power : 1050
Healing power : 1050
Toughness : 560
Something: 560

This would had solved the issue. Only 1610 stats for defensive attribute, compare to the 2100 from cleric.

But anyway, the balanced team did nerf Ele heals, did nerf Ele damage (with CD). So, cleric amulet would had been balanced.

Or maybe they want to remove bunker possibilities on some professions (because next elite spec ). But as said in your other topic there is few explanations on global intention from the devs (both balance and PvP devs) so we can only assume things because no one goes into deeper gameplay conversation with what appears to me (from my noobish point of view) as invested players.
Grouch said they want " to take support down a notch and increase the pace of combat" without more details.

This discussion makes me so happy… but also so sad.
Happy because there are plenty of things that engineer can do and the more you think about it, the more you find new usage.
Sad because I am forbidden to use my engi in my guild unless we go on VG, because “engi do no damage” “engi are not in the strat vids of [KING]” “there is no space for engi in the group” “better have 2 PS and 2 Rev in the group because else we can’t have enough might and fury” “Necros are better condi dealer than engi” “If you don’t take FT you won’t make enough condi damage”…. yes I’m crying now…

Astralporing.1957:

And Anet listened, and made them easier (also, people started doing them at level 80 in full exotics/ascended, the first threads were made by people in greens/blues trying dungeons at their theoretically correct levels – no such change will happen now, people are already playing at full capacity). I wonder why people bringing “dungeons were hard” argument always keep forgetting about that.

Because this is only partially true. After initial nerf there were still many people to find dungeons too hard (even today there are still some remaining post). And do people go into Fractals with food, consumables and Fractal potions? Have all people adapted to high boss armor in T3/T4 Fractal by using more condi build? Do some consider to bring a healer in raid to help. Yes one can do it, yet many do not need to contrary to raid … so this is a big difference between raid and Fractals, the latter content is way less strict in term of composition and itemization.

Cynz.9437:

Whole forums are made for complains. Happy people don’t post on forums, they play game. Players don’t complain for the sake of it (well most don’t), they complain because they love this game and want it to be better.

They want it to better …for them. Many complaints are countered by other posters because they see the flaws in what the complainer asks … and then it turns into fights, battle quotes, post history necroing and other stuff.

Maybe that is what I find a bit sad on this forum : there are no “in-depth” CM to animate debate and offer counter argument. Most hot discussions end up being closed by a Moderator without any insight on what the game dev think.

For many years there was a weekly discussion in Dungeon sub about the berserker meta which was intended or not intended, easy or hard… Nobody ever came to say “guys, we tuned our content so that most teams can do dungeons but some are more rapid while more risky”.
Today there are weekly thread about easy mode Raids. There are discussions about MMR hell, about how it is easy for anybody to reach Legend league, about GvG in WvW maps, about balance … add whatever weekly/monthly discussion

There should be someone labelled Anet being able to enter those discussions and give the opinion of the dev, the direction they want to give to a particular content. Because while forum is a good tool to gauge the community’s opinions on things to give devs some feedback, we are in need of a feedback from the devs on what they intend to do.
Gaile is doing a great job, especially when it comes to social interaction with players but she never enters deep mechanistic conversation. I don’t know if she actually could do it (either from time point of view or maybe she simply would not like) but I think every team (Fractal/Raid, PvP, WvW maybe but they seem to have that through their Live beta, Balance, Open world) should have someone to interact with player via the forum or other media (not necessarily an already busy dev but someone whose task is to do so). I know it would be a huge cost for the company and it may not be that simple…

But having some more in depth reasons for balance (more than 2 lines in patch notes, or to discuss what they don’t feel is needed), what kind of archetypes the PvP team want to promote (they always say they want to shift the pacing of the game but never disclose their true final goal), what they think about PvE Meta in instanced content (or maybe to guide us to some builds they planned but never occurred), how do they choose their itemization choice (hopefully they don’t simply roll dices for stat combination) and so many more other developing philosophy would actually help the community to handle better quality discussion.

Sismis.5390:

Look make no mistake MM cant fix human error.The system cannot predict what a player does or will do. The issue is right now every lost game I had was due to Human error,3 thief who refuse to swap class, player using wrong builds and so on…. The issue is still on player side who refuse to accept things how they are and bring the wrong weapon to the fight. Still one thing I refuse is players who want to complete their daily and Quene into Ranked and I get a lost game cause he never plays that class. There should be a system to prevent that.

Some much truth in this post !
You only forgot the “I make my own strat” error where people decide to, for example, run far without even telling (or without a character able to do it…) or disappear from fight to kill a beast….

And yes I think they should have everyday 3 professions titles: Daily Soldier/Adventurer/Scholar winner, paired with 2 task achievement so that re-rollers may get up to 3 achievements while people feeling only confident on one profession would not reroll an unknown toon for the sake of getting their daily.

This discussion reminds me the game launch where people found dungeons such an awful experience because it was way too hard (with the same arguments).
For the last years people claimed that things in the game were not too easy but too much predictable after playing them over and over. Here we are with new / revamped 5-player content and the game turned harder… so those people were right.
In less than a year people will ask for new Fractals in a new thread every second day because Swamp will be too easy and berzerker meta makes this content trivial

Jourdelune.7456:

It would be better to know all time the team MMR and know your own MMR. Making a friend, public, private switch on individual MMR to counter drama QQ would be great.

While exact values are always hidden in most games (I think it is to avoid MMR manipulation), at least a “color code” for where you are could be a nice addition. In an ideal world, your MMR should correlate with the league you’re in, but with the actual system it is only true for Legendary. Before that, I know you like to say that, it is somehow grind-based (with an amount of required skill increasing starting ruby).

Upon reaching Legend, the player ranking should follow the legendary level but I am not sure if matchmaking takes legendary level into account meaning a low MMR/low level player may be paired with high MMR players, at least as long as they are in the allowed search range.

Jourdelune.7456:

Actually, we are losing an archetype define by Grouch there:

It is just a matter of feeling but I had the impression that they were trying to decouple bunker and healer in order to create fragile strong support-healer and resilient selfish bunker. Not saying it is a good or bad thing but this is the impression I got from the last changes.

fishball.7204:

Do they still give average MMR to new players? That might explain a bit if the system gives you a few new players that’s rip.

Not sure to understand the wiki correctly but from what I got, a new player is given an MMR of 1500 with a deviation of 350 (so his MMR range is 1150-1850) out of a total scale of 100-5000.
It may have been chosen as an average value based on player distribution, but since then the distribution is maybe different, centred around higher (or lower) value.

Also compared to OP scale of 1-10, I am not sure the algorithm authorizes a distance between highest and lowest MMR of 1200 (between the 6th and 8th minute) plus 700 from deviation, so a difference of 1900 in extrema of ratings. In a 1-10 scale it would translate to a max difference of 4, if the best is 10 nobody in that game should be lower than 6.

But again, I am not fully certain of this….

What about exchanging hardened foundation and eluding nullification?

While the former may creates issue in PvE and passively helps pvp healer (with healing power) to become more “bunker” (which goes against their actual view) the ICD of the latter makes it a worse option to choose compared to other traits.
Moreover hardened foundation is somehow problematic since not having healing power makes it have no effect which goes against the untying of stats and trait lines (especially with passive minor traits).

OP, I am sure a lot of people also spend time at night to invent a new spelling for Khaleesi (sometimes adding too many eee or iii just becomes ridiculous) or Targaryen to pass the character naming step

But I have to confess that my key farm character is called IDoctorI and I try to recreate Peter Capaldi’s face and as soon as he arrives in Shaemoor I dress him with the noble count outfit…. not so unique I guess ><"

I would not only blame the company but somehow some players as well. Too many people enter the game as solo players thinking they will only 1v1 on point and do not care about general rotation. And balance is I think enough since a big part of the game is how your team moves and react and not so much about single fights. Having hard hitting builds is ok if they are kind of slow and you can basically exhaust the “monster” by out-rotating him. A strong healer is fine if he is not on top of that a good damage dealer and/or bunker. This is why people feel the game so unbalance, they only want stand alone builds while everything is created and balanced around team synergy (e.g. there is a good controller around the healer to protect him while he heals the party).

Maybe the team is responsible for not making their rules or design clear enough. It feels like they are still wondering what they want Conquest to become.

Another thing that is not clear in solo is who you play with. And this is related to balance in a way. By having meta build, it is a bit easier to identify who you play with. For comparison, in a MOBA, when you select a hero, you have a set of skills and role that other can identify as soon as the game starts (you can play some differently but generally you don’t). In Gw2, since every profession is supposed to fill different roles it is too hard to know who are your team mates. This become a real issue in conquest where team play is the key… hence the frequent blows of solo vs pre-made.

I also played GW1 and in that game it would have not made any sense to have soloQ GvG. For the same reason I find it weird to have soloQ conquest because I find conquest really close to what GvG was, only with a more aggressive gameplay, which is good because fighting 20 minutes around a flag stand only to test enemy monk was not that great. They’ve put more emphasis on the relevance on base defence (home point) and split to enemy’s base (far point).
And about balance at that time, things were not as good as some tend to think. Builds were also somehow restricted, with always the same characters in every game, with some elites changing according to the last balance updates. At that time people were horrified how the game was unbalanced but it was more about some skills than about character archetype (how many threads on how they should make every single skill as strong as the others). Like in GW2 there were some awful comp as well (hexway comes to my mind as prime example).

To be honest since I find Stronghold much more solo friendly than conquest I would not mind restricting it to soloQ and have conquest for team only. The problem is that they’ve put so much resources in conquest that restricting it so hard would be dramatic.

Jerus.4350:

Pinpoint Distribution -> Grant 150 condition damage to nearby allies. Make that change and see how it plays out?

I’d prefer 150 expertise now that it is a stat.

But on the other hand I am not a huge fan of profession specific party wide buffs (which clutters our buff bar) or debuff (which have no counterplay in pvp), especially when they are not tide to a support line.
I think generic, non stackable buffs would be better, and them being on a support line or an elite spec line. Even better if they would use the boon system.
I find things like PSEA (25might + banners + empower allies) too powerful to allow diversity.

Scaling instances based on number of people is always a bit hard to tune and often results in optimal strategies of “do wing XX with 8 people to optimize boons and DPS”.

If boss scales on number of players then players’ skills should also scale, meaning SoI should only have 4 targets when 8, number of regen ticks should be lowered on some abilities because you will provide the boon too easily …. and so on

But for your issue of not finding people quick enough, maybe you should consider being more “flexible” for your PUG, it could be that the requirements you have are a bit too high.

OriOri.8724:

If you are going to come to the mesmer forums and claim that alacrity makes up for the kittentiest personal dps in the game then please at least read the actual discussion held by players who do play chronomancer and know what they are talking about.

No I am coming to a DPS thread to claim that better science would be more profitable.
OP start with a comparison of DPS of power specs (full zerk and trait damage oriented) with a support spec, the rotation of which is not optimized for maximal damage output.
Then OP talks about a condi specs which he claim to be 13.3k while it has been months since video showing a 21 k DPS on single target have been released. So I think player skill may account for more DPS increase than any buff in the game.
I have yet to see a video of someone playing full berserker gear, with domi/duel/illu build and people around to buff the iSwordmen (because in raid situation your phantasms will also get might, quickness and area effect). Then the question of the DPS boost will be a thing.
Basing conclusion on bad science is maybe something we see everyday on TV but it still is a bad habit.

Right now, Mesmer is Meta in raid (look how 4-men VG requires one), recommended in Fractals, has some good solo builds (I don’t know for power but condi build is correct), has no issue for tons of open world activities (personal experience where I can better solo champs with mesmer than Ele), is a deadly roamer in WvW, is more than appreciated in zerg, has always a place in the sPvP Meta and (cherry on the pie) has really good ways to troll people in open world without being sportted (illusion of life has a huge potential!).
I am not sure so many professions around are so much wanted then mesmer.
I can totally see that players want to have a super broken DPS spec because not being first hurts feelings, but if it happens it will remove Chrono and party wide buff through their utility.

Eragon.8234:

http://qtfy.enjin.com/engineer

This link gives you the condi and power builds that are now best, the vidoes show to rotation, you just have to watch the skill bar.
I am using the power build shown, and it works quite well.

Hmmm I thought Power build was using hammer for thunderclap and electro whirl (on your video I don’t see you using rifle skills). At least that is what I got from Xyonon’s post on reddit.

Please no… I have seasickness

“We want top-tier fractal players to be exposed to more difficult encounters” is the key here. It is not “we want top tier fractals player to be ready to go in raid because it is our true end game content”…

But whatever, English is not my native language and I’m too much an optimistic person so you may be as right as I am.

SkinnyT.5382:

hmmmm.

Vale Guardian:

Normal mode: (aka. NM)
Stays the same.

Easy Mode
- 15% base damage reduction from NM
- 20% skill recharge time increase from NM
- Enrage: VG get +15% base dmg. , and -25% skill recharge time

Hard Mode
- 15% base damage increase from NM
- 20% health increase from NM
- Phases now activate every time VG looses 1/5 of it’s full HP
- Enrage: Same as NM

Wait.. What this? A 3 tier Vale Guardian? No but this cant be. It’s not possible.
I mean despite not changing any mechanics at all, it clearly breaks the game. It’s too dumb down now, and any idiot can do it. Where’s the challenge? It was clearly taken away from the people who do easy mode and everyone else simultaneously.
Oh and the time! This is gonna gonna take so much time to implement. I mean the dev has to go and copy and paste THE WHOLE VG FIGHT CODE! And then! Then they have change whole HALF A DOZEN variables for each tier. I mean.. god they’ll need a whole new group of people for that.
You know what your guys? You’re right tiers are just not realistic. GG! Everybody go home! Raids are just for people with specific gear and builds!

Seriously, do you genuinely think that if it was so easy, the developers of GW2 are not doing it just because they enjoy to see people argue on the forum about who is the elitist, who is the spoiled kid, who is the lazy……? Have you ever considered that developing an MMO is actually harder than doing excel macros?

And yes -15% on green means you can forget about them. If the seekers strikes for less, you don’t need to CC them. Then self-heal (and a bit of regen around you) is enough… so you get maybe a T2 Fractal boss. There is far less challenge, which is the core design of raids….

No I think you are reading too much between the lines. The comment on reddit was more meant as :
“We have a difficulty scale in the game but the steps are not equally distributed. We find there is a huge gap between Fractals and raid. We would like to use our Fractal “scalability” to offer players, who find Fractals too easy and want challenging content but don’t want to get into raids, a suitable spot in term of challenge. This is our view on the expandability of FOTM: finding the right challenge for every players".

It is actually how they want to not force people to do raid to feel challenged.

Supreme.3164:

It’s the foundation of every PvP forum of every MMO ever released, zealously followed by your average player with no fail at every turn, it goes like this:

-Class I play is underpowered
-Class I beat easily is balanced
-Class I barely beat needs a shave
-Class that beats me is OP and needs huge nerfs

So would you conclude it would be better to shut down pvp or balance forum and don’t let player be vocal on balance and let professional (game developers who actually learned and practised their job for many years on different games) do their job instead of emotionally involved players?

Tapioca.9062:

This feels like the exact raid or die mentality so many people were worried would creep into the game with the introduction of raids. Similarly, I saw a dev post on Reddit stating that high level Fractals were being redesigned to act as a stepping stone towards raids in terms of difficulty. Does everything in the game have to revolve around raids in some way now? Is this what the game’s about?

out of topic but why is it bad that they are creating a ramp in difficulty from Fractal lvl 1 open world to raid?
On top of that it is not remotely true, I found some T4 Fractals harder than raid, for different reasons than I can find raid difficult but still.

Blaeys.3102:

OnizukaBR.8537:

Blaeys.3102:

I understand the things you are saying, but the Unbound Guardian still isn’t a raid boss and has nothing to do with the conversation about tiered difficulties in raids.

It has, because people want easy mode to experience the bosses. And UG give you that, so why waste resource just to put UG in an instanced place?

People want tiered difficulties so they can experience the raid itself and the fun of a semiorganized group – just with a little more freedom regarding builds/playstyles/skill levels.

That experience includes the story, the setting and the mechanics involved in mid sized group play (as opposed to open world – which is an entirely different game mode).

I don’t think anyone thinks that mirroring the bosses in the open world – with different, albeit similar mechanics, is the solution people are looking for.

But from a design point of view, and given the high number of possible combination, making raid boss “easy” comes necessarily down to what UG is. In that I mean you only scale the difficulty (read boss HP) on the number of people and let them do what they want.
This somehow breaks the philosophy of the raid where this is really because you fought hard that you can go further and discover the story. If the raid bosses were made easy the raid itself would worth less than a dungeon tbh because there is less story in it than any Arah path.

There is already some freedom in build/playstyle in raid. Sure there is “the team” that everybody copies from Quantify videos though they never noticed that those guys are beast at the game (well others are too). I’ve seen people finishing the raid pulling far less DPS out of their Ele and doing quite the same DPS with their condi thief than staff Ele… yet they complete the encounters.

Just as an example, if you assume VG fights needs 7 DPS (10 – tank, healer and chrono) and occurs in 6 minutes (8 from timers – one minute for each split phase), the DPS requirements is less than 9 k DPS. VG as 1900 armor, so on the golem, the DPS measurement should be 6,5 k for power builds, and 9k for condi ones…. so in term of strictness, we are far from what some seem to expect.

What actually amost always kills you on all raid encounters is not the lack of DPS (well for Gorseval it can be) but mistakes in moving to the right place at the right time, use a cc, an object, the additional skill when you need to. Tiering this in different difficulty would actually mean having mechanisms you can avoid. And as I said, avoiding the boss mechanisms would make the raid less interesting than any dungeon.

Arcane skills being instant cast makes them quite powerful with the Elemental surge trait. This trait combined with arcane precision can be quite deadly for burst damage and control. They are underused but in the present state they already have some values.
Signet of water should be improved either in term of condi removed or frequency of removal.

Ananeos.4587:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4v76gq/qt_updated_guides_and_dps_benchmarks_for_all/
44,320 dps divided by Mesmer’s 7,828 = 5.7 rounded up to 6

This has to stop. Even the second lowest class, the Ranger, manages do deal more than double the dps at 18,969. The Mesmer was in full Zerker.

But wait you ask, what about condi mesmer?
13.3k on a test golem (without confusion and torment’s added damage, but it wasn’t high enough anyway) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wC1NsFfVUc

Anet why do you torture us so?

/endrant

Even if the thread has derailed a bit and although as said previously, the DPS number only comes out of a video showing the rotation (hence no buf so no validity for comparison… another video later showed something closer to 12 kDPS) one should not forget what the real DPS of the mesmer is in this situation.
For this, do an experiment: try an Ele rotation with and without quickness. The difference is the contribution of the mesmer in the ele optimal DPS.
On top of that you can do it for the entire raid because every DPS is in the same situation.
So the comparison would hold if it was done between DPS builds and DPS builds, not support.

Are you using healing coefficients multiplicatively?They stack additively.

I did not run my own test but read it was multiplicative, like damage modifiers… then my bad

Well, Monk rune, sigil of Transferance, Rice balls, Tranquil Balance, Invoking Harmony, Srene Rejuvenation and Selfless amplification (with 1600 healing power) makes a coefficient of 2,55 for 10 sec after switching so it is not that hard to achieve. Especially in PvE because once you know the encounter you know how to have Ventari ready for damage spikes. In WvW I admit that the action tends to make one forget about it.
But yes PvP is a different story you are right.

When you compare healing numbers of revenant, don’t forget to multiply the tooltip number by 2,5 because that is basically what a healer geared rev get when all outgoing healing align (hence the need to change Legend every 10 sec to get the best results). That means Ventari’s Will heal 5 players for 3700…every 3 sec for 10 sec.
On top of it, the lack of ICD on Bolster Fortifications makes the trait almost broken with the tablet.