Guild Wars 2

I get the gist of where you’re trying to go with that, but you should probably just call them CoF Farmers for clarity’s sake. The looming sense of dread doesn’t come from their gear and class choices afterall, it comes from their self-imposed steady diet of waaayyy too easy content.

Kohler’s a Legendary rank mob.
Doesn’t that mean he’s subject to the new Champion rewards system?

These aren’t meant to be examples of things that can go wrong. They’re just meant to illustrate the two ways of looking at optimizing. A last man standing was meant to be an example of someone who views optimizing as an absolute, and will seek to capitalize on mechanical strengths although it may affect their ability to positively influence what’s happening around them. A person who slots in Reflection was meant to be an example of somebody who views optimizing on a situational basis, and will seek to influence what’s happening around them although it may involve using tools their build has no noteworthy specialization in. Both these people walk out of their respective situations thinking; “I did my best”, because they’re two totally different measuring sticks for success.

I don’t really mean to paint one perspective as better than another, just generally acknowledge that they exist and say I think that it accounts for our very divided opinions. (Although, I don’t mean to paint us as representatives for a dichotomy, either. I like to think nobody’s really fully in one corner or the other, just varying levels of both.)

I think PvE developer should take a long hard look at sPvP and then analyze how they can make PvE closer to sPvP.

I think that’s really the long and short of it.

Yeah, I do feel bad about resorting to such a hypocritical move. I’m sorry about that. But in all fairness, I did try asking you to tone it down nicely first, and that didn’t seem to get me much of anywhere.

Whatever, it’s water under the bridge for me if it is for you.

I guess where we really disagree is on what’s considered optimizing.
I view doing the best for your group as dependent on the circumstances, and you seem to view it as an absolute. If forced to choose what would be considered a good player carrying their group; is it being the last man standing on a boss fight, or slotting in some reflection on a fight known for that? I think we’d probably have two different answers to that question, and there’s really no right answer to it anyway.

Oh, so does that mean you really didn’t take anything personally and laying down an ‘agree with me or I’ll call you a baddie’ ultimatum is your standard response to critiques? This isn’t exactly the better of the two options.

But I suppose I can find the point you’re trying to make under all that combative acid. It’s not that you don’t acknowledge the potential impracticality of it, it’s that you just don’t care. You’re more about banking on the hope a run will end up the way you want it to, than acknowledging that it might not and working through that.

Well, I guess I can’t fault you for your optimism, but I think that outlook is kind of asking for dissapointment.

If you are unable to play them, you’ll either complain that it’s too hard, that I’m not being helpful, or you’ll try to improve.

Now, now, no need to get so defensive.
I think you’re very intelligent and highly skilled, and speedrunners would be fools not the change their meta in light of your discoveries. If I’m raising concerns, it’s because I genuinely think the speedrun culture could use a healthy dose of pragmatism every so now and again. I’m not the sort of woman that would go around being contrary just to demean your accomplishments or try to injure your pride.

I don’t mean anything malicious, so I’d appreciate it if you disagreed with me without being so passive aggressive about it.

You know what I mean, captain snarky.
The numbers themselves are totally sensible for the size of our HP pools, the problem areas with healing build options is that need for group recovery is too situational. Healing Power could scale 100 times what it does now, and we would still have a zerker meta.

I think ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is oversimplifying the situation.

Glass cannon builds play well with other glass cannon builds. They work specifically because guy next to you is doing the same thing, and the guy next to him is doing the same thing, and the guy next to him is doing the same thing. By qualifying your run as a speedrun, you attract other players who have that same sort of a build, so things just sort of naturally pan out.

For a variety of reasons, you just can’t make that same assumption in normal pug play. Calling that good play or bad play just isn’t a productive line of thought. It simply is, and you either adapt to that or you don’t. If you run a normal pug operating under the same assumptions you do a speedrun, you’re setting yourself up for frustration and disappointment.

This has always been true.
The reason I feel more inclined to remark on your video is specifically because what you’ve managed here is such a feat of mechanical engineering. It’s a successful build comprised of three creatures that can’t dodge, in a game where content is trivialized by dodging. That’s awesome. But it’s also glass cannoningst glass cannon that ever lived (with a skyscraper skill floor to boot).

Can you really blame me for thinking it might be kind of a dangerous thing for pugs?

You can’t understand the impact of healing by looking at the size of the numbers and comparing them to the size of the numbers damage does. Not only are Mob HP bars massively larger than a player’s, but Damage is linear and Healing is cyclical. They don’t have to be as large to make the same impact.

I guess I’m just not seeing a great argument that supports the idea of using healers/prots to mitigate damage so that people can faceroll, as opposed to people having to hit their dodge key.

Why can’t we have both?

What I’m saying we’re missing out on is sufficient reward for building characters in a support and control directions with current existing options that conform to overarching design fundamentals. I’m not saying they should add additional options that breaks their own rules and alter play to conform to trinity ideals.

Switching in a reflection utility for a fight is not really the same thing as saying the content has a satisfactory level of reward for support as a character building direction.

Having about 2/3rds the character building options fall off to the wayside is pretty unacceptable in an RPG, considering how much the genre revolves around character building.

I don’t really think it’s like that.

I mean, there is a damage bias in dungeons.
And I think it’s not good for your group if you try to ignore that, but I also think for a variety of non-skill-related reasons if you operate under the assumption of that somebody will be kissing dirt and all the finger pointing in the world isn’t going to bring them back up again.

If you’re feeling supporty, you should probably follow the cookie cutter setup as far as viewing support largely in terms of offensive buffs as a standard action instead of healing as a standard action. You should have a similar goal in that you want to avoid stepping on other people’s toes with offensive redundancy, but also striving to minimize your opportunity cost. This may involve bringing different things to table each time depending on what everybody else is.

But I do also think you should deviate from the cookie cutter setup in that you need to be able to make some situational nods to healing and defense on a case-by-case basis. The reason for this is that dead allies are a DPS loss far greater than the opportunity cost of the scant handful of skills and utilities you need to manage most recoveries. Defense is this odd mix of useless and powerful; when you don’t need it it does nothing, but when you do it’s so potent that you don’t even need to build any particular statistics to make use of it.

I never really feel negatively about Spreadsheets and Guides.
Those things either occur in vacuums or paint fight strategy in broad strokes, so they’re pretty general. Trying to translate speedrun play to pug play is largely a problem of context.

Namely speedruns operate on the ‘the best form of defense is a good offense’ principal and pugs don’t. Yes, that’s partly due to the new player element, but this also happens for completely innocuous reasons. Like, people needing a testing ground for balance update changes or new build ideas, or people who prefer to advance their character by exploring build options and skillcurves rather than setting aesthetic goals.

It’s not as though regular pug groups are some kind of speedclear larval phase, they’re their own separate thing. Which is why speedclears make for such bad reference. They just have different needs, and a typical run pans out very differently. Speedclear builds are highly dependent on eachother because a ‘good offense’ strategy is high risk, and normal Pug builds tend to have fixed roles but need to be more general and flexible to compensate for various compositions.

I guess it’s kind of like; a good speedrunner is a cog, and a good pugger is a chameleon. A good cog doesn’t worry about things like being highly specialized or having high skill floors, if that’s their designated niche then they aim to fill it and that’s just the way it is. But to a good chameleon these are more like limitations and concerns.

@ Nike
Put that thing back in your pants, please.
I’m not interested in a kitten ing contest.

Let me try and be more clear.
I’m saying race-style record keeping isn’t really all that much of a community support system because the average player can’t do much with the information provided by it. That’s not a dig at OP’s performance, that’s a critique of the speedrun meta’s influence over the pug meta. There’s nothing inherently evil about tooting your own horn, but I just can’t agree with the altruistic spin I quoted because it seems to encourage that influence. Which I regard as a recipe for disaster, and OP regards as a trial-by-fire.

You don’t want us to try and help the community by pushing more skilled play?

Not really, no.
The point of giving people advice is that it’s something they can realistically find useful, not a demonstration of prowess that when attempted will likely get them killed. Advice is like; If you want to play aggressively mix in knights with your berserker gear until you reach a comfortable equilibrium, and then as you learn the finer points of damage avoidance start mixing more berserkers back in. ‘See what me and my awesome glass cannon friends can do on this one specific ridiculously easy path’ is not useful advice. That’s bragging.

(Not that’s it’s your fault the community’s so mixed up proof of concept for a build comes down to that.)

I think that’s a fair statement.

Just sharing some observations I’ve made while toying with this

In theory Rapid Fire doesn’t get to capitalize on it’s vulnerability, but in practice I find that I rarely ever have to fire off a ‘dry’ Rapid Fire. It’s true that without any investment in MM, you don’t have any condition duration and your Rapid Fire will fall off completely before the next one is ready. But if you have either 30 MM OR Quick Draw, the vulnerability stacks from your previous Rapid Fire will still be around when you’re doing the next, and you’ll ‘catch’ the stacks as they’re falling to push them back up to 10 (With 30 MM you’ll catch it at 4 to 6 stacks, with Quick Draw you’ll catch it at 2 to 4 stacks.) If you have 30 MM AND Quick Draw they overlap, so you’ll be doing Rapid Fire with all 10 stacks still on from the previous Rapid Fire.

It’s true that you can no longer get 6 seconds of 20 stacks at the start of combat.
But for what it’s worth with Remorseless you can get 6 seconds of 15 stacks every 12/9.5 seconds. You just have to reverse the order. Instead of Hunter’s -> Rapid, you do Rapid ->Hunter’s -> LRS/PBS.

It’s a decent question, but it has it’s limits.

On the one hand things should feel worthwhile without traits, on the other hand nobody is walking around with a blank trait template or makes a habit of wielding weapons outside their build direction.

If you felt you needed Remorseless to make Longbow work that would be a problem. Feeling the need to do some level of investment into the power trait line while using a power weapon just seems like a standard of character building that should be taken for granted.

I think it’s generally interesting to manipulate how the vulnerability stacks ebb and flow with Remorseless. But all I’ve really got at the moment are a small collection of stupid pet tricks I don’t quite have a practical handle on.

For example; You can open a fight with a window of 25 vulnerability stacks that lasts long enough to sandwich in a pet’s F2. But while I’m decent enough at doing that on test dummies for somebody trying to re-work her muscle memory, oh god, do I ever fumble it on actual bosses.

You start the fight off with Hunter’s Shot -> Rapid Fire.
You get 5 from the initial opening strike on hunter’s shot, 5 again from the remorseless renewed opening strike on the first hit of rapid fire, 10 from rapid fire, 5 from the pet. It’s about a two second window, but if you get the hang of the timing it’s not too hard to land.

At first flush you’d think it would be pretty hard to activate an F2 before the end of the rapid fire channel, but after a pet has had a chance to do a melee attack to apply their own opening strike, but before any lengthy family attacks get into queue. But oddly in practice it mostly just works out all on it’s own with a few adjustments per family. (For example; I F1 birds before firing my arrows to get Quickening Screech out of the way).

There’s all sorts of weird little things like that with Longbow now.

Not that I’m not happy for the recognition.

But if somebody’s honestly judging the state of a class based on speed-clear times they sincerely need to get back in touch with the realities of variance. I thought the Meta was silly before, and I still think it’s pretty darned silly even if it is doublingback and saying something positive about my class for once.

Fortifying bond doesn’t transfer Stealth or Stability.

The only skill that really has the distance requirement is Long Range Shot. You can stand on a boss’s toes and rapid fire to your heart’s content.

Hmm. I think it might be worthwhile to see how these changes actually operate in practice before working ourselves up. It’s a pretty large overhaul to the weapon both mechanically and conceptually. While patch notes are a good summary, they’re not tooltips and nothing really beats getting the weapon in your hands and testing the feel yourself.

@ Oranisagu
Did a post get deleted somewhere? It sounds like you’re talking to me because you mentioned my phrasing, but I have no idea where those last three paragraphs are coming from given that I openly agreed that stacking and glitching should be distinguished as separate things.

I don’t really agree that the game does a good job of sticking to the ‘melee = high risk/high reward; ranged = low risk/low reward’ dichotomy. Putting aside for the moment outliers who have a mechanical basis for enforcing one type of gameplay over the other; like Melrona whose clearly a ranged-favored fight and Subject Alpha whose pretty clearly a melee-favored fight. Most other fights you can tell this dichotomy’s been put in there in broad strokes from the way range limits work and the way baseline damage values are constructed, but the nitty gritties of practice don’t really pan out consistently enough.

I think there’s alot of subtle things that are contributing to that.

The lack of any real roadblocks like phases means the ‘killing it faster = less time to hurt people’ principal is in full swing. This is made all the worse by the cyclical nature of the AI, which boils down alot of fights into doing the same thing multiple times and trying not to lose your rhythm your nth time through. So safety does make things slower, but slower can also make things less safe.

The fact buffs have a mid-range concentration of about 600. This actually works excellently with the highrisk/highreward design when it comes to offensive buffs as the closer you are to the action the more damage you do, but unfortunately this also holds true for defensive buffs as well. Meaning whatever natural safety advantage ranged play has needs to weighed against a hidden defense opportunity cost.

The fact stacking makes resurrection so many orders of magnitudes easier the definition of failure itself is different. Getting downed while kiting and ranging is dangerous, getting downed in the melee-zergball is so divorced of consequence it’s practically a glorified healing cooldown. Usually this is where the consequences for multiple resurrections would counterbalance things, but bosses die long before being downed four times in a row is a practical assumption and all Downed Penalty does is give you less Free Health. If it’s such a foregone conclusion that you’ll get back up, there’s not much meaning in going down.

I’m kind of thinking it’s the sort of thing they’d have to hit when they’re using the living story to revamp a place. There just isn’t any kind of minor tweak you could do to break up the melee zergball, encounters would need to be rebuilt from the ground-up with this in mind before you could hope to make any headway.

I kind of with Oran, I think you definitely have to make a distinction.

To me glitching out a boss is, like, actually honestly and truly abusing terrain to cause a boss to be unable to hit you while you can still hit them. This is not a playstyle. This is straight-up cheating. Any instance of that needs to be fixed. No excuses.

Stacking can sometimes be the way people execute this, but when people stack it’s not always a case of trying to cause a Boss to glitch out. Mostly when you see people stacking, it’s for Buffs, ease of rezzing, or to avoid a secondary AI behavior that triggers certain effects when players are at a range (Subject Alpha’s dragontooth, for example).

All that said, yeah, it is kind of Lame.
The feeling you get from bunching Spider Queen into some corner and just brainlessly wailing on her is not epic…it’s just kind of pathetic. I don’t care whose fault that is, I just know that it has to change. Moving forward encounter design really needs to be doing more to keep melee play and the zerg ball from being such a dominant strategy.

That was an unfortunately suggestive pair of noun choices to follow that interjection. :p

Or, they could make the reward dynamic. Start rewarding 10 silver at 5 minutes and climb upwards like a reverse timer, capping out at 1G after an hour, something like that. If the reward is per account per day, there might be some optimal timing for completion. Say you get to the boss, it might be worth taking 5 for a smoke break then finishing out. Speculating is fun.

It’s a game with Metrics Analysis.
If they really wanted to, they could compare your dynamically adjusting multivariate gaussian curve of theoretical ranking versus the Boss’s and reward you based on how you performed versus an algorithmically determined probability of winning. Not saying that that’s a good idea. But, Completion Time is like, 2003 stuff. You’re seriously underestimating the capacity for frighteningly glorious evil there is in your modern big brother MMORPG.

I don’t particularly care what the original intention was. If the majority of folks find it more frustrating than fun, then back to the drawing board it goes. It is a game afterall.

the rest of your team wasn’t already capping vuln stacks

I’ve never understood that viewpoint.
I hear that with all sorts of other boons and conditions. I mean, there’s like nine to twelve of them. Isn’t functional overlap kind of a foregone conclusion?

Just because the functional redundancy is rooted in core weapon concepts and not utilities like banners doesn’t mean you can’t still adapt to make sure your group is getting the best bang for their buck. Heck, I’m constantly switching around my offhand just to approach different fights better. So I kind of don’t get how two people with overlapping weapon concepts creates a point of contention?

The problem with TTK test dummies is that your testing procedure can easily end up circumventing cooldowns, which are prettymuch the only balancing mechanism this game actually has.

@DeadlySynz
There are specific kinds of AOE heavy fights that are hopeless and that does need to change. However, 90%? C’mon, don’t be so dramatic. Nobody’s pet is keeling over on Mark T-B34RC3, Torn Fur, Gunpowder Morgan, or any other in a long line of not-too-particularly-threatening mid-boss battles. The pet being a lost cause in a fight is more exception than rule. It’s just that these fights tend to stick out in your mind the most, because there is nothing more frustrating than your profession mechanic being nuked from orbit and there not being a kittened thing you can do about it.

Well, it’s not an arbitrary restriction, there is a reason that the root happens.
Kick and Pounce are mechanically leaps, even though Kick doesn’t say so, and technically any leap skill causes your character to be rooted while the animation is cycling through. Though in my opinion, any design that has such widespread disapproval could rightly be called clunky no matter what the reasons are.

Hmm. Normally I’d agree that melee is more dangerous therefore you should get more reward. But in practice, not so much?

With a few exceptions, when bosses AOE, they carpet bomb the place. Truly dangerous pointblank AOE is in pretty limited supply. You have cleaving melee attacks to deal with, but they’re an unfortunate mix of avoidable and easily surmountable. Considering how much of support is pointblank AOE and accessible without much in the way of speccing for it, and how much easier it is to rez someone whose stacked on top of the group, being closer to the action oftentimes seems safer than being farther away. With the group you have backup, farther away you’re on your own.

I think there’s a case for ranged proficiency that at least meets melee proficiency. That or a movement towards much, much, much more dangerously aggressive melee range gameplay in dungeons.

Depends on the buffing.
Is it sustainable or does it rely on high cooldown skills? Does it have certain requirements that may be difficult to fullfill regularly? You can’t just look at numbers in isolation, you have to contextualize things.

Look, I get that getting a legendary is a long thankless soulless grind. That sucks. But that just means legendaries need a road to acquisition outside of gold purchase that has a feeling of steady progress. That doesn’t mean devs should hold off using the living story system to revamp dungeons for the better or turn blind eye to their entire risk/reward dynamic falling to pieces.

Another issue I’m seeing though, just to add it to the pile of “kitten that needs fixed on Rangers” is that my Jaguar doesn’t always crit from Stealth. Isn’t it supposed to?

It used to, but that’s was altered last patch. It’s still a very high Crit rate, even if it’s not 100%.

No, no, dear. You’re very intelligent. I’m just having a communication fail right now. Truthfully, I should probably just drop it. I’d hate to derail anymore than I already have.

He makes the assumption that in my spare time I am actively denying any evidence put forth to me.

…what?
Good gravy, I know I have a penchant for being too wordy, but was my original statement really that confusing? I’m so lost I don’t even know how I should be clarifying.

@ Swiftpaw
Just to make sure we’re on the same page, because I can’t quite make heads or tails of what you just said.

First parapraph was for you.
Second paragraph was for Masked to help explain what he’s seeing.

@swiftpaw
Like, seventeen billion slave driver videos later and people are only just now getting a conscience about strawman science? Doesn’t it seem a little late for that?

Re: Subject Alpha
By virtue of stacking and having people dodge into a pillar/wall, you’re hitting the five person cap on AOEs automagically. There was an update a while ago that changed pets into being the lowest priority for AOE, which is why you might have experienced it one way at first and then come back later to find it different.

Eh.
You say that like adding 5% damage kills something 5% faster, and runs weren’t already naturally variable to the tune of whole minutes. Stuff like that just seems to be more about hypothetical good luck charms than having anything to do with practical application.

It’s even less than that.
In most other games if you weren’t somewhat involved in the Meta discussion, you had a hard time completing or even seeing new content. In this game the Meta is just about Farming the same path over and over and over and over again. You’re just not missing out on all that much, which is probably why most folks don’t really seem to give a kitten.

Longbow: I want to see the math for that statement ! I haven’t played for a while so i still think 1 deals more than 2 :P

It’s kind of shady business.
Rapid fire takes like 4.8 seconds and to exceed it’s numbers autoattack would have to be getting in 5 attacks in that same timeframe. Which seems approachable on paper, but because of the 1/4th second hidden aftercast on auto-attack it only just barely doesn’t get there.

No wonder people want a burst skill, that’s just kind of lame.
And it’s not like the increase is anything to write home about.

Syn,
I’m not trying to “call you out” or question your “cred” or anything like that. I’m actually seriously positing this. The apples vs apples comparison isn’t because I have any doubts about your capabilities, I’m asking because character building is bonkers and no sane man could model this in their head. But I guess it wasn’t right of me to say that without some kind of an explanation.

This game feels like it’s balanced on a spreadsheet.
It’s as if somebody worked backwards with about six different major playstyles per class and then thought about what pieces they should cleave off and turn into traits. I’m sure it’s clever way to ensure character building was never overpowered, as it would be if you were happy with where things were as a baseline and then added traits on top of that. But it’s odd in that things only really ‘click’ together at their extremes, and it makes so much of this game’s traits and balancing seem downright aazy crass.

Like, 7% reduction on Moa peck.
If you tried to logic that out as a standalone nerf, you’d only end up scratching your head. Why 7%? Why a nerf? It just doesn’t make any sense all by itself. But if you look at from the perspective of a designer trying to get all pets to hit a (or various) invisible lines on a spreadsheet somewhere suddenly it doesn’t seem quite so random.

/edit: eh, I was getting a bit wordy. trimmed.

Sorry. If you want full PvE field testing you’ll need to provide me with the dosh to gear my charas as such…

If you don’t already have two characters of different classes in comparable circumstances, then do you really feel comfortable comparing them?

I gotta’ share the ‘do not use TTK golems’ sentiment.
Their HP is so low it starts to undermine the whole cooldown balancing mechanism. If you need a field test subject, go prod an open world champion thirty times.

At the end of the day if I were asked to summarize the GW2 dungeon experience in a sentence, it would go something like;

/sucks in a breath through teeth. Well…

And no, I don’t think that’s okay.