Yes, I am serious.
I do and they sure are fun, but still CC doesn’t play any role there either
That’s what pug players keep saying.
thats a whole nother problem, but is true, there is no use for CC on boss fights which is lame I for one would welcome more dynamic combat and less stacking in a corner
Then start doing fractals.
The problem is that in most cases, the “high risk” right now isn’t there.
This is a courtesy of the active defence being exactly the same for all setups, and the larger a percentage of the fight you can cover with active defence, the less your passive defences matter. As soon as you can cover ~all of the fight (most of dungeons), the need for any defensive stat evaporates since there are no situations in which it’d contribute.As such, there is no longer a high-risk-high-reward vs low-risk-low-reward choice.
It’s no-risk-high-reward vs no-risk-low-reward.
Solution? Increase the skill floor of active defense usage.
I enjoy open world “raiding”. I can stand back with my longbow and sip a c’ocktail while commanders are doing all the job. If we somehow kill the beast, I can claim I am a hardcore and that I’m one of the best pve-ers in this game.
I have no clue why anyone would expect anything from anet in that kind of content. This game was designed for casuals so it’s silly to expect any kind of hard core content for organized teams. Everyone’s equal so everyone is allowed to participate, no matter his input and effort.
(edited by haviz.1340)
If zerker gear is going to be nerfed, why anet won’t do anything with soldiers which are clearly strong in wvw?
Aegis and reflections are the only skill based stuff? Maybe after anet butchers their durations and uptime.
If you want to increase the praised build diversity, just increase the difficulty of playing zerkers by increasing the skill floor of active defense like aegis and reflections.
At the moment boss mechanics only really negate soft CC, hard CC, and conditions. There is little to nothing in the way of direct damage mitigation.
Typical bosses do not negate condition damage and soft cc at all and they do mitigate direct damage by reducing vulnerability duration by half.
The first thing that needs changing is how bosses deal damage. At the moment most bosses do large telegraphed attacks that can simply be dodged. Having these big attacks isn’t a bad thing in the least. The problem is the lack of any pressure outside of that.
A lot of the bosses do have autoattacks and they do pressure you. Problem is that most of those autoattacks are often projectiles which are being negated by reflections. Moreover, if bosses did only large telegraphed attacks that can simply be dodged that would mean that they do it once every 10 seconds since that’s the time your endurance regenerates without a vigour for builds like LH or staff elementalist. So, how come you can simply dodge their attacks if you don’t have enough endurance for that?
An example of a boss done well in this sense would be lupicus. […]
His autoattack is enough to one shot an elementalist. Secondly, it seems like you are kiting him which only leads to perceived fun mechanics because it’s one of the bosses (if not the only one) that can actually chase you since he’s faster than you. It’s still better to just melee him.
An example of a boss that needs work would be alpha. […]
If you are talking strictly about path 1 alpha, his aoe has 2 parts. First one is point blank burning plus damage while the second one are multiple dragon’s tooth on ranged users.
His earth attack doesn’t hit if you stand on him, fix that and suddenly you lack endurance to constantly dodge everything (and you cannot block it). I would advise you to take a look at this to improve your knowledge.
-soft CC […]
If by promoting chill you mean kiting them you can already do that with great effectiveness. There’s virtually nothing that oppose that, in fact, it’s the decent tactics for bosses with strong autoattacks like fractal bosses. Weakness only lasts 50% of its original duration because there are certain builds or even skills that can permanently maintain that condition on trashmobs.
-defensive stats […]
-soft support […]
Advanced players do not want to rely on passive defense because that’s an antithesis of active combat. Protection is mostly used in fractals. Permanent protection to add. Adds so much diversity and fun to the guardian builds that now has to spam autoattacks and do nothing else.
However, this is not the end of it. Making bosses more offensive will be good, but with the current state of defiant all of the soft CC conditions are neutered too much to be useful. On top of that, the amount of effort required to get stacks low enough to interrupt a skill simply isn’t worth it when the skill can be avoided instead.
Interrupting is pointless not because of defiance but because the skill you interrupted goes on 4s cooldown. There are few exceptions like abomination in arah and you see hard cc being used there, despite the presence of defiance.
Another point albeit lesser, is the PvE enemy use of buffs. At the moment most enemies don’t buff themselves. The ones that do, however, re-apply them so quickly that removing the buffs is almost pointless. There needs to be more of a happy middle ground created because, as of right now, buff removal is only really effective in PvP. The same can be said about condition removal. Enemies that have it tend to use it extremely frequently making condition duration ineffective.
Buff removal is highly scarce mechanic for most of the classes. You’d first need to give it classes like elementalist or ranger. There are exactly 19 skills or traits that can remove, steal or transform boons and classes like warrior or guardian has only 1 trait for that.
If you want to know what should be done without redesigning most of the bosses, it should be increasing the skill ceiling of active defense usage, not increasing the viability of passive defense.
Awesome idea but let’s go further with this. Every cleric’s or soldier’s piece reduces your damage by 10% and increases aggro generation by 10%.
Never said CC and blind helped condition damage ranged bunkers. I only said that it makes CC harder and blind only work 10% of the time. Which affects everyone. Also it “Feels” like my damaging conditions aren’t lasting as long to busy switching kits and spamming stuffs to look at see how long they last. but like i said it “FEELS” like they aren’t lasting as long as they should =/ Gaun Long Wu Caii is probably right that it is just vunrability and weakness, OR the coding got messed and its all conditions /conspiracy =P
You started your opening post with the claim that defiance is the reason why a condition builds does not do the same damage it does against monsters without it which is a false statement.
How do cc and blind help condition damage dealers when bosses are mostly dangerous in melee and the vast amount of condies builds are ranged bunkers?
The second sentence in the opening post makes no sense. Defiance in no way makes condition builds killing slower, in fact it’s the opposite, it makes direct damage dealers killing slower.
I think it’s time to ask Cookie to include the all-time records of Simin on his site. The more time spent, the higher the position.
(edited by haviz.1340)
I starts where it should start.
Non dedicated lh with d/f is superior in fractals.
Condition damage dealer should do similar damage to zerker but only if you use gear like rampager’s, not rabid or, god forbid, dire. Moreover, it should do similar damage as zerker using ranged weapon.
What about spirit rangers, minion masters and even spirit weapons guardians in pvp? Are there any plans to increase cooldowns to 30 minutes of the skills that allow those builds to exist? Hypothetically, instead of 10 players participating in battle of khylo, there could be even 70 entities, that’s seven times more, not just two.
You made several very big mistake in your calculations. First, you ignored the time factor. Obviously, the longer the fight lasts, the more damage you receive – or you get more points of failure when dodging oneshots. Second, you ignored the fact that lot of oneshots are really oneshots – working equally well against bunkers as zerkers.
Basically, you assumed that the worth of ep and ehp is relatively even. It is not. Currently, damage is worth way, way more.
I could say the same thing. First of all, you forgot about healing skills as well as sustain that actually matters, especially when you’re tanky. Next thing, a lot of oneshots are not really oneshots. List all of the oneshots and I’ll list all of the non oneshots and we can make a percentage to finally end this myth that oneshots are everywhere.
c) But full offense is nothing but the most efficient extreme setup. Should the game allow those average groups to run it or should demand a higher amount of skill and coordination to make it succesful?
That’s exactly my points. Running full offense is just too easy.
Yes, I am annoyed by the assertion that somehow surviving via utilities/dodging is somehow worse than surviving via face tanking in pvt/clerics. I am also annoyed that you think that anyone not wearing pvt/clerics needs to be punished. I think pvt/clerics does more facerolling of content than zerk ever has. Zerk just does it faster.
The duration of aegis is around 20 seconds if I recall….if you don’t count the fact that one breath from an enemy removes it completely. This is regardless of if it was just applied or is at the 19th second. It doesn’t magically refresh because something looked in your direction sternly. This makes aegis potentially the shortest duration boon in the game. I see balance in that.
Why do you keep thinking I’m using some kind of defensive gear?
Berserker’s gear users need to be punished because they abandoned all of their passive defense in favour of offensive. I would like people to actually dodge instead of relying on aegis and projectiles defenses which is the case now. Let’s not fool each others, you could give meta dps builds to play-how-you-want crowd, explain basics and they would be almost as effective as you. That’s a horrible design, the skill ceiling is extremely low. If you want to abandon entire passive defense, you should be skilled enough.
The duration of aegis is exactly 20 seconds (excluding +boon duration), both from “Retreat!” and Virtue of Courage. It does exactly what I’m claiming it does, promotes rotations instead of timed usage. Decrease the duration tenfold and let’s find out how many “pro-zerkers” can survive with active defense.
Why do the two of you think its okay to try to make others play the way you want? Crab mentality?!? How dare I deviate from your face tank gear! Everyone should be reduced to only wearing pvt/clerics right? The only way anyone should be allowed to survive should be face tank gear/trinity. Lets get rid of any strategic utility use as well…I mean who needs that when you can just face tank. Lets throw that silly play how you want design out of the window because zerk’s playing how they want somehow stops you from playing how you want!
You seem to be somehow annoyed by my analysis. Are you aware that not everyone who doesn’t like the current state of instanced pve is a zerker hater? In fact it’s the opposite. But I’d like the content to be how it was advertised, requiring coordination and skillful gameplay, not this sad state we currently have .
Aegis blocks one single hit…on a significant CD. It doesn’t matter if this is a 1hp hit or a one shot. That is in no way deserving of a nerf. There are exactly two skills in a guardian’s kitten nal that do this…and neither is on a short CD. Aegis also does not stack…so multiple guardians will just over write each other’s aegis 99% of the time. Not quite seeing the problem here or understanding how this is single handedly the ruin of GW2.
Rotating aegis is a basic skill any decent guardian should show. The result is literally facetanking a boss that would otherwise one shot you or at least force to into defense. The duration of aegis is too long that in turns allows a guardian to rotate without much of a thought. If you want to run full glass cannons, the game needs to punish you proportionally to your squishiness.
Reflect is a very useful utility, but again…not the ruin of GW2. This is a situational utility, that I would be fine with them removing….so long as they also remove the mandatory situations where it is needed. I don’t like getting pigeon holed into having to use that specific utility at the expense of other’s that provide more universal appeal.
I’m not going to make up random numbers but a lot of the bosses’ autoattacks are reflectable projectiles. That makes most of the encounters about putting reflects and occasional dodging of slow attacks. There are too many reflects and with any optimal party composition a team has enough projectiles defenses that you just rotate them, again, without any thought.
Reflects as well as aegis should promote proper timing. Their durations need to be severely decreased so you are actually punished for facerolling the content. Right now, it’s not the case.
The lies that everyone is speedrunning in fullzerkers with any profession…
Most groups require a DEFENSIVE support, (LFG check looking for guardian)
Most Group will require offensive support either (LF Warrior)Few players can play every content without said support since it becomes slower AND harder.
The issue is fotm 50 with 2 guardians is easier than AC with 0 guardians.
Any dungeon with a dps warrior is 10-40% faster.Ele fgs without a guardian means horrible death in most parties…(you die during the first fiery rush being unable to evade….Attacks like cleaves etc will kill ele in few seconds without a guardian).
Gear is not an issue professions are….yet we are a test server for eastern launch….so our progression is worthless for anet….
Notice how players warning are never considered…..really few were in favor of zerk nerfs, same with ascended equipment….CDI = damage control.
P.S. please don t come with “i can playwithout a guardin i m so pro”… mostly because you can t reliably pug without a guardian unless you can solo the content in zerker….at that point you are not an issue Worth considering in balancing.
This is the first time I agree with you, good job!
Zerker is passive offense. Toughness and vitality is passive defense.
They are both mindless.
If you think zerker is mindless, why won’t you join my fotm 49 or 50 without guardians? I’ll count the numbers of your deaths at bosses like mossman or archdiviner.
Passive defense is useless because there are attacks you must avoid (dodge, block. reflect) regardless of how much vit or toughness you have (with a few exceptions).
By “few exceptions” you mean 95%? Because the attacks you have to dodge while wearing soldier’s are about 5%.
This makes passive defense useless – a good player doesn’t need it and a bad player will hardly benefit from it.
Facetanking bosses and trivializing encounters does not benefit new players?
Of course the PvE problem is far beyond zerker stats, which is the stat combo that give the most in PvE since all the support one needs come from skills/traits and not from stats.
Maybe it’s a good idea considering you are supposed to pug with random team compositions and succeed. Retraiting, changing utility and weapon skills if you lack something is much easier and faster than getting new gear.
You’ve never played pve I guess.
What’s wrong with his statement?
Not a good idea.
Traits, weapons and utilities (and runes up to some degree) are still the most build defining choices, with more impact on the end result than gear stats will ever have.
Moving gear stats, which can also be mixed, to traitlines would achieve nothing but a far less flexible character building.
It would be much better if you could change your stats more flexible. Not saying to tie them to trait lines but more flexible than they are now.
More rng?
You can’t mess with game mechanics because dungeons just are not developer’s focus, not even close.
Exactly, I don’t think people realize that anet abandoned dungeons almost 1 year ago.
You increase your support via traits (pure of voice, elemental attunement, etc) and that’s a better option than to have it tied to gear. Let’s imagine a new dungeon (yes, I might have taken that too far) where support is very efficient and sought. You want to play with a group of friends but all of you have offensive gear and traits. Is it easier for 1-2 people to retrait for 3.5s each or get a new sets of gear? As long as anet wants people to randomly create successful parties while giving the incentive to play more supportive we need to have a gear that doesn’t influence said support.
There are 2 mitigations of damage that mostly responsible for the current state. The first one is aegis which guardian provides and the second are reflections. Decrease their abundance or uptime and it is much harder for glass cannons to play giving tanky gears more viability.
Let’s just hope anet doesn’t listen to the feedback filled with hyperboles.
Elementalist doesn’t have a dps weapon set by design, you could only discuss about dps attunements.
“Guise, we need more healers”.
we need better support skills and (yes i will say it) tanking skills, and along with that some dungeon/fractal bosses revamp that will require the players use both the support and the tanking skills, and then just enjoy! this will indeed be a light trinity but will also be more entertaining
Support is already needed if you want to complete the content painlessly. But how can you enjoy facetanking?
Also, the only reason “everyone can see” zerker meta only in dungeons is because the groups that are looking for people with specific requirements fill up much slower. That’s always the case. The vast majority of people are not playing the meta hence it’s not even the meta. Not to mention that the content is apparently niche and no longer being developed.
There is no PvE meta, it’s dungeon meta and dungeons have been abandoned by anet for almost a year now so how exactly that’s a problem?
The meta in PvE content that is being developed is zerg, not zerk.
I wouldn’t panic just yet. Let’s wait till the patch comes and see how anet resolved that issue. I’m sure they wouldn’t forget about you.
As opposed to what? Fairy prayers?
As opposed to playing the game, not bashing dummies in LA. Have you ever tried your staff build for bosses like imbued shaman or archdiviner on high scales? I’m sure people would like to hear how well that went.
- Defiance single handedly eliminated the support/control archetype from dungeon running builds. Content designers have since designed around the Defiance mechanic also, further entrenching this halfway house solution. There are practically no worthy attacks to interrupt because you can just DPS race the boss down before the sequence initiates.
How defiance eliminated the support archetype?
- Interrupting is also not rewarded with a shorter encounter either – which further erodes support/control. DPS has become entrenched in such a toxic fashion because there is no other role that is as efficient. There are no roles because the only role is DPS.
There are no dedicated roles which is by design. Every person brings dps, support and control (which currently doesn’t work against bosses).
Slow, instagib attacks: – Bosses attack slowly and hit extremely hard, often meaning that Toughness is essentially a wasted stat because it slows you down.
- What attacks there are are therefore one-shot mechanics to punish players that don’t dodge. Again, this further reinforces the DPS race meta.
- If you are to be one shot anyway, what does it matter to have 10% damage reduction when you can DPS the boss down 10% faster and take less attacks?
There are probably less than 5% bosses than have instagib attacks even if you have a lot of toughness and most, if not all of them, have 3s long wind-ups which is their mechanics. If you don’t agree with that number, please list those instagib attacks.
Bosses that do attack frequently are most often using projectiles which are fully negated, even turn against them, with the help of reflections/absorptions.
At higher scales of fotm, a lot of end bosses attack very frequent for a lot of damage. What people do in those cases? Stack guardians and rotate aegis (6 aegis with 2 guardians). Try doing bosses like archdiviner or mossman at high scales without any guardians with tanky team and then with glass cannons. Tanky team will kill slower only in perfect situation where your glass cannon party can dodge everything because one frequently occuring autoattack kills 3 people, unlike with tanky team that can then use thier sustain to heal up and continue attacking, unlike with glass cannons.
- Toughness is a wasted stat at the moment. Semi-tanky builds are numerically inferior to Glass cannons.
Toughness and vitality are wasted if you exclude sustain from your argumentation. Both or those stats play the role of buffer that allows you to get hit more often but in order to “reset” that buffer you need sustain (regen, healing symbols, soothing mist, healing shouts, etc).
I don’t know if you seen recent videos of people playing arguably the hardest dungeons with dodge key disabled but they prove defensive stats are not exactly wasted though they promote bad gameplay. Just remember that this game was advertised with active combat in mind so if you are active you should be rewarded more than someone who rely on passive stats.
All in all, I agree with some of the changes you proposed (more human like bosses, changes to control, etc) but a lot of stuff you put there is just false and it doesn’t help.
First step to increase the viability of support/control archetypes. I completely agree with that change.
Math shows that 2 ele specs deal more damage than warriors, warriors have Great burst but not particularly good DPS.
Thank you for proving my point.
Please stop creating same threads that use hyperboles, misinformations and misconceptions. Research the subject matter at hand before doing that.
As to cross-profession comparisons, is there really any reason why an elementalist (top tier DPS) deals 50% more DPS than a warrior (tier 4 DPS)? Given that all classes have unique utility options that justifies taking them even if they don’t actually hit any harder (i.e. warrior has banners, ranger has spirits, etc.) such huge DPS disparities aren’t really warranted nor necessary. An elementalist doesn’t need to deal 50% damage than average to be viable; if it dealt ordinary damage, it’d still be plenty good. Look at LH ele, it stacks might and fury to the max and it STILL deals more damage than average. Why.
You complain that warrior in ideal situation deals less damage than ele? Do you now know why noone takes you seriously?
Not really. Try do to alpha or AC spider or any other boss at a distance and you will see the risk vs. reward. As said earlier, almost every boss have a special punishment for ranged guys… so no, your risk is about the same.
Only advantage you have at range is the overview of battlefield, you can see what is happening better and it allows you to evade easier, than if stacked. Also if you keep moving and kite the mob, you are more likely to escape slow aoes.I think that the proper way how to “balance” melee and ranged is to make it more “real” – and use ammo for ranged weapons. And the damage should be the same.
Firearms should do higher damage with 100% ammo loss, bows shall do less damage (about as much as stabbing attacks) with some chance to recover arrows from body or battlefield.
Spider queen is faceroll at distance and a bit harder in melee.
The ferocity change is helping by making critical damage consistent across pieces of gear. There will no longer be the 17:1 trade-offs on some pieces of gear between secondary stats and critical damage, and 4.5:1 trade offs on other pieces of gear. This is how it should have worked from the beginning.
A (valuable) side effect is that the worst offenders (ruby orbs and friends) are losing a ton of critical damage, such that they do not grossly outshine everything else. Ruby orbs will have the same sorts of stat trade-offs as every other piece of gear post-patch.
They did a really incredibly bad job of explaining this – they should have just said the net effect was a nerf of ruby orbs and a reduction of crit damage from traits. Instead we get dozens of threads about people’s berserker gear getting nerfed. This is why communications is important people.
It will still be inconsistent between traits, gear and most likely runes.
They said they would change a formula for calculating damage so I wouldn’t assume any conversion from critical damage to ferocity just yet.
Anyway, those changes are coming in march, right?
Condition bunkers increase build variety thus zerker meta should have been nerfed much more to help accomplish this.
Hopefully nothing, it’s already strong enough.
I don’t think you need to be decent to facetank.
Whether or not this gameplay or a dodging one is anyone’s cup or tea, if a group has a certain cohesive strategy that supports each other through their traits and gear, there is no reason why it should not work.
It shouldn’t work because you are ignoring bosses mechanics. I think this is one of the silly arguments against berserker’s meta, that they ignore game mechanics.