Guild Wars 2

I would be okay with Unravel as a F5, but I’m more partial to the idea of allowing weapon swap (with the usual 10 second cd) to switch the two active attunements. As far as I can see, that would fix the problems with offhand skills without messing with the “weaving” concept at all.

Terra Dactyl.2047:

I did some rough testing in WvW (let some ice drakes chill me), and it appears that it does work, but that it only cleanses cripple, chill, and immobilize.

Which is: 1. Not what the trait text says it does, and 2. Really not all that great.

Made a post in the bug forum before I saw this thread.
Didn’t even consider the possibility that it only affected the 3 conditions in the tooltip. Tested it again, and it seems you’re correct.

Unravel Hexes
Lose conditions at a rapid rate while under the effects of superspeed. Gain superspeed when you are inflicted with inhibiting conditions.

The phrasing suggests that the condition removal should happen any time you’re affected by superspeed. It currently only works with the superspeed provided by the trait itself.

This means that it has no synergy with Elemental Pursuit from the same horizontal line in Weaver. It also does not work with One With Air from the air line.

Update: My mistake. It appears the trait only works on the three movement impairing conditions listed in the tooltip. It’s triggered by all sources of superspeed.
(what a kitten GM trait, though)

Jski.6180:

Now that they dropped the number of targets you can hit with line effect i say they need to make some of the counter play boons a bit weaker. Stab is in a good places but resistances is not. Resistances needs to only work on dmg condition or have a set number that is removed as ppl apply more conditions a lot like stab works for hard cc.

The taget limit on hard CC was an excessive nerf and should be reverted in my opinion.
Stability is mechanically in a very good place, I think, but boonduration and -sharing is currently making it way stronger than it needs to be. Stab should be strong enough to carry a push, but there needs to be gaps in the uptime to enforce good rotations and make hard CC useful when timed well.
I kind of agree that resistance should be specific to damaging conditions, but at the same time I feel there’s way too much immob in the game right now for that to work well. The same goes for chill. I miss how useful it used to be, but there’s honestly just way too much of it passively going around in big fights now (from frost aura).

For folks who want a little more space, we want to let you know that we already have an upgrade for a second, larger arena for bigger battles in the works.

Don’t worry, fam. It’s on the way..

Honestly, even if they fixed up the arena to be OS-equivalent with easy access, I doubt it’d see much use considering how terrible combat is now.

Jayden Ennok.3687:

Which is a rather small proportion of the total healing ele does in such a fight. With roughtly 1350hp/s passive heals, that’s covered in less than 7s. one wash the pain away gives same healing to allies on one use, blasting water gives more than one aura, when playing staff, heal from one aa is similar to heal from one aura, dodge gives like double healing than one aura. sure 9k heal per trait per fight looks amazing, unless compared to other traits/skills.

bastion is great for burst heals but it’s far from necessary, i often don’t use it, especially if playing /w. if they’d remove the heal from bastion, nobody would slot it and healer ele would still be awesome.

uh.. I think we’ll both have a better day if we just agree to disagree here.
It’s details in any case. The point I was making (the one relevant for this thread, anyway) is that the current meta is enabled by a few key skills/builds, and it would be fairly easy to push it in a more offensive direction and make it feel less gimmicky.

Jayden Ennok.3687:

elemental bastion isn’t that great even with tons of healing power

You’re right insofar as the sustain from healbot ele comes from a lot of different sources and this is only one of them. However, I don’t think the build would be a thing without the healing from elemental bastion. Between auras on skills and passive procs, it accounts for around 7-9k healing on every engagement with a typical d/f build.

Kaldo.7960:

So why is sustain and healing so important and popular atm? Simple: With HoT came such an overflow of CC and random damage everywhere that good movement simply doesn’t do the job anymore

How is an ele who plays glascanon supposed to survive when tons of revs in zoneblobs spamming their hammer 2 everywhere and u are possibly a one hit?

So playing with more sustain and healing is just a logical consequence of the insane randomdamage and cc boost that came with the update

A lot of people mistake cause and effect.

This is completely true. The sustain meta was born out of necessity when the amount of CC and damage cleave was massively increased with HoT. But now that it’s a thing, you can’t get out of it by nerfing damage. Both sides need to be addressed and it seems only logical to start with the one currently being (ab)used.

It wouldn’t even be that hard. From a large scale perspective, all the bullkitten is supported by a few overperforming skills. Make Facet of Nature a personal buff, prevent Great Dwarf from stacking with other damage reducing effects, take away the healing from elemental bastion, and give Signet of Inspiration the Heat Sync treatment.
4 nerfs and an instantly more enjoyable game..

Then when people start running glass backline revs again, rework hammer to something that isn’t kittened (apparently, mental issues is a sensitive subject to the word filter).

QQing.3089:

Sounds interesting. I’d like separate WvW balance to be next. I don’t want boon meta to die, just get leukemia.

It’s funny they should mention the first poll. The context makes it sound like this is the clear #1 request from the community, yet in the thread they made prior to the polls, skill balance won by a fair margin. That part seems to have been forgotten.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that they’re working on something WvW related.. but I do wonder what happened to “future balance updates will take WvW into consideration” (paraphrased from MO).

I’m also not convinced by this new system. It’s a band aid on runaway matches, but people are still going to be logging in to empty maps ~18 hours of the day.

EremiteAngel.9765:

Have these 2 giants in WvW ever fought?

lol

I’d put all my money on AHMA if this ever happened (it won’t).

Blobs blob like they always have, but there are far less organized groups running around because they are not appropriately rewarded (performance-wise) for their dedication in the post-HoT game.
Builds and roles within the meta require very little organization and cooperation in order to perform optimally. Many rotational requirements have been abolished due to poor balance decisions (rip in pieces static field) and most classes have had their primary weaknesses covered by elite-specs, making them far more self-sufficient (/yolo friendly).
A large part of the formerly dedicated population simply doesn’t enjoy the meta (even the non-boonshare part of it), which contains little to none of the tactical and communicational requirements of the 2014 version of the game.

Basically, WvW caters to the casual player to such an extreme degree now that there is no point trying to be anything else.

Swagger.1459:

This game just started to evolve in a healthy way with all HoT related stuff and I much prefer the devs continue down this path.

My face when..

Xenesis.6389:

Combat was like the one big foundation of this game. When players leave for another game the usual excuse as to their return is, they missed the combat it’s much more enjoyable.

Ya, that’s the frustrating part. The overall combat system is exceptional. The actual combat design is garbage.
From a large scale perspective, builds/comps are valued so much higher than execution at this point that fights are often over before they even begin – or end up being decided randomly because the skill cap is so low. There’s literally no point competing in a meta like that.

People transfer for activity. The current population can’t sustain 4 matchups. Further restricting transfers would only exacerbate the problem as more and more people get stranded in matchups with no action during the hours they play.

Here’s something to consider: off-hour coverage (non prime time) on NA servers is near non-existent outside of T1, yet it accounts for roughly half the total activity (in terms of kills) across all the servers.

Bandwagoning, night-capping, coverage issues.. it all stems from a core system (static “servers”) that simply doesn’t work for a 24h gamemode with regional servers. The people who transfer after every relink are simply trying to get the most out of the game. You can’t fault them for Anet’s failures.

Arcane Shield:
Block attacks for 3 seconds. While this skill is active, Detonate Arcane Shield becomes available.
Channeled ability
25 seconds recharge

Detonate Arcane Shield:
Make your arcane shield explode, dealing critical damage to nearby enemies. Using this skill adds 10 seconds to the recharge of Arcane Shield.
Damage modifier: 1.0 (currently 1.5)
Number of targets: 5
Radius: 360

It’s time..

Alternatively, instead of the detonate skill, take away the damage entirely and add a trait to the arcane line:
Reduce the current recharge of your attunements by 0.25s on each succesful block.
I actually rather like that idea, and it fits with the overall concept of arcanes. They could turn Final Shielding into this, passive defensive procs are bad anyway.

Also, scepter deserves a proper rework. One-shot gimmicks (Phoenix) and instant burst damage (air swap, lightning strike) is never going to be balanceable in the long term.
As someone who thinks staff is a really well designed weapon, I’d also really like to see some buffs to it’s single target potential (instant lava font ticks, shorter cast times and delays on other #2 skills).
And yea, dagger cds are archaic. I hate this new development with super spammable skills, but if they insist on going that route, they need to make sure everyone is on par. Almost everything on ele is way too 2013 to compete.

Ele also needs a niche defensive mechanic that isn’t based on face tanking the enemy. The above buff to arcane shield would be a start. Maybe better accessibility to blinks and movement skills. Anything to give better potential for kiting and damage mitigation.

Also, since we’re doing pictures:

babazhook.6805:

Soldiers is equal to dire.

Not even remotely.

BeepBoopBop.5403:

Because conditions were never meant to be a viable sole source of damage that explode people as fast as power builds?

I believe this is true (in the original design of the game). You could argue that gear sets like dire used to be conceptually reasonable because it took a long time to kill something with conditions and you needed the defensive stats to extend the fight. But now that we have condition bursts which deal equivalent damage to many power bursts, this is no longer the case.

With that in mind, the condition overhaul seems like a classic Anet half-measure. They needed to address more than just the conditions themselves in order to create a good system. They didn’t, and we ended up with horrible binary gameplay, where you either hard-counter your enemy or get hard-countered. There’s literally no fun in that – only frustration.

I firmly believe that the game would be far more enjoyable if they just straight up removed all damaging conditions.

Nuzt.7894:

I read it as, finally something to replace that boring, mind numbing, crappy meta called Pirate Ship.

Is it the most optimal ? No but it sure is a lot more enjoyable to see melee leading the charge and doing melee on the frontline as they should be instead of pacing back and forth for 5 hours waiting for someone to make the first move. I’m sure there are youtube video’s of Pong that are more entertaining than the Pirate Ship video’s.

True.
But I think what the previous poster meant is that people are getting “carried” by these comps. Sounds a bit salty when you say it like that, but I genuinely believe that the skill cap in “HoT comps” (for lack of a better term) is so low that it practically puts everyone at the same level. There’s far less discrepancy between the efficiency of groups of different skill levels in this meta than any before it.
So the problem really is this: why compete if the game doesn’t favor the “better” group of players (or rather, if there’s no way to be the better group)?

Dawdler.8521:

vana.5467:

Personally, I think it should be lowered to 20-25% boon duration for other allies (still 50% for the rev itself).

Or how about 0%?

No really, why should it even be shared? Why cant this be a skill for the player only? The rev is already AoE sharing boons far better than the individual utility skills of other classes (no contest at all in perma uptime vs giving like 5s on 25s cd or similar).

Without it being shared, we would be back to normal boon durations on other classes and the rev would still be insanely strong. Lowering the upkeep on it as a tradeoff would be fine.

I have no objection to this. It would be my preferred solution. But I’ve made that suggestion so many times, I just wanted to offer an alternative.

Halving the effect and putting a duration limit on it would force some coordination and timing in its use. What really bothers me about Herald is the passive nature of the skills. Anything to make them more active would be an improvement in my book.

Also, it’s pretty ridiculous that the same facet from multiple revs stack, but that’s another topic entirely, I guess (probably one we’ll see after boonshare and damage reduction gets nerfed and people start running glass backlines with permanent 25might again)..

Artaz.3819:

Trim Step #1, just add a boon application cap that lowers the effective stacking cap from 9 to say 5 (exclude Swiftness) just like Retaliation boon.

This only affects WvW play and doesn’t imbalance the rest of the game.

Agreed, though I think the cap for certain boons (like resistance and quickness) should be even lower. Like 2 or 3.
Another thing is that the boonshare signet seems to bypass the stacking limit. That needs to be fixed as well.

Artaz.3819:

Nerfing Facet of Nature would break Revenant without huge class improvements though. It does come with a hefty upkeep cost and it isn’t really broken with Revenant-provided-only boons.

Personally, I think it should be lowered to 20-25% boon duration for other allies (still 50% for the rev itself). I’d also put a duration limit on it, maybe 10-15 seconds, after which it automatically goes on cd. Potentially, this cd could be shorter if the active isn’t used. In any case, the current permanent 750 stat boost to every party member is pretty excessive.

Yo, can you guys stop breaking up my meme?

jesus..

Saw TW streaming last Thursday.

Amazing group of about 20 players, mostly Dragon hunters with

one Tempest, a war, a Herald, a Mesmer and some others

that could stood under JQ’s fire from defenders on the wall

above the SMC inner gate and repeated withstood attacks from JQ’s

circling from the right side through the SMC inner gate portal

without losing much health or have a downed player,

with most of players on constant boons and never below 75% health,

and after wearing down JQ’s supply and broke through the gate,

it took SMC from JQ all for about 10 minutes of play.

The Driver already commanded over 11 hours of the12 hour stream-a-thon,

And his disposition shown on the lower left corner of window was

a sharp contrast of the happy, energetic animations of the characters on screen

surrounded by flashing of lights and trails of rainbow sparkles of The Bifrost.

He was complete without happiness on his face nor in his voice,

no thrill of victory and no emotion of any kind after wiping JQ repeatly

and taking SMC.

He could not wait for the 12th hours to come

to log out and quit streaming

and on time

he quit.

BlackBeard.2873:

All that they need to do for conjures is:

1. Remove the cast time: all the skills already have cast-times that are balanced around the strength of the skills
2. Reduce the CD and duration to 30 seconds: eles are built around cycling through skills, and only lightning hammer and FGS can justify using the auto-attacks, so they usually get used for their additional utility (a few select skills) then dropped. This would allow them to be used more regularly for the proper utility.
3. Make earth shield a stunbreak: this is a defensive utility, but can’t be used as a stunbreak, meaning it is extremely hard to justify as a spot on your utility bar.

Kits! Kits! Kits! Kits! Kits! Kits! Kits! Kits! Kits! Kits! Kits! Kits! Kits! Kits!

Seriously, though. I’d be okay with this, but I’d still massively prefer a proper kit functionality. The skills are already limited by cast times and cds. Even a 30 second cooldown seems too long for what they currently offer.

Making them instant in one way or another should definitely be top priority, though. If Anet are so dead set on “speeding up the game” (\sigh), they need to at least take the time to make sure everyone can keep up.

I believe the unofficial motto of Heart of Thorns is:

“Now you can have your cake and eat it too!”

We are seeing the ramifications of that development mentality now (and have been for a while). People are able to bring far too much damage and sustain at the same time. If that wasn’t the case, if you had to sacrifice all of your damage potential for the sustain provided by a current meta comp, traditional compositions would be much more viable.

In that sense, yes, durability and damage reducing effects are big issues.

People play WvW because of its PvP element. Anet fail to treat it as a PvP mode. People leave. Anet are baffled.

Today I got hit for 9020 damage by a ranged auto-attack. That was fun. Since this patch failed to do anything positive for WvW, I’ll be taking an extended break from the game. Bye.

Don’t be ridiculous now. Surely, being able to block 3(!) attacks every 60 seconds will be enough to keep you alive.

Regardless of how strong it’ll end up being (depends on what other changes are included, I guess), more hard CC randomly tossed around is hardly what the game needs. Most people were probably hoping for quite the opposite.

Aury.1367:

Ok, well not SO recent. Am I the only one thinking that condi builds completly ruined WvW? Everyone is crying about powercreep, which is less toxic than this nonsense.

Powercreep refers to the inflation of everything (sustain, damage etc.), not just power damage. When people are crying about powercreep, it’s as much about ridiculous condi bombs as it is about 5k auto attacks.

Personally, I despise how (damaging) conditions work right now. I think it’s a terrible system and I do not enjoy fighting condi builds/comps in any way. I have many issues with the state of combat in GW2 since HoT (/June last year), but this is the one that could realistically make me stop playing all together.

I’ve only participated in one season and won’t be bothering with the next one either. It’s not the system that bothers me, it’s the quality of combat. The actual game play in PvP has simply not been enjoyable to me since HoT released.

Mushin.3928:

I’d be fine with nerfing the Rev’s boon duration facet, if that what it takes to fix it. And I say that as a Herald main. I’d prefer to spend the energy on my skills anyway.

Fun fact: The effect of Facet of Nature is roughly equivalent in stats to the difference between full ascended and rare gear.

As ridiculous as that is, however, boonshare was possible before HoT and can’t be blamed on herald alone. While it’s far easier and quicker to apply now, the current popularity has just as much to do with the increase in condi damage, which makes resistance a much stronger boon than before.
As long as boonsharing is possible, it’ll continue to see use. The “fix” needs to be applied either to the sharing process or the boons themselves.

I have never been stunned while in mist form, but vapor form had this issue for a while. It was most notable in WvW before the stab buff when everyone was running heavy on hard CC. Specifically, if you got hit by Hunter’s Ward after entering vapor form, you’d get stuck in the fence. I haven’t seen it happen since Hunter’s Ward got reworked, though.

Slightly related: non-boon damage reduction effects also work on siege (Great Dwarf, frost aura etc..).

Tongku.5326:

To me, the game in general has too few boon strips of all sorts, and they are ineffective vs boon generation due to boon spam.

In addition, there are too many abilities now which are not considered boons, thus can not be stripped, but should be.

Buffing boon strip is not a good solution. Survival has been made far too dependent on boons and this would only enforce hard-counters. You’ll end up in the same situation as stab 2.0 where people just explode with no warning.
They’ve thoroughly power crept themselves into a corner on this one, and outside of a some massive reworks, there isn’t a lot you can do to change the meta while keeping frontlines viable.

Personally, I enjoy this meta far more than the pirateship in blob/open-field fights, but find it extremely boring for organized 15s.

BlackBeard.2873:

The problem is, that the sulf-sustain that is needed for a dps role (in pvp) is hard mitigation – blocks, invulns, evades, stealth – things that allow you to AVOID damage.

All of eles defense is soft mitigation – protection, cleanse, regen, etc. All of these defenses reduce damage of hits but don’t reduce the number of hits.

If you give hard mitigation that is controllable, that means adding more evades to weapon skills, reducing the CD of invulns/blocks like mistform and arcane shield, etc. Any of these things can be stacked onto the bunker build and enhance that as well as the burst build.

The class is fundamentally flawed and can’t play the dps role in pvp. To give it the tools to play a dps role (meaning hard mitigation that can compete with DH, revs, and daredevils) would make ele OP at bunkering. There was a time when you could have just slightly increased these active mitigations, and maybe even modified them, to put something like fresh-air ele in the picture, but power creep has gotten so out of control, that you would need to put arcane shield on a 15s CD and obsidian flesh on a 20s CD while also increasing the damage. To put it simply, this just isn’t going to happen.

I think this is spot on. Due to the game wide increase in damage output and efficiency (ease of landing skills, excessive cleave etc), the fundamental sustain mechanics of eles are completely insufficient at their base stats.

Personally, I’m in the “just kittening gut the team support and give us some proper active defense”-camp on this one. I’m still dreaming about a conjure rework to kit-like functionality with a focus on utility and defensive skills.

The simple solution would be to lower the number of times certain boons can stack. Drop the maximum stacks down to 2 for resistance and quickness, maybe 3 for protection which is overall a less problematic boon, and you effectively kill this type of pre-buffing. Double rev remains a viable way to run heavy resistance uptime, which is necessary with the current ridiculousness of condis, but that at least requires timing and rotations similar to stab.

mulzi.8273:

I want real balance throughout the day, not having one server sitting in an empty EB at different times to make the score close.

As do I. Unfortunately, that’s never going to happen with the current server and matchup structure. Which is why I, and I suspect many others, were hoping for something a little more creative than server merges (linking, whatever..) as a “solution” to population issues. Matchups need to be determined according to the largest population (NA) to avoid massive queues, but this inevitably leaves the smaller off-hours populations scattered across way too many tiers. In the end, WvW for most servers is downright boring for 18 hours of the day.

Ithilwen.1529:

I think that ANET is moving in the right direction by adding sustain and lengthening fights.

Conceptually, sure. But they’ve gone about it the wrong way. When you powercreep mechanics and make individual effects super strong, you only enforce hard-counters, which makes gameplay extremely boring. In the same vein, the stronger each skill on your bar is, the bigger the gap is going to be between an optimal and a slightly sub-optimal build.
If the goal is to lengthen fights (which is a design decision I would agree with), it should be done as a baseline thing – not by giving out more all-purpose panic buttons and super healing, but by reducing both damage and sustain across the board.

Xenesis.6389:

1. Jade Quarry(F) - Sanctum of Rall(H)

Considering how much SEA has recently moved to SoR specifically to fight JQ, this would be hilariously sad. And not at all surprising..

Rhyse.8179:

More power creep.

Seconding this. Any additional power creep at this point would be completely detrimental to my enjoyment of the game.

Shiyo.3578:

This belongs in the PvP section imo, but yeah I agree, kinda, do an extent. Not exactly what you’re saying, but:

People are too tanky and there’s too much sustain and healing, it makes PvP really unrewarding(compared to pre-hot) because you can’t make skillful plays when people die so slowly and have so many get out of jail free cards and are hard to punish for mistakes.

It’s not just sustain and healing, though. There’s too much of literally everything post-HoT, including damage. Contrary to what Anet seem to believe, super high sustain doesn’t balance out super high damage, it just creates a thoroughly frustrating game full of hard counters and gimmicks (immortal bunkers, one-shot builds, perma evade etc..).

.. be lowered.

Transfer costs are needlessly restrictive as is – especially now that Anet are manually adjusting server statuses. Any effort you make to forcibly discourage bandwagoners screws over just as many people who want to transfer for legitimate reasons.
22USD (or 500gold) is a ridiculous price for a basic feature of the game. Transfers allow people to experience new scenery and fight new people. For many players (non-primetime timezones especially), this is a very important part of what keeps the game interesting. Being stuck in a matchup where you only have 1 or 2 enemy guilds is the kind of staleness that makes people quit.

Korgov.7645:

Obsidian Sanctum offered too good competition for the disappointing guild halls arenas.

Don’t worry.
“For folks who want a little more space, we want to let you know that we already have an upgrade for a second, larger arena for bigger battles in the works.” – ArenaNet, October 2, 2015.

ETA: 2020?

Spurnshadow.3678:

This is completely exaggerated.

I’ve yet to see 30 seconds of resistance. I WvW a ton. I know that theoretically, it’s possible, and sure, maybe under controlled circumstances with the ideal party comp and with your allies popping the right skills at the exact right time. But that almost never, ever happens in real world circumstances.

As a “BG native” how have you not come across ND at any point in the past year?

Boonshare is just one way to run the current super-tanky meta. It’s a composition that’s gained popularity mainly as a response to the absurd amount of condi cleave and damage introduced with the expansion. The high uptime of resistance and protection creates a much more interesting environment for fights because it prevents all the new one-shot gimmicks that plague the game. Unfortunately, by forcing people to stack defensive effects, Anet has dramatically limited variety and options in compositions. Hard counters are heavily enforced because comps without certain crutches are vastly inferior, and people are being carried by builds over execution.

As much as I loathe these gimmicky comps, removing them without also hard-nerfing damage (condi and power alike) across the board would negatively impact the dynamics of fights (i.e. never push because you’ll get blown the kitten up before you even reach your target). I have no faith that Anet’s balance team (lol) will ever do that.

All that said, being able to prebuff boons to such an extreme extent is plain silly and shouldn’t be a thing.

tl;dr the actual outcome of the current meta is good – it requires more coordination to get kills and they mean more to the fight, movement is emphasized and backlines are rewarded more for proper positioning. But the way this “pace” has been created is absolute dogkitten and you’re forced to abuse cheesy mechanics to stay competitive.

.. and it’s a big issue in modes like WvW.

Here’s a gif to show the problem.
Water field goes down. Half a second later the blue ring disappears. 3 seconds later I successfully blast a completely invisible field.
Once again, this is a huge issue when you’re reliant on water fields for survival.

It happens with fields cast by your allies (not your own) and gets more frequent when there’s a lot of stuff going on. It started when the new colored indicator rings were introduced in the spring update.

Cerby.1069:

Curious, can some1 link a video showing a much smaller force taking on an organized zerg/blob (where the blob is actually focused on killing the smaller force and the small force is winning)? Small groups killing many times their size in stragglers is kitten. Find me an organized group vs a much much smaller organized group and show me the smaller one winning.

This kind of fight at 1:20 is probably the closest you’ll get to a legitimate 2:1 disadvantage. The choke is necessary. The days of full on 20v50 blob-busting in open areas are long gone – there’s simply way too much damage and way too much damage efficiency in the game for that.

Stand The Wall.6987:

shouldnt it be the first field?

Yes, it should. Finishers always interact with the oldest field.
Are you sure there were only two fields down, though? – they’ve recently developed a habit of randomly disappearing.

For starters, it needs to be much easier to see what’s actually going on in fights. Not just in regards to visual clutter, but the amount of effects getting thrown around. The game is incredibly spammy right now (many things optimally used on recharge), and individual skills do too many things at the same time. They’re going to need to slow the game way down and focus on better telegraphs and more focused functionality of skills (e.g. a CC can just be CC – it doesn’t need to also deal massive damage and have a bunch of utility effects). The game simply isn’t engaging for viewers when you can’t tell how a fight is won. People want to see interesting combat and mechanical skill from the competitor.

More examples. This time blasting invisible fields:
https://gfycat.com/DigitalCoolHawaiianmonkseal
https://gfycat.com/FairPinkBedbug

Voted “don’t count my vote”.
I’m on a T1 server and I haven’t seen any significant difference as a result of world linking.

If this poll ends on a ‘yes’, would the population issues be considered fixed? If so, I’d swap my vote to a ‘no’. Coverage imbalance is still the biggest problem for me and linking does nothing to fix that.

Here are a few examples I just recorded. Both of them are out of combat, no other fields being dropped. It’s easier to see it that way.

https://gfycat.com/FancySkeletalBorderterrier
Air overload lightning field. Animation persists for the full 4 seconds (effect LOD not triggered), ring disappears after 2 seconds.

https://gfycat.com/AngryJollyDinosaur
Static field. Initial animation triggers, gets immediately removed (effect LOD), ring disappears after less than 1 second.

Sometimes the ring doesn’t show up at all. In those cases, you’ll only see the character animation and the initial trigger animation of the skill – e.g. thief pistol shot and a tiny smoke explosion for Black Powder. I have no recording of this but I’m sure I can get it if more evidence is needed.

This is not just a problem on my end. Everyone I’ve talked to about it sees the same thing.
Now, this is fairly harmless when it’s just a static field for swiftness blasts, but when it’s a water field that’s supposed to keep your frontline alive, it’s a massive issue.

Bowdosa.3687:

You have the “Effect LOD” option ticked in your settings.

I do. It’s supposed to reduce a field to a simple ring, not remove it entirely.