Einlanzer.1627

> @"DeceiverX.8361" said:

> Toughness-primary kits currently dominate the PvP formats where they're available in optimal/near-optimal configurations/synergy, and point-per-point, power is one of the lesser-efficient stats in the game as far as damage goes due to its high dependence on ferocity and precision to make the investment into the stat worthwhile.

>

> Toughness, Concentration, Condition Damage, and Expertise vastly outweigh power in efficiency. OP even says this so I don't understand why Power is the problem.

>

> Instead of increasing base HP, why don't we cut the massively-powercreeped expansion damage coefficients, instead? Cut down some of the powercreeped core-game buffs since expansion releases? Fix skills to not be broken on the concept-level? Things are dealing like 50% more damage than core which is more or less the major culprit.

Maybe. I think you're overstating a bit, but, regardless, PvE is played far more often by far more players than PvP is, so it makes no sense for PvE's balance to suffer for PvP.

I think Power is overtuned, I just think Condition damage is more overtuned because it doesn't need synergy with other attributes to nearly the degree Power does.

I agree with nerfing offense rather than buffing Health, though. My suggestion to increase base Health was in the context of redesigning Vitality so that it improved Endurance rather than Health, not to compensate for too much damage being thrown around in the game, which I think is a power creep problem that needs to be reigned back.

Attributes are very poorly balanced, and we've seen very few changes to any of them for a long time. Why things like this are never changed or discussed for ONCE PER QUARTER balance patches is beyond me, and shows the work of the balance team is far, far too myopic for the game's good. Here are just a handful of examples of things I think need attention (ymmv):

Power appears to be overtuned and matters way too much to your offensive potential, which is why it's a primary stat on way too many combos and why everyone recommends avoiding sinkhole stats like Toughness, Vitality, and HP that are supposed to be defensive but actually undermine your defense by crippling your offense too much. Unless maybe, just maybe you are a dedicated group support/healer, which is viable for one or two people in raid content, which most people don't do. As elaborated on below with toughness, offense should have a narrower floor-ceiling range with stats. In reality, we have the opposite, especially when boons get mixed in.

Toughness was undertuned even before there was much condition damage in the game; now it's just a terrible "gotcha" stat that, again, actively ruins your defense by making you kill stuff much more slowly and therefore take a lot more damage (as discussed above). Passive defense through armor/toughness needs to baseline lower and scale higher than power to offset the negatives of having weakened offense, but that isn't the case - if anything it's the opposite, which wouldn't even make sense if the game didn't have active defense mechanics. It's flatly absurd considering it does. I'm also not sure it makes sense to tie threat to Toughness, although it's something I have mixed feelings about.

Vitality is pretty weak also. Adding to health is arguably not the best mechanic. Its value is uneven across classes due to differing base Health pools, and it provides diminishing returns to HP rather than synergizing with it. IMO, Base health should be moderately improved across all classes and Vitality should probably be reworked to add to endurance instead of Health so that it conceptually aligns better with "helping to avoid big damage", is less redundant with Toughness, is strategically more interesting, and removes the impediment to HP scaling. This change would require a bit of peripheral rebalancing, like nerfing Vigor and some daredevil traits, but IMO would be worth it. Max health should probably only be modified as direct % by specialized things like food and sigils.

Healing Power needs better normalization. HP points go to almost total waste on gear unless you are a dedicated group healer. I don't see the point of that. It's a major reason why Celestial stats are far less desired than they should be. A lot of people complain about "bunker" builds, but, IMO, the main problem is that personal healing skills are too strong at baseline and scale too poorly with HP. This needs to be reversed. Or, if they really want to keep it this way, remove Healing Power from Celestial and redistribute those points to the other stats.

The power of condition builds is too heavily weighted toward a single stat (Condition Damage), and this was made even worse by their bizarre and misguided decision to "balance" condi by making the durations last longer (it needs to be balanced through armor ratings, not duration), helping to reduce the need for Expertise on condition builds. This bad weighting is unfair to other builds since it leaves more strategic flexibility to have "suboptimal" extra points in other areas that you want. If you doubt me, try running a Condi build with dire stats and then a power build with soldier stats and observe the difference in efficacy.

Condition damage and Healing Power should probably both be normalized and be turned into stats that provide fixed % increases (replacing Outgoing Healing effectiveness) (i.e. Spirit and Malice, or whatever you want to call them) just like the overhaul Ferocity, Concentration, and Expertise got back in the day. I don't really see the point of having different scaling for different healing/condition skills.

I'm fine with UA and PS being how they are, honestly. UA is mostly useful for Might stacking and evading. The damage is kinda secondary especially when you're using it against multiple targets, but the evade is also more useful when you're fighting multiple targets, so it works out. PS is the same way. The damage is more significant than the control factor vs one target, but the opposite becomes true vs multiple targets. Kinda how it should be.

There are definitely parts of this game that just aren't solo friendly. Much of the expansion and story content is like this. It can be done, but it's frequently tedious and annoying even for someone with reasonably decent builds and skills. My opinion is that Toughness and Healing Power don't scale as well as they should for solo play. They should be desirable stats for solo play but the truth is pure offense is usually better for attrition, which is just bad balance.

> @"Danikat.8537" said:

> I think before launch Anet expected level 80 exotics to be harder to obtain. Not to the point where we'd still be working on them 6 years later, but enough that lower level exotics and level 80 rares would be useful to at least some people. I remember them talking about how hard dungeons would be and how things like the Orr temples would require coordination between several guilds to take. (Not sure about crafting, I don't think it was supposed to be difficult, but I guess without a ready supply of T6 materials and ecto from drops it would be more expensive.)

>

> Then until HoT launched, or a bit after, people were still throwing hundreds of exotics into the Mystic Forge to try for precursors, which kept the prices up a bit. And until relatively recently ectoplasm was quite expensive which again created a demand for them.

>

> Now we've hit a point where none of those things are happening. Although it did make me realise the low price of most exotics and their salvage materials means it couldn't hurt to try throwing some in the Forge. With my luck I'll only lose money, but at least it wouldn't be much money. (A bit like when I realised the nerf to Maize Balm had crashed the price so much that even if you mostly got candy corn from the elementals it spawned you were making roughly 300% profit...but the numbers were so low it wasn't worth doing even for me.)

Yes, and I think this is also the main reason they introduced Ascended tier. People got exotics pretty much right away and were like "okay now what?".

I think the issue now is not that we have <80 exotic gear, it's that exotic gear in general doesn't drop often enough. The same argument could probably be made for rare gear.

To play devil's advocate with myself a bit, I'm actually more interested in new weapons than I am in new races, and I think it's pretty lame that we haven't already gotten several. It's also something that's more easily doable than new races. I just wanted to post my thoughts on the potential of adding new races.

> @"Mea.5491" said:

> > In a nutshell, using Celestial you won't notice any significant difference in your TTL with moderate bonuses to Toughness and HP

>

> As a person who mains Cele but has tried glass cannon builds, I disagree. The difference is actually huge. However, it all depends on what the player is capable of. If someone has quick reaction times and can handle glass cannon builds without getting downed all the time, then yay for them! But I must admit that my reaction times are kind of slow, I'm bad at timing blocks and dodges, so I'm a lot more effective in my Celestial gear because it gives me more time to react during fights. Definsive stats being useless is probably the biggest lie in the game. They are useless **for some** but not for everyone.

I don't know. I'm not immensely skilled at the game, but I have always noticed my attrition is better the more offense I stack because of how much faster things die, reducing the amount of time I'm taking damage and leaving more room for error. In contrast, when I use defensive stats, I still die pretty quick when I'm screwing up, but there's a lot more time for me to screw up due to how much longer things live - especially considering the limitations on endurance and dodging.

So, I don't really buy this argument. It's possible there's merit for some builds, but it's not an across-the-board thing to nearly the degree it should be. Toughness and Healing Power in particular are very, very situational stats that are largely undertuned, and therefore the extra points completely go to waste and undermine the usefulness of Celestial gear.

The relative uselessness of Celestial is the biggest red arrow pointing to a major balance issue that, ridiculously at this point, has never been properly addressed. If the game was balanced, Celestial would be the best stat spread for many generalized solo builds and would be in pretty high demand across many professions. But, it isn't. Not by a long shot.

Specifically, there's a major problem emerging from how wasted Toughness, Healing Power, and to a lesser extent Vitality are in general usage, and it's gotten worse rather than better due to offensive power creep. Because of that, even though the total stat point is higher, you lose too much offense and don't gain enough from healing or defense to compensate. This is why Viper is pretty meta (mixing power and condition offense) while Celestial is not.

It's not so much an issue with Celestial in and of itself, but rather an issue mostly with the balance of Toughness and Healing Power as attributes. Toughness just sucks due to the prevalence of conditions and the way combat design is skewed too heavily toward avoidance of high damage rather than mitigation of minor damage, and HP only scales well if you are a dedicated group healer (in which case you wouldn't want Celestial). For personal healing, it's undertuned and totally pointless.

In a nutshell, using Celestial you won't notice any significant difference in your TTL with moderate bonuses to Toughness and HP, whereas you'll notice a significant loss in your TTK from not having more offense on your gear.

If Toughness and Healing Power in particular scaled better in an independent way it would probably be a lot more competitive. They really need to revisit the mechanics behind the attributes.

OP is not correct. There are definitely situations where ranged should equal or outdamage melee. Deadeyes have to give up all of their mobility and utility for that damage, and Elementalists are very squishy and, frankly, should be as capable (if not more) at range as warriors are in melee. Combat shouldn't be designed on a simple "melee > range" balance dynamic - there are many more factors that have to be taken into account.

That's disregarding the obvious fact that this game does not have melee and ranged classes and that all classes have capability in both melee and range, which is how it should be.

I'm of the opinion that you die too easily in the game, and the impact of death is not significant enough. But if that isn't changing, then, yeah I agree that armor breaking is totally pointless.

The bosses take a very tediously long time to kill. Is this intended?

I've never waited this long for a response, and I've posted a few times. Did this get overlooked?

> @"Super Hayes.6890" said:

> Yeah, so I get that adding a new race will take work. That is the most obvious thing everyone seems to enjoy pointing out over and over again. Fact is they should figure out how to accomplish adding a new race because it would sell an expansion to the game. Good for business! I will be happy to repeat what a lot of players have already said. I want a new race to be added and am willing to pay for it. I hope they are considering it.

Basically, yes. You can tell a lot of people posting on threads like these aren't very good at outside-the-box thinking, and Anet gets away with the "it's difficult" excuse way too often IMO.

> @"Cyninja.2954" said:

> There is only 1 good thing to do with new LA:

>

> re-invade it

> flatten it

> and rebuild old LA.

>

> Everything else is wasted developer resource.

>

> > @"Just a flesh wound.3589" said:

> > I doubt that statues and vendors will fix what is very probably a deliberate city “coldness” and the overall lack of inviting features that would make people want to hang around. LA used to be _the spot_ to get together and socialize. imo ANet wanted to spread the population out among all the racial cities. LA’s unique buildings were wiped out and all the cozy spaces where people congregated were flattened, removed, and replaced with open spaces. After all these years people know how to design a city that attracts and holds people. If they designed LA to not fit this knowledge then it was probably planned that way.

>

> I had never thought of that. Seems logical enough, sad honestly. Old LA was a great hub spot for new and old players.

This would make sense if not for the fact that everything they do in terms of cities is put in LA and nowhere else. I don't think it was planned at all, I just think they thought it would work better if it was cleaner and more open looking.

I think both old LA and new LA have their pros and cons. I wish they had just made new LA a new city altogether and left old LA mostly alone.

> @"Ashantara.8731" said:

> Just no. Either fully integrated new races or none.

>

> You don't get the difficulty behind new races: armor sets, new body types,... This isn't just about story content. If it was, we'd probably already have gotten new playable races.

>

> I still hope there will some added in the near future, but that might just remain but a dream. :/

Sorry, completely disagree that not getting new races is better than not getting them retroactively integrated. They can and should create a new system of supporting races to make it feasible to add new ones.

And yes, I assure you I do "get it". Work has to be done, but none of the other things should be prohibitively difficult. Adding new races is a thing other MMOs do pretty routinely because it's something that's in high demand and generates a lot of hype.

> @"Super Hayes.6890" said:

> I had forgotten about GW1 build crafting. I REALLY miss that. Maybe that's part of why especs are falling short for me. Not free to choose any weapon, not free to access skills from other professions, not free to choose the entire skill bar, and the thought of never getting a new class. It probably is just that GW1 spoiled me too much. To be fair I also remember the large amount of useless skills because of balance issues.

I think a lot of people overlook how important this is in a game like GW2, and is probably the most key way that GW2 regressed from GW1. I can't help but feel it would be a lot more popular than it is if characters weren't put on rails so much and you had a lot more of a free form way to customize your toons like in GW1.

It's critically important to have lots of ways to design and customize your character ESPECIALLY in a game that tries to focus on horizontal progression over vertical progression.

Now, the presumed idea here is that Anet isn't creating new races largely due to difficulties in integrating them into the story, but, here's an idea -

How about they just don't?

New races could be unlocked at level 80 or through an achievement of some kind, and could part of a new system of "supporting races", where they are intended to be played as races that are allied with the "main races" but don't have quite the same presence in the story. Therefore, they could maybe have a simple personal story, but would never become the commander and play through the LW. They could access LW zones through alternate means, or whenever a main race unlocks them on your account. This might be a good option as well for people who just aren't that interested in the story.

This game is so alt friendly anyway - by having them be unlocked as a special level cap feature, you are ensuring everyone has the ability to play through the full story on at least one of their toons. I've only played the story at all on a couple out of my 10 characters.

This new "system" would allow them to add a lot of new races with relative ease, and we could eventually have a large number of supporting races available for play. Wouldn't that be better than never getting new races at all?

> @"Mea.5491" said:

> I prefer elite specs because I love my Firebrand so much, I highly doubt that I would reroll as an other class anyway (I'm a mainoholic). Plus if the Guardian gets another spec I like, at least I don't have to start over from scratch -> full map and story completion, maxed crafting, etc.

yeah, but, again, elite specs are not appropriate for every concept. For example, if we were ever to get a monk class, it really should be its own profession rather than an elite spec of another profession.

Yeah, I'm worried they're going to shoehorn every new concept into an elite spec when we really should get the occasional all-new profession.

Honestly, I'd be pacified if we so much as got trait memory.

> @"Haishao.6851" said:

> > @"Einlanzer.1627" said:

> > > @"Critical Lag.9075" said:

> > > > @"Einlanzer.1627" said:

> > > > > @"Critical Lag.9075" said:

> > > > > They should never be relevant in PVE. Active defenses make for much more fun combat than facetanking with defensive stats.

> > > >

> > > > You don't really get to mandate that for other players.

> > >

> > > I didn't even try, I thought it was obvious that this is my opinion since it's my post but I guess it needs to be spelled out for some people.

> >

> > By saying "they should never be relevant in PvE", you are stating that your opinion is that they should never be relevant for anyone in PvE because _you_ aren't interested in them.

>

> Or because that's how the game is and has always been and is one of the main reason people actually play it.

> Having already overpowered stats become more powerful would be ridiculous.

>

> What if Power stat let us kill monsters without attacking them?

This response makes so little sense I don't even know how to rebut it. Do you even understand what's being discussed here?

> @"Critical Lag.9075" said:

> > @"Einlanzer.1627" said:

> > > @"Critical Lag.9075" said:

> > > They should never be relevant in PVE. Active defenses make for much more fun combat than facetanking with defensive stats.

> >

> > You don't really get to mandate that for other players.

>

> I didn't even try, I thought it was obvious that this is my opinion since it's my post but I guess it needs to be spelled out for some people.

By saying "they should never be relevant in PvE", you are stating that your opinion is that they should never be relevant for anyone in PvE because _you_ aren't interested in them.

> @"AliamRationem.5172" said:

> > @"Einlanzer.1627" said:

> > I really like Arenanet's attempt at simulating a role system without a hard trinity, although the execution does need a bit more iteration (as others have stated, chrono and druid are too dominant mostly because of their over-the-top boon sharing, which is something that has persisted without balance updates for far too long.)

> >

> > In particular, Elementalist, Engineer, Guardian, and Revenant all have heavy support themes built into their profession but are pretty mediocre in that role compared to druid and chrono, which is something that needs to be re-balanced.

> >

> > I also think that the Power/Condi balance isn't as good as it should be. Fights should generally favor a mix of both when most fights heavily favor one or the other. Condi tends to be stronger than direct damage unless the fight is very, very short, which isn't a great meta to have. As I've said many times, armor rating should be the primary determinant of whether direct or condition damage is better.

> >

> > Lastly, I don't think you need to have a hard "tank role", and it's actually better if you don't, however, defensive stats are not tuned the right way especially in PvE. They need to rethink the implementation of and mechanics surrounding Vitality and Toughness.

>

> Here's the problem with this thinking. If you have no "hard" tank role, as you say, what do you have? Without meaningful threat manipulation you can't force enemies to attack your tank. This means that there has to be some way for non-tanks to survive boss damage. So now your pseudo-tank not only can't protect other players, but has no significant advantage over non-tanks defensively. In other words, your tank in this scenario is just a DPS role that can't deal damage effectively.

>

> You propose balancing stats like vitality/toughness, but without introducing meaningful threat manipulation that would ultimately facilitate a hard tanking role. How? First, it goes against the entire design paradigm of action combat. You're supposed to avoid damage, not tank it. And if you make these stats required for survival without adding in some means of a tanky character protecting non-tanky characters, then everyone ends up having to use these stats and we're back to square one.

>

> Which brings us back to the current system. The only roles we have are healers, support, and DPS. A trinity of sorts, but it lacks depth compared to a traditional trinity system because it's an intentional failure to commit to fully developed roles. Conceptually I don't see how this is an improvement over the trinity and, in practice, my opinion is that it definitely isn't.

FYI - I revised my post to better say what I was trying to say for the tank role.

> @"Critical Lag.9075" said:

> They should never be relevant in PVE. Active defenses make for much more fun combat than facetanking with defensive stats.

You don't really get to mandate that for other players.

> @"Khisanth.2948" said:

> > @"Einlanzer.1627" said:

> > > @"Khisanth.2948" said:

> > > Even if you ignore everything else ... while doing LS3 one of the bosses had 1.5 million HP. Between the two extremes of my characters' builds that will take between 3 minutes and 1 hour to finish that fight. No prize for guessing which end I prefer.

> >

> > Right, and that, precisely, is why there's a problem that needs to be addressed. Offensive builds make too much of a difference in offense while defensive builds don't make enough of a difference in defense.

>

> Not quite ... no matter how how you crank up the effectiveness of defensive stats the times I mentioned won't change

LOL. We're talking about attribute balance more generally at this point. It most certainly is possible to rebalance the attributes to reduce the gap between the floor and ceiling when it comes to offense, and it's exactly what needs to be done.