XenesisII.1540

ok well.. everything went to hell tonight, lag galore in ebg and only with 2 zergs fighting not even in smc. meh.

At one point last night near a smc fight, not even a full blob fight, my skills stopped working, like I couldn't cast anything, I could still move around normally, and everyone else was moving around me normally, but I couldn't cast anything, lol it was weird, had to relog to fix it.

Classes should have never been given downed skills based on the class. It should have been the same 3 or 4 generic skills for everyone, 1 attack 2 single target knockdown 3 regain health, that includes the down state health pool. They were designed that way as per class balancing/theme (why necros have like the largest health pools, while the lowest healthpool classes have the best down skills ele guard thief mesmer), but you can already customize your character in stats/specs to live longer in fights or go for more damage, I don't think down state should be a part of this balance.

Gee wiz, I wonder how this will affect boon balling groups.... There's a lot of projectile hate in the game already with shields, invuls, reflects, blocks. The other range aoes you have to worry about is ground aoes, which a lot of them can also be blocked or simply dodged out of. Every class has access to gap closers (especially melee weapons compared to range weapons) or speed of some sort. Most melee weapons already have cleave of up to 3 targets, which also affects auto attacks which have no cooldowns. There are many other utilities a weapon provides other things than just damage to look at, this also goes for the class as a whole. There's a reason why necros were one of the slowest classes for years. Also cooldowns tend to be much higher and longer cast times on most aoes than single target skills, they're also crappy in singles fights, so you're at a disadvantage at range for those fights. You're going to have to look at it as a whole, and not just the damage.

Know how many times we asked them to run like even a monthly event for a weekend to promote wvw with bonus wxp/participation. But no, get a golem event that was broken and ignored. Get class skill swap event that was broken and ignored. Get no downstate event once a year. Even world of warcraft runs weekly weekend xp events for their battlegrounds. Something so simple to do, but they can't be bothered...

Don't nerf teef, that's what I'm playing these days lmao. Mesmer needs buffs. Losing stealth duty to scrappers was a nono, losing chrono for a year was a nono, clones are garbage in zergs, Mirage losing a dodge was... yeah. Stuff like well of corruption has unblockable yet why not null field? Their shatter mechanic seems so poor now when I compare it to something like a deadeye mark and the stuff you could do with that. But people have problems telling a clone apart from the player so constant calls for nerfs...

Remember back in the day when TC was the rp server... then they had their parties crashed... think it was FA that constantly loved to do that. I use to be in a zerg guild that ran weekly events too like dolyak parades, all necro, or all ranger nights. Servers like SoS ran training days. Uplevel k-train fridays, until eotm showed up. Can't do much of that stuff these days because of the how much combat and classes have changed, any event would get destroyed with any semi organized or even a pug cloud, boons especially stability are too important now. Not to mention how much communities have shrunk, and guilds sticking to themselves. I suppose you could run an outfit night lol, but then do you want to reward anet more for how badly they run/ignore this section of the game? It was pretty fun running mm night all those years ago, the blob fights we had, if that happened today we would have been destroyed easily.

20 Firebrand 20 Scrappers 1 Elementalist 1 Tempest 1 Weaver 1 Druid 1 Chrono 1 Scourge 1 Reaper 1 Spellbreaker 1 Herald 1 Daredevil If you can't out sustain and kill anything by just hitting 1 with this you need to uninstall.

> @"Shroud.2307" said: > Oh no, Scrapper was overtuned in the beginning as well. Although it wasn't wanted in zergs, it was one of the best 1v1/small scale specs at the time. Release Scrapper was _astoundingly_ broken. Like I would genuinely rank it top 3 most broken OP on release specs. > That said, again, it wasn't so in zergs. In PvP and WvW roaming though, Scrapper was big L U L. > Yeah I didn't pay much attention to them, was mostly on my reaper, but I coulda swore people said they were one of the weaker zerg specs. :) > Agreed, and this goes back to my original comment about _"Game is too far powercrept to fix it now"._ There are roles that should never have existed by GW2's balance philosophy, and literally everything is overloaded with Boons, Conditions, and general effects. It would take such a colossal balance patch to bring everything down to a more reasonable state that ANet would be better off releasing a _Guild Wars 2 Classic_ with no elite specs. > > I don't think a lot of people are fully comprehending how much stronger and easier everything is now. Agreed, they did do a good step in trying to bring damage down across the board last year, but not really much of a follow up unfortunately. > Scourge and Spellbreaker are still used, but now it's more out of necessity than because they're strong. There is just _SO MUCH_ Boon spam that if you don't bring these things you really have no chance of wiping anything. These two specs will always have a place until something else comes along that does what they do better, be it a new elite spec, or a reworked skill/trait/utility, etc. Boon hate is just mandatory now and there isn't any other way about it. > > I'm sure some might argue, _"well it's this way because there are so many AOE's and Conditions!",_ and they're sort of right. It's a feedback loop where ANet tries to resolve one thing with another and it just keeps getting worse. Unfortunately, they stopped at support being the solution to AOE's/Conditions without continuing the cycle. Why not let everyone have an immortal sustain blob so they can smack each other with pool noodles and everyone's happy. > > At times it truly can be difficult to avoid a coordinated _(or even uncoordinated)_ bomb, especially for inexperienced players. Generally however, all it takes is familiarity and it becomes relatively easy to position yourself and read groups such that death is minimal. If ANet brings support down _**JUST A LITTLE**_ we'd be in a better spot. Not so much that the feedback loop starts all over again, but just touch on a couple outliers to bring things more in line, and we can start having actual fights again. I honestly don't notice as many scourge or spellbreakers around, sometimes the odd guild group is running a bunch of warriors, but generally their usage is way down. But yes they will always be needed because they're the main boon destroyers still, and that is highly needed, (you can kinda sub mesmers in there but they're not as good), but I still think the nerfs to those two classes went too far, I agree they needed nerfing for sure from their original implementations, but not to that extent. The infinite boon cycle is just too much and I'm more of a fan of active than passive applications, which something like purity of purpose is the biggest offender of. Just another example of anet trying to put in a step to fix a previous step. Add a bunch of boons, add of bunch of corruption, oh no too much corruption, add recycle boons, now lower corruption, adjust recycling boons? oh sorry we're working on next expansion! kitten...

I think people should have expected no significant changes since the expansion was announced.

> @"kamikharzeeh.8016" said: > @"XenesisII.1540" still, the point stands; the "balance" been mostly plain nerfs, without a real filter. instead of trying to buff completely unused things (weapons, traits, skills) > Let's not forget that for the most part (I say most because scrappers I believe were not that great in the beginning) every single elite spec were overtuned, and added roles that were not intended to be in the game in it's first design, namely pure support specs which added so much more heals and cleanses and boons, and no longer even needed blasting fields to produce them. Plus the inflation of power since the expansion, there's only one way to go, nerfing down, not continuing to buff up. Buff useless stuff by all means (gyros are a good example of this aren't they?), but they need to continue keeping the op stuff in check. > like what do people expect? nerfing firebrand and scrapper to unplayabilty? and then? all will just become a huge pirateship, probably healing rev and tempest would sorta take their place. and people would cry about "rev meta"... and here we go again (i mean, they do complain about rev yet... but eh. remove all classes so everybody is unhappy? idk.) And yet it was ok to over nerf scourge chrono and mirage right? when gyros got buffed and practically kicked every mesmer out of zergs. And shades being reduced to 2 targets is a god damn joke. Winds repeated nerfed into uselessness, I can barely tell if even one warrior bubble goes up in a fight these days. You worry about lack of stability and turning into a pirateship, and yet now we have groups just walking over aoes like they don't exist, there's no fear to walk through a bomb with 12 boons and the infinite cycle of boons to condi back to boons instantly. To counter this you're expected to come up with an army of boon strippers with a coordinated bomb, meanwhile the army of scrappers and fb are sitting there mindlessly hitting a couple buttons to cleanse and heal and refreshing everything. There are ways they can deal with the stability issue, they even mentioned it one time they thought about giving more access to stability, if they could do that and reduce the boon spam in general it would be a better step in the balance direction. But hey, wvw is the last thing they ever thing about in this game, certainly not going to care about balance when they have new specs coming to break the game again.

> @"Mil.3562" said: > Oh, another one of those topics created by condi mains (most likely necros) calling for further nerfs to cleanse and heals. Well, less than two years back you guys did it once and ANet agreed that 2% of the player base in the forum represented the other 98% as well and over a few balance patches, handled some very devastating nerfs to anti toxin runes, Scrapper traits and even dropped their vitality by 3k. And nothing has changed over the years with ANet still having that 'all calls for nerfs are most welcomed and will be done ' attitude, you guys will succeed again. Congrats! > > notes to self : Avoid WvW section, there is nothing constructive here but endless calls for nerfs Yeah we should have been calling for buffs to scrappers instead, purity of purpose and gyro rework that made them one of the top support in zergs wasn't enough... Oh let's not forget the amount of crying over scourge that got them nerfed multiple times cause people are too dumb to avoid red areas. These are forums, where people give their feedback, usually about something broken.

Hm, a t3 smc is both a problem and a boon actually. When it isn't fully upgraded it's easy to break in and maybe even take, but unfortunately it also tends to take most of the focus of the map zergs, leaving everywhere else free to upgrade unless the roamer and small groups are active in taking stuff. Two hours into reset night you can see t3 keeps and inner towers. When it is fully upgraded it's much harder to break and take, sometimes even needs to provoke a 2v1 on it, but it also pushes groups to focus elsewhere on the map until the ideal times to sneak it. I don't think SMC should have a t3 upgrade actually, but they probably should at least double or even triple up the dolyaks required for upgrade levels, and also cut it's max supply limit down in half. Still the most important thing to do is to take enemy camps to slow down the upgrade process, and even a roamer can do this.

I think bow 4 unblockable aoe daze interrupt is a beautiful thing, and while it doesn't carry a flashy high damage number with it, I think it can be even more deadly if you manage to get it done on an important skill cast by the enemy. Meanwhile aoe poison on downs, and also double pump deadeye mark to down weak targets is also nice to catch strays off guard. Unfortunately combat was pushed into more of a zerg boon ball style rather than front/back line of the past. But if all you want to do is run in a zerg and throw out boons and aoes, then run a more zergy built class for it I guess, thieves still have their uses around zergs.

Nerfed necro and warrior strips into garbage. Hands scrapper purity of purpose. Boons still have no max cap on durations. What could go wrong...