The big balance patch that was supposed to fix the game has ruined everything.

[c u again.3267]

It ruined the build variety, beforehand you could have played almost anything and in a certain variatin it has worked. Now you have 4 buidls that dominate the game. The classes that devs forgot to nerf are just so much superior. Two of those builds being scrapper and holo meanwhile mesmer,warrior are unplayable. The power discrepanncy between certain skills is astonishing. Grav well pulsing for 8 damage but holo can spam crate which baits dodges with stow does insane dmg and has insane utility. Certain skills have been nerfed to oblivion while others were untouched. Classes with the most untouched skills reign superme in a way that has never been seen before. Every single matchup these days is like thief v mesmer used to be. Theres no class identity. The matchups are just impossible. You have to reroll or be irrelevant. The balance patch was a failure and a quite big downgrade compared to what we have had before. Not to mention that after people being used to fast paced meta for years, with the game slowing down many people have lost interest. Before i quit the game there were always people playing prime time ATs and you were guaranteed 2-3 good matches every tournament , these days every AT is dead. I've done 6 prime time tournaments this month and had a single good game. There isn't even a way to practice. Meanwhile soloq is filled with holos ( funnilty i had 6 holos 3 games in a row yesterday) and obnoxious easy to play bunkers (scourge, core guardian, scrapper). There is just NOTHING appealing about this game mode anymore. The devs have also lied to the community saying we'll get faster balance cadence but the balance is slower than ever when the game mode is the most unbalanced it has ever been. Good luck to anyone still standing, meanwhile i'll be enjoying world of warcraft.

[Tayga.3192]

Give me your stuff before leaving

[Aktium.9506]

Nah.

 

Build diversity is definitely better than before. There's something like 15~ or so different builds being played regularly at higher ranks (at least on EU) while all being effective at their role.

[rng.1024]

You are not wrong.

 

But..

 

Given the strict chain of command they run this game by, it's more than understandable that they are waiting on following up after a global pandemic hit, no question about it.

 

A little communication would go a long way though, even just a simple letter from the game director with a **time frame** would probably give them atleast 6 months of freedom where players would understand. This silence however is only detrimental.

[HotDelirium.7984]

 

>

> A little communication would go a long way though, even just a simple letter from the game director with a **time frame** would probably give them atleast 6 months of freedom where players would understand. This silence however is only detrimental.

 

This statement is ironic to me seeing as Mike Z in my conspiracy theory opinion allegedly left ANET back in November of 2019 without even a goodbye and the new game director hasn't even said hello. Who even knows who's in charge over there anymore. Anet has always had this air of undisciplined creativity without effective leadership that sometimes shined and sometimes was just squandered.

[wasss.1208]

I played holo and core engi before february. While playing holo, I thought: yeah, it is balanced... of course I tought that, holo carried me hard. Swapping to core engi, the fun ended the moment **any** meta build came against me. All of them were strictly better in almost everything, that the best core engi build I found could do. I literally lost duels to enemies that blew all their burst into my block, then simply AA me to death.

 

Then the february patch dropped, and now I always feel like I have a chance to fight. Unless I get chain CC-d to death, which almost never happens, I can kite, resustain, try to outplay my enemies, go to LoS points, use my second long cast time condi cleanses, and so on. Holos on the same skill level of course still clap me, as holo is currently an engineer+, but they have to work for the kill, or they could even lose if they misplay hard. In short: the gap between meta and off-meta build became smaller, so you can have fun, even if you roleplay as a core engi.

 

In my opinion: those who cry that the balance was fine before the february patch, and it is garbage now, never touched anything underperforming, and are really used to the cushioned hardcarry build they got before.

[Exedore.6320]

The February patch was intended as an initial push toward fixing years of power creep and poor design. It accomplished that.

 

The problem is that there was no follow-up with redesigns or major mechanics tweaks.

[KrHome.1920]

Before the patch the build with the bigger "you can't touch me, because I am invulnerable/evasive/in stealth/at range"-factor won. The rest was just buttonmashing-burst, since every single skill dealt absurd damage.

 

That was the reality and every person, that called that skillful play, was just delusional.

 

It is possible to play bunker builds now, that can keep you alive and misrepresent your skill level, but these builds have such a low pressure and can't kill any player, that does not want to be killed, which is overal still better, than what we had before the patch.

[Psycoprophet.8107]

Well they and community were warned by players that actually considered how many inbalances would be created by such a blanket patch that did not take each class into consideration, especially when anets steller reputation of providing quick fixes and adjustments etc. I feel a lot 9f players were just blinded by the fact that even though it was a lazy blanket patch the fact it effected so many things made it seem so great. The game didn't have great balance before that's for true but its utter trash now, only people defending it are the players who main the few classes that were left in a far more powerful state then the rest of the roster, and those that bandwagoned to them.

Anet needs to revert the patch and make the few adjustments do the the classes/builds that were outliers at the time, far less work then trying to ring this clown show back into somthing that even resembles a decent balanced and healthy game state. That won't happen so good luck to the games pvp modes in the future.

[KryTiKaL.3125]

> @"Psycoprophet.8107" said:

> Well they and community were warned by players that actually considered how many inbalances would be created by such a blanket patch that did not take each class into consideration, especially when anets steller reputation of providing quick fixes and adjustments etc. I feel a lot 9f players were just blinded by the fact that even though it was a lazy blanket patch the fact it effected so many things made it seem so great. The game didn't have great balance before that's for true but its utter trash now, only people defending it are the players who main the few classes that were left in a far more powerful state then the rest of the roster, and those that bandwagoned to them.

> Anet needs to revert the patch and make the few adjustments do the the classes/builds that were outliers at the time, far less work then trying to ring this clown show back into somthing that even resembles a decent balanced and healthy game state. That won't happen so good luck to the games pvp modes in the future.

 

I personally never considered the February patch as "good" after we saw the preview of it, at least not in the sense of it "fixing" things and I repeatedly tried to remind people that it was **never** going to be a "fix all" patch. I always saw it, and hoped for it, to be a patch that *broke the shit out of the balance* and it accomplished exactly that. It was something that needed to happen to more bluntly highlight the blaring issues at the core of the game today. Which it also did exactly that.

 

* Condition damage has no scaling mitigation like Power does and also needs far less stat allocation to be an effective method of damage/DPS which means the currently available stat sets make condition builds not only high output in damage, even with the available cleanses in the game, but also some of the tankier builds in the game.

* Boons have become practically **the** defining factor in a class or builds viability, or more specifically whether or not it just completely outshines other classes and builds entirely. The currently overperforming "outlier" classes and builds, even those in the category of Power builds, are the ones with **the** most access to boons, and a variety of them. Firebrand, Holosmith, Revenant, Tempest and Necromancer. Necromancer is the **only** exception among this list due to its innate, and very accessible, boon stripping/corruption effects which allows it to compete with these boon heavy classes and actually counter them. Even Spellbreaker, a class that is allegedly built to do as its name suggests, falls short of Necromancer.

 

The February patch doesn't need to be reverted, but ANet does need to do *more* with balance, more frequently, and address the leftover issues from the patch and the issues that existed before. For instance, while I don't think the CC changes need to be reverted, I do think that they need to back off a bit from the "trivial damage" aspect of CC skills. At the very least a 0.40 or 0.45 coefficient for these skills would allow them to actually deal damage but not **so much** that it turns into one of the classes burst damage skills; i.e like how Bull's Charge would pretty consistently hit for 5,000+ damage, that was not okay and that did need to change but the 0.01 coefficient took it too far and its, in my opinion, a failed experiment with CC skills. The biggest thing ANet could do for PvP balance is hinder boon access on these classes that are overperforming **because** of them. There is just too many boons, to frequently, and these classes can apply too many of them to themselves and others. What used to require blasting combo fields and coordination with your team to achieve high stacks of Boons is now practically achievable with **a** button press. That is simplification of gameplay at its worst and its probably the core of the issue as to why PvP balance has become such a grotesque mess.

[UNOwen.7132]

> @"Exedore.6320" said:

> The February patch was intended as an initial push toward fixing years of power creep and poor design. It accomplished that.

>

> The problem is that there was no follow-up with redesigns or major mechanics tweaks.

 

The problem was that it replaced power creep and poor design, with power dip (which is like power creep, except reverse and *much* worse) and even worse design. The patch was inherently very poorly thought out. They overshot the damage nerfs by far, making even glass cannons unkillable in 1v1s, they rendered a large number of skills and builds unplayable, and failed to really improve on anything. At this point just reverting the patch would massively improve the game.

[Psycoprophet.8107]

> @"UNOwen.7132" said:

> > @"Exedore.6320" said:

> > The February patch was intended as an initial push toward fixing years of power creep and poor design. It accomplished that.

> >

> > The problem is that there was no follow-up with redesigns or major mechanics tweaks.

>

> The problem was that it replaced power creep and poor design, with power dip (which is like power creep, except reverse and *much* worse) and even worse design. The patch was inherently very poorly thought out. They overshot the damage nerfs by far, making even glass cannons unkillable in 1v1s, they rendered a large number of skills and builds unplayable, and failed to really improve on anything. At this point just reverting the patch would massively improve the game.

 

This^ the patch did not fix powercreep at all, in the end it just left a few classes/builds far superior to other, power creep has no set base level so in reality power creep still exists, and the outliers are far more "powercrept" now in comparison to the rest of the roster then the outliers were that existed before. Players that new anets way and that were hopelessly full of false hope knew that anet wouldn't follow up with adjustments needed after such a ridiculously lazy patch as they promised they would, just like all the past promises that ended up being empty words.

Again gl to the pvp modes lol