Breaking the Boon Meta

[mygamingid.5816]

Rather than buffing the boon meta even more to open up spots on teams (that will only be filled with DPS spots anyway), why not nerf the current boon meta so that boon builds become a choice, rather than a mandate?

 

Alacrity: 25% instead of 33%

Frost Spirit: 50% chance to give 5% bonus

Grace of the Land: 1% damage bonus, 1% condition bonus, 5 stack max, 12s duration

Might: 25 or 20 power instead of 30

Quickness: 33% or 25% instead of 50%

Sun Spirit: 50% chance to apply 2 stacks of burning

 

Hit Spotter, Empower Allies, and similar abilities with a drop from 150 to 100 (150 for assassin’s presence). Drop banners to +100, too. All of that works with lower DPS on boonbots to make them a choice, not a mandate, and hopefully open up the meta.

[TexZero.7910]

Doesnt salve the problem. I should be more clear, there's no reason to lower the effectiveness of things like alacrity, gotl, might, quickness etc....

 

Just make them effect 10 people and trim the power of the always on passives like spotter/ea/pp/etc....

[Feanor.2358]

Making something useless isn't creating a choice.

[mygamingid.5816]

Why not? The value of the boon meta now is that it grants far more DPS than it costs. Reduce that grant to be more in line with the cost and you create a meta where you don’t need boonbots at all.

[TexZero.7910]

> @mygamingid.5816 said:

> Why not? The value of the boon meta now is that it grants far more DPS than it costs. Reduce that grant to be more in line with the cost and you create a meta where you don’t need boonbots at all.

 

I'd certainly hope that supports provided more dps than the DPS themselves given that they are sacrificing for the greater good and not playing greed.

[Feanor.2358]

The value of boon meta is that it creates gameplay that isn't "fire off all your damage skills". It creates different roles in the team by having cross-class/build synergies. It makes the game an actual multiplayer instead of a some sort of "time-shared single player".

[mygamingid.5816]

For balance, they should provide no more team DPS than what they give up personally. So if they give up 20k, they should give out 2k in boons to 10 squad members. Perfect balance may not be the goal, so give them a token benefit over that, but nothing like the massive benefits they offer now.

[Feanor.2358]

> @mygamingid.5816 said:

> For balance, they should provide no more team DPS than what they give up personally. So if they give up 20k, they should give out 2k in boons to 10 squad members. Perfect balance may not be the goal, so give them a token benefit over that, but nothing like the massive benefits they offer now.

 

Here's the problem with that: if you don't reward the sacrifice in personal dps properly, it makes no sense to make it. Why bother building a support which relies on having a group to do the dps when you can go dps and do equally well both in group and solo?

[Cuon Alpinus.7645]

What would this accomplish? Did you actually think this through, or did you just slap numbers together because you thought they feel good?

Why objectively make the raid experience worse? This won't get rid of the holy mirror trinity, as you'd still need these buffs for optimal play- it would only make things harder and slower. By specifically targeting boons, you're severely hurting the DPS builds as well, not just the Support builds. And your argument against the 10-man is that the remaining 3 slots would just "fill up with DPS builds anyway." So let me get this straight: you don't want more slots available to DPS, but you ALSO want to drastically nerf supports? What's your goal here? To force every party member to be a suboptimal hybrid support/dps build?

 

The reason people suggest the 5 > 10 man buff is because it removes the need for the mirror without damaging your ability to clear. With the three extra slots, people would be able to experiment with hybrid builds to cover gaps in support rotations, to maximize dps for hyper-optimal runs, or to cover lost bonuses should boons be balanced around the 10 man buff. But that's the thing- they're BALANCE changes, not "make everything better" or "make everything worse" changes.

[Cyninja.2954]

All this would do is create even more pressure to bring top tier dps since the entire raid now suffers from lack of damage of utilitie buffs.

 

Nerfing something does not more value create. If you leave the requirements unchanged in the raid, any loss of efficiency will be bought at a high price.

 

Following though example: best would actually be to balance utility skills for 10 man groups. That way no 2 classes of mesmer, ranger or warrior would be required. In the end, buffing the 3 support classes would far better achieve the result of more class diversity than nerfing them.

[Aetatis.5418]

said it on the necro forum already. while the intention is good ... the outcome is super boring. because we are going back to stacking 4 warrior + 1 mesmer (pre HoT)... difference is probably instead of warrior it is going to be 4-5 weaver ... in terms of raids: 8 weaver + heal + tank in the extreme of extreme cases.

 

that would boost the discrimination vs classes even more. atleast thats what i fear

[TexZero.7910]

> @mygamingid.5816 said:

> For balance, they should provide no more team DPS than what they give up personally. So if they give up 20k, they should give out 2k in boons to 10 squad members. Perfect balance may not be the goal, so give them a token benefit over that, but nothing like the massive benefits they offer now.

 

You're assuming this isnt currently the case, I'd argue its pretty dang close to the case.

 

If you rate each support (druid/chrono/war) the combined increase in DPS from all of these is roughly 10-12k ? that's 4k each which isn't some earth-shattering number given that a personal dps role can crank out near 30k with minor issues. Meaning these guys who don't come close to that are giving about what the currently lose out on.

[nextgen.3750]

Why would you want to nerf boons?

Even if you nerf them, you would still take them over everything else. I'd rather have 50% quickness than no quickness, 25% alacrity than no alacrity

 

[savacli.8172]

> @nextgen.3750 said:

> Why would you want to nerf boons?

> Even if you nerf them, you would still take them over everything else. I'd rather have 50% quickness than no quickness, 25% alacrity than no alacrity

 

^ This

 

To fulfill what OP is asking you would have to nerf boons to the ground or remove them altogether. At that point you would take away all diversity. Remember the 5 Warrior meta when the game first released? No other class was needed since a warrior running 5 signets at the time was about as strong as it gets so why not run 5 of them? Same thing would happen to raids in that players would find the single best class for the encounter and then just stack that. Sure, you may have diversity across encounters, but you would end up with something like 10 Power Holo's on VG or 10 Condi Mirages on Matthias.

 

While not perfect, the "Boon meta" does place DPS builds within close enough of a margin where its viable to take a handful of DPS classes on any given encounter.

[mygamingid.5816]

The goal is to change the meta from “you have 4 spots to fill” to “you have 10 spots to fill” by bringing boon performance (X) more inline with individual performance (Y). The closer X is to Y, the less value the boon meta has. I’m not against expanding boons to 10 people as the standard, either, just making sure that the value doesn’t unreasonably exceed the commitment.

[Zenith.7301]

> @mygamingid.5816 said:

> The goal is to change the meta from “you have 4 spots to fill” to “you have 10 spots to fill” by bringing boon performance (X) more inline with individual performance (Y). The closer X is to Y, the less value the boon meta has. I’m not against expanding boons to 10 people as the standard, either, just making sure that the value doesn’t unreasonably exceed the commitment.

 

As said before, why would anyone bother with a support who brings the same net DPS as an actual dedicated DPS, but is total trash outside group play by comparison?

 

A support relies on his allies doing their duties properly to benefit from that support. A sole DPS player only relies on himself.

 

What's more, in order to nerf druid you are royally screwing over all other ranger builds which are plain mediocre at the moment. Ranger spirits are terrible in pvp and wvw, and you want to make them obsolete crap in PvE as well where the spirits only have marginal value in a group while being made completely useless solo.

[Atmaweapon.7345]

The thing about the boon meta is that every either every profession should be able to participate in it so that you can puzzle out successful comps that don't require specific classes to bring certain buffs, or every boon skill should be rebalanced to function like Hard Light Arena where it gives more benefit to the caster over allies. No wishiwashiness between "this profession brings absolutely required utility to groups" and "this profession's utility would be overpowered when applied to groups."

 

[vicious.5683]

> @Feanor.2358 said:

> Making something useless isn't creating a choice.

 

Ofc it is. They made Necromancers useless and now everyone CHOOSE not to bring them to raids.

[mygamingid.5816]

> @Feanor.2358 said:

> > @mygamingid.5816 said:

> > For balance, they should provide no more team DPS than what they give up personally. So if they give up 20k, they should give out 2k in boons to 10 squad members. Perfect balance may not be the goal, so give them a token benefit over that, but nothing like the massive benefits they offer now.

>

> Here's the problem with that: if you don't reward the sacrifice in personal dps properly, it makes no sense to make it. Why bother building a support which relies on having a group to do the dps when you can go dps and do equally well both in group and solo?

 

I’m all for rewarding the sacrifice of personal DPS. Just don’t make the reward so overwhelming that there literally is no substitute.

[Belenwyn.8674]

To counter a boon meta you have to begin with the mob and encounter design. Boon stealing, corrupting or removing enemies would be a very effective counter. You can adjust which boons will be addressed and the length of the neutralised boons. You could have encounters with 50% uptime for alacrity and might or only 20 %.

 

Clever designed encounters would vary the importance of certain boons. For encounter A you would need a high uptime and strength for regeneration, protection and resistance whereas might plays no big role. Encounter B could favor high uptime for might.

 

Instead of mindless boon spamming for 100% uptime encounters should encourage a situational usage of certain boons.

[savacli.8172]

> @mygamingid.5816 said:

> The goal is to change the meta from “you have 4 spots to fill” to “you have 10 spots to fill” by bringing boon performance (X) more inline with individual performance (Y). The closer X is to Y, the less value the boon meta has. I’m not against expanding boons to 10 people as the standard, either, just making sure that the value doesn’t unreasonably exceed the commitment.

 

To "fix that you indeed would have to increase boon/buff availability to other classes. As in right now you have 3/5 party members bringing every possible combination of boons and buffs that a party could potentially need. That's not so much a problem with the boons/buffs themselves but rather the access that classes have to them. While I do agree that there should be a certain degree of class exclusivity when it comes to a unique buff of sort I believe every class should have something unique that makes them compelling/attractive. As in Chrono has Alacrity why not give another class an Alacrity-esque buff. It doesn't have to work exactly like Alacrity but said esque buff should work in a similar manner in regards to affecting cooldowns.

 

Alternatively (or additionally), you could spread out the currently available buffs so that other classes have a shot at filling the role. E.G. Support Renegade grants 25 stacks of might, minor healing and okay-ish Alacrity. Firebrand provides some Quickness uptime, block uptime, and healing in a pinch. both these classes are moving in a good direction as far as spreading support but obviously there not quite competitive enough to be handed the torch.

[xDudisx.5914]

Banners, EA, frost spirit and all special buffs should be converted to boons.

[Walhalla.5473]

Poorly thought out suggestion. What do you hope to accomplish by this? What sort of meta do you want to create with this?

 

This here just looks like " Don't like it, nerf it by some random numbers"

[Rising Dusk.2408]

Nerfing boons doesn't change the boon meta, it just makes it worse. If you want to avoid "permanently stacking" boons then you need to hit their durations, but even that wouldn't honestly do much other than limit group compositions since there are _so_ many sources for the various necessary boons.

[mygamingid.5816]

Not worried about boon duration, just about balance between classes. Support should be approximately as valuable as any other category.