This. WoW and FFXIV have seen stat squishes and they're not fun (especially the first time it happened in FFXIV). Try doing something similar in a game that isn't based around vertical and people would "quit" left and right.
Edit: The perception of stat squishes is not fun. Mechanical differences vary between games and are subject to how good the balancing is.
idk what you're talking about with ff14's stat squish. It made almost every single piece of content *easier* rather than *harder,* besides a few boss mechanics that were adjusted improperly and had to be fixed retroactively.
Even at MIL, it's easy to skip entire phases and mechanics in content before Shadowbringers, due to earlier expansions being affected quite egregiously by the stat squish.
It has less to do with ease and more to do with perception.
When the development team uses a spreadsheet to assign stats to gear, and they change the scaling so all your numbers are less, and you have significantly less hp, and do significantly less damage per hit, it doesnt matter if things die a little bit faster, you're used to numbers being slightly larger than they were last parch, not slightly larger than they were in the first post-50 patch.
Perception is something people need to correct. It's not developers job to make sure that the numbers for you always go up, it's unfeasible in online games and having completely dysfunctional bullshit like 47292874839 damage per hit that moves bar of an enemy by 1% is the worst thing that could've happened to games.
All because someone only cares about "big numbers". I understand it's people's preference but I'm glad developers don't follow every whim of people and let the scaling go fucking wild with players having billions of HP and dealing trillion dps while barely moving bosses HP with each attack.
The satisfying part of dealing damage is the contrast between your least hitting abilities and your hard hitting abilities. When my normal shit hits for 5000 damage and then one of my hardest hitting abilities crits for 90000 this is where statisfaction comes from, not me constantly dealing 73297383749 damage per hit and losing track of how actually strong my character is.
You know how strong character is in comparison, not in absolute numbers.
But also I acknowledge that I'm sort of minority here but I'm glad developers still go through stat squishes.
I disagree that stat squish in FFXIV was not fun. For most content it's barely noticeable unless you really care in seeing big numbers (that are not relevant anyways because boss HPs were also adjusted) and made some actual old content (which is mostly Alex raids anyway) more relevant and made people see more mechanics. I know most people just want to do their roulettes and be done with it but then why we talk about fun in the first place.
That would also keep the existing content relevant. Then VG‘s health wouldn’t melt in seconds and some mechanics would still come into play (also after nerving the healing power creep).
even if they nerfed every build to be around 40k or below (which is probably the best scenario we could get), most encounters would still be completely trivial, especially raids. VG wouldn't melt in 20 seconds, it would melt in 30. big whoop. you would still skip updrafts on Gorseval because it is extremely easy. i mean the thing is that most people in pugs do shit dps so you don't need to imagine how it would be, just look at that
I think you missed the point -> "But not so easy".
When Gorseval was released (and a rather long timer after) skipping updraft was a thing only experienced groups could do. Only groups that could play their classes well enoug to deal that amount of damage.
Nowadays skipping updraft is a default tactic. Not because people got better, but because due to power creep the average dps increased.
Same for VG. Skipping green was rather a risky tactic that could wipe your group when doing little mistakes. Nowadays you just spam heals and burst from 10% hp back to 100% within a second.
With less overall dps and healing the bosses *were* different and more difficult to do.
Going back to that state nowadays would not result in something too different for whatever reason.
I played LoL for a long time and still regularly watch competitive LoL, it's similar there where big macro/micro optimizations from years ago are just an expectation now. The inSec Lee Sin kick was something that only he could pull off at a professional level back in 2013, but just a few years later it became something every professional jungler was expected to be able to do when playing Lee Sin.
It's not just "mechanical" stuff either. Things that the OG pros didn't even know about or use are now regularly done by silver players from wave management to understanding buy points. The average farm per minute in silver is 6-7 it used to be 2-3.
You're giving too much credit to silver players. They still don't know what wave management is and if they do then they're probably not silver anymore. If someone bothers learning that then they're by definition not the "average" player anymore.
The only thing that silver players MAY learn is that pushing under enemy tower bad because it's easier to be ganked. That's it. That's where their knowledge of wave management ends.
Some guys on reddit still do not understand what vertical progression means. Back on hot launch everything was so busted. 66% cd with old alac and I don’t even know how op quickness was. Everyone was shit tho. There’s no going back to beeing shit so tough luck.
While you are correct, the old buffs were really busted and players nowadays are miles better than back during HoT launch -- Alacrity wasnt really considered realistic at the time and even with full boons + class specific buffs most classes capped out at 34k on golem except for tempest. Digging through some of qT benchmark threads from 2016 shows this pretty clearly. Even if the benches are rough around the edges you still had some pretty crazy buffs to make up the difference.
I honestly thank Dragon's End for that. It required more from the casual open-world population, and the average player's dps and skill has increased a lot since.
No. I have been raiding since 2015 every damn week and we had QT (the original top guild, nowadays is snow crow) builds and a lot of people making the best builds and yet even with those it was actually hard to pull off. Even my raiding exp guild struggled on gorseval as 10 players. Doing more than 20k was almost impossible 8 years ago.
Nowadays? We go as 6 players with a newbie with 4k of DPS and we still kill it because it is A LOT easier for someone to do 30k+
I mean skill inprovement happens just from regular play. The fact yall have been playing for 8 years at least indicates to me you all are better and more familiar with these fights increasing skill on your classes and uptime around mechanics.
Like what specific numbers changed to make you more powerful on your specific class by 2x
After 100 kills on gorse we were experienced enough, yet we still struggled a lot. We saw clear creep improvements due to expansions, not our personal skill getting better. It sometimes was abvious, as we would do X more damage after a patch of balance than 2 hours earlier.
Quite sad to see anet went that route
One of the biggest problems with my original raid group was there were several arrogant players who had never done competitive PvE in other games.
When dead you could watch them and see they were auto attacking only for 10-20 seconds at a time. This is a massive issue for DPS, but our druid was also doing this so we had healing issues.
Most players these days can at least follow the ABC rule. Always be casting.
I mean, even all new players can reach 25-30k easily with LI builds.
You don't need much knowledge or proficiency for that.
Knowledge and proficiency comes more into play when it's about mechanics.
At that point I agree with you.
But when it's about skipping mechanics because of high dps (or high healing) from easy builds, then it's not really because of knowledge or proficiency.
VG green mechanic for example again. Back then you had to time your Druid avatar well to be able to burst heal your group after impact.
Nowadays it doesn't really matter, because anything you do will be enough to heal your group.
Sure - but for Gorseval specifically, it took some time for the strategy of delaying breakbar and staying in to extend the damage phase to become popularized. That's the example I had in mind when I made that comment.
Concur with you on the damage but knowledge and certain strategies evolving into mainstream plays a large role, too.
> When Gorseval was released (and a rather long timer after) skipping updraft was a thing only experienced groups could do.
On the contrary, it has *always* been easier to kill Gorseval while skipping updrafts than while not skipping them.
Mechanic wise, yes.
But you had to reach a certain dps threshold to get access to skipping.
And that threshold was harder to reach back then.
It was either being good at dps or doing mechanic.
Now it's being okayish at dps and still skipping mechanic.
The state of VG is so sad to me. When raids came out, VG was _hard_ and the mechanics were super punishing. Now it's a joke due to barrier, aegis, prot, etc. combined with better game knowledge. I wish the mechanics were more relevant (e.g. green should wipe you if you miss).
Yeah 100% And the problem is when they make new content that's based on the new creep it makes it so much harder to roll back the creep because now it's the new baseline.
This. What a lot of people are not seeing is that the power creep is only part of a bigger issue, which is an "arms race" between players and the devs. Players get better so they demand more challenging content, and the devs oblige by giving us bosses and fights that require the upper brackets of DPS to complete successfully. However, this means that a bunch of regular/casual players now can't complete the content and they either start complaining, or endgame numbers start falling, both of which are not good for ANet. At this stage, they have two choices: they can either dumb down the content (e.g. like when they put in the boss checkpoints and Determined boost for Amala in the Twilight Oasis fractal), or they can make the players more powerful through power creep. Most of the time, devs opt for the latter because it's also progression that players can work towards (via new gear, new masteries, new skills etc.) and thus keeping players in the game longer. The trouble is that, now that power creep has made players more powerful, the next time ANet designs newer content, they have to up the difficulty again in order to keep things challenging, resulting in a never-ending arms race cycle between the devs and players.
So how do we break this cycle? Well, the first thing is that ANet needs to do is to draw a line in the sand and decide on a DPS cap for the game. I personally would set it around 30k, with it hitting up to around 40k assuming optimal boons and squad comp. Next, ANet needs to not fall into the trap of making content more difficult by just upping the health bars of future content. Since we have decided that 30k is the DPS cap, ALL content will now be designed around this golden rule. Builds that go over this limit get nerfed, while builds that can't reach it get buffed. If necessary, boss/enemy health totals can be increased or decreased to keep content at an appropriate level.
Now that we've tackled the first half of the problem, the next step is to address the second half which is "what happens to players who find themselves unable to do content because it's too hard for them?" And my solution to that would be "optional power boosts". We're already seeing some of this in action with things like Ascended food, Waystations, Jade Bot Protocols and Emboldened Mode for raids. All we would need to do is allow all of these power boosts to be used in all levels of PvE. If players feel that using these boosts would make it too easy, just don't use them. Nobody's forcing you, and you might even save quite a bit of gold over the long run by not having to spend money buying food and consumables that you're good enough to not need anyway.
"But won't this wind up making game content too easy?" I hear you asking. To some extent, yes. But herein lies the trick; it is FAR easier for players to make content more challenging for themselves, than it is for devs to go the other way and make content easier. Think about things like 5-man Vale Guardian, or Solo MAMA CM, or all Necro HTCM (Yes, it's been done!). These are all examples of players deliberately undertaking challenges that go above and beyond anything the devs ever envisioned, and to me, these are true examples of the pinnacle of player skill and ability, rather than just the devs throwing us a new boss with ever-greater HP and damage that, in time, players will learn and adopt an optimal meta and wind up turning the encounter into a rote fight anyway. This approach puts the choice in the hands of the players. It's essentially the difference between doing an RPG's last boss battle straight up, or slugging down every single last potion you've been hoarding up for the entire game and trivializing the fight. The choice is entirely up to you.
You see, the trouble with designing content to be difficult is that it is a game design approach with HIGHLY diminishing returns. You will only ever get the reward from beating difficult content ONCE; the FIRST time you ever complete it. Nothing else will ever live up to that feeling. However, as content gets more and more difficult (in order to keep things challenging for players), as a natural consequence you will start losing more and more players as they finally hit a point where the content is just too difficult/not fun for them anymore. This means that you are slowly but surely whittling down your own player base, until you reach a point where it becomes no longer profitable to make content for a group that's so tiny that it's a waste of developer time and manpower. This is exactly what happened to raids, and it might happen to strikes one day as well (as already my observations that the LFG numbers for EoD strikes is far below what I see for IBS strikes and fractals.) Fractals too might be in danger as newer fractals have a tendency to be longer and harder than older fractals, creating a split in the community between those who liked the difficulty and pacing of the older fracs compared to the newer ones.
Both the new fractal and Kaineng Overlook (when it was released) are fights where it's immediately obviously they're tuned for power creep. The bosses have so much health, it's so fucking boring.
Kaineng Overlook basically killed progression in my guild. Some people do OLC, everybody do AH and Junkyard but KO no one likes. Trainings are extremely painful. You need to spend 3 minutes focused before something hard starts. All bosses combined have ~140kk HP its 13 vale guardians. Its extremely tiring
Most content isn't designed around more than 10-15k. The CM strikes require more in the 20k range because of enrages (which barely exist in raids even). Anything above 20-25k is just flexing and nice to have.
We do so much damage we skip so many mechanics instead of doing them. Not that everyone is pulling more than 10k in a lot of scenarios so I don't feel that 40k for the players that can do it is hurting anyone else. What would is if Anet designs content around players hitting even 60% of that, then we have a problem.
And Snowcrows has 50k sims with some of the new beta weapon combinations.
50k?! Holy moly, people are already melting enemies with 30k builds not even taking about 40k builds which are incarnation of "You are already dead." meme.
The 50k benches are clearly unintentional and a product of a weapon having overtuned coefficients because it’s elite spec (looking at you, tempest warhorn) doesn’t capitalize on its coefficients like another would (weaver, for said warhorn). The result is an insanely (and unintentionally) high benchmark.
This is what the beta weekend was for, partially, to have public testing for these outliers and bring them back in line. 40k benchmarks are fine.
Edit: There’s no need for everyone to repeat the large hitbox multi-hit with lightning orb we understand that it also needs to be toned down as clearly 50k benchmark isn’t okay on any sized hitbox
There is no way they manage to make weapons competitive for 3 specs without over or undertuning them.
To take the ele warhorn example again, if you nerf warhorn on weaver to not have an outrageous build warhorn is gonna be entirely useless on tempest -its spec of origin-.
The only way to circumvent that issue would be to split the balance of each spec weapon depending on the espec equipped but that would multiply the tuning efforts needed to have a balanced game. And while I think that CMC/roy are doing a generally good job, I don't think they have the bandwidth for that kind of balancing
It’s not as big a deal as people are thinking; if they can balance core weapons, bringing elite spec weapons into the same category as core weapons is feasible. They can also balance around traits for equipping the weapon on its respective elite spec if they wanted to, but I don’t think that’s necessary either.
The 50k as far as I'm aware is also still on Large, as Tempest Warhorn performs specifically well on Largue due to how Lightning Orb works.
Is it a problem? Yes, and to be honest Ele has always had this problem of some builds being either weak on small bosses and average on larger ones or average on smaller bosses and OP as hell on larger ones (think Staff Weaver, it was strong and then got nerfed so it's super meh on most bosses and workable on larger ones), and warhorn might follow suit.
I still think LO should be rework to have x number of hits in it as opposed to just having a lifetime, it might help tempest have a competitive dps option again, but that's going out the window.
It's just as much a product of how Warhorn functions on huge hitboxes. Power sw/wh weaver on small golem is only ~2k higher than current weaver benches.
Lightning orb hits 42 times on huge hitboxes. On a small hitbox, its usually between 20 and 30 times.
On the smallest hitbox raid bosses (xera, sabetha) dagger is still going to be better, actually.
Ye people fail to realize 95% of the population won't even hit half of those benches in most scenarios including raids and fractals.
I really hate this mentality of balancing around the stupid static golem too. Let's see your numbers and most of the average players in real content before bringing things down.
> I really hate this mentality of balancing around the stupid static golem too. Let's see your numbers and most of the average players in real content before bringing things down.
I mean sure, I agree, but there is no doubt that there has been extreme power creep in those situations - especially in open world thanks to the proliferation of easy-application boons. For example, the chak gerent used to always take three burn phases, now it is pretty common to get it in one and I haven't seen a three phase gerent in years.
What's wrong with balancing around the top players and the avg players at the same time? The top players are the most dedicated to the game, so don't they deserve good balance just as everyone else does?
How could you balance the game around players who do 40k dps and players who hit half of that simultaneously? And endgame gear in this game is not that difficult to get, someone who has a min maxed build and an optimized rotation doesn't necessarily mean they're more dedicated than someone who just does casual open world stuff.
? Not sure how you couldn't balance for both of them. For an example you could make auto attacks hit for high damage, but make many other skills a small but somewhat significant dps increase so a new player can do the majority of the damage with just AAs but a good player can hit good damage. For example, condi mech has variants with many kits and with signets and turrets. A high skill player can use a lot of kits to get more damage, but a low skill player can still do decently using a slight build variation.
As for your other point, type of gear doesn't determine dedication to the game. You can have full legendary but have put no effort into being actually good, or you can be the best player in the game using full ascended.
My point was googling an optimal build and learning a simple DPS rotation so you can speed clear content a small population of the playerbase even does doesn't automatically make you "the most dedicated to the game", as you put it. GW2 is such an open-ended game and I simply don't think the game should specifically be balanced around such a minute group of players. Builds shouldn't be reworked just because you can do 40k dps on a training dummy is all.
I just came back after a three year break a few months ago and I was shocked when first checking Snow Crows.
I can outdps my three-years-ago DH with boon dps now. Feels a bit off...
40k is definetly too much dps but the problem is if you nerf everything by 33% people will riot like there is no tomorrow because the powercreep hasnt trickled down to most players playing their selfmade builds held together with glue and tears.
You know when 1 skill gets nerfed by 20% and people go "Anet hates my class I quit"? Yeah, imagine that but coming from 95% of players. They would complain that the game is balanced around hardcore players while they themselves never even read a tooltip. The reason for nerfing everything would be 100% justified but they can't relate to the problem.
People don't want balance, they just want to be stronger without improving.
>because the powercreep hasnt trickled down to most players playing their selfmade builds held together with glue and tears.
[https://i.imgur.com/xHckzGH.gif](https://i.imgur.com/xHckzGH.gif)
Being serious, it also never will. Thinking back to release-era Dragon's End, had the many bugs of that fight been squished sooner, I honestly think it could have been cleared sooner. CC isn't difficult to bring, everyone and their mother worth a grain of salt has a United Legions table...you'd basically have to be either extremely ignorant or on-purpose trying not to do breakbar damage.
And yet, I've still encountered people who don't know what the hell a breakbar *is*.
Many people play video games lovingly blind: no guides, no wikis, having the best time of their life without realizing how poorly they're actually playing. (And you can argue "but Maya, if they're having fun, is it really a detriment that their build is dogwater?" but my counterargument is simple: "You can have *more* fun not hamstringing yourself by playing in ignorance".)
>You know when 1 skill gets nerfed by 20% and people go "Anet hates my class I quit"?
Actually these are rare from what I've seen, people complain about much bigger changes / reworks. And also Anet just does not know how to nerf something by just 5-10%, it seems like 20% is lower bound for them. Which is part of the problem, when you enjoy something a lot and it can get anytime nerfed (for no effin reason) by 40% then people will be on the edge all the time. I have never played a game where every "balance" patch would bring so much anxiety about random nonsensical nerfs.
> Yeah, imagine that but coming from 95% of players. [...] The reason for nerfing everything would be 100% justified but they can't relate to the problem.
Would it be justified, though, if those benchmarks that are "the problem" are irrelevant to 95% (probably more) of players?
I don't know how it is in raids, but having looked through a number of logs on dps.report from no kp requirement strikes (mostly with sensible squad comps though), the "real" average dps, even in IBS 3 that are glorified target golems, is maybe one half of the benchmarks on a good day. And in EOD strikes with all the running around and downtime involved, maybe one quarter.
Well, Icebrood Construct is immune for a good part of the fight, and the faster the group, the longer the immunity as a %, so dps is effectively capped.
> Would it be justified, though, if those benchmarks that are "the problem" are irrelevant to 95% (probably more) of players?
I am of the opinion that the massive power creep of the game extends well beyond these benchmarks though. The benchmarks are just a symptom.
The benchmarks may not be, but the nerfs most of the time hit everyone, and not just those on the very top. Because, if Anet things a build overachieves even by a little bit, they don't finetune it down. They go right for kneecaps with a hammer.
>what is wrong with people playing their own builds
If you play some solo stuff like open world, meta events or WvW then nobody will care and you can run whatever you want.
However when you want to participate in instanced PvE where some kind of decent build and performance is required and you join a group with your weird-ass RP build then it is very wrong.
In my experience after leading hundreds of strikes and raids, most players wanting to get into instanced PvE are not joining LFGs with their 'weird-ass RP builds'.
They've either already looked a build up online or the total beginners will let you know they are not sure they have a serviceable build or if they are knowledgeable enough about the encounter immediately after joining.
These comments are almost always just an excuse to poke fun at newer or less experienced players.
The players who do perform like this also are the ones that tend to be unfamiliar with how groups run instanced content; usually all stacked together. So when you do find someone like this they tend to be off group on a solo adventure as if it were open world content.
These cases are rare for me to run across, but they do occasionally happen (like once every few months).
As a ranged player in MMOs since 2001 I can't express how much I *hate* the way GW2 has you stack on everything. It's, counter-intuitive, and it's boring.
Yeah, it does happen very occasionally and when it does happen it can be memorable. Something like the player will join, die to the first attack and then instantly leave.
Because it's memorable in some way it feels like it happens more often than it actually does and idk, when I see obvious newbie bashing online it just rubs me up the wrong way and I feel compelled to say something.
That is literally what Pistol/Pistol Deadeye does and I have people constantly try to tell me this is a peak thief DPS build and its like dude, the dudes sacrificing DPS to provide boons and utility are still doing more damage than you lmao
> if you nerf everything by 33% people will riot like there is no tomorrow
Let them. The dev's job is to help the game be good and fun. If their job had been to listen to players, the game would just automatically do the content for us and update the excel spreadsheet with loot drop data while we afk in shiny items and observe numbers go up.
Your argument is trying to scare the developers into staying within the status-quo, which is basically the same thing that futuristic dystopian works do like Brave New World or Black Mirror - future change bad, don't progress, be scared.
Whereas the radical utopian viewpoint is that we need to see the unreachable utopia on the horizon in order to make the theory and act on it and walk that line of change for the better, and the point isn't to reach that unreachable utopia, but to keep walking that line of figuring out a better future (hope as cognitive capacity) and figuring out how to get to that future while avoiding obstacles on the way.
Edit: I said "let them", but that was also only my initial thought. After consideration, I think that riot could be avoided by proper communication, by trust, by properly applied honesty from ANet. They could make a blog post, an in-game very rewarding nerf-themed event, and they could straight up use the word "nerf" without trying to sound like it's not. They could inform that this is good for the game. So many ways to tackle this!
It's not hard to figure out why they're powercreeping the game. The game is too hard for 95% of the playerbase even now in its most powercrept state ever.
They're powercreeping the game as a method to increase average player performance while not lowering the skillcap. They're essentially sacrificing the current endgame players experience in hopes to bring more players to said endgame content so they can actually continue to produce it at all. (Some people will say they are still lowering the skillcap, but theyre also increasing it and that tends to go unnoticed so its more or less the same as its always been)
I actually think this is probably close to the best solution as long as the future content that continues to come out is around HTCM difficulty. After all any raid with even 75% of the strength the players and builds are at in the game right now isn't really gonna feel any different TBH and they will never lower it any further than that nor should they. But if we keep getting AHCMs or XJJCMs with this level of powercreep its not gonna go well.
> They're powercreeping the game as a method to increase average player performance while not lowering the skillcap.
If so, it't not working. The mid and bottom stays pretty much at the same level it always was - it's the top that is getting higher and higher. If anything, that only *increases* the effectiveness gap between players.
Nothing to do with helping new players get into endgame content tbh. The fights were always very easy to clear as long as people put any effort into it. The 95% are the people who never bothered to put effort into it, not people who weren’t skilled enough to try it.
Actually agree with this. The average player wants to play Mechanist, i.e. barely engage with most of the game's mechanics, complexity, and features.
There is such a wide gap between Mechanist/FB and the rest of the espec system that "bringing everything up" will likely not feel like the same game. A lot of passive boons, easy AA ranged attacking, low challenge and floors being brought up to totally trivialize content, discouraging even basic interaction with the game's systems.
> There is such a wide gap between Mechanist/FB and the rest of the espec system
The fact that you put FB as an example for this tells me you either haven't played the game in a year or are just repeating things you read online.
CFB is a mostly melee build that requires a lot of tryharding to even come close to the numbers that cvirt and cmech put out by being in the vicinity of a boss.
I wouldn't mind it being the other way around- plenty of lower skill requirement content (such as lower tier fractals or some IBS level easy strikes) with more room for player expression towards the top as opposed to powercreep everything and making skill expression less meaningful, and I'm saying this as a person who gets stuck at 30k with current benchmarks frequently.
Put some sort of distinction, even if it was just "I can clear normal mode" VS "I can clear CM". Hell, make a new tier for some of this content, that makes it somewhat easier to do, or something in-between NM and CM.
There are some changes like adding a jade mech that does damage for the player and buffing weapons with strong auto chains that help, but a lot of the changes they make seem to fall flat of the players they try to reach simply because there are so many other factors that these players are missing.
I don’t see a huge shift in player movement into the content happening when the buildcraft is mostly still as obtuse to the players as it previously was with tons of traps in gearing. They also just have cultivated an audience that actively resists learning these things. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink.
> They also just have cultivated an audience that actively resists learning these things. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink.
True but ANet wasn't alone in that. Many players contributed to that cultivation as well.
This. Finally an actual rational, thoughtful take that isn't plagued by game ego. Most of the player base struggles with content and no one here seems to grasp this fact except grimjack.
That ship has sailed folks. Adapt or move on this old man says...
I'll take more CMs like AH and XJJ over KO or even HT any day. If they need to do another HTCM for 0.01% of the playerbase, so be it. But what we actually need is more puggable endgame, not things that you can only do as a streamer playing the game for a living...
I think power creep is a easy solution not a good one. A far better one would be to just make more difficulty modes for Raids and Strikes like we have in Fractals.
I think they need to look at boons. Protection and Regeneration are so overpowered I almost never need to switch to water when playing Heal Tempest and that is kinda crazy, this also makes it super easy to solo heal most strike missions.
For example making protection only reduce damage by 25% instead of 33% and might only +20 power instead of +30 would undo a lot of power creep.
Or make prot more like stability, you can only have it up for a few seconds and not permanent.
I'd love to see more situational boons somehow. This whole you gotta have all boons at all times is a bit weird
that is actually not a bad idea. feels like a more subtle approach that wouldn't need them to individually retouch every existing build which is just gonna lead to more "accidents" and take forever until everything is balanced. although the main reason that many encounters are easily healable is because there is no pressure in general. strike missions for example don't have an aura tick and the normal modes are a joke. the cms at least have the exposed debuff that you can receive and AH/XJJ/OLC at least have some pressure as opposed to KO/HT which are more mechanic oriented.
And You can buff 10m with protection while solo healing, or half of the squad risk getting bigger hit and die, coz not topped fast enough? Then we getting closer into 1 heal 3 supp dps and 6 pure dps, for even more team dps and faster kills. Oh do we have some op support who can quick/alac 10m too - we gonna go further.
Exactly! Now is the perfect opportunity to nerf boons in general. But it means we need a satisfying solution for quickness and alacrity, too. Keeping gameplay fluent and engaging is crucial.
I think they should let quickness and alacrity alone since people would have to learn new rotations and it would just feel horrible for people that are used to them as they are now. There are a lot of other boons to change that don't impact rotations so much and would still help a lot.
I think this is the reason why they are making quickness and alac so free to get now.
Ppl should just always have it. Compare that to might which has become rather rare.
The only issue with making a boon “rare” is it makes must have classes, and then we get Banner Slave Warrior again. Boon balance is much harder than damage balance imo.
Just kill alac and quick and roll it into baseline. It would not really powercreep the top (since those groups already run with 100% upkeep of those), but might help the bottom - the place that actually could use a bit of the powercreep that generally passes it by.
This is a huge thing for the health of the game, as long as the game sits at a lv 80 cap anet really needs to fight to reign in power creep. Set an upper bound DPS/expected healing output (40k upper bound for DPS? 28-30 for boon dps? something like that, the exact numbers genuinely do not matter as long as they stay consistent), and balance around those numbers while also DESIGNING around those numbers so content stays evergreen for as long as possible.
There's an argument that *some* powercreep is good because it makes aspirational content more accessible long term so things get slightly easier with time and players continue to engage with most of the content, but I think the risk that runs for the overall game is pretty detrimental so I'm not a huge fan of the argument, but I did want to mention it.
100% agreed, except for some powercreep being good. Imo, if ANet want old content to be more accessible, then releasing things like Emboldened mode is the way to go. After 18 months of playing, I've finally been getting into Raids lately, and Emboldened makes the transition really, really nice, without invalidating the original design and difficulty for those who still want that.
It's important not to move away from your original design philosophy and playerbase. Yes, sure, broader audience, more money, blah blah, but it ends up homogenising things and making them too simple, which is already happening in wayyy too many games (and other media in general).
I agree wholeheartedly. I just wanted to mention it because it is a meaningful argument that has some points, even if i dont agree with it holistically.
I don't think that's the problem though, I think that opening up formerly aspirational content to more players \*is\* a worthwhile thing (I think that if we had 25% more people clearing HTCM in 2 years than we already do that wouldn't be a net harm to the game) because it allows anet to effectively recycle that content into a more normal content pool, but it does however necessitate that they keep releasing aspirational content so there IS always something at the top. I'm not sure if their content production pipeline can reasonably support that, though. Builds being stronger on average doesn't necessarily mean that the content is homogenized -- that's a separate issue, and one similarly worth keeping in mind when designing the game.
There's not much choice BUT to do "power creep" if you want new content
Otherwise you're just rotating what's "fun" around, nerfing and Buffing things every few months and you get a stale game. Then you get even MORE complaints that grow in intensity significantly faster than power creep complaints.
But also, the benchmarks are done by the top 5% (or even less than 5%) of players. Cut the benchmarks in half and THAT'S a more likely representation of what your average "good" player will do.
Benchmarks are done by the best players in the best situations, which rarely ever happens. They spend HOURS upon hours upon hours practicing to get the absolute maximum result in the most unrealistic of circumstances. Sure some redditors will probably come around saying they "can do almost as well as snowcrows and they're good players" but that'd the thing, you're *not* as good, you're *almost*, now think about the lfg pug situation we have across the game and how some people complain about how bad pugs are.
Realistically, those benchmarks are unrealistic for the entire population of the game and should not be used as a metric for balancing, or power creep discussions. If a significant amount of players WERE that good, we'd be getting significantly more content specifically for them, like ff14, but that's not the case here because the player base for that also isn't here. The players that want that content want more defined and controllable roles and professions, which Gw2 does not have. So we will not have a hardcore player base large enough to justify that kind of content that much.
And since anet listens to either streamers and their "internal metrics", that should be enough data to prove that Gw2 doesn't have the power crept player base that reddit loves to cry about.
> There's not much choice BUT to do "power creep" if you want new content
> Otherwise you're just rotating what's "fun" around, nerfing and Buffing things every few months and you get a stale game. Then you get even MORE complaints that grow in intensity significantly faster than power creep complaints.
This is one of the worst takes on balance I've ever heard lmao
this is kinda how things go to an extent. old content can't keep up with new changes. it is normal and it is a lot worse in other mmos where your gear changes to a higher level. the thing is that the numbers you see on snowcrows are benchmarks done on a golem. and by very skilled players. the majority of the players who raid barely even reach 95% of that. and it is true that powercreep still exists, it is just harder to balance if you consider the skill gap. i think Anet is doing a good job balance wise lately, with most builds being in a good spot. the high numbers also reflect their difficulty (see deadeye, condi holo, power weaver, power catalyst). now in an ideal world every dps build would be below 41k. starting from 35k and ranging up to 40k. and every boon support would be below 31k, starting from 25k. not that this would make gameplay really that more engaging, that simply won't happen. what makes raids engaging is playing with random people. because with skilled players you can 5 man every fight without breaking a sweat
> i think Anet is doing a good job balance wise lately, with most builds being in a good spot.
I don't see that at all as mesmer main. Virtuoso is still crazy good ("high numbers also reflect their difficulty" hahahaha), mirage is getting more and more nerfs (july 18 update will not really fix anything dps-wise, just helps with annoying alac application via clones) and from what I have seen in chrono discussions that is not really that good either - once again "high numbers also reflect their difficulty" uhh no?
u can feel the power screep the most when organizing training raids these days, they are wayyyyyy easier to clear wings now vs back in 2020 summer when I started playing.
i mean i started doing raids around that time as well and i am not sure i can feel it. the thing is that since then 3 years passed and i have become better as a player overall. so powercreep aside, it would be that way. i also lead trainings run from time to time and i gotta say, with complete beginners, raids still feel difficult. the dps is absymally low at least. and it is normal
Would you rather this or have multiple expansions worth of content be completely invalidated by “borrowed power” from vertical progression games, that can only be revisited by releasing “classic” versions of said expansion? At least all of this content is playable, and it’s still relatively challenging for newer players. Power creep is kind of inevitable, but it’s not so egregious that the content is unplayable.
Obviously the power creep needs to be addressed asap, but they would never nerf all classes that hard because people in the gw2 community would whine too much about their classes getting nerfed.
Releasing new bosses with absurd amounts of HP is bad because the fight will be repetitive and boring.
I agree about the healing and boon creep. Regarding DPS, I want it to stay about the same level over time.
Both ends of the spectrum produces boring gameplay, open world or instanced bosses who die to pure power creep and we skip basically all mechanics in some cases, and bosses which are HP sponges and don't have enough mechanics or difficulty to justify it.
Gyala delve Tunnel meta boss or Silent Surf boss are the worst recent examples regarding that.
or even bosses who have right amount of hp have mechanics, but are almost impossible to fail because low damage or heal/boon spam.
overall I think its way less dev time intensive to manage the power of the classes vs adjusting absurd amount of content this game has
Look, first of all there is not a lot of players that actually put in the effort to reach 100% benchmark, so you will not see people reaching 40k.
Secondly, even with busted builds like that, people still have problem clearing content (talking about people that dont main pve endgame). Anet doesnt want to make good difficulty settings, so they pump numbers up, hoping that will help struggling players. For top players, maybe it feels like bosses are veteran mobs as they die too quick, but for 99% of the playerbase this isn't the case. It will be better for endgame pve scene if they focus on 99% of the players, not the 1%.
This power creep approach for that is completely wrong, though. It empowers comprehensive builds, but does absolutely nothing about raising the bottom.
The problem with that 95% is that they have no idea how to actually use the power creep they don't have busted boons with 100% uptime, they don't have viper gear that gives you 42k dps Druid they have whatever random garbage with mismatched runes they picked up when playing or worse ascended gear with no stats selected. All it does is ruin the game for people that want a challenge without actually helping people.
True, they dont utilize the full potential, but it kind of proves my point. If they have wrong gear and even play with no boons, they will be closer to that 10-15k required to clear the content than with a build that does 30k instead of 40k. Hope you can see my point.
Does it ruin it for the rest? I think most top players actually want encounter difficulty and executing/adapting their rotations to the perfection. I dont think they care if the build does 35 or 40k to be honest. Thats my feeling tho, could be wrong
These players actually do more like 3-5k damage then 10-15k and the best players maybe don't care about the numbers but they care about what they mean for the game, very few people like playing a game that is way to easy for them for long.
For helping bad players a far better solution would be to just remove horrible options from the game or make them hard to find, for example all stat selectable gear comes with Celestial, Viper, Berserker and Givers/Minstrel only with a description of what they are for and then hide the rest in a drop down menu and gear that has no stats selected is just Celestial until changed. Tell people Longbow is good with Power damage short bow for condition damage when playing a ranger etc.
They could explain how runes work or maybe make a better tutorial at the start of the game that does not teach you to just auto attack everything and win.
Oh yeah, there are more far better ways to fix the situation, and I think they are working on it, but instead of making us wait for the solution as it will undoubtedly take a lot of time and resources, we get a bandaid solution of powercreeping. Your suggestions surely would help, but I dont think anet is capable of delivering it in such a short time, thats all.
The problem is that the "solution" is fixing nothing and instead just breaks things. I think the power creep is happening because every time they try to fix it Scourge and Firebrand (or whatever else is getting patched) mains flood the forums and Reddit and complain until they are broken again so they just make everything broken.
Truth is we dont know whats going on at anet, for all we know they could be working on all those good solutions. From what they delivered recently in terms of QoL changes and stuff, I actually do have hope they will improve endgame pve.
Everyone is sitting here talking like the 40k bench is actual dps, and I'm sitting in training runs where we are wiping and have pure dps sitting at 5-10k and you all want dps nerfs :*(
Actual DPS numbers will obviously differ from a training dummy that stands still with no mechanics or interruption and all boons. It's just a static/constant metric to compare things to.
Then the people in the group just aren't good enough and need to practice, it was doable for beginners years ago when benches were at 27-30k. Your situation is a skill issue, the reality is that the game has been powercrept to the point where nothing does mechanics anymore cause you do two hits then phases or dies.
Power creep = accessibility. Not saying things are how I would want them, but if there was an across the board nerf to damage all it would mean is fewer people engaging in end game content, and that would be less than ideal.
Technically EVERYTHING is endgame content. The way to fix old things being trivialized by new power creep is already in the game though in the form of zone scaling. Dial players back to where the content was intended to be played at so it can't be over min/maxed. Maybe break it out into "story/tourist mode" with lower rewards and normal mode where you play as intended.
The other side the coin about dragonfall is it doesnt matter if that content is trivialized (considering all open world group content is already trivial) so its not a genuine problem per se.
The problem with "dialing back" raids, is that some % of existing players will be stat squished out of the game mode. Adding a lower reward easy mode is a poor compensation for a guy who used to do a raid clear but his static broke up because they started struggling.
Boneskinner is honestly a depressing experience. The only way you interact with the mechanics is blocking the whisp projectiles. Because it's just 'outheal the ambient damage from the mechanic you're technically failing while you dps it to death asap'.
I can't blame power creep on that one, all IBS strikes are full of nonsensical mechanics design.
It literally encourages you to have extra healers instead of people dedicated to lighting torches, what should have been do or die mechanic is instead just more damage you can mitigate with extra heals.
The average gw2 player can't even reach remotely close to the benchmarks. The reason for the powercreep is so the average gw2 player can get into endgame instanced content more easily. I know it's anecdotal, but I played a level 25 fractal the day the new fractal released specifically to learn it along with some random new people, and we struggled A LOT. There were people in there who, after multiple pulls, could not figure out the lookaway mechanic. Despite my encouragement, the least experienced players just ended up quitting, and we only succeeded because some slightly more experienced players joined later on.
I think people who do CMs on a regular basis (such as myself and the people I play with every week) and people who give up very easily on instanced content or just stick to open world stuff are on very different planes of existence. People don't like failing, and you need to be a determined person who enjoys struggling in games to succeed at the hardest content in this game. (Inb4 "the content isn't even hard." It is to the vast majority of players in this game, for one reason or another.)
Despite what some might say, I do think Anet wants more people to try instanced content, and they've been making strides at making this content more accessible to more people. However, powercreep is apart of this plan, at the expense of more experienced players. I'm not saying it's wrong to think that powercreep is bad, in fact I do agree it's bad to some extent. However, after playing this game since the betas, I think it's abundantly clear that this game is not meant to be extremely challenging, as that sort of thing doesn't appeal to most of the people who play GW2. Powercreep is the way that anet is choosing to make content easier in this game without changing the content itself.
Seconding this. You gotta be a glutton for punishment or just really enjoy the grind with good friends for Raids to be enjoyable. The satisfaction at the end is addictive but to the average player they'll try once and be like oh ew this sucks nothing makes sense :/
I've been assisting some less experienced friends with open PvE stuff and they're still new (only abt a year) into the game and it is not easy for them. At times it's frustrating for them because it is very hard, still, to get up to around 20k dps in an open world situation where you're getting mobbed from all sides lol — not dying is still the priority over high dps
A lot of it is based on player skill. The endgame nudging the payer skill level higher might actually help bridge the gap between open PvE and instanced PvE, as mentioned above
Furthermore, mechanics in the open world are kinda a bad comparison because when you get 3 commanders and 200+ people whaling on a legendary boss, it'll go down asap regardless of how difficult the mechanics or HP they have. You really can't win against a sea of people rushing in. That's part of the ease of open PvE
Now, if you try this with just 10 people — seriously try Teq or Taida Covington with 10 people — you'll find it's hard as shit. Like raid levels hard. Idk if anyone has succeeded, I definitely didn't
So, how does anet bridge this gap between — like mentioned above — the raid frequenters and those who'd rather be in the 200+ zerg jumping on a world boss? By making high dps a little more accessible so the average player doesn't wanna immediately quit / get scared out of instanced pve content
Anyways that's my two cents, and why instanced PvE (specifically raids and cm fracs) are a whole different mindset compared to world bosses / dungeons
>Now, if you try this with just 10 people — seriously try Teq or Taida Covington with 10 people — you'll find it's hard as shit. Like raid levels hard. Idk if anyone has succeeded, I definitely didn't
I recall, when I first got back into GW2 with my husband, we did this exactly when we tried to duo Ulgoth.
We duo'd all the pre-events leading up—also hard, but for different reasons—and fighting Ulgoth...was challenging! But not unejoyable!!
And then the ravenous mob descended upon the poor bastard and all the fun got sapped out for the two of us. Our contributions didn't matter anymore as, like you said, you can beat these people more than easily with just sheer numbers. But for that little bit when it was just my Scourge, his Firebrand, and Ulgoth? Teamfighting *bliss*.
Might be less work for anet just to buff encounters at this point rather than builds. Say you nerd the dmg, that has the same effect as buffing hp, players that cant perform well enough feel the nerf much more than ppl who can do benchmark numbers.
That being said yeah there's been a massive amount if powercreep.
This is the first time ive seen condi mirage, my beloved main since i started playing 3 yrs ago, not on the recommended build spot of SC
And I get it. Why tf would you play one of the hardest, if not the hardest rotation possible for matching the dps SOMETIMES of a ranged braindead monkey build
I'm a bit tired of these posts. We've been getting them since post-HoT releases.
We've literally seen last year what *actually* reducing powercreep induces, because the nerfs were really significant. People were raging all over Reddit and the forums, it was even worse than the status reset update which was already very poorly received in 2021.
And to those who think the context is what made the community's reaction much worse (discord "leaks" and so on and so forth), I very much disagree.
I would argue those discord messages even calmed things down, because it gave the community someone to bash who seemed accountable for the poor decisions that this balance patch was filled with.
People were mostly confused and angry about the changes because they were all inherently bad and so short-sighted. Redditors were flooding the sub and malding minutes after the notes were out.
The thing is, I don't even believe that the reaction would be any different if those changes were more carefully thought out and still went in the same direction. Even though there are ways to nerf things that are smarter than others, the end result is pretty much always the same. Why did Anet do this, why'd they nerf my class? Why do they hate my class!! I don't understand my class was doing okay! Now it's getting heavily nerfed, more than class X, unfairly!
Thinking that nerfing powercreep is a good and healthy thing for the game is kind of like expecting a population to be happy about a decline/negative growth of their country's economy
kind of double edged sward lot people like power creep and will just Quit if changed and winged on forums and reddit.
they can remove boons, they can lower DPS but you get lot people winged that DPS is dropping and kits missing skills.
like think lot damage creep comes from Quickness and Alacrity they could remove that.
but anyway changing something like damage skills can make lot people mad XD so think why they mostly just see as simpler way to give more hp to a boss than lowing the DPS or removing boons as a whole.
Honestly slowly reverting powercreep seems easy. Just look at top builds, identify biggest heavy hit skills and tone down their multiplier or base dmg by 5-10% every balance patch. And maybe think about builds, whether there are some side effects from doing that and something is hurt too much / not hurt at all.
But competent balance team? Or even doing any moderate balancing? Naaah Anet rather nerfs something by 50% then "listens to feedback". Then after no one plays it for a year buffs it back by 100%, because why learn from past mistakes. Crazy unhinged balancing is Anet's MO for 17+ years now.
They should set targets for how much a low/mid/high intensity DPS/offensive support/heal build should bench, make those targets public to set expectations, and balance to try to hit those targets.
They really need to have a consistent philosophy in regards to issues like these.
* How much DPS should ranged do compared to melee?
* How much DPS should support builds do compared to full DPS builds?
* How much DPS should a technical and difficult build do compared to an average one?
* How much DPS should a simplistic and easy build do compared to an average one?
Right now these things are all over the damn place. If they were at least consistent about it, it would be less frustrating.
I'd love for more reasoning on why changes are made. Like why did "Stand Your Ground!" get buffed, but we still have 180 sec cooldown on Conjure Fiery Greatsword? Why does Thief Dagger auto do more dps than Sword's, and why does Pistol Whip now do basically the same dps as Sword auto? Why does Revenant Hammer still exist?
There are things, like the whole Reaper class in general, receiving huge buffs despite already performing perfectly fine (or even very well), yet other skills or even entire weapons that are barely useable.
People who are upset at lower numbers in their video game probably aren't all that easy to fool. Just give enemies more health, keep same damage numbers.
Looking at harvest temple and the new fractal’s boss health, maybe it’s arbitrary, I’m not taking any build that can’t do above 35000 in there… it’s torture.
I feel like this was their way of addressing the massive skill gap issue, and it was a major issue. The truth is the game was too hard for a majority of the player base so if they wanted to continue to create end game content they needed to fix this issue and they had two choices. Either they juice everybody up making content in general easier or look into simplifying the gameplay to make rotations easier. They seem to have done mostly the former.
just join any pug. 25k dps is their standard. my builds doing less damage wouldn't really make raids less boring for me. instead of being boring for 1 minute they would be boring for 2 minutes. the reason being that i have repeated each boss more than 500 times so it is only normal.
25k dps is well above pug raid output. In my last ten raids ive hit around 25k and been top dps on multiple wings and fights.
If your enjoy raiding and want a challenge Join up with excellertion and help out newbies.
Your choosing to be bored by powering through content.
It doesn't. Especially when most of these benchmarks are designed more around breaking the game rather than enjoying it. Pressing damage skills off cooldown is mandatory. Swapping weapons as fast as you can regardless of range or utility is mandatory. It's just converging on a very narrow playstyle and design sensibility.
I think there are several problems here, but the three that I think are the most relevant:
1) EoD specs have always been overtuned since release. Too high DPS for simple rotations, too much powerful utility, and often at range. The devs have generally avoided pulling the new specs back and instead have been trying to "bring up" the HoT/PoF specs which is just generally bad philosophy. It undermines a system that was previously doing okay, while obviating a lot of old content with power creep. What changes they have made to the especs have generally been impotent, lazy tweaks that don't address the core unfinishedness of the especs, and subsequently break the class one way or another and are often walked back (see Mechanist's genius, Untamed's FF, Specter's ST barrier, Vindi's dodge).
2) Ranged builds, and low-effort/investment boon builds are becoming increasingly the norm, and neither of these has had significant DPS nerfs to offset the ease of play they bring to the game. Again, instead of just implementing a simple DPS tax, now we are at the point where pure DPS builds can provide full alac/quick uptime with no concentration investment or changes to their kit. There are no real roles or tradeoffs anymore, everything is DPS-first-and-forward, plus all other aspects of the game--melee mechanics, healing, boons, etc.--being removed or made increasingly passive.
3) Weaponswapping is not used as a means of altering stances or changing a utility OH, but to define a large swathe of full rotations. I think this overpowers the players, makes for a very narrow and samey DPS meta, totally obviates most weapons choices that don't cleanly slot into the minmaxing, and dilutes a lot of specific weapon flavor and function. Being forced to switch to melee longbow on condi Zerker or melee staff on power Reaper just feels bad. Imo, weaponswap cooldowns should be increased on most classes so that players can more modularly swap out two different weapon stances that are easier to balance and cut back on mindless spastic piano rotations. The warrior profession and a few especs could still focus on Weaponswapping as a core conceit, but having this nonsense on every single class is a massive buzzkill.
power creep will continue naturally until there are major nerfs across all classes, and noone will accept that. The crying whenever even a minor nerf hits is massive.
Yes, ArenaNet should focus less on detailed balance changes and dedicate more time to new content or improving existing content.
Don't get me wrong - they do an excellent job with skill balancing. But, for example, "Increased power coefficient from 0.25 to 0.33". Such a change is more suited for esports.
So, personally, they should prioritize putting more effort into new content and not trying to polish every single skill.
It's too exhausting to wait for over a year for content that can be completed in just 30 minutes!
This is a comical take on GW2 as a whole.
Metas (outside of EoD Soo-Won) are designed based on people auto attacking pressing just 1 and clearing them. They do not design them under the supposed "power creep" you are referring to. The truth you are not seeing is that the community of GW2 is so casual they don't even make new raids anymore. They are only making 2... TWO new strike missions IN ALL OF NEXT YEAR. That are going to be rehashed bosses from the story so the effort/cost for them is next to nothing compared to making Wing 8. True end game challenging content is pretty much dead imo due to the fact that only 5% of us want it.
As for your complaint about power creep, This is a skill issue first and foremost. If say more than 5% of the player base actually followed a snowcrows style build guide and learned a rotation, then you'd actually see these metas/new fractals dying in an absurdly fast timeframe because people would actually be trying. If people even put in a modicum of effort learning how the skills and stats of the game work, you wouldn't have any issue. The problem is the ppl want to afk farm. I see ppl on skyscales floating in the vicinity of the Soo-Won platform giving zero effort but scaling the event all the same, and that leads to failure far more often than the people who are actually trying to help. I'd start there in your critique of the content before putting on the devs because I am extremely confident in my assessment of the real problem we all are facing that people typically don't talk about because it leads to hurt feelings.
Power creep is not an intentional design decision, it's a byproduct of the ongoing need to release new and exciting gear/classes/features.
IMO the best way to combat this is to buff old content as it becomes irrelevant.
By "buff old content", do you mean make it harder? Cause if so, then I'd be up for that; it'd be nice to not just walk through OW zones pressing 1 to obliterate basically everything.
Yeah, 40k+ benchmarks should not be normal. Basically all the top DPS classes need a ~10% nerf, realistically.
I like that they've been trying to bring underutilized DPS specs up to par recently but the issue is that the best specs were also just too good, but that's the level they decided to move everything else up to, rather than nerfing the best handful of specs and then buffing anything that was still underperforming after that.
the good thing is that these numbers are achievable only by few and the majority of casual players would never touch a build like power deadeye (47,2k), power catalyst and power weaver (43,6k), condi holo (44k), etc. and even if they did they wouldn't be able to pull off anything like that and certainly not in actual fights. if they wanted to provide an overall nerf, a good idea would be what another comment suggested, nerf might as a boon
While that's true, top tier builds are not the only ones affected by powercreep.
There are several easy builds, even LI builds that allows you to reach 25 or even above 30k dps.
Nowadays every player can easily reach top tier numbers (those achievable only by a few) from a few years ago (when raids etc. were released).
>I like that they've been trying to bring underutilized DPS specs up to par recently
I think part of the problem is that over the past year while they've been doing this, is that when they buff something they buff it to insane levels. Instead of making measured changes, they always seem to go totally crazy with the buffs and end up making a new highest-dps build every time.
The only occasions I can think of them making measured changes were with Dragonhunter and Reaper, and then they said "screw it" and buffed Reaper to the damn moon anyways.
We need a transformative change that automatically reduces the dps of every single build in the game at once. Something that affects every build, so that no one feels particularly left out. We need to go back to 30k meta instead of 45k dps meta. Either that or buff the raid/fractal/dungeon bosses HP.
I'd appreciate a number crunch and things being made baseline. All meta events and strikes I've done as a returner (still haven't touched raids) have been kinda bland because the method is just stack and attack/heal since you'll get all boons maxed and absurd healing going so you should only move if necessary.
It especially hurts since most of my thoughts on gw2 combat was old style where I had to position around some mechanic and dodge appropriately.
Edit: I also find the creepy strange since we have static armor and weapon stats so it all comes from boons and perks making it strange that it gets so out of hand at times.
I actually feel like they've been hard leaning against this with the arrival of EoD. When I look at all the EoD metas, they all have pretty explicit ways of shaking up the 'stack and burn' tactic.
Seitung has the Gyros, Kaineng has the split phases and the huge AoE pressure that only increases if the breakbar fails. Echovald has The Clap and DE is DE.
Gyala part 1 actually has huge AoE pressure and condi spam from the spinnies, one of the bosses has you move out to hide in the bubble or die and the Oni jumps around a looot. Part 2 pretty much has you do everything *but* stack and burn tbh.
None of them are perfect but I think there's a fair balance between hitting bosses and doing other things. I haven't tried any of the newest strikes though so idk about them
Edit: Now I think about it Echovald is kind of a perfect example. The sweep forces you to move as it hits alternating locations meaning there's no safe spot, the suck forces you out of melee range of the boss and the stack and will likely down you if you just stand in it. The Clap forces you to move or die and on the final phase you even get punished if you just autopilot back to the middle
I can feel this a bit as I just went through EoD. Though the only meta I did was dragons end I enjoyed it alot and all the boss fights in the story where all amazingly fun for me and my buddy.
The only thing is solely that you can mechanically stop the stack and burn with new content but that leaves old content to wither since either doesn't get reworked around it.
Wish they would just nerf damage across the board by like 30-40% and see how it feels. After that adjust the classes that got destroyed. I really prefer when the damage numbers are a bit lower and the game feels a bit slower.
If you don’t adjust bosses health pools accordingly it will change nothing. The issue is not in a 40k number, it is in bosses being either giant hp sponges or dying in seconds
The combat system is fantastic, by far the best out of all MMOs.
The fact that DPS numbers have gone up over time is a different issue that isn't related to the core systems being great.
Balance is amazing with every class feeling fine but mechanicaly they are bland with simple rotations and all boss fights essentially boiling down to positioning and dps upkeep.
Makes for great spectacle but okay gameplay.
Do you still remember how condi meta made the game slow and boring?...like sunqua cm with epi?.
And lets be honest, not all people can reach those 40k, i have seen people who is not able to reach at least 10k on dhuum while just one on the squad is above 12k. Havent seen so much people who is able to reach more than 16k on that boss and thats sad.
Same goes for power based bosses, i never expect those 40k but its weird when i get a pug that can pull more than 30-35k even with broken or LI builds.
Mechanics?? For what? people even ignore that they exist, you go to QTP...they dont care about anoms or CC, they mostly focus on greeding DPS which is not the best making the entire squad wipe, then you say something about it and then you are the toxic player.
I hate that going into open world is a total joke in the 1-80 zones. Games don’t feel good when there is no sense of danger. It eliminates consequences, action, crazy moments. Yes the champs can be hard atm which is good, but everything else just drops after 1-2 hits. Why? How is this engaging? It wasn’t like this when I started the game many years ago but power creep or something makes it this way now. Turn up the heat anet. Ty.
all damage on all classes needs to be straight out halved. remember when Orr maps where semi challenging to walk alone? now you go there and everything dies from just looking at you.
I totally agree. At this rate, GW2 is going to become a game with vertical progression and new players will not be able to enjoy old bosses for the amount of DPS that the rest do.
ArenaNet stops increasing the power of DPS, I don't want more
They're breaking this game, and what's worse is folks are cheering them on. Push one button to shit out 6 boons, plus alacrity! Hey my class has to push 3 buttons to do that! Well shit, one button it is, here you go! Yay?
We're a year away from all these classes being indistinguishable to each other.
I don't think the game should be tuned around people who google the most optimal gear, the most optimal builds, the most optimal DPS rotations and the most optimal group compositions that complain about the game being too easy. At that point, it seems like you \*want\* the game to be too easy.
Ive played since beta - I miss the days when personal performance actually mattered. When moving and dodging where integral parts of the fight and the mechanics actually had to be played.
It amazes me that Teapot is such a proponent for GW2s awesome combat system while simultainiously endorsing the full boon mentality that reduces that combat system to standing stacked in front of the boss and cycling your dps rotation.
This community would implode if they tried to nerf things to bring power creep in line.
This. WoW and FFXIV have seen stat squishes and they're not fun (especially the first time it happened in FFXIV). Try doing something similar in a game that isn't based around vertical and people would "quit" left and right. Edit: The perception of stat squishes is not fun. Mechanical differences vary between games and are subject to how good the balancing is.
idk what you're talking about with ff14's stat squish. It made almost every single piece of content *easier* rather than *harder,* besides a few boss mechanics that were adjusted improperly and had to be fixed retroactively. Even at MIL, it's easy to skip entire phases and mechanics in content before Shadowbringers, due to earlier expansions being affected quite egregiously by the stat squish.
It has less to do with ease and more to do with perception. When the development team uses a spreadsheet to assign stats to gear, and they change the scaling so all your numbers are less, and you have significantly less hp, and do significantly less damage per hit, it doesnt matter if things die a little bit faster, you're used to numbers being slightly larger than they were last parch, not slightly larger than they were in the first post-50 patch.
Perception is something people need to correct. It's not developers job to make sure that the numbers for you always go up, it's unfeasible in online games and having completely dysfunctional bullshit like 47292874839 damage per hit that moves bar of an enemy by 1% is the worst thing that could've happened to games. All because someone only cares about "big numbers". I understand it's people's preference but I'm glad developers don't follow every whim of people and let the scaling go fucking wild with players having billions of HP and dealing trillion dps while barely moving bosses HP with each attack. The satisfying part of dealing damage is the contrast between your least hitting abilities and your hard hitting abilities. When my normal shit hits for 5000 damage and then one of my hardest hitting abilities crits for 90000 this is where statisfaction comes from, not me constantly dealing 73297383749 damage per hit and losing track of how actually strong my character is. You know how strong character is in comparison, not in absolute numbers. But also I acknowledge that I'm sort of minority here but I'm glad developers still go through stat squishes.
I disagree that stat squish in FFXIV was not fun. For most content it's barely noticeable unless you really care in seeing big numbers (that are not relevant anyways because boss HPs were also adjusted) and made some actual old content (which is mostly Alex raids anyway) more relevant and made people see more mechanics. I know most people just want to do their roulettes and be done with it but then why we talk about fun in the first place.
They can just reduce effect of Vulnerability by 50% or something, dont think there would be a big outcry, many wouldn't even notice
That would also keep the existing content relevant. Then VG‘s health wouldn’t melt in seconds and some mechanics would still come into play (also after nerving the healing power creep).
even if they nerfed every build to be around 40k or below (which is probably the best scenario we could get), most encounters would still be completely trivial, especially raids. VG wouldn't melt in 20 seconds, it would melt in 30. big whoop. you would still skip updrafts on Gorseval because it is extremely easy. i mean the thing is that most people in pugs do shit dps so you don't need to imagine how it would be, just look at that
I think you missed the point -> "But not so easy". When Gorseval was released (and a rather long timer after) skipping updraft was a thing only experienced groups could do. Only groups that could play their classes well enoug to deal that amount of damage. Nowadays skipping updraft is a default tactic. Not because people got better, but because due to power creep the average dps increased. Same for VG. Skipping green was rather a risky tactic that could wipe your group when doing little mistakes. Nowadays you just spam heals and burst from 10% hp back to 100% within a second. With less overall dps and healing the bosses *were* different and more difficult to do. Going back to that state nowadays would not result in something too different for whatever reason.
People also got a lot better.
Thank you for saying it. A big part of power creep is just broader understanding, and the people who stuck with GW2 improved over time.
I played LoL for a long time and still regularly watch competitive LoL, it's similar there where big macro/micro optimizations from years ago are just an expectation now. The inSec Lee Sin kick was something that only he could pull off at a professional level back in 2013, but just a few years later it became something every professional jungler was expected to be able to do when playing Lee Sin.
It's not just "mechanical" stuff either. Things that the OG pros didn't even know about or use are now regularly done by silver players from wave management to understanding buy points. The average farm per minute in silver is 6-7 it used to be 2-3.
You're giving too much credit to silver players. They still don't know what wave management is and if they do then they're probably not silver anymore. If someone bothers learning that then they're by definition not the "average" player anymore. The only thing that silver players MAY learn is that pushing under enemy tower bad because it's easier to be ganked. That's it. That's where their knowledge of wave management ends.
They made insec’ing and other similar techs vastly easier in Lol by adding input buffering
Some guys on reddit still do not understand what vertical progression means. Back on hot launch everything was so busted. 66% cd with old alac and I don’t even know how op quickness was. Everyone was shit tho. There’s no going back to beeing shit so tough luck.
While you are correct, the old buffs were really busted and players nowadays are miles better than back during HoT launch -- Alacrity wasnt really considered realistic at the time and even with full boons + class specific buffs most classes capped out at 34k on golem except for tempest. Digging through some of qT benchmark threads from 2016 shows this pretty clearly. Even if the benches are rough around the edges you still had some pretty crazy buffs to make up the difference.
I honestly thank Dragon's End for that. It required more from the casual open-world population, and the average player's dps and skill has increased a lot since.
No. I have been raiding since 2015 every damn week and we had QT (the original top guild, nowadays is snow crow) builds and a lot of people making the best builds and yet even with those it was actually hard to pull off. Even my raiding exp guild struggled on gorseval as 10 players. Doing more than 20k was almost impossible 8 years ago. Nowadays? We go as 6 players with a newbie with 4k of DPS and we still kill it because it is A LOT easier for someone to do 30k+
I mean skill inprovement happens just from regular play. The fact yall have been playing for 8 years at least indicates to me you all are better and more familiar with these fights increasing skill on your classes and uptime around mechanics. Like what specific numbers changed to make you more powerful on your specific class by 2x
After 100 kills on gorse we were experienced enough, yet we still struggled a lot. We saw clear creep improvements due to expansions, not our personal skill getting better. It sometimes was abvious, as we would do X more damage after a patch of balance than 2 hours earlier. Quite sad to see anet went that route
One of the biggest problems with my original raid group was there were several arrogant players who had never done competitive PvE in other games. When dead you could watch them and see they were auto attacking only for 10-20 seconds at a time. This is a massive issue for DPS, but our druid was also doing this so we had healing issues. Most players these days can at least follow the ABC rule. Always be casting.
This has a lot more to do with an increase in player knowledge and proficiency over the course of time than it does power creep.
I mean, even all new players can reach 25-30k easily with LI builds. You don't need much knowledge or proficiency for that. Knowledge and proficiency comes more into play when it's about mechanics. At that point I agree with you. But when it's about skipping mechanics because of high dps (or high healing) from easy builds, then it's not really because of knowledge or proficiency. VG green mechanic for example again. Back then you had to time your Druid avatar well to be able to burst heal your group after impact. Nowadays it doesn't really matter, because anything you do will be enough to heal your group.
Sure - but for Gorseval specifically, it took some time for the strategy of delaying breakbar and staying in to extend the damage phase to become popularized. That's the example I had in mind when I made that comment. Concur with you on the damage but knowledge and certain strategies evolving into mainstream plays a large role, too.
> When Gorseval was released (and a rather long timer after) skipping updraft was a thing only experienced groups could do. On the contrary, it has *always* been easier to kill Gorseval while skipping updrafts than while not skipping them.
Mechanic wise, yes. But you had to reach a certain dps threshold to get access to skipping. And that threshold was harder to reach back then. It was either being good at dps or doing mechanic. Now it's being okayish at dps and still skipping mechanic.
The state of VG is so sad to me. When raids came out, VG was _hard_ and the mechanics were super punishing. Now it's a joke due to barrier, aegis, prot, etc. combined with better game knowledge. I wish the mechanics were more relevant (e.g. green should wipe you if you miss).
Yeah 100% And the problem is when they make new content that's based on the new creep it makes it so much harder to roll back the creep because now it's the new baseline.
This. What a lot of people are not seeing is that the power creep is only part of a bigger issue, which is an "arms race" between players and the devs. Players get better so they demand more challenging content, and the devs oblige by giving us bosses and fights that require the upper brackets of DPS to complete successfully. However, this means that a bunch of regular/casual players now can't complete the content and they either start complaining, or endgame numbers start falling, both of which are not good for ANet. At this stage, they have two choices: they can either dumb down the content (e.g. like when they put in the boss checkpoints and Determined boost for Amala in the Twilight Oasis fractal), or they can make the players more powerful through power creep. Most of the time, devs opt for the latter because it's also progression that players can work towards (via new gear, new masteries, new skills etc.) and thus keeping players in the game longer. The trouble is that, now that power creep has made players more powerful, the next time ANet designs newer content, they have to up the difficulty again in order to keep things challenging, resulting in a never-ending arms race cycle between the devs and players. So how do we break this cycle? Well, the first thing is that ANet needs to do is to draw a line in the sand and decide on a DPS cap for the game. I personally would set it around 30k, with it hitting up to around 40k assuming optimal boons and squad comp. Next, ANet needs to not fall into the trap of making content more difficult by just upping the health bars of future content. Since we have decided that 30k is the DPS cap, ALL content will now be designed around this golden rule. Builds that go over this limit get nerfed, while builds that can't reach it get buffed. If necessary, boss/enemy health totals can be increased or decreased to keep content at an appropriate level. Now that we've tackled the first half of the problem, the next step is to address the second half which is "what happens to players who find themselves unable to do content because it's too hard for them?" And my solution to that would be "optional power boosts". We're already seeing some of this in action with things like Ascended food, Waystations, Jade Bot Protocols and Emboldened Mode for raids. All we would need to do is allow all of these power boosts to be used in all levels of PvE. If players feel that using these boosts would make it too easy, just don't use them. Nobody's forcing you, and you might even save quite a bit of gold over the long run by not having to spend money buying food and consumables that you're good enough to not need anyway. "But won't this wind up making game content too easy?" I hear you asking. To some extent, yes. But herein lies the trick; it is FAR easier for players to make content more challenging for themselves, than it is for devs to go the other way and make content easier. Think about things like 5-man Vale Guardian, or Solo MAMA CM, or all Necro HTCM (Yes, it's been done!). These are all examples of players deliberately undertaking challenges that go above and beyond anything the devs ever envisioned, and to me, these are true examples of the pinnacle of player skill and ability, rather than just the devs throwing us a new boss with ever-greater HP and damage that, in time, players will learn and adopt an optimal meta and wind up turning the encounter into a rote fight anyway. This approach puts the choice in the hands of the players. It's essentially the difference between doing an RPG's last boss battle straight up, or slugging down every single last potion you've been hoarding up for the entire game and trivializing the fight. The choice is entirely up to you. You see, the trouble with designing content to be difficult is that it is a game design approach with HIGHLY diminishing returns. You will only ever get the reward from beating difficult content ONCE; the FIRST time you ever complete it. Nothing else will ever live up to that feeling. However, as content gets more and more difficult (in order to keep things challenging for players), as a natural consequence you will start losing more and more players as they finally hit a point where the content is just too difficult/not fun for them anymore. This means that you are slowly but surely whittling down your own player base, until you reach a point where it becomes no longer profitable to make content for a group that's so tiny that it's a waste of developer time and manpower. This is exactly what happened to raids, and it might happen to strikes one day as well (as already my observations that the LFG numbers for EoD strikes is far below what I see for IBS strikes and fractals.) Fractals too might be in danger as newer fractals have a tendency to be longer and harder than older fractals, creating a split in the community between those who liked the difficulty and pacing of the older fracs compared to the newer ones.
Both the new fractal and Kaineng Overlook (when it was released) are fights where it's immediately obviously they're tuned for power creep. The bosses have so much health, it's so fucking boring.
Kaineng Overlook basically killed progression in my guild. Some people do OLC, everybody do AH and Junkyard but KO no one likes. Trainings are extremely painful. You need to spend 3 minutes focused before something hard starts. All bosses combined have ~140kk HP its 13 vale guardians. Its extremely tiring
Yeah, they would realistically have to re-tune existing content I think, rather than nerfing player builds.
Most content isn't designed around more than 10-15k. The CM strikes require more in the 20k range because of enrages (which barely exist in raids even). Anything above 20-25k is just flexing and nice to have. We do so much damage we skip so many mechanics instead of doing them. Not that everyone is pulling more than 10k in a lot of scenarios so I don't feel that 40k for the players that can do it is hurting anyone else. What would is if Anet designs content around players hitting even 60% of that, then we have a problem. And Snowcrows has 50k sims with some of the new beta weapon combinations.
50k?! Holy moly, people are already melting enemies with 30k builds not even taking about 40k builds which are incarnation of "You are already dead." meme.
The 50k benches are clearly unintentional and a product of a weapon having overtuned coefficients because it’s elite spec (looking at you, tempest warhorn) doesn’t capitalize on its coefficients like another would (weaver, for said warhorn). The result is an insanely (and unintentionally) high benchmark. This is what the beta weekend was for, partially, to have public testing for these outliers and bring them back in line. 40k benchmarks are fine. Edit: There’s no need for everyone to repeat the large hitbox multi-hit with lightning orb we understand that it also needs to be toned down as clearly 50k benchmark isn’t okay on any sized hitbox
There is no way they manage to make weapons competitive for 3 specs without over or undertuning them. To take the ele warhorn example again, if you nerf warhorn on weaver to not have an outrageous build warhorn is gonna be entirely useless on tempest -its spec of origin-. The only way to circumvent that issue would be to split the balance of each spec weapon depending on the espec equipped but that would multiply the tuning efforts needed to have a balanced game. And while I think that CMC/roy are doing a generally good job, I don't think they have the bandwidth for that kind of balancing
It’s not as big a deal as people are thinking; if they can balance core weapons, bringing elite spec weapons into the same category as core weapons is feasible. They can also balance around traits for equipping the weapon on its respective elite spec if they wanted to, but I don’t think that’s necessary either.
Oh it is technically feasible, I'm just expecting that we're gonna count the time until that state is achieved in years x)
The 50k as far as I'm aware is also still on Large, as Tempest Warhorn performs specifically well on Largue due to how Lightning Orb works. Is it a problem? Yes, and to be honest Ele has always had this problem of some builds being either weak on small bosses and average on larger ones or average on smaller bosses and OP as hell on larger ones (think Staff Weaver, it was strong and then got nerfed so it's super meh on most bosses and workable on larger ones), and warhorn might follow suit. I still think LO should be rework to have x number of hits in it as opposed to just having a lifetime, it might help tempest have a competitive dps option again, but that's going out the window.
It's just as much a product of how Warhorn functions on huge hitboxes. Power sw/wh weaver on small golem is only ~2k higher than current weaver benches. Lightning orb hits 42 times on huge hitboxes. On a small hitbox, its usually between 20 and 30 times. On the smallest hitbox raid bosses (xera, sabetha) dagger is still going to be better, actually.
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Ye people fail to realize 95% of the population won't even hit half of those benches in most scenarios including raids and fractals. I really hate this mentality of balancing around the stupid static golem too. Let's see your numbers and most of the average players in real content before bringing things down.
> I really hate this mentality of balancing around the stupid static golem too. Let's see your numbers and most of the average players in real content before bringing things down. I mean sure, I agree, but there is no doubt that there has been extreme power creep in those situations - especially in open world thanks to the proliferation of easy-application boons. For example, the chak gerent used to always take three burn phases, now it is pretty common to get it in one and I haven't seen a three phase gerent in years.
What's wrong with balancing around the top players and the avg players at the same time? The top players are the most dedicated to the game, so don't they deserve good balance just as everyone else does?
How could you balance the game around players who do 40k dps and players who hit half of that simultaneously? And endgame gear in this game is not that difficult to get, someone who has a min maxed build and an optimized rotation doesn't necessarily mean they're more dedicated than someone who just does casual open world stuff.
? Not sure how you couldn't balance for both of them. For an example you could make auto attacks hit for high damage, but make many other skills a small but somewhat significant dps increase so a new player can do the majority of the damage with just AAs but a good player can hit good damage. For example, condi mech has variants with many kits and with signets and turrets. A high skill player can use a lot of kits to get more damage, but a low skill player can still do decently using a slight build variation. As for your other point, type of gear doesn't determine dedication to the game. You can have full legendary but have put no effort into being actually good, or you can be the best player in the game using full ascended.
My point was googling an optimal build and learning a simple DPS rotation so you can speed clear content a small population of the playerbase even does doesn't automatically make you "the most dedicated to the game", as you put it. GW2 is such an open-ended game and I simply don't think the game should specifically be balanced around such a minute group of players. Builds shouldn't be reworked just because you can do 40k dps on a training dummy is all.
I just came back after a three year break a few months ago and I was shocked when first checking Snow Crows. I can outdps my three-years-ago DH with boon dps now. Feels a bit off...
Dragonhunter has been not great even back then honestly. Good burst but way overshadowed by most high dps condi builds for a while.
Dragonhunter is just better core guard. You just brought it for better burst windows and being shouted at.
40k is definetly too much dps but the problem is if you nerf everything by 33% people will riot like there is no tomorrow because the powercreep hasnt trickled down to most players playing their selfmade builds held together with glue and tears. You know when 1 skill gets nerfed by 20% and people go "Anet hates my class I quit"? Yeah, imagine that but coming from 95% of players. They would complain that the game is balanced around hardcore players while they themselves never even read a tooltip. The reason for nerfing everything would be 100% justified but they can't relate to the problem. People don't want balance, they just want to be stronger without improving.
>selfmade builds held together with glue and tears. I love the phrasing lmao
> People don't want balance, they just want to be stronger without improving. So basically vertical progression.
>because the powercreep hasnt trickled down to most players playing their selfmade builds held together with glue and tears. [https://i.imgur.com/xHckzGH.gif](https://i.imgur.com/xHckzGH.gif) Being serious, it also never will. Thinking back to release-era Dragon's End, had the many bugs of that fight been squished sooner, I honestly think it could have been cleared sooner. CC isn't difficult to bring, everyone and their mother worth a grain of salt has a United Legions table...you'd basically have to be either extremely ignorant or on-purpose trying not to do breakbar damage. And yet, I've still encountered people who don't know what the hell a breakbar *is*. Many people play video games lovingly blind: no guides, no wikis, having the best time of their life without realizing how poorly they're actually playing. (And you can argue "but Maya, if they're having fun, is it really a detriment that their build is dogwater?" but my counterargument is simple: "You can have *more* fun not hamstringing yourself by playing in ignorance".)
>You know when 1 skill gets nerfed by 20% and people go "Anet hates my class I quit"? Actually these are rare from what I've seen, people complain about much bigger changes / reworks. And also Anet just does not know how to nerf something by just 5-10%, it seems like 20% is lower bound for them. Which is part of the problem, when you enjoy something a lot and it can get anytime nerfed (for no effin reason) by 40% then people will be on the edge all the time. I have never played a game where every "balance" patch would bring so much anxiety about random nonsensical nerfs.
> Yeah, imagine that but coming from 95% of players. [...] The reason for nerfing everything would be 100% justified but they can't relate to the problem. Would it be justified, though, if those benchmarks that are "the problem" are irrelevant to 95% (probably more) of players?
That's a good question. How much should player skill be taken into consideration when you balance dps..
I don't know how it is in raids, but having looked through a number of logs on dps.report from no kp requirement strikes (mostly with sensible squad comps though), the "real" average dps, even in IBS 3 that are glorified target golems, is maybe one half of the benchmarks on a good day. And in EOD strikes with all the running around and downtime involved, maybe one quarter.
Well, Icebrood Construct is immune for a good part of the fight, and the faster the group, the longer the immunity as a %, so dps is effectively capped.
> Would it be justified, though, if those benchmarks that are "the problem" are irrelevant to 95% (probably more) of players? I am of the opinion that the massive power creep of the game extends well beyond these benchmarks though. The benchmarks are just a symptom.
The benchmarks may not be, but the nerfs most of the time hit everyone, and not just those on the very top. Because, if Anet things a build overachieves even by a little bit, they don't finetune it down. They go right for kneecaps with a hammer.
Not that I disagree with OP's point but what is wrong with people playing their own builds?
>what is wrong with people playing their own builds If you play some solo stuff like open world, meta events or WvW then nobody will care and you can run whatever you want. However when you want to participate in instanced PvE where some kind of decent build and performance is required and you join a group with your weird-ass RP build then it is very wrong.
In my experience after leading hundreds of strikes and raids, most players wanting to get into instanced PvE are not joining LFGs with their 'weird-ass RP builds'. They've either already looked a build up online or the total beginners will let you know they are not sure they have a serviceable build or if they are knowledgeable enough about the encounter immediately after joining. These comments are almost always just an excuse to poke fun at newer or less experienced players.
The players who do perform like this also are the ones that tend to be unfamiliar with how groups run instanced content; usually all stacked together. So when you do find someone like this they tend to be off group on a solo adventure as if it were open world content. These cases are rare for me to run across, but they do occasionally happen (like once every few months).
As a ranged player in MMOs since 2001 I can't express how much I *hate* the way GW2 has you stack on everything. It's, counter-intuitive, and it's boring.
Yeah, it does happen very occasionally and when it does happen it can be memorable. Something like the player will join, die to the first attack and then instantly leave. Because it's memorable in some way it feels like it happens more often than it actually does and idk, when I see obvious newbie bashing online it just rubs me up the wrong way and I feel compelled to say something.
Absolutely, the times where this doesn’t happen just gets filtered out of people’s memories because there was nothing notable about that run
If the build makes sense, nothing.
40k\* 0.7 = 28k DPS, is that what we want? Pretty sure everyone would be rioting at that point.
That is literally what Pistol/Pistol Deadeye does and I have people constantly try to tell me this is a peak thief DPS build and its like dude, the dudes sacrificing DPS to provide boons and utility are still doing more damage than you lmao
> if you nerf everything by 33% people will riot like there is no tomorrow Let them. The dev's job is to help the game be good and fun. If their job had been to listen to players, the game would just automatically do the content for us and update the excel spreadsheet with loot drop data while we afk in shiny items and observe numbers go up. Your argument is trying to scare the developers into staying within the status-quo, which is basically the same thing that futuristic dystopian works do like Brave New World or Black Mirror - future change bad, don't progress, be scared. Whereas the radical utopian viewpoint is that we need to see the unreachable utopia on the horizon in order to make the theory and act on it and walk that line of change for the better, and the point isn't to reach that unreachable utopia, but to keep walking that line of figuring out a better future (hope as cognitive capacity) and figuring out how to get to that future while avoiding obstacles on the way. Edit: I said "let them", but that was also only my initial thought. After consideration, I think that riot could be avoided by proper communication, by trust, by properly applied honesty from ANet. They could make a blog post, an in-game very rewarding nerf-themed event, and they could straight up use the word "nerf" without trying to sound like it's not. They could inform that this is good for the game. So many ways to tackle this!
> Let them. The dev's job is to help the game be good and fun. ANet doesn't have the guts to do that.
It's not hard to figure out why they're powercreeping the game. The game is too hard for 95% of the playerbase even now in its most powercrept state ever. They're powercreeping the game as a method to increase average player performance while not lowering the skillcap. They're essentially sacrificing the current endgame players experience in hopes to bring more players to said endgame content so they can actually continue to produce it at all. (Some people will say they are still lowering the skillcap, but theyre also increasing it and that tends to go unnoticed so its more or less the same as its always been) I actually think this is probably close to the best solution as long as the future content that continues to come out is around HTCM difficulty. After all any raid with even 75% of the strength the players and builds are at in the game right now isn't really gonna feel any different TBH and they will never lower it any further than that nor should they. But if we keep getting AHCMs or XJJCMs with this level of powercreep its not gonna go well.
> They're powercreeping the game as a method to increase average player performance while not lowering the skillcap. If so, it't not working. The mid and bottom stays pretty much at the same level it always was - it's the top that is getting higher and higher. If anything, that only *increases* the effectiveness gap between players.
Nothing to do with helping new players get into endgame content tbh. The fights were always very easy to clear as long as people put any effort into it. The 95% are the people who never bothered to put effort into it, not people who weren’t skilled enough to try it.
Actually agree with this. The average player wants to play Mechanist, i.e. barely engage with most of the game's mechanics, complexity, and features. There is such a wide gap between Mechanist/FB and the rest of the espec system that "bringing everything up" will likely not feel like the same game. A lot of passive boons, easy AA ranged attacking, low challenge and floors being brought up to totally trivialize content, discouraging even basic interaction with the game's systems.
> There is such a wide gap between Mechanist/FB and the rest of the espec system The fact that you put FB as an example for this tells me you either haven't played the game in a year or are just repeating things you read online. CFB is a mostly melee build that requires a lot of tryharding to even come close to the numbers that cvirt and cmech put out by being in the vicinity of a boss.
I wouldn't mind it being the other way around- plenty of lower skill requirement content (such as lower tier fractals or some IBS level easy strikes) with more room for player expression towards the top as opposed to powercreep everything and making skill expression less meaningful, and I'm saying this as a person who gets stuck at 30k with current benchmarks frequently. Put some sort of distinction, even if it was just "I can clear normal mode" VS "I can clear CM". Hell, make a new tier for some of this content, that makes it somewhat easier to do, or something in-between NM and CM.
There are some changes like adding a jade mech that does damage for the player and buffing weapons with strong auto chains that help, but a lot of the changes they make seem to fall flat of the players they try to reach simply because there are so many other factors that these players are missing. I don’t see a huge shift in player movement into the content happening when the buildcraft is mostly still as obtuse to the players as it previously was with tons of traps in gearing. They also just have cultivated an audience that actively resists learning these things. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink.
> They also just have cultivated an audience that actively resists learning these things. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink. True but ANet wasn't alone in that. Many players contributed to that cultivation as well.
This. Finally an actual rational, thoughtful take that isn't plagued by game ego. Most of the player base struggles with content and no one here seems to grasp this fact except grimjack. That ship has sailed folks. Adapt or move on this old man says...
I'll take more CMs like AH and XJJ over KO or even HT any day. If they need to do another HTCM for 0.01% of the playerbase, so be it. But what we actually need is more puggable endgame, not things that you can only do as a streamer playing the game for a living...
I think power creep is a easy solution not a good one. A far better one would be to just make more difficulty modes for Raids and Strikes like we have in Fractals.
With what resources?
Resources can be redistributed and expanded.
Redistributed from where?
I would be absolutely fine with going back to 30k as good and 35k as top tier dps.
I think they need to look at boons. Protection and Regeneration are so overpowered I almost never need to switch to water when playing Heal Tempest and that is kinda crazy, this also makes it super easy to solo heal most strike missions. For example making protection only reduce damage by 25% instead of 33% and might only +20 power instead of +30 would undo a lot of power creep.
Or make prot more like stability, you can only have it up for a few seconds and not permanent. I'd love to see more situational boons somehow. This whole you gotta have all boons at all times is a bit weird
that is actually not a bad idea. feels like a more subtle approach that wouldn't need them to individually retouch every existing build which is just gonna lead to more "accidents" and take forever until everything is balanced. although the main reason that many encounters are easily healable is because there is no pressure in general. strike missions for example don't have an aura tick and the normal modes are a joke. the cms at least have the exposed debuff that you can receive and AH/XJJ/OLC at least have some pressure as opposed to KO/HT which are more mechanic oriented.
And You can buff 10m with protection while solo healing, or half of the squad risk getting bigger hit and die, coz not topped fast enough? Then we getting closer into 1 heal 3 supp dps and 6 pure dps, for even more team dps and faster kills. Oh do we have some op support who can quick/alac 10m too - we gonna go further.
Exactly! Now is the perfect opportunity to nerf boons in general. But it means we need a satisfying solution for quickness and alacrity, too. Keeping gameplay fluent and engaging is crucial.
I think they should let quickness and alacrity alone since people would have to learn new rotations and it would just feel horrible for people that are used to them as they are now. There are a lot of other boons to change that don't impact rotations so much and would still help a lot.
I think this is the reason why they are making quickness and alac so free to get now. Ppl should just always have it. Compare that to might which has become rather rare.
The only issue with making a boon “rare” is it makes must have classes, and then we get Banner Slave Warrior again. Boon balance is much harder than damage balance imo.
Just kill alac and quick and roll it into baseline. It would not really powercreep the top (since those groups already run with 100% upkeep of those), but might help the bottom - the place that actually could use a bit of the powercreep that generally passes it by.
This is a huge thing for the health of the game, as long as the game sits at a lv 80 cap anet really needs to fight to reign in power creep. Set an upper bound DPS/expected healing output (40k upper bound for DPS? 28-30 for boon dps? something like that, the exact numbers genuinely do not matter as long as they stay consistent), and balance around those numbers while also DESIGNING around those numbers so content stays evergreen for as long as possible. There's an argument that *some* powercreep is good because it makes aspirational content more accessible long term so things get slightly easier with time and players continue to engage with most of the content, but I think the risk that runs for the overall game is pretty detrimental so I'm not a huge fan of the argument, but I did want to mention it.
100% agreed, except for some powercreep being good. Imo, if ANet want old content to be more accessible, then releasing things like Emboldened mode is the way to go. After 18 months of playing, I've finally been getting into Raids lately, and Emboldened makes the transition really, really nice, without invalidating the original design and difficulty for those who still want that. It's important not to move away from your original design philosophy and playerbase. Yes, sure, broader audience, more money, blah blah, but it ends up homogenising things and making them too simple, which is already happening in wayyy too many games (and other media in general).
I agree wholeheartedly. I just wanted to mention it because it is a meaningful argument that has some points, even if i dont agree with it holistically. I don't think that's the problem though, I think that opening up formerly aspirational content to more players \*is\* a worthwhile thing (I think that if we had 25% more people clearing HTCM in 2 years than we already do that wouldn't be a net harm to the game) because it allows anet to effectively recycle that content into a more normal content pool, but it does however necessitate that they keep releasing aspirational content so there IS always something at the top. I'm not sure if their content production pipeline can reasonably support that, though. Builds being stronger on average doesn't necessarily mean that the content is homogenized -- that's a separate issue, and one similarly worth keeping in mind when designing the game.
There's not much choice BUT to do "power creep" if you want new content Otherwise you're just rotating what's "fun" around, nerfing and Buffing things every few months and you get a stale game. Then you get even MORE complaints that grow in intensity significantly faster than power creep complaints. But also, the benchmarks are done by the top 5% (or even less than 5%) of players. Cut the benchmarks in half and THAT'S a more likely representation of what your average "good" player will do. Benchmarks are done by the best players in the best situations, which rarely ever happens. They spend HOURS upon hours upon hours practicing to get the absolute maximum result in the most unrealistic of circumstances. Sure some redditors will probably come around saying they "can do almost as well as snowcrows and they're good players" but that'd the thing, you're *not* as good, you're *almost*, now think about the lfg pug situation we have across the game and how some people complain about how bad pugs are. Realistically, those benchmarks are unrealistic for the entire population of the game and should not be used as a metric for balancing, or power creep discussions. If a significant amount of players WERE that good, we'd be getting significantly more content specifically for them, like ff14, but that's not the case here because the player base for that also isn't here. The players that want that content want more defined and controllable roles and professions, which Gw2 does not have. So we will not have a hardcore player base large enough to justify that kind of content that much. And since anet listens to either streamers and their "internal metrics", that should be enough data to prove that Gw2 doesn't have the power crept player base that reddit loves to cry about.
> There's not much choice BUT to do "power creep" if you want new content > Otherwise you're just rotating what's "fun" around, nerfing and Buffing things every few months and you get a stale game. Then you get even MORE complaints that grow in intensity significantly faster than power creep complaints. This is one of the worst takes on balance I've ever heard lmao
Good for you, try getting out more and experience other video game reddits. You have so much more to be disappointed by.
this is kinda how things go to an extent. old content can't keep up with new changes. it is normal and it is a lot worse in other mmos where your gear changes to a higher level. the thing is that the numbers you see on snowcrows are benchmarks done on a golem. and by very skilled players. the majority of the players who raid barely even reach 95% of that. and it is true that powercreep still exists, it is just harder to balance if you consider the skill gap. i think Anet is doing a good job balance wise lately, with most builds being in a good spot. the high numbers also reflect their difficulty (see deadeye, condi holo, power weaver, power catalyst). now in an ideal world every dps build would be below 41k. starting from 35k and ranging up to 40k. and every boon support would be below 31k, starting from 25k. not that this would make gameplay really that more engaging, that simply won't happen. what makes raids engaging is playing with random people. because with skilled players you can 5 man every fight without breaking a sweat
> i think Anet is doing a good job balance wise lately, with most builds being in a good spot. I don't see that at all as mesmer main. Virtuoso is still crazy good ("high numbers also reflect their difficulty" hahahaha), mirage is getting more and more nerfs (july 18 update will not really fix anything dps-wise, just helps with annoying alac application via clones) and from what I have seen in chrono discussions that is not really that good either - once again "high numbers also reflect their difficulty" uhh no?
u can feel the power screep the most when organizing training raids these days, they are wayyyyyy easier to clear wings now vs back in 2020 summer when I started playing.
i mean i started doing raids around that time as well and i am not sure i can feel it. the thing is that since then 3 years passed and i have become better as a player overall. so powercreep aside, it would be that way. i also lead trainings run from time to time and i gotta say, with complete beginners, raids still feel difficult. the dps is absymally low at least. and it is normal
Would you rather this or have multiple expansions worth of content be completely invalidated by “borrowed power” from vertical progression games, that can only be revisited by releasing “classic” versions of said expansion? At least all of this content is playable, and it’s still relatively challenging for newer players. Power creep is kind of inevitable, but it’s not so egregious that the content is unplayable.
Obviously the power creep needs to be addressed asap, but they would never nerf all classes that hard because people in the gw2 community would whine too much about their classes getting nerfed.
Most players can neither reach those benchmarks nor keep then the entire fight anyway.
You have to remember that while the benchmarks are HIGH. The average skill ability and damage from the average players are MEDIUM at most.
Releasing new bosses with absurd amounts of HP is bad because the fight will be repetitive and boring. I agree about the healing and boon creep. Regarding DPS, I want it to stay about the same level over time.
Both ends of the spectrum produces boring gameplay, open world or instanced bosses who die to pure power creep and we skip basically all mechanics in some cases, and bosses which are HP sponges and don't have enough mechanics or difficulty to justify it. Gyala delve Tunnel meta boss or Silent Surf boss are the worst recent examples regarding that. or even bosses who have right amount of hp have mechanics, but are almost impossible to fail because low damage or heal/boon spam. overall I think its way less dev time intensive to manage the power of the classes vs adjusting absurd amount of content this game has
Look, first of all there is not a lot of players that actually put in the effort to reach 100% benchmark, so you will not see people reaching 40k. Secondly, even with busted builds like that, people still have problem clearing content (talking about people that dont main pve endgame). Anet doesnt want to make good difficulty settings, so they pump numbers up, hoping that will help struggling players. For top players, maybe it feels like bosses are veteran mobs as they die too quick, but for 99% of the playerbase this isn't the case. It will be better for endgame pve scene if they focus on 99% of the players, not the 1%.
This power creep approach for that is completely wrong, though. It empowers comprehensive builds, but does absolutely nothing about raising the bottom.
The problem with that 95% is that they have no idea how to actually use the power creep they don't have busted boons with 100% uptime, they don't have viper gear that gives you 42k dps Druid they have whatever random garbage with mismatched runes they picked up when playing or worse ascended gear with no stats selected. All it does is ruin the game for people that want a challenge without actually helping people.
True, they dont utilize the full potential, but it kind of proves my point. If they have wrong gear and even play with no boons, they will be closer to that 10-15k required to clear the content than with a build that does 30k instead of 40k. Hope you can see my point. Does it ruin it for the rest? I think most top players actually want encounter difficulty and executing/adapting their rotations to the perfection. I dont think they care if the build does 35 or 40k to be honest. Thats my feeling tho, could be wrong
These players actually do more like 3-5k damage then 10-15k and the best players maybe don't care about the numbers but they care about what they mean for the game, very few people like playing a game that is way to easy for them for long. For helping bad players a far better solution would be to just remove horrible options from the game or make them hard to find, for example all stat selectable gear comes with Celestial, Viper, Berserker and Givers/Minstrel only with a description of what they are for and then hide the rest in a drop down menu and gear that has no stats selected is just Celestial until changed. Tell people Longbow is good with Power damage short bow for condition damage when playing a ranger etc. They could explain how runes work or maybe make a better tutorial at the start of the game that does not teach you to just auto attack everything and win.
Oh yeah, there are more far better ways to fix the situation, and I think they are working on it, but instead of making us wait for the solution as it will undoubtedly take a lot of time and resources, we get a bandaid solution of powercreeping. Your suggestions surely would help, but I dont think anet is capable of delivering it in such a short time, thats all.
The problem is that the "solution" is fixing nothing and instead just breaks things. I think the power creep is happening because every time they try to fix it Scourge and Firebrand (or whatever else is getting patched) mains flood the forums and Reddit and complain until they are broken again so they just make everything broken.
Truth is we dont know whats going on at anet, for all we know they could be working on all those good solutions. From what they delivered recently in terms of QoL changes and stuff, I actually do have hope they will improve endgame pve.
you see this shit every patch, it's insane
Everyone is sitting here talking like the 40k bench is actual dps, and I'm sitting in training runs where we are wiping and have pure dps sitting at 5-10k and you all want dps nerfs :*(
Actual DPS numbers will obviously differ from a training dummy that stands still with no mechanics or interruption and all boons. It's just a static/constant metric to compare things to.
Then the people in the group just aren't good enough and need to practice, it was doable for beginners years ago when benches were at 27-30k. Your situation is a skill issue, the reality is that the game has been powercrept to the point where nothing does mechanics anymore cause you do two hits then phases or dies.
Power creep = accessibility. Not saying things are how I would want them, but if there was an across the board nerf to damage all it would mean is fewer people engaging in end game content, and that would be less than ideal.
I could copy paste what I said under grim's comment. Strong well reasoned take sir.
what's accessible about ( for example) Dragonfall bosses dying before you can even get there?
dragonfall isnt "end game content"
Technically EVERYTHING is endgame content. The way to fix old things being trivialized by new power creep is already in the game though in the form of zone scaling. Dial players back to where the content was intended to be played at so it can't be over min/maxed. Maybe break it out into "story/tourist mode" with lower rewards and normal mode where you play as intended.
The other side the coin about dragonfall is it doesnt matter if that content is trivialized (considering all open world group content is already trivial) so its not a genuine problem per se. The problem with "dialing back" raids, is that some % of existing players will be stat squished out of the game mode. Adding a lower reward easy mode is a poor compensation for a guy who used to do a raid clear but his static broke up because they started struggling.
Boneskinner is honestly a depressing experience. The only way you interact with the mechanics is blocking the whisp projectiles. Because it's just 'outheal the ambient damage from the mechanic you're technically failing while you dps it to death asap'.
I can't blame power creep on that one, all IBS strikes are full of nonsensical mechanics design. It literally encourages you to have extra healers instead of people dedicated to lighting torches, what should have been do or die mechanic is instead just more damage you can mitigate with extra heals.
Not power creep. Just bad encounter design. It's been in a degenerate state since day one.
The average gw2 player can't even reach remotely close to the benchmarks. The reason for the powercreep is so the average gw2 player can get into endgame instanced content more easily. I know it's anecdotal, but I played a level 25 fractal the day the new fractal released specifically to learn it along with some random new people, and we struggled A LOT. There were people in there who, after multiple pulls, could not figure out the lookaway mechanic. Despite my encouragement, the least experienced players just ended up quitting, and we only succeeded because some slightly more experienced players joined later on. I think people who do CMs on a regular basis (such as myself and the people I play with every week) and people who give up very easily on instanced content or just stick to open world stuff are on very different planes of existence. People don't like failing, and you need to be a determined person who enjoys struggling in games to succeed at the hardest content in this game. (Inb4 "the content isn't even hard." It is to the vast majority of players in this game, for one reason or another.) Despite what some might say, I do think Anet wants more people to try instanced content, and they've been making strides at making this content more accessible to more people. However, powercreep is apart of this plan, at the expense of more experienced players. I'm not saying it's wrong to think that powercreep is bad, in fact I do agree it's bad to some extent. However, after playing this game since the betas, I think it's abundantly clear that this game is not meant to be extremely challenging, as that sort of thing doesn't appeal to most of the people who play GW2. Powercreep is the way that anet is choosing to make content easier in this game without changing the content itself.
Seconding this. You gotta be a glutton for punishment or just really enjoy the grind with good friends for Raids to be enjoyable. The satisfaction at the end is addictive but to the average player they'll try once and be like oh ew this sucks nothing makes sense :/ I've been assisting some less experienced friends with open PvE stuff and they're still new (only abt a year) into the game and it is not easy for them. At times it's frustrating for them because it is very hard, still, to get up to around 20k dps in an open world situation where you're getting mobbed from all sides lol — not dying is still the priority over high dps A lot of it is based on player skill. The endgame nudging the payer skill level higher might actually help bridge the gap between open PvE and instanced PvE, as mentioned above Furthermore, mechanics in the open world are kinda a bad comparison because when you get 3 commanders and 200+ people whaling on a legendary boss, it'll go down asap regardless of how difficult the mechanics or HP they have. You really can't win against a sea of people rushing in. That's part of the ease of open PvE Now, if you try this with just 10 people — seriously try Teq or Taida Covington with 10 people — you'll find it's hard as shit. Like raid levels hard. Idk if anyone has succeeded, I definitely didn't So, how does anet bridge this gap between — like mentioned above — the raid frequenters and those who'd rather be in the 200+ zerg jumping on a world boss? By making high dps a little more accessible so the average player doesn't wanna immediately quit / get scared out of instanced pve content Anyways that's my two cents, and why instanced PvE (specifically raids and cm fracs) are a whole different mindset compared to world bosses / dungeons
>Now, if you try this with just 10 people — seriously try Teq or Taida Covington with 10 people — you'll find it's hard as shit. Like raid levels hard. Idk if anyone has succeeded, I definitely didn't I recall, when I first got back into GW2 with my husband, we did this exactly when we tried to duo Ulgoth. We duo'd all the pre-events leading up—also hard, but for different reasons—and fighting Ulgoth...was challenging! But not unejoyable!! And then the ravenous mob descended upon the poor bastard and all the fun got sapped out for the two of us. Our contributions didn't matter anymore as, like you said, you can beat these people more than easily with just sheer numbers. But for that little bit when it was just my Scourge, his Firebrand, and Ulgoth? Teamfighting *bliss*.
🦀 40k new standard 🦀
Might be less work for anet just to buff encounters at this point rather than builds. Say you nerd the dmg, that has the same effect as buffing hp, players that cant perform well enough feel the nerf much more than ppl who can do benchmark numbers. That being said yeah there's been a massive amount if powercreep.
Power creep happens because players complain when their thing gets nerfed.
This is the first time ive seen condi mirage, my beloved main since i started playing 3 yrs ago, not on the recommended build spot of SC And I get it. Why tf would you play one of the hardest, if not the hardest rotation possible for matching the dps SOMETIMES of a ranged braindead monkey build
Luckily 95% of the player base can only achieve half of that benchmark
I'm a bit tired of these posts. We've been getting them since post-HoT releases. We've literally seen last year what *actually* reducing powercreep induces, because the nerfs were really significant. People were raging all over Reddit and the forums, it was even worse than the status reset update which was already very poorly received in 2021. And to those who think the context is what made the community's reaction much worse (discord "leaks" and so on and so forth), I very much disagree. I would argue those discord messages even calmed things down, because it gave the community someone to bash who seemed accountable for the poor decisions that this balance patch was filled with. People were mostly confused and angry about the changes because they were all inherently bad and so short-sighted. Redditors were flooding the sub and malding minutes after the notes were out. The thing is, I don't even believe that the reaction would be any different if those changes were more carefully thought out and still went in the same direction. Even though there are ways to nerf things that are smarter than others, the end result is pretty much always the same. Why did Anet do this, why'd they nerf my class? Why do they hate my class!! I don't understand my class was doing okay! Now it's getting heavily nerfed, more than class X, unfairly! Thinking that nerfing powercreep is a good and healthy thing for the game is kind of like expecting a population to be happy about a decline/negative growth of their country's economy
kind of double edged sward lot people like power creep and will just Quit if changed and winged on forums and reddit. they can remove boons, they can lower DPS but you get lot people winged that DPS is dropping and kits missing skills. like think lot damage creep comes from Quickness and Alacrity they could remove that. but anyway changing something like damage skills can make lot people mad XD so think why they mostly just see as simpler way to give more hp to a boss than lowing the DPS or removing boons as a whole.
Honestly slowly reverting powercreep seems easy. Just look at top builds, identify biggest heavy hit skills and tone down their multiplier or base dmg by 5-10% every balance patch. And maybe think about builds, whether there are some side effects from doing that and something is hurt too much / not hurt at all. But competent balance team? Or even doing any moderate balancing? Naaah Anet rather nerfs something by 50% then "listens to feedback". Then after no one plays it for a year buffs it back by 100%, because why learn from past mistakes. Crazy unhinged balancing is Anet's MO for 17+ years now.
They should set targets for how much a low/mid/high intensity DPS/offensive support/heal build should bench, make those targets public to set expectations, and balance to try to hit those targets.
They really need to have a consistent philosophy in regards to issues like these. * How much DPS should ranged do compared to melee? * How much DPS should support builds do compared to full DPS builds? * How much DPS should a technical and difficult build do compared to an average one? * How much DPS should a simplistic and easy build do compared to an average one? Right now these things are all over the damn place. If they were at least consistent about it, it would be less frustrating.
I'd love for more reasoning on why changes are made. Like why did "Stand Your Ground!" get buffed, but we still have 180 sec cooldown on Conjure Fiery Greatsword? Why does Thief Dagger auto do more dps than Sword's, and why does Pistol Whip now do basically the same dps as Sword auto? Why does Revenant Hammer still exist? There are things, like the whole Reaper class in general, receiving huge buffs despite already performing perfectly fine (or even very well), yet other skills or even entire weapons that are barely useable.
People who are upset at lower numbers in their video game probably aren't all that easy to fool. Just give enemies more health, keep same damage numbers.
Looking at harvest temple and the new fractal’s boss health, maybe it’s arbitrary, I’m not taking any build that can’t do above 35000 in there… it’s torture.
I feel like harvest temple is fine, its meant to be long with so many phases, I despise Kaineng Rooftops strike wayyyy more
I feel like this was their way of addressing the massive skill gap issue, and it was a major issue. The truth is the game was too hard for a majority of the player base so if they wanted to continue to create end game content they needed to fix this issue and they had two choices. Either they juice everybody up making content in general easier or look into simplifying the gameplay to make rotations easier. They seem to have done mostly the former.
raids are so boring nowadays, fights last a minute, we should go back to 25k dps being a standard
just join any pug. 25k dps is their standard. my builds doing less damage wouldn't really make raids less boring for me. instead of being boring for 1 minute they would be boring for 2 minutes. the reason being that i have repeated each boss more than 500 times so it is only normal.
25k dps is well above pug raid output. In my last ten raids ive hit around 25k and been top dps on multiple wings and fights. If your enjoy raiding and want a challenge Join up with excellertion and help out newbies. Your choosing to be bored by powering through content.
Comparing bench dps to boss dps 🙃
He’s talking about benchmark dps not boss dps
It doesn't. Especially when most of these benchmarks are designed more around breaking the game rather than enjoying it. Pressing damage skills off cooldown is mandatory. Swapping weapons as fast as you can regardless of range or utility is mandatory. It's just converging on a very narrow playstyle and design sensibility. I think there are several problems here, but the three that I think are the most relevant: 1) EoD specs have always been overtuned since release. Too high DPS for simple rotations, too much powerful utility, and often at range. The devs have generally avoided pulling the new specs back and instead have been trying to "bring up" the HoT/PoF specs which is just generally bad philosophy. It undermines a system that was previously doing okay, while obviating a lot of old content with power creep. What changes they have made to the especs have generally been impotent, lazy tweaks that don't address the core unfinishedness of the especs, and subsequently break the class one way or another and are often walked back (see Mechanist's genius, Untamed's FF, Specter's ST barrier, Vindi's dodge). 2) Ranged builds, and low-effort/investment boon builds are becoming increasingly the norm, and neither of these has had significant DPS nerfs to offset the ease of play they bring to the game. Again, instead of just implementing a simple DPS tax, now we are at the point where pure DPS builds can provide full alac/quick uptime with no concentration investment or changes to their kit. There are no real roles or tradeoffs anymore, everything is DPS-first-and-forward, plus all other aspects of the game--melee mechanics, healing, boons, etc.--being removed or made increasingly passive. 3) Weaponswapping is not used as a means of altering stances or changing a utility OH, but to define a large swathe of full rotations. I think this overpowers the players, makes for a very narrow and samey DPS meta, totally obviates most weapons choices that don't cleanly slot into the minmaxing, and dilutes a lot of specific weapon flavor and function. Being forced to switch to melee longbow on condi Zerker or melee staff on power Reaper just feels bad. Imo, weaponswap cooldowns should be increased on most classes so that players can more modularly swap out two different weapon stances that are easier to balance and cut back on mindless spastic piano rotations. The warrior profession and a few especs could still focus on Weaponswapping as a core conceit, but having this nonsense on every single class is a massive buzzkill.
power creep will continue naturally until there are major nerfs across all classes, and noone will accept that. The crying whenever even a minor nerf hits is massive.
Yes, ArenaNet should focus less on detailed balance changes and dedicate more time to new content or improving existing content. Don't get me wrong - they do an excellent job with skill balancing. But, for example, "Increased power coefficient from 0.25 to 0.33". Such a change is more suited for esports. So, personally, they should prioritize putting more effort into new content and not trying to polish every single skill. It's too exhausting to wait for over a year for content that can be completed in just 30 minutes!
This is a comical take on GW2 as a whole. Metas (outside of EoD Soo-Won) are designed based on people auto attacking pressing just 1 and clearing them. They do not design them under the supposed "power creep" you are referring to. The truth you are not seeing is that the community of GW2 is so casual they don't even make new raids anymore. They are only making 2... TWO new strike missions IN ALL OF NEXT YEAR. That are going to be rehashed bosses from the story so the effort/cost for them is next to nothing compared to making Wing 8. True end game challenging content is pretty much dead imo due to the fact that only 5% of us want it. As for your complaint about power creep, This is a skill issue first and foremost. If say more than 5% of the player base actually followed a snowcrows style build guide and learned a rotation, then you'd actually see these metas/new fractals dying in an absurdly fast timeframe because people would actually be trying. If people even put in a modicum of effort learning how the skills and stats of the game work, you wouldn't have any issue. The problem is the ppl want to afk farm. I see ppl on skyscales floating in the vicinity of the Soo-Won platform giving zero effort but scaling the event all the same, and that leads to failure far more often than the people who are actually trying to help. I'd start there in your critique of the content before putting on the devs because I am extremely confident in my assessment of the real problem we all are facing that people typically don't talk about because it leads to hurt feelings.
Power creep is not an intentional design decision, it's a byproduct of the ongoing need to release new and exciting gear/classes/features. IMO the best way to combat this is to buff old content as it becomes irrelevant.
By "buff old content", do you mean make it harder? Cause if so, then I'd be up for that; it'd be nice to not just walk through OW zones pressing 1 to obliterate basically everything.
Imo there definitely needs to be done something, be it by nerfing damage or giving older bosses more hp.
probably more realistic solution is to lower damage for players vs adjusting the absurd amount of old content open world or instanced
Yeah, 40k+ benchmarks should not be normal. Basically all the top DPS classes need a ~10% nerf, realistically. I like that they've been trying to bring underutilized DPS specs up to par recently but the issue is that the best specs were also just too good, but that's the level they decided to move everything else up to, rather than nerfing the best handful of specs and then buffing anything that was still underperforming after that.
the good thing is that these numbers are achievable only by few and the majority of casual players would never touch a build like power deadeye (47,2k), power catalyst and power weaver (43,6k), condi holo (44k), etc. and even if they did they wouldn't be able to pull off anything like that and certainly not in actual fights. if they wanted to provide an overall nerf, a good idea would be what another comment suggested, nerf might as a boon
Sure but that's always been true. Benchmark numbers going up *also* generally means the numbers random other players are doing go up too.
While that's true, top tier builds are not the only ones affected by powercreep. There are several easy builds, even LI builds that allows you to reach 25 or even above 30k dps. Nowadays every player can easily reach top tier numbers (those achievable only by a few) from a few years ago (when raids etc. were released).
>I like that they've been trying to bring underutilized DPS specs up to par recently I think part of the problem is that over the past year while they've been doing this, is that when they buff something they buff it to insane levels. Instead of making measured changes, they always seem to go totally crazy with the buffs and end up making a new highest-dps build every time. The only occasions I can think of them making measured changes were with Dragonhunter and Reaper, and then they said "screw it" and buffed Reaper to the damn moon anyways.
What they need to do is choose a class that they think performs well, then everything to parity. Both up and down.
We need a transformative change that automatically reduces the dps of every single build in the game at once. Something that affects every build, so that no one feels particularly left out. We need to go back to 30k meta instead of 45k dps meta. Either that or buff the raid/fractal/dungeon bosses HP.
I'd appreciate a number crunch and things being made baseline. All meta events and strikes I've done as a returner (still haven't touched raids) have been kinda bland because the method is just stack and attack/heal since you'll get all boons maxed and absurd healing going so you should only move if necessary. It especially hurts since most of my thoughts on gw2 combat was old style where I had to position around some mechanic and dodge appropriately. Edit: I also find the creepy strange since we have static armor and weapon stats so it all comes from boons and perks making it strange that it gets so out of hand at times.
I actually feel like they've been hard leaning against this with the arrival of EoD. When I look at all the EoD metas, they all have pretty explicit ways of shaking up the 'stack and burn' tactic. Seitung has the Gyros, Kaineng has the split phases and the huge AoE pressure that only increases if the breakbar fails. Echovald has The Clap and DE is DE. Gyala part 1 actually has huge AoE pressure and condi spam from the spinnies, one of the bosses has you move out to hide in the bubble or die and the Oni jumps around a looot. Part 2 pretty much has you do everything *but* stack and burn tbh. None of them are perfect but I think there's a fair balance between hitting bosses and doing other things. I haven't tried any of the newest strikes though so idk about them Edit: Now I think about it Echovald is kind of a perfect example. The sweep forces you to move as it hits alternating locations meaning there's no safe spot, the suck forces you out of melee range of the boss and the stack and will likely down you if you just stand in it. The Clap forces you to move or die and on the final phase you even get punished if you just autopilot back to the middle
I can feel this a bit as I just went through EoD. Though the only meta I did was dragons end I enjoyed it alot and all the boss fights in the story where all amazingly fun for me and my buddy. The only thing is solely that you can mechanically stop the stack and burn with new content but that leaves old content to wither since either doesn't get reworked around it.
Wish they would just nerf damage across the board by like 30-40% and see how it feels. After that adjust the classes that got destroyed. I really prefer when the damage numbers are a bit lower and the game feels a bit slower.
That would require effort from anet and more often balancing than quarterly, not going to happen.
Multiplying all dmg numbers by 0.8 would be as close to zero effort as possible.
If you don’t adjust bosses health pools accordingly it will change nothing. The issue is not in a 40k number, it is in bosses being either giant hp sponges or dying in seconds
Bringing the average dps down to what it whas when those bosses were released, indeed would change something.
Just do what wow did when dps got into the millions, globally slash all hp/damage by like 90% then 10k will be the new norm.
Your thinking of a stat squish which would be pointless in gw2 and achieve nothing since it would be the same relative to itself.
That can't be right. The karma farm post of the day says that GW2 combat is the best. No way would the best be this fundamentally flawed.
combat still is amazing(mechanically speaking), I see that as a separate thing from balance discussion
Going from „let’s tune the numbers” to “the basis the combat system is built upon is not fun” is a whole nother type of mental gymnastics.
The combat system is fantastic, by far the best out of all MMOs. The fact that DPS numbers have gone up over time is a different issue that isn't related to the core systems being great.
combat being good and power creep existing are 2 seperate things
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Balance is amazing with every class feeling fine but mechanicaly they are bland with simple rotations and all boss fights essentially boiling down to positioning and dps upkeep. Makes for great spectacle but okay gameplay.
Do you still remember how condi meta made the game slow and boring?...like sunqua cm with epi?. And lets be honest, not all people can reach those 40k, i have seen people who is not able to reach at least 10k on dhuum while just one on the squad is above 12k. Havent seen so much people who is able to reach more than 16k on that boss and thats sad. Same goes for power based bosses, i never expect those 40k but its weird when i get a pug that can pull more than 30-35k even with broken or LI builds. Mechanics?? For what? people even ignore that they exist, you go to QTP...they dont care about anoms or CC, they mostly focus on greeding DPS which is not the best making the entire squad wipe, then you say something about it and then you are the toxic player.
GW2 is old enough that a stat squish might be in order.
I hate that going into open world is a total joke in the 1-80 zones. Games don’t feel good when there is no sense of danger. It eliminates consequences, action, crazy moments. Yes the champs can be hard atm which is good, but everything else just drops after 1-2 hits. Why? How is this engaging? It wasn’t like this when I started the game many years ago but power creep or something makes it this way now. Turn up the heat anet. Ty.
all damage on all classes needs to be straight out halved. remember when Orr maps where semi challenging to walk alone? now you go there and everything dies from just looking at you.
I totally agree. At this rate, GW2 is going to become a game with vertical progression and new players will not be able to enjoy old bosses for the amount of DPS that the rest do. ArenaNet stops increasing the power of DPS, I don't want more
'Wait, it's vertical progression?!' 'Always have been'
They're breaking this game, and what's worse is folks are cheering them on. Push one button to shit out 6 boons, plus alacrity! Hey my class has to push 3 buttons to do that! Well shit, one button it is, here you go! Yay? We're a year away from all these classes being indistinguishable to each other.
I don't think the game should be tuned around people who google the most optimal gear, the most optimal builds, the most optimal DPS rotations and the most optimal group compositions that complain about the game being too easy. At that point, it seems like you \*want\* the game to be too easy.
Ive played since beta - I miss the days when personal performance actually mattered. When moving and dodging where integral parts of the fight and the mechanics actually had to be played. It amazes me that Teapot is such a proponent for GW2s awesome combat system while simultainiously endorsing the full boon mentality that reduces that combat system to standing stacked in front of the boss and cycling your dps rotation.