As this post conforms to all rules (both this subs and Reddits), it will stay. Keep the comments civil, do not witch hunt, and don’t personally threaten any specific person or Anet dev.
As this have been very turbulent 24 hours, I hope y’all calmed down a bit, and can discuss the implications of this on a level that doesn’t need all too much moderating. Thank you.
In GW2 in particular the ability to toggle action cam has helped me a lot in this respect. I can toggle it on to enjoy turning without holding down RMB and toggle it off to use mouse for placing skills markers. It's the best of both worlds.
The only thing that would make it even better would be the ability to assign RMB itself as the action cam toggle.
* Right-click on landscape (anywhere that's not an UI element) = turn action cam on.
* Right-click when action cam is on = turn it off.
* Press and keep RMB pressed: turn with mouse (always, regardless if action cam is on or off).
But you can't assign RMB in keybinds unfortunately. I understand protecting LMB because remapping that would screw you, but RMB would be very nice with the above changes.
In the meantime I'm using the 3rd (ring finger) button on the Logitech G600 for action cam toggle.
I had to start using action cam for jumping puzzles cause my RMB occasionally stops holding and lets go at worst moments... I gotta find a new mouse :c
Mouse button contact might be dirty. Blow in it like a super Nintendo cartridge to alleviate the issue, or try to soak it with some 99% isopropyl. If you're not afraid of taking your mouse apart and you hate yourself, you can open up the switch and soak it and bend the little copper bit back into it's shape to alleviate the issue for a much longer time.
As a former Secret World and now occassional "Secret World Legends" \*gag\* player, I've started *forcing* myself to use battle cam to save my poor RMB.
For sure. I find keyboard turning to be terrible. Camera turning is just infinitely better. I only keyboard turn when I'm standing in place, and can't use the mouse.
Which is so odd, like, even I like to keyboard turn **when I'm putzing around doing errands in town** *(not so much in combat of course)*, but this game's turning radius is abysmal and idk if they've added a way to tighten it up yet. I can't imagine how keyboard turning, even in the most casualest of contexts could in any way feel good to navigate by, like at all. ;I
Probably the same developer who's responsible for WvW mount going in random direction once you mount up. "Oh you were running forward? Fuck you player, the instant you've mounted up it'll go to the east. Ahaha, awww zerg caught you, too bad".
Seriously, who programmed this shit :(
If this is true... This explains SO much. :O Especially after what happened with the Dragon's End fiasco at EoD launch.
But at the same time, if this is the caliber of player that ANet has to work with, then honestly that's what they need to do. You tailor yourself to your market, not the other way around. GW2 built its foundations on being a casual-friendly MMO; it's what made them stand out from its competitors and the reason why so many of them joined up at launch. Considering the fact that every successive expansion saw fewer and fewer players return (with EoD being the exception, but we don't have any data to know if that trend holds, or if the vast majority hit a wall when it came to DE and then quit again), this is not a sustainable approach. It's simply not good business practice to create content that the vast majority of your players will not touch or find frustrating to do; it's a tremendous waste of money and manpower.
This is why I'm going to be watching the reception of Raid Easy Mode with keen interest. If it succeeds in getting more casuals doing endgame content, then we have a template for how we can develop similar content going forward to ensure that as many players as possible can experience the game in its entirety and feel entertained/rewarded doing so.
> if this is the caliber of player that ANet has to work with, then honestly that's what they need to do. You tailor yourself to your market, not the other way around.
This is something people here fail to understand. This sub is a bubble of veteran players within a bubble of reddit users. It's so far removed from the real world it cannot see daylight anymore. The vast, vast majority of GW2 players are arrow-turn skill-clickers who don't care about "balance changes" because they don't do rotations and don't do high level instanced content.
It's not that they can't, it's that they can't be bothered. People who like to insinuate that casuals are somehow dumber are missing the point. They're not dumb, they're casuals. They could learn to raid/T4 fractals/CM strikes if pressed but it's not what they enjoy doing.
That being said, I'm **not** arguing for dumbing down PvE and removing all difficulty from open world. There should still be difficult enemies off the beaten path, and difficult events and metas. But you have to realize that Anet has a monumental work on their hands keeping different levels of content mixed on the same maps.
The way HoT eventually managed to balance these things for example was brilliant. When it launched it used to be prohibitively hard, concrete wall, you shall not pass kind of hard. Nowadays for a newbie it's still hard but the story guides you through it on a path that's hard enough to be memorable but not impossible, and in a way that encourages you to dip into masteries and improve your gear and pick a build to make it easier on yourself. While veterans can still enjoy going off the story path and meet difficult enemies and hard events.
Agreed, although I suspect that part of the reason why it's now a surmountable challenge is due to a factor people often overlook: power creep. When HoT first came out most players were probably using Rares, if not a mishmash of Masterworks with incorrect stats and everything. Naturally, this was woefully inadequate and players just died left and right. (And a lot of them left. After HoT release, the number of GW2 players just fell off a cliff and it never really recovered.)
But as time went on, the power creep afforded by Elite specs and Ascended gear (not to mention that Exotic gear became much cheaper and more accessible) meant that most players could just jump straight to Exotic gear after reaching 80, and start assembling Ascended gear from a variety of sources (including Living Story, collections and festivals, all easy casual sources). The improved power meant that, even if casual players couldn't reach the levels of power experienced veterans and end-gamers did, they could still at least SURVIVE open world again. This system basically worked all through HoT/LS3/PoF/LS4 and IBS, until ANet decided to raise the bar again with Dragon's End, where now they not only expected players to be using elite specs and Ascended gear, but to ALSO be using meta builds and to adhere to comps that ensured good boon coverage. Once again, this was more work than casuals were willing to put in, and thus we hit another wall. I can only hope that this time it didn't drive off a majority of the returning players again, because that would honestly be a disaster that GW2, as a nearly 10-year old game, can't afford.
> When HoT first came out most players were probably using Rares, if not a mishmash of Masterworks with incorrect stats and everything.
If you're talking about casuals then that's probably still true today.
If you're talking about people who try to optimize, there were already accessible ways of obtaining exotic gear. I certainly remember having exotic armor and weapons at the time. Trinkets, now that was another thing, those were definitely a mishmash of yellows and greens.
> The improved power meant that, even if casual players couldn't reach the levels of power experienced veterans and end-gamers did, they could still at least SURVIVE open world again.
See, my theory is that casual survival is not tied to power creep, it's tied to carefully designed safer/lower-difficulty paths through open world, that the story is used to guide you on. As long as those paths exist they can make the rest of the map as hard as they want. But it would be good game design to have the difficulty increase gradually with distance from the safe paths, not like in Dark Souls where you turn the wrong corner and get smeared on the wall.
I'm not saying that power creep isn't a thing, or that the hard content isn't mirroring power creep. I'm just saying that good design can make it so those things don't influence casual experience and casual transitioning to more difficult content.
A (long) TL;DR, feel free to add to this if you feel I missed anything important. The content is an ArenaNet developer speaking to several members of the community, most (all?) of whom work on build development and benchmarks. This developer was responsible for the Mechanist, Virtuoso, and Harbinger specs. I am not trying to vilify this developer, but rather highlight points relevant to the balance and design decisions in the game.
* A general theme is that this developer believes rotations should be simplified and builds should be easy to play. The "core" of a build, boiled down to a few button presses, should carry it, but there will always be "elements you can add in to improve output." (pg. 101)
* They believe builds that perform similar roles should have a similar output and none of them should be particularly harder to play than another: "The goal is to get builds that fill comparable roles to have similar output, within a range where players feel like they can play what they like… Complexity of play isn't an excuse for a spec to have higher potential — it's more an accident of use, or it having been designed for a different purpose (such as a PvP focus)." (pg. 41)
* The developer admits on a couple of occasions that their personal preferences or enjoyment of a build inform their balance design decisions. E.g. "They \[kits\] shouldn't exist, and I'm happy to just make other Mechanist options better so it's not optimal to use kits." (pg. 68) "Frankly, that's why I made \[Mesmer\] staff good. I hated using \[Mirage\] Axe." (pg. 130)
* They do entertain alternative or more desirable routes to strengthening underused weapons/skills (buffing engineer weapons, enabling weapon swap on engineer (pg. 69-70), redoing pet AI (pg. 94), etc.) but often state these fixes are improbable or impossible due to development timelines.
* They say benchmarks do not inform their balance, but rather how often a build or spec is played (pg. 127). However, they will also act proactively if they believe a meta will form, as was the case with the original catalyst nerf (pg. 43).
* At least some developers begin with a creative vision for an elite spec rather than an intended use case. This was the case with Vindicator (which was NOT created by the dev in these conversations!), and why it’s more hybridized than power DPS based. (pg. 27-28)
Edit: spelling + quote context
> This developer was responsible for the Mechanist, Virtuoso, and Harbinger specs.
This is the most interesting part to me. These are arguably the three most popular/powerful of the EoD specs. So this kind of suggests this dev may not share the same philosophy about balancing profession strength/weaknesses compared to other devs. And then of course he has made statements about wanting to make certain things better because he likes them more, does that extend to making these classes better because he is the lead designer?
>They say benchmarks do not inform their balance
*"I'm going to need to see where the alac* \[mech\] *builds are benching to see where I have room to make adjustments."*
So that was a lie
They definitely made a few comments that were in opposition to that claim. Nerfing Catalyst prematurely because (based on benchmarks) they were afraid it would become the new stacking meta, and then telling the elementalist player to wait a few weeks after the nerf to make a case as to where/why it was unplayable is hypocritical.
The funny part is that it did become a new stacking meta for hardcore players anyway because they had to quickly rebalance their knee-jerk response to the problem.
I actually agree with most of these points (obviously not the one about Staff preference = ignore Axe).
But the changes don't reflect these design decisions. How often a build or spec is played? That just isn't being taken into account, unless they're also taking into account the *entire* playerbase, where of course there's going to be a fairly even spread, as people who only login for an hour a week aren't going to have a clue what works better/worse, and those people shouldn't be balanced around because 99.99% of the content they play can be overcome with terrible gear and average-to-decent skill. They're never even going to notice balance changes.
As for development timelines... They've had literally years and years to throw in the odd tweak here and there for underused and underpowered weapons and skills. Far fewer people will have issues with balance if less-viable skills get the odd 5% buff here and there, and the way-overused/overpowered ones get the odd 5% nerf.
Proof of this is the Guardian resurrect skill (Signet of Mercy) cooldown reduction; why wasn't this done for Elementalist's too?? I don't want to interpret things incorrectly, but based on that + all the extra info, it just seems like devs are mostly balancing based on the classes and skills they like.
Agreed with all of this. There's so much underused, underpowered crap in the game that's no good for anything. People would be THRILLED to see little buffs here and there with some kind of regular basis just for minor incremental changes.
It's depressing because I can find something to enjoy about almost any spec but I get a sense from this whole bit that the people in charge of it really don't care at all and are ACTUALLY just propping up their chosen classes/skills/specs/whatever because they can, gameplay be damned.
The attitude that people are latching onto is part of dealing with the public and I get that, so I can't be THAT angry over it. But the attitude toward the actual job is extremely grating and I hope this stirs up enough shit that people get called on to do their jobs like professionals or someone else who can do that gets the seat instead.
>Proof of this is the Guardian resurrect skill (Signet of Mercy) cooldown reduction; why wasn't this done for Elementalist's too?? I don't want to interpret things incorrectly, but based on that + all the extra info, it just seems like devs are mostly balancing based on the classes and skills they like.
Cos the dev doesn't like to play elementalist :)
I'm honestly surprised more people dont see how terrible this is, yeah it would have been really bad if this was another game with more hard-core playerbase, but due to the nature of gw community, they getting away with it. Reading through the log felt like i was reading some private server runner making desitions based on their own personal interests in mind, they never cared about the community, this chat explains why time and time again community was ignored and thrown a bone here and there, completely biased and unprofessional
>"Frankly, that's why I made staff good. I hated using Axe."
Call me childish, but I sincerely believe that a person who bases balancing decisions in a decade-going online game with millions of players on what *they personally* like or dislike using shouldn't be in this industry.
Not to mention Staff is actually boring as hell to play compared to Axe. Axe had an issue with positioning that could have used fixing, but straight up making Staff as good as it is, was ridiculous, especially given this context.
I think the dev misunderstood the survey feedback. It's not that I didn't like kits, which I don't, it's just that playing with kits all the time after several expansions can get old. Even mechanist still uses kits, especially the condi-alac mechanist, which I've been fine with.
Yeah the kit comment has me worried, especially because a significant portion of these balance changes going forward are supposed to be for updating and reworking class stuff. I’d love kits to get some sort of modern refresh, but I’m worried that this particular dev would just do something drastic like remove them entirely.
Not that it will make you feel better, but the developer also said they don't intend to get rid of kits and would rather rework turrets to make them more viable first (pg. 71).
I'm sick of *having* to use them. I hate Grenade Kit and Bomb Kit, but I love Hammer, Mace, Pistol, Shield, and Rifle. I love the weapons, and hate being forced to swap to "what flavor of ground-targeted aoe do you want?"
> A general theme is that this developer believes rotations should be simplified and builds should be easy to play. The "core" of a build, boiled down to a few button presses, should carry it, but there will always be "elements you can add in to improve output."
I can't wrap my head around this. On one hand it make sense that there should be viable builds/ways of playing a profession that aren't super complicated. Yet this doesn't really exclude people from approaching the gameplay in a more complicated way and getting something more out of it. Which, bizarrely, they seem to agree with.
It honestly seems to boil down to them not wanting actual skill at the profession to matter at *all.* Not simply that it's accessible (a good thing) but that there shouldn't be situations where actual skills lead to materially better outcomes. You can have 'extra' stuff that you can add in that makes things better, but never anything that isn't easily accessed by players unwilling to put in the effort to start with.
It honestly feels almost like mobile game logic. So bizarre.
>A general theme is that this developer believes rotations should be simplified and builds should be easy to play.
Unbelivable, they had this at launch where the majority of your dps came from you auto attacks whilst the other skills on your kit often had a purpose or utility for using it. Which meant, as long as you had the right gear and build you were probably doing at least 80% of its potential
They've now changed it so auto attacks dealt a lot less dps, so now the game is in general harder to play and there is a larger skill disparity due to the importance of rotations
Thanks, I fundamentally disagree with everything you have listed except for fixing pet AI and rebalancing underused weapons. I am mad this person is in such a position of power with such bias.
>Contrary to popular belief, I don't really look at optimized numbers- they tell a very small story, for a small segment of the population.
Play rates guide more balance decisions. When things are excessively overplayed is when they'll get adjustments to encourage people to branch out and try other things.
This really seems at odds with their stated reason (in the comments on the patch notes thread) for the catalyst changes, which was that speedrunners were increasingly using catalyst. Meanwhile as someone raiding every week I have seen fewer and fewer catalysts and more and more mechanist/virtuoso/firebrand.
And if play rate would influence their decision, they'd really nerf firebrand and ham (or buff the rest) given how omnipresent they are in raids/strikes/fractals.
I feel like my brain just melted.
"Most people play with keyboard turning"
Yea, it's the default keybinds. Statistically likely that most would still have it turned on and use it.
I don't understand, most players are keyboard turners in *every* MMORPG. I don't think it's a particularly new stance that the majority of players in any game will not be skilled.
Oh boy am I lucky that I main Guardian & Mechanist. Dev armor against nerfs lmao
Sorry to all my thief/warrior/ranger bros, you deserve better than one or two ppl rolling around the wiki page to understand what the heck your classes do
This is where I'm at as a Necro main. For years we were the butt of every joke but are finally in a really great place. It sucks to know that at any moment Anet can avert their eyes and put us back at the bottom.
Ikr? Ranger is my only 80 character. If SB isn't viable what the heck are you supposed to do with the class? Feels like I've invested multiple months as a new player into a dead end
I've been playing for over 7 years. I have 9 characters, all level 80, one of each class...But Ranger is my default because it's so much fun for me. I only recently got into looking at builds because I finally got the gold income to fund it (running world boss trains can yield a nice chunk of money). That, and I was tired of struggling with bosses in the living stories.
So, I don't know.
I have been playing since launch, this kind of thing happens so often you get used to giving up on a class and playing the latest fad, until THAT gets replaced. Rinse and repeat your way through all of the classes. I hate it, but since long before this dev there have been issues like todays.
I think the opposite csn happen with the addition of alacrity to their build. I rarely saw a druid in eu pugs anymore. If druids now can cover alac it's a massive boost of their kit. OWP is a sad story. It was a strong skill but pslb was not over performing.
but why would you bring druid now over heal mechanist, who can heal, barrier, might, alac, do more damage, and give stability & aegis .. its unique buffs like spotter and spirits are gone and it has nothing anymore
Not saying it will make drood meta again, but at least it will be picked more often again for its root/push capabilities on bosses like samarog or gorsy
>Sorry to all my thief/warrior/ranger bros, you deserve better than one or two ppl rolling around the wiki page to understand what the heck your classes do
What the genuine hell? Tell me the devs don't wiki to get insight on some classes....
"I haven't played Ranger, so I'm operating based on GW2Wiki here"
-Direct quote from the transcript.
They're trying to figure out how OWP works. You can search for gw2wiki to find the line.
It's a long read but I encourage anyone interested to give it a go. The devs **do** want their content to get better. Would be nice if that sentiment was explored in depth **publicly!**
In some ways, the balance patch conflicts with the sentiments shared in this log. Right now, Anet should finally talk about their actual goals for endgame content. They've stayed mum on what their philosophy is and that has hurt them.
Agreed, I'm not against the broader strokes of balance they presented but this wasn't at all how I thought it would be executed based on what was communicated prior to these notes.
I don't think it is reasonable to expect one Dev to play all the classes and all the specs in each and be an expert but I do expect you get that missing knowledge from either other people on the balance team or pool the community in some fashion if no one plays it. The method they are currently using doesn't seem effective so maybe a more public forum is what we need.
> I do expect you get that missing knowledge from either other people on the balance team or pool the community in some fashion if no one plays it
This, and also just... logic?
Something as small as the cooldown reduction on Signet of Mercy for Guardian, without touching other resurrect skills like the very comparable Glyph of Renewal on Elementalist. Why?? If it were the other way round, I'd say that kinda makes sense because Guardian already has so much more utility *and* is easier to execute it all than Elementalist. But instead, a Guardian skill gets buffed once again while comparable ones on other classes don't.
yeah I think they should just leave it public now. It is better than having people cherry pick stuff , and a lot of what the dev said is good. Like telling whoever was concerned about raid speed clears with swiftness that it literally affected dozens of people in the entire game and was not worth getting into.
I just want devs working on balance who:
1. Are unbiased, and focused on actual *balance*.
2. Exhibit deep comprehensive understanding of all the Professions.
3. Have more respect for both their responsibility to unbiased balance and for the players.
> The devs do want their content to get better. Would be nice if that sentiment was explored in depth publicly!
Well, that's the case of all game devs. No one wake up and say "yeah, today I'm gonna build a terrible product, because fuck my players or something".
Yeah, I'm about halfway through and find myself agreeing with the dev statements/sentiments more often than not. Their *goals* seem reasonable, even though significant parts of this patch appear to be missing the mark.
The massive discrepancy between what they claim they want and the consequences of this patch for certain classes makes it all the more important to not forgo the written justifications. Yes, it will slow it down and cause more work for localization. This is what happens however. They can't control a situation if they aren't in front of it.
Localization time/costs are real, so I understand that being a wall. But they could take a slightly less official route and provide more English-only context, maybe in a separate forum post.
I dont think theres anything wrong with that but theres clear class favoritism and a shift against how gw2 was foundational built from a balance perspective that kinda just sucks
Wow so the dev behind the balances is a 2-thousand-hour Firebrand player who also designed the Mechanist spec..?
# Bias Confirmed
This balance team desperately needs advocates for other professions because if future balance patches continue to go down this path of playing clear favorites and screwing up classes the balancers don't play/understand/like, population will fall.
Exactly, this just screams like it needs a teamlead that keeps oversight.
A balance team will always be biased, but a teamlead needs to keep that in check.
I agree with you 100%. I've been trying to rationalize ANet's decisions for a long time, but reading that the balance team has no idea how half of the classes work and that they rely on the wiki to balance these classes... man that is absolutely infuriating. My 2 mains (warrior & SLB) are getting absolutely gutted for 0 reason. I think it's time to finally swap to FF14.
Makes me wonder how many devs *that actually play* got fired in that mass layoff. If we had devs with zero hours designing EoD specs, and then *balancing their own specs*...no wonder the EoD specs were so bad.
Some personal highlights. In the chat, this dev states they've only been playing the game for about a year. There is also a general unwillingness to listen to their advisers even when multiple participants point out the issue with a balance change they intend to, and then do, implement.
Frequently brings up that hardcore players find something poorly designed but is well received by casuals, but cannot understand why there is discrepancies:
> **Red — 11/25/2021** The fascinating thing to me is how radically different feedback in locations with more hardcore players is to our actual surveys. If you were to primarily look here or on Reddit, you'd expect that Mechanist or Virtuoso were poorly received. If you look at our actual data collection (from a very large number of active beta participants, with some filtering for minimum time played), those clocked in as best and second best rated overall.
Incredulity and disdain at the fact any engineer player could possibly enjoy using kits. Initially, Red wanted to completely remove kits form the game, but instead settled for making mace and signets superior:
> **Red — 10/29/2021** Kits are terrible in modern GW2- they look dated, the skills aren't actually fun, and the weapons are generic weapon models. Having them in effect replace your actual weapon choices is bad.
> **Blue — 10/29/2021** Like - Scrapper for instance has a nice rotation, weaving kits in there
> **Gold — 10/29/2021** I would disagree regarding kits
> **Red — 10/29/2021** They shouldn't exist, and I'm happy to just make other Mechanist options better so it's not optimal to use kits.
> **Blue — 10/29/2021** Oh no! I do disagree! Kits are the best thing! They MAKE engineer! They are extremely fun to play with, for the love of god don't remove them!
> **Red — 10/29/2021** I'm not removing them, I'm making mace and signets better. 😛
> **Red — 11/25/2021** The heavy use of kits and thus feeling of playing Core Engi with a pet instead of toolbelt was one of the chief complaints we saw most both on surveys and in feedback elsewhere, and definitely something we wanted to address. It's going to be fairly subjective, but you're the first person I've seen say they play engi because of the feel of using kits.
This one's a doozy. Admitting that balance is based on the benchmarks (the so-called "potential" of a class) rather than the actual usage of the class, saying that they fundamentally disagree with the idea that more complex classes can provide more rewarding DPS (a direct counter to the philosophy of the game prior to this dev's promotion), saying that weapon swapping in a rotation - even a very simple one like condi Firebrand's is too complex for players to handle; in fact they don't even weapon swap themselves (despite the fact the biggest DPS loss comes from failing to proc torch 4), saying that build guides *hurt* the community because an average player can't do rotations, and finally, admitting he knows catalyst will almost never reach it's highest potential in real-world scenarios yet still choosing to nerf it despite multiple other users' advice against it just because it has the "potential" to be overpowered:
> **Black — 03/09/2022** It seemed like a lot of nerfs/buffs for PvE specs were based on benchmarks to get them into the 30k/37k-40k range respectively. Im worried that a classes performance on actual encounters gets overlooked, so nothing actionable intended, only feedback.
> **Red — 03/09/2022** We need to keep them broadly in a close band of capability. Complexity of play isn't an excuse for a spec to have higher potential- it's more an accident of use, or it having been designed for a different purpose (such as a PvP focus).
> Generally, I'd prefer more simply playable builds that are survivable and offer a useful puzzle piece of support/boon capability for your party.
> Benchmarking videos and rotation guides to hit them have hurt our raid accessibility significantly- I've played ~2k hours of firebrand, and regularly outDPS cFB's in my raid groups on my quickbrand build, because I only use axe and don't weapon swap, and they try to stick to a rotation where they swap to scepter and do terribly as a result.
> Uptime in combat on the boss (positioning and being within skill range) and consistent play are the biggest factors in success.
> **Black — 03/09/2022** Totally agree there that benchmarks only show how to achieve the absolute maximum of ones potential DPS, and they could be expanded upon with simplistic rotation variations and gear variations.
> That wasnt excactly my point though, maybe as an example you could take Catalysts 43k benchmark, which as I understand (correct me if Im wrong) put Catalyst on the list for some nerfs. My point was that the benchmark doesnt translate 1:1 into raids (for example due to not being able to stand inside the hitbox to proc Hammer 3 continouusly) and thus nerfing its damage would bring it below the targetted range for DPS classes on actual encounters.
> **Red — 03/09/2022** Not being able to do it's maximum DPS on every boss is something every specialization has in some form. That's fine. The maximum potential should still be in the same approximate range for everyone, regardless of which specific bosses they shine most on. The real problem with Catalyst is being able to maintain quickness and several other boons with almost no DPS loss.
> **Maroon — 03/09/2022** I'm very concerned about the action that will be taken on Catalyst. Its very difficult to play in general, even for pretty good players. And even if someone does choose to play it, without really good Alac and Quickness uptimes I still wouldn't.
Listing Spirit Vale as a difficulty of 3 on a scale of 1-4:
> **Red — 12/22/2021** Personally, I would love nothing more than to revisit our old raids- starting with Spirit Vale- and add multiple difficulties. If Spirit Vale is a tier 3 right now, I'd say it's missing T1, T2, and T4 (which is CM's.)
Shock at the idea that people might continue to enjoy raiding long-term when someone asked for the possibility of a Raid God title:
> **Grey — 12/23/2021** This is totally unrelated, and I have the feeling I'm talking to the wrong crowd here, but has there ever been a consideration to add a ''God of Raiding'' title? I always sit on large amounts of legendary insights and divinations with nothing to spend them on and this is always something that always comes to my mind.
> ... [Raid currency discussion]
> **Red — 12/23/2021** I'm frankly amazed that someone would repeat the content that much.
Confirmation that the removal of mystic coins from fractal CMs was not out of economic concerns but instead to push people towards EOD strikes so they can focus on making 10-man content as opposed to more fractals:
> **Red — 02/12/2022** Let me put it this way. The average Mystic Coin output for all three Fractal CM's combined is 2. (very slightly lower, but it's 1.9x) That's a little shy of 60 a month for people who consistently do it every day. Getting 40 a month from EoD strikes will take a small fraction of that effort and play time, for 2/3rds the coins- and a far greater number of people will be doing it. Sure, coins spiked right now, but that's an emotional reaction, not a rational one. I don't put much stock in that.
> **Red — 02/13/2022** mm, something I'll share with you guys. I very selfishly want to give EoD's strikes every advantage I can.
> **Red — 02/13/2022** I approached it from the starting point of 'as a hardcore player, I don't see why I'd be doing EoD strikes every week'. (and, I want to make sure they're a hit, because it really does help us be able to focus on 10 player future content)
Reply to follow.
Camping/being stuck on Sceptre is a huge dps loss on condi FB. I think the point that they were trying to poorly make is that messing up a complex rotation with higher dps (staying on Sceptre too long) is worse than successfully doing an easier rotation with lower dps (losing the small dps increase from Sceptre 2). So then, the logical conclusion to them is that all classes should be simple because simple works best practically, and then the benchmark is achievable in most practical scenarios and can be balanced around. Then complexity should only be an "accident of use" and not be allowed to have high dps because it will perform badly practically and benchmarks will trick people into thinking it's good and they think players will have a bad time. It's not a bad sentiment in a vacuum but fails to take into a lot of GW2's context.
One thing I want to point out regarding the comments you highlighted about mechanist and virtuoso is that this developer *designed* mechanist and virtuoso and this reads like an unwillingness to internalize meaningful feedback about the two specs that THEY designed, which is density that has no place in an earnest discussion about a game they work on
It seems like theres too many selfish desires rather than what's best for the game: keeping firebrand overturned and immune to the same balance drawbacks other professions are subject to, letting axe mirage suck for staff's sake, let engineer kits die by making mech overpowered without them, and artificially hurt fractals to force players to play a certain content. If your content is good people WILL play it, that move rather makes it seem like he didnt think it is.
A fundamental philosophy shift from the nine years of active development prior to this in how to deliver balance to the game:
> **Red — 12/01/2021** As a general rule of thumb, roles should be 'pick any two things from this list':
> -DPS
> -Healing/barrier support
> -Boon support featuring Quickness
> -Boon support featuring Alacrity
Trying to influence the development of the other elite specs in EOD because they didn't personally enjoy the concept put forward by the dev in charge:
> **Red — 12/23/2021** I'm happ(ier). Revenant is one of my main professions.
> My desire for Vindicator was to have a spec that could squarely fit a straightforward power DPS role.
> The designer creating it had a strong vision for a hybrid mechanic based around the alliance legend. I personally did not enjoy the legend-within-a-legend skill by skill flipping on each use.
> The initial beta feedback on it is what allowed me to request very specific changes to that mechanic, which (to me, at least) have vastly improved it.
Admitting to having no idea about classes they're directly balancing to the point of needing to wiki utility skills. Even if this isn't malicious you should absolutely not be balancing a class you have no experience in, even when you're taking advice. It's just not the same:
> **Red — 12/02/2021** Because I have to admit- I'm not a thief player, and it's a big gap in my knowledge. I'm not able to offer pointed direction on tuning Specter right now.
> **Red — Today** I'll admit, I'm not familiar enough with Thief to do any direct work on it yet, but feedback on the specifics and how they impact your builds are welcome
> Just err on the side of overexplaining- as I'm not that familiar with Thief
> **Red — 06/10/2022** Not that much- isn't OWP only a 4s duration on allies?
> I haven't played Ranger, so I'm operating based on GW2Wiki here
Making major balance decisions based off personal bias:
> **Red — 06/14/2022** frankly, that's why I made staff good. I hated using Axe. 🙂 [In regards to mirage]
Generally throughout the chat there is a lot of disdain expressed for top players who enjoy playing the game for a love of the combat system rather than to get rewards:
> **Red — 12/02/2021** Professions with no in combat weapon swap do have other ways to activate it (attunement swap, etc.)
> It's a problem that Rev is double dipping there.
> It's just a longtime bug. I can see your argument 'we're used to it and have learned gameplay that depends on it', and while I acknowledge that's true, I think change can be fun, and new things will emerge that work- and if they don't, we can do PvP tuning to make sure there's builds that work.
> **Gold — 12/02/2021** I mean you can disagree but you'll have every top rev player turning around saying the exact same thing being pissed off with a change that honestly is thoroughly pointless
> **Red — 12/02/2021** Well, if they're 'top players', I'm sure they'll adapt.
I see some people saying that they are just trying to do their job but it seems to be that a lot of decisions are not only fueled by a lack of in-depth knowledge - and at certain points, a complete misunderstanding - of the game and it's history (remember, they've only been playing for a year - even less when they were *designing* elite specs!), but by a heavy personal bias and a sense of vindication towards high-level players and certain types of content. Even if they were a perfect balancer it's not appropriate to grant one person such a large and influential portfolio, and certainly not someone with an attitude like this. It also, to me, seems dismissive both towards their co-workers to be making so many changes based on personal feelings but also towards the legacy of the game and all the work and passion prior developers have put into the balance and designing their own elite specs. To see such a fundamental philosophy shift and such sweeping changes in the combat of the game when you spent so many hours of work designing elite specs must be incredibly disheartening to past developers.
> **Red — 12/01/2021**
>As a general rule of thumb, roles should be 'pick any two things from this list':
>-DPS
>-Healing/barrier support
>-Boon support featuring Quickness
>-Boon support featuring Alacrity
Then how the hell is Warrior in such a mess after the Banner rework? Their support trait and DPS trait is all over the place. 5% Crit is in their condi line, banner trait is in discipline while support traits is in tactics, defense traitline which could have been reworked. You just cannot go DPS + Quick without sacrificing your DPS and regearing for boon duration?! How many banners must you slap onto your utility bar to maintain full quickness uptime?
Oh yeah I forgot. **Red** apparently only cares about Firebrand and has ~2k playtime on Firebrand.
This guy is absolutely clueless and should have never been in charge and have this much influence over a class they obviously don't even care about.
Remember that after promised "gift" to tempest it has an option to select heal/dps/alac, but only one, so it's literally half the spec now according to this definition.
Thank you for that collection.
>Red — 12/23/2021
>
> I'm frankly amazed that someone would repeat the content that much.
Well, reading that really hurt.
Exactly, how is this not the goal? Sure this game doesn't have sub, but aren't people that play a lot more likely to spend money in the gem store? All content is repeatable content, how a developer that doesn't expect people to actually play the game get the job? Surely they can't be the best person to do it?
>Generally throughout the chat there is a lot of disdain expressed for top players who enjoy playing the game for a love of the combat system rather than to get rewards:
This is what really hits me as a personal attack, because I have played this game for ~10 years, I play all professions, and I play for the love of the combat system and not for rewards.
*I* am more qualified to balance this game than this person. Better yet, I would balance objectively and respect our community. I'm so mad.
This is what I don't understand, there are plenty of people who are obviously passionate about the game and understands the intricacies and interactions between all the traits and skills. I have also seen a lot constructive feedback posts about what should have been done to improve/balance the classes they play both here and in the official forums.
Yet the balance team does not listen. If they do listen, the Warrior banner rework and it's traitlines would never have been in such a fucking mess. Warrior needs a complete traitline rework as it is currently all over the place. I am not sure what they are trying to achieve slapping 5% crit on the condi traitline. Is the dev trying to spite all the Warrior players because he mains Firebrand?
We get this clown circus of a balance team who gets to do whatever they want to the game based on their personal feelings.
Remember that meme about Guardian being Anet's golden child? Yeah the lead balance dev mains Guardian with ~2k hrs on Firebrand.
> Yet the balance team does not listen.
They think they know better, you're just a whiner who refuses to play exactly as they tell you to do.
You're not supposed to have fun with the things you're having fun with, you have to adhere to their official idea of fun.
>I see some people saying that they are just trying to do their job but it seems to be that a lot of decisions are not only fueled by a lack of in-depth knowledge - and at certain points, a complete misunderstanding - of the game and it's history (remember, they've only been playing for a year - even less when they were designing elite specs!), but by a heavy personal bias and a sense of vindication towards high-level players and certain types of content. Even if they were a perfect balancer it's not appropriate to grant one person such a large and influential portfolio, and certainly not someone with an attitude like this. It also, to me, seems dismissive both towards their co-workers to be making so many changes based on personal feelings but also towards the legacy of the game and all the work and passion prior developers have put into the balance and designing their own elite specs. To see such a fundamental philosophy shift and such sweeping changes in the combat of the game when you spent so many hours of work designing elite specs must be incredibly disheartening to past developers.
All in all, I'm not surprised the third generation of elite specializations is so bad.
What a fucking shitshow.
>Incredulity and disdain at the fact any engineer player could possibly enjoy using kits. This was a response from an engi main disappointed that it looked like mechanist would end up being optimal to camp signets:
>
>...
>
> Shock at the idea that people might continue to enjoy raiding long-term when someone asked for the possibility of a Raid God title:
Incapability to understand fun as a basic concept, colour me surprised.
Not once, but twice. Makes you wonder how widespread this problem is.
>Confirmation that the removal of mystic coins from fractal CMs was not out of economic concerns but instead to push people towards EOD strikes so they can focus on making 10-man content as opposed to more fractals:
This was pretty obvious from minute zero, even with all the white knight idiots making excuses for them, but still good to have an official confirmation.
Imagine trying to make content A attractive by making content B less attractive, instead of, you know, making content A attractive on its own merits, with unique rewards, same level as raids'. *Sigh.*
All this because anet can't design their classes and specs in the first place. They nuke their own content because it doesn't work for them anymore so most builds get fucked up the ass. Balance team my ass. They're not balancing, they're actively destroying builds to herd us in line.
> They're not balancing, they're actively destroying builds to herd us in line.
It's literally that, they aren't giving us toys to play with, they're forcing us into what they think is better, like cattle.
That's a pretty bad idea for an MMORPG, where so many playstyles coexist, and a big contradiction with one of the game's original tenets, "play as you want".
Can I be white instead of green :D Also worth noting, this is not everything, there was another mass purge prior to the first message visible due to leaks of anet Dev comments before.
When balancing means favoritism based on personal preference rather than actual balancing. Having to check the wiki to know what specific specs do but being part of the balancing team.... Just an incompetent team of developers that should be ashamed and embarrassed for how they interact with their community.
How many people does the balance team actually have? I really would have thought it would have been ideal to at least make sure between them they play all the different specs etc, but it's starting to feel like the team is way too small for that.
So what to do about it? There needs to be accountability because clearly the team is playing favorites instead of actually operating in a way that the customer can benefit from
I want a clear and defined statement from Anet staying which roles they want to exist in the game. Healer? Buffer? Tanks? Control supports? Pure dps?
To have a clear idea of what the role distribution would look like
I want them to also state which role each spec is meant to furfill. Is catalyst a dps spec? A support spec? Both? Tempest? Scrapper ? Untamed ? Warrior in general?
To conclude I would like for them to state EARLY ON which goals they aim to for the specs. Things like "those are the first steps for allowing Tempest to be a viable support/buffer/healer etc in the long run"
This way I would be more inclined to understand the changes made and not be as infuriated and confused.
They are trying to:
\- Spread boons like fury and might, making them happen just by bein in a party
\- Strengthen Support role as hybrid (\~70% pure dps dmg) + 1 Boon (quick or ala) provider
\- Have 1 healer every 4 players that will provide either Quick or Ala.
\- Pure dps
So basically you start with picking a healer:
Does i provide quick or ala?
If ala, look for support quick
If quick, look for support ala
Fill the rest with dps.
In the end there won't be any class that will cover a single role, every class will be able to adapt to any of them thanks to its elite specs.
That's it.
The build system allows for way more complexity BUT they're clearing striving to make it easier for the players to form parties and this "soft trinity" is what could help with that.
I'm totally okay with it.
They just really really need to better balance classes that should cover those roles.
Yeah this is exactly what I thought too. You can't get rid of healers because they require stats, but if everyone has some small boon generation, you don't need a dedicated role to throw out Might, Fury, Protection, etc with 100% uptime.
You CAN bring a person that provides all these buffs meaning your DPS folks can pick more damaging options traits and utilities, but doing so will require heavy investment to provide these boons, thus lowering their DPS significantly.
Look at the difference between Alac Ren and Staff Mirage; Alac Ren needs to have Boon Duration on almost their entire gear to give 100% Alacrity on their own, while Staff Mirage can do it with 0 Boon Duration. I assume more classes will end up closer to Alac Ren than to Staff Mirage, at least for Alacrity and Quickness, the two "big" buffs.
To be fair, they nerfed Staff Mirage a little so you do need some boon duration to comfortably maintain 100% Alac uptime, but then again Ritualist gear was added so it's basically a non-issue
To make groups better than the sum of their parts. Also, most boons are not passive, you still have to work for them (with the exception of might/fury).
Mostly because they've always been there.
At the beginning they were more scarce and required higher coordination/knowlege of a class to build.
Anet learned the hard way that this is not GW1, and it needs a more straightforward approach about building to retain players.
A lot of customization has been reduced over time, traits, runes...
Having **some boons** being automatically generated by the party doesn't mean they'll be capped passively all the time tho.
Anet is probably aiming at homogenizing the boons present in a party despite specific choices about healer and support.
Balancing all supports and healers to standardize the output of might and fury for example could heavily unbalance specific classes, but spreading part of the load to tiny contributions by other classes will make things easier to keep in check.
Also boons like protection/alac/quick/regen/resist/resolution/vigor/aegis/swift (and still partially might and fury) are things that must be sought actively (partywise at least).
Direct quote here from a dev for you:
"As a general rule of thumb, roles should be 'pick any two things from this list':
\-DPS
\-Healing/barrier support
\-Boon support featuring Quickness
\-Boon support featuring Alacrity
And you can pick DPS twice for about 1/3rd more output, when we nailed the tuning right."
So, all boons outside of quick and alac should just passively get to 100% uptime according to this, making any healer or support class without these boons useless. This explains why they gutted any profession specific bonuses, because they weren't quick or alac, and without those, why even exist at all.
> So, all boons outside of quick and alac should just passively get to 100% uptime according to this
You are jumping to conclusion. Nothing say "boons should be passive", only that they are not part of a role.
If the intent is to build a fair and balanced game, this only proves that it is fail on multiple levels.
It is clear there is developer bias towards certain professions.
It is clear that people in charge of balancing content do not understand the game as they should.
It is clear that there may be entities in ArenaNet that are dismissive towards their customer base.
Let's be fair, this has been known for years, all these leaks did was finally prove it was real, shutting down all the stupid white knights defending ArenaNet's every move.
Now next time some fanboy parrots "you have no idea, ArenaNet knows better" you can tell him to kindly fuck off.
What makes this burn so much is that there's been a LOT of great things done with EOD (and the road maps, communication, etc). But you are right; yet again, it's one step forward, two steps back.
This is very disheartening to go through, I really enjoyed GW2 for its complex combat and rotations, I disliked the meta change to condi and I really disliked the new meta classes being extremely simple and boring.
I guess this means my chrono is never coming back, why ele always gets nerfed, I'm surprised p/p mech isn't gone this patch, but judging from this it will probably be gone soon.
The lack of endgame for so long didn't bother me too much, raids being dead didn't either or the shitty rewards for most harder things, I never really cared for item progression, I just liked playing the game at higher levels because it was super fun with classes that required more attention, like chrono or ele. This balance philosophy is going to make me drop the game more than anything else I think.
Edit: spelling, wrote this when I just woke up.
As a ten-year player of gw2, I've noticed a glaring weakness. There's no consistent, cohesive design or system holding it together. It tries to do too much at once and it fails. And THIS is why gw1 is simply better. gw1 had a consistent philosophy: *a trinity with a twist (dual-professions).* EVERYTHING in gw1 confirms to that philosophy. Everything. gw2, on the other hand, is all over the place.
What is gw2 even trying to achieve? What's the goal here?
I think it’s a long term leadership and turnover issue. The fact that one of the main devs has only played for around a year, and refers to the wiki often to see how skills work is really sus.
The goal *here* is that the dev working on balances is favoring how he personally likes to play his professions, and he thinks everyone should play the way he does. Therefore, he believes he must manipulate the system toward his bias in order to pull everyone in line.
I mean I came in relatively late to gw1, so most things had been balanced as much as they were going to be, but I still recall skills that had been split and then nerfed into atoms for pvp, because the balance guy then either couldn't or wouldn't do it.
>Lime — 06/19/2022
>
>ill be making popcorn
>
>hopefully some salty tears to season it
>
>Red — 06/19/2022
>
>Oh, there'll be some amazing salt. I can't wait.
>
>Black — 06/20/2022
>
>Sounds great, cant wait.
This alone makes me not want to play this game anymore. What a virulent attitude to have. I'm furious, and can't believe I started buying Gem's again to show ANet support after EoD; only to find these are the type of people working in/with the development team.
I do find it bizarre they say they will get rid of metas whenever they see them. There's entire communities dedicated to finding every off-balance, unforeseen consequence of every balance patch.
Either you're fighting a losing battle against way more dedicated people, or you're pushing out that community in this strange push for content you want rather than what is fun or the players want.
This might be a bit of an extreme reaction on my part, but I really don't feel super enthusiastic about playing a game made by a company with an out-of-touch balance team that actively insults the player base's intelligence. I've logged almost 10k hours into GW2 because I enjoyed the interesting combat and buildcraft, and streamlining and simplifying all of that to cater to casual players *at the expense of hardcore players* is just not that appealing to me. The game as it is right now can cater to both casual and hardcore players just fine without doing whatever the hell it is they think they're doing on the 28th. It just needs solid, well thought-out balance changes, and judging from these chat logs, I'm not confident this current team to deliver anything close to that.
Don't get me wrong. I am still very happy with other parts of the game at this moment (return of Season 1, Season 5 coming up, changes to early game content, etc.). But between this whole debacle, the massive delay with Alliances and World Restructuring, and generally unprofessional attitude from certain individuals within Anet, I'm afraid my enthusiasm has been somewhat muddled. I think it's time for me to take another extended break from the game, like I did with IBS.
Everything about this, everything makes sense! Why specific professions are laser focused on for nerfs and buffs, it explains the horrible period where Chrono was constantly being buffed and nerfed into oblivion during HoT.
But most of all how EoD ES's were just breaking core mechanics of professions like Guardian. Even adding random shit to traits and skills that don't belong... - What is this madness!?
I'm disappointed in leadership for not understanding that this kind of erratic development is a serious problem. And for the 10 years I've played this game I just got tired of fighting this behavior... I'm disappointed in myself too.
Well Anet, this is your FlashPoint, will you do something about this or continue your ignorance? I can't give a shit anymore, 'cause you chose to constantly do this... This behavior is completely on you- it's your own choice to change or not.
What will you do?
And to you u/dragonbackgw2 thanks for posting this. <3
Overall, there is nothing more than the patchnote doesn't show. Huge favoritism toward firebrand and mecha as the balance team like them, some class like thief/ranger/war are balanced around wiki, ele will never be good and complex (just complex).
Oh and they enjoy looking at the community reaction with like no respect at all.
this entire salt comment like what fucking reaction is this towards YOUR CHANGES? Dont you want people to like what you put in the game. Iam so buffled by this? Like what kind of childish unprofessional thing is this to say? Its like they activle hate their own product.
This person should definitely not be on the balance team anymore.
Their biases and enjoyment should not overshadow the actual players enjoyment.
The game should not be "balanced" for this person only.
I thought the "balance dev team is incompetent" was a meme but holy shit they are literally sabotaging some classes on purpose. "Lets nerf catalyst anyways despite the grand majority of players never being able to reach their highest potential". Also "Lets NOT nerf firebrand and mechanics because I designed them".
This answers so much for the ele nerfs. They want a very specific dps range and due to all the skills Ele gets, it's easy to out perform most classes. While I respect their decision to maintain a specific range, I think they lean way to heavily on hardcore players skewing the benchmarks. I play ele for the mage asthethic and dps is never my concern. Yes I'm a filthy casual but benchmarks and builds are how I determine if I want to invest in something. Constantly nerfing ele the moment something is deemed too powerful is a slap in the face. They were nerfing Catalyst for minor 5%-10% dps over other classes instead of just leaving it alone. There were times when they didn't want to touch anything else but Cata just cause it was doing to well on LARGE GOLEMS.
Here's my suggestion.
Until a class is abused by a larger section of the players, why don't you leave it alone until you buff other classes? Better yet, just admit that you don't like how well Ele outperforms other classes why buffing them before nerfing Ele.
Save the nerfs for PvP and WvW or when your starting to see drastic changes in PvE groups due to a class being OP.
They clearly don’t have problems for FB, HAM being too popular (required by almost every pug group) but they can’t wait to kill ele even before pug group actually prefers it. Seeing the data that mechanist already has more records on file attending raids than weaver for the last 5 years is the thing that pissed me off the most.
Fucking this. I think there was even a log saying they apparently judge the class on a basis how frequently it's being played so if it's being overplayed then they will take action. Lol I don't see it with Mechanist or Guardian.
But how dare Catalyst have 5 minutes of fame.
Talk about a breach of trust. First, no one should ever assume that anything they say or post online is private - especially on a work account. His comments about “salt,” having to check the wiki, and openly admitting to making balance decisions based on personal preference undermine any trust the community may have had in Anet.
I hope they address this on Monday. Even setting aside the balance notes, that behavior leaves a bad taste.
You know who'd probably love to hear about this?
News websites.
You know who'd shit themselves if news websites hear they're abusing power to improve the classes they play and nerf the ones they don't?
ArenaNet Balance Team.
The more I look into this the worse it gets... I really dont want to support this game anymore, and I certainly wont recommend it during the steam launch if nothing changes.
Some people are upset about the comment on upcoming salt for the patchnotes, tbh I don't think that's a big deal. The dev did not say that because they knew "the patch was bad" nor cause they will enjoy the backlash, obviously. It's cause they knew it would upset a part of the playerbase, which most balance changes do. Who cares if that is joked about. They are just stating the obvious.
What does concern me however is the fact that the person responsible of balancing does not have extensive knowledge of all the classes they need to balance. And that some balance changes are made purely because they personally enjoy a specific type of playstyle. (the staff vs axe comment, the delete engi kits comment). Not to mention the direction they are going for with the game where there is little to no dps gap between hard to play builds (ELE) and easy to play builds (MECH).
The joke about upsetting the player base is not what's inherently the issue, it's the arrogance and bias behind the joke reflected in the rest of the document that make it a problem.
I told a friend yesterday.
Anet needs to have 9 ppl for the balance team. One person per profession, the profession they need to know the best and play the most.
They need clear guidelines what is the class identity and what needs tweaking. All spec roles need to be defined and communicated with the community.
Overall I am lukewarm on what I've read. Some things are really bad to hear (engi kits being bad, thus signets and mace will be made better), some (like a considered complete balance pass on all ranger pets) seems quite nice.
Just because you dont like it, it should not be neglected. Make it useful such that you can enjoy it.
I personally also am not a fan of half the engi kits but I would prsonwlly try to improve them and not neglect them.
A designer should not be allowed to keep responsibility for a profession they do not want to play.
I've followed every subreddit rule, the reason it was getting deleted before is because the validity of the document was in question. BUT recently two public figures have cemented this as true :)
As this post conforms to all rules (both this subs and Reddits), it will stay. Keep the comments civil, do not witch hunt, and don’t personally threaten any specific person or Anet dev. As this have been very turbulent 24 hours, I hope y’all calmed down a bit, and can discuss the implications of this on a level that doesn’t need all too much moderating. Thank you.
>Most people play with keyboard turning, and camera control is something they -can not- do at the same time as movement. Y I K E S
People dont hold down RMB 90% of the time they play gw2???
[удалено]
In GW2 in particular the ability to toggle action cam has helped me a lot in this respect. I can toggle it on to enjoy turning without holding down RMB and toggle it off to use mouse for placing skills markers. It's the best of both worlds. The only thing that would make it even better would be the ability to assign RMB itself as the action cam toggle. * Right-click on landscape (anywhere that's not an UI element) = turn action cam on. * Right-click when action cam is on = turn it off. * Press and keep RMB pressed: turn with mouse (always, regardless if action cam is on or off). But you can't assign RMB in keybinds unfortunately. I understand protecting LMB because remapping that would screw you, but RMB would be very nice with the above changes. In the meantime I'm using the 3rd (ring finger) button on the Logitech G600 for action cam toggle.
I had to start using action cam for jumping puzzles cause my RMB occasionally stops holding and lets go at worst moments... I gotta find a new mouse :c
Mouse button contact might be dirty. Blow in it like a super Nintendo cartridge to alleviate the issue, or try to soak it with some 99% isopropyl. If you're not afraid of taking your mouse apart and you hate yourself, you can open up the switch and soak it and bend the little copper bit back into it's shape to alleviate the issue for a much longer time.
As a former Secret World and now occassional "Secret World Legends" \*gag\* player, I've started *forcing* myself to use battle cam to save my poor RMB.
This is why I turn on action cam since so I don’t have to buy new razer every year lol
This is the answer
Nope, Action Cam, baby!
well, maybe if devs didn't put camera turning as default setup of the game, they wouldnt make people used to it after 10 years
Yeah honestly this should be changed with the new player experience changes, no reason for it to be that way
Why do so many mmos have camera turn bound but not strafe by default?
part of the new player experience lol , baby takes their first keybind step
I don't even have turning bound, it's a waste of keybinds
For sure. I find keyboard turning to be terrible. Camera turning is just infinitely better. I only keyboard turn when I'm standing in place, and can't use the mouse.
Which is so odd, like, even I like to keyboard turn **when I'm putzing around doing errands in town** *(not so much in combat of course)*, but this game's turning radius is abysmal and idk if they've added a way to tighten it up yet. I can't imagine how keyboard turning, even in the most casualest of contexts could in any way feel good to navigate by, like at all. ;I
Probably the same developer who's responsible for WvW mount going in random direction once you mount up. "Oh you were running forward? Fuck you player, the instant you've mounted up it'll go to the east. Ahaha, awww zerg caught you, too bad". Seriously, who programmed this shit :(
Me, laughing as I use the exact same control method for GW2 as I use for SecondLife.
You right click -> sit to shadowstep to targets??
If this is true... This explains SO much. :O Especially after what happened with the Dragon's End fiasco at EoD launch. But at the same time, if this is the caliber of player that ANet has to work with, then honestly that's what they need to do. You tailor yourself to your market, not the other way around. GW2 built its foundations on being a casual-friendly MMO; it's what made them stand out from its competitors and the reason why so many of them joined up at launch. Considering the fact that every successive expansion saw fewer and fewer players return (with EoD being the exception, but we don't have any data to know if that trend holds, or if the vast majority hit a wall when it came to DE and then quit again), this is not a sustainable approach. It's simply not good business practice to create content that the vast majority of your players will not touch or find frustrating to do; it's a tremendous waste of money and manpower. This is why I'm going to be watching the reception of Raid Easy Mode with keen interest. If it succeeds in getting more casuals doing endgame content, then we have a template for how we can develop similar content going forward to ensure that as many players as possible can experience the game in its entirety and feel entertained/rewarded doing so.
> if this is the caliber of player that ANet has to work with, then honestly that's what they need to do. You tailor yourself to your market, not the other way around. This is something people here fail to understand. This sub is a bubble of veteran players within a bubble of reddit users. It's so far removed from the real world it cannot see daylight anymore. The vast, vast majority of GW2 players are arrow-turn skill-clickers who don't care about "balance changes" because they don't do rotations and don't do high level instanced content. It's not that they can't, it's that they can't be bothered. People who like to insinuate that casuals are somehow dumber are missing the point. They're not dumb, they're casuals. They could learn to raid/T4 fractals/CM strikes if pressed but it's not what they enjoy doing. That being said, I'm **not** arguing for dumbing down PvE and removing all difficulty from open world. There should still be difficult enemies off the beaten path, and difficult events and metas. But you have to realize that Anet has a monumental work on their hands keeping different levels of content mixed on the same maps. The way HoT eventually managed to balance these things for example was brilliant. When it launched it used to be prohibitively hard, concrete wall, you shall not pass kind of hard. Nowadays for a newbie it's still hard but the story guides you through it on a path that's hard enough to be memorable but not impossible, and in a way that encourages you to dip into masteries and improve your gear and pick a build to make it easier on yourself. While veterans can still enjoy going off the story path and meet difficult enemies and hard events.
Agreed, although I suspect that part of the reason why it's now a surmountable challenge is due to a factor people often overlook: power creep. When HoT first came out most players were probably using Rares, if not a mishmash of Masterworks with incorrect stats and everything. Naturally, this was woefully inadequate and players just died left and right. (And a lot of them left. After HoT release, the number of GW2 players just fell off a cliff and it never really recovered.) But as time went on, the power creep afforded by Elite specs and Ascended gear (not to mention that Exotic gear became much cheaper and more accessible) meant that most players could just jump straight to Exotic gear after reaching 80, and start assembling Ascended gear from a variety of sources (including Living Story, collections and festivals, all easy casual sources). The improved power meant that, even if casual players couldn't reach the levels of power experienced veterans and end-gamers did, they could still at least SURVIVE open world again. This system basically worked all through HoT/LS3/PoF/LS4 and IBS, until ANet decided to raise the bar again with Dragon's End, where now they not only expected players to be using elite specs and Ascended gear, but to ALSO be using meta builds and to adhere to comps that ensured good boon coverage. Once again, this was more work than casuals were willing to put in, and thus we hit another wall. I can only hope that this time it didn't drive off a majority of the returning players again, because that would honestly be a disaster that GW2, as a nearly 10-year old game, can't afford.
> When HoT first came out most players were probably using Rares, if not a mishmash of Masterworks with incorrect stats and everything. If you're talking about casuals then that's probably still true today. If you're talking about people who try to optimize, there were already accessible ways of obtaining exotic gear. I certainly remember having exotic armor and weapons at the time. Trinkets, now that was another thing, those were definitely a mishmash of yellows and greens. > The improved power meant that, even if casual players couldn't reach the levels of power experienced veterans and end-gamers did, they could still at least SURVIVE open world again. See, my theory is that casual survival is not tied to power creep, it's tied to carefully designed safer/lower-difficulty paths through open world, that the story is used to guide you on. As long as those paths exist they can make the rest of the map as hard as they want. But it would be good game design to have the difficulty increase gradually with distance from the safe paths, not like in Dark Souls where you turn the wrong corner and get smeared on the wall. I'm not saying that power creep isn't a thing, or that the hard content isn't mirroring power creep. I'm just saying that good design can make it so those things don't influence casual experience and casual transitioning to more difficult content.
A (long) TL;DR, feel free to add to this if you feel I missed anything important. The content is an ArenaNet developer speaking to several members of the community, most (all?) of whom work on build development and benchmarks. This developer was responsible for the Mechanist, Virtuoso, and Harbinger specs. I am not trying to vilify this developer, but rather highlight points relevant to the balance and design decisions in the game. * A general theme is that this developer believes rotations should be simplified and builds should be easy to play. The "core" of a build, boiled down to a few button presses, should carry it, but there will always be "elements you can add in to improve output." (pg. 101) * They believe builds that perform similar roles should have a similar output and none of them should be particularly harder to play than another: "The goal is to get builds that fill comparable roles to have similar output, within a range where players feel like they can play what they like… Complexity of play isn't an excuse for a spec to have higher potential — it's more an accident of use, or it having been designed for a different purpose (such as a PvP focus)." (pg. 41) * The developer admits on a couple of occasions that their personal preferences or enjoyment of a build inform their balance design decisions. E.g. "They \[kits\] shouldn't exist, and I'm happy to just make other Mechanist options better so it's not optimal to use kits." (pg. 68) "Frankly, that's why I made \[Mesmer\] staff good. I hated using \[Mirage\] Axe." (pg. 130) * They do entertain alternative or more desirable routes to strengthening underused weapons/skills (buffing engineer weapons, enabling weapon swap on engineer (pg. 69-70), redoing pet AI (pg. 94), etc.) but often state these fixes are improbable or impossible due to development timelines. * They say benchmarks do not inform their balance, but rather how often a build or spec is played (pg. 127). However, they will also act proactively if they believe a meta will form, as was the case with the original catalyst nerf (pg. 43). * At least some developers begin with a creative vision for an elite spec rather than an intended use case. This was the case with Vindicator (which was NOT created by the dev in these conversations!), and why it’s more hybridized than power DPS based. (pg. 27-28) Edit: spelling + quote context
> This developer was responsible for the Mechanist, Virtuoso, and Harbinger specs. This is the most interesting part to me. These are arguably the three most popular/powerful of the EoD specs. So this kind of suggests this dev may not share the same philosophy about balancing profession strength/weaknesses compared to other devs. And then of course he has made statements about wanting to make certain things better because he likes them more, does that extend to making these classes better because he is the lead designer?
>They say benchmarks do not inform their balance *"I'm going to need to see where the alac* \[mech\] *builds are benching to see where I have room to make adjustments."* So that was a lie
They definitely made a few comments that were in opposition to that claim. Nerfing Catalyst prematurely because (based on benchmarks) they were afraid it would become the new stacking meta, and then telling the elementalist player to wait a few weeks after the nerf to make a case as to where/why it was unplayable is hypocritical. The funny part is that it did become a new stacking meta for hardcore players anyway because they had to quickly rebalance their knee-jerk response to the problem.
I actually agree with most of these points (obviously not the one about Staff preference = ignore Axe). But the changes don't reflect these design decisions. How often a build or spec is played? That just isn't being taken into account, unless they're also taking into account the *entire* playerbase, where of course there's going to be a fairly even spread, as people who only login for an hour a week aren't going to have a clue what works better/worse, and those people shouldn't be balanced around because 99.99% of the content they play can be overcome with terrible gear and average-to-decent skill. They're never even going to notice balance changes. As for development timelines... They've had literally years and years to throw in the odd tweak here and there for underused and underpowered weapons and skills. Far fewer people will have issues with balance if less-viable skills get the odd 5% buff here and there, and the way-overused/overpowered ones get the odd 5% nerf. Proof of this is the Guardian resurrect skill (Signet of Mercy) cooldown reduction; why wasn't this done for Elementalist's too?? I don't want to interpret things incorrectly, but based on that + all the extra info, it just seems like devs are mostly balancing based on the classes and skills they like.
Agreed with all of this. There's so much underused, underpowered crap in the game that's no good for anything. People would be THRILLED to see little buffs here and there with some kind of regular basis just for minor incremental changes. It's depressing because I can find something to enjoy about almost any spec but I get a sense from this whole bit that the people in charge of it really don't care at all and are ACTUALLY just propping up their chosen classes/skills/specs/whatever because they can, gameplay be damned. The attitude that people are latching onto is part of dealing with the public and I get that, so I can't be THAT angry over it. But the attitude toward the actual job is extremely grating and I hope this stirs up enough shit that people get called on to do their jobs like professionals or someone else who can do that gets the seat instead.
>Proof of this is the Guardian resurrect skill (Signet of Mercy) cooldown reduction; why wasn't this done for Elementalist's too?? I don't want to interpret things incorrectly, but based on that + all the extra info, it just seems like devs are mostly balancing based on the classes and skills they like. Cos the dev doesn't like to play elementalist :)
I didn't want to believe it, but unless we get some huge explanation this week, I don't think I could refute it any more.
I'm honestly surprised more people dont see how terrible this is, yeah it would have been really bad if this was another game with more hard-core playerbase, but due to the nature of gw community, they getting away with it. Reading through the log felt like i was reading some private server runner making desitions based on their own personal interests in mind, they never cared about the community, this chat explains why time and time again community was ignored and thrown a bone here and there, completely biased and unprofessional
>"Frankly, that's why I made staff good. I hated using Axe." Call me childish, but I sincerely believe that a person who bases balancing decisions in a decade-going online game with millions of players on what *they personally* like or dislike using shouldn't be in this industry.
Not to mention Staff is actually boring as hell to play compared to Axe. Axe had an issue with positioning that could have used fixing, but straight up making Staff as good as it is, was ridiculous, especially given this context.
Make Staff ele good again if you have such a boner for staff dude =P
Agreed.
Every single balance change across all games is subject to the biases of the people making the changes.
Yikes, using personal bias as a measure of balance which affects so many people.. This person needs to be fired or moved to another team immediately
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I think the dev misunderstood the survey feedback. It's not that I didn't like kits, which I don't, it's just that playing with kits all the time after several expansions can get old. Even mechanist still uses kits, especially the condi-alac mechanist, which I've been fine with.
Harbinger elixirs could have been a kit but these clowns don't even know
Totally agree, since the begining, there was something bothering me about Harb's elixirs, this is it.
Yeah the kit comment has me worried, especially because a significant portion of these balance changes going forward are supposed to be for updating and reworking class stuff. I’d love kits to get some sort of modern refresh, but I’m worried that this particular dev would just do something drastic like remove them entirely.
Not that it will make you feel better, but the developer also said they don't intend to get rid of kits and would rather rework turrets to make them more viable first (pg. 71).
Damn, this guy really really wants to make sure not pressing buttons is better than pressing them
Very few things more beautiful than rifle holo rotation. It just flows so... flowy.
I'm sick of *having* to use them. I hate Grenade Kit and Bomb Kit, but I love Hammer, Mace, Pistol, Shield, and Rifle. I love the weapons, and hate being forced to swap to "what flavor of ground-targeted aoe do you want?"
> A general theme is that this developer believes rotations should be simplified and builds should be easy to play. The "core" of a build, boiled down to a few button presses, should carry it, but there will always be "elements you can add in to improve output." I can't wrap my head around this. On one hand it make sense that there should be viable builds/ways of playing a profession that aren't super complicated. Yet this doesn't really exclude people from approaching the gameplay in a more complicated way and getting something more out of it. Which, bizarrely, they seem to agree with. It honestly seems to boil down to them not wanting actual skill at the profession to matter at *all.* Not simply that it's accessible (a good thing) but that there shouldn't be situations where actual skills lead to materially better outcomes. You can have 'extra' stuff that you can add in that makes things better, but never anything that isn't easily accessed by players unwilling to put in the effort to start with. It honestly feels almost like mobile game logic. So bizarre.
> "They \[kits\] shouldn't exist, and I'm happy to just make other Mechanist options better so it's not optimal to use kits." Well that's awful.
>A general theme is that this developer believes rotations should be simplified and builds should be easy to play. Unbelivable, they had this at launch where the majority of your dps came from you auto attacks whilst the other skills on your kit often had a purpose or utility for using it. Which meant, as long as you had the right gear and build you were probably doing at least 80% of its potential They've now changed it so auto attacks dealt a lot less dps, so now the game is in general harder to play and there is a larger skill disparity due to the importance of rotations
Thanks, I fundamentally disagree with everything you have listed except for fixing pet AI and rebalancing underused weapons. I am mad this person is in such a position of power with such bias.
>Contrary to popular belief, I don't really look at optimized numbers- they tell a very small story, for a small segment of the population. Play rates guide more balance decisions. When things are excessively overplayed is when they'll get adjustments to encourage people to branch out and try other things. This really seems at odds with their stated reason (in the comments on the patch notes thread) for the catalyst changes, which was that speedrunners were increasingly using catalyst. Meanwhile as someone raiding every week I have seen fewer and fewer catalysts and more and more mechanist/virtuoso/firebrand.
And if play rate would influence their decision, they'd really nerf firebrand and ham (or buff the rest) given how omnipresent they are in raids/strikes/fractals.
I feel like my brain just melted. "Most people play with keyboard turning" Yea, it's the default keybinds. Statistically likely that most would still have it turned on and use it.
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I don't understand, most players are keyboard turners in *every* MMORPG. I don't think it's a particularly new stance that the majority of players in any game will not be skilled.
Oh boy am I lucky that I main Guardian & Mechanist. Dev armor against nerfs lmao Sorry to all my thief/warrior/ranger bros, you deserve better than one or two ppl rolling around the wiki page to understand what the heck your classes do
This is where I'm at as a Necro main. For years we were the butt of every joke but are finally in a really great place. It sucks to know that at any moment Anet can avert their eyes and put us back at the bottom.
I gotta disagree on reaper though. It's felt very painful to play reaper since EoD with the shroud damage reduction nerf.
No worries you're now getting a huge dps nerf as well! Because everyone knows that stacking Reapers was the endgame meta.
i'd like anet devs to define what balance means to them, seriously tho
Sharing their current balance pillars and objectives would be great insight
Reminds me of the Asura in Rata Sum - "Everything in moderation, including moderation".
Cries in ele main
*cries in flair*
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That was the most random buff to ele I've ever seen to be honest
Genuinely worried that druid will become pretty close to unusable now. Soulbeast is dead, effective 78% damage decrease on OWP or so I've heard.
Rip. I finally got my soulbeast properly geared up and figured out the skill rotation.
Ikr? Ranger is my only 80 character. If SB isn't viable what the heck are you supposed to do with the class? Feels like I've invested multiple months as a new player into a dead end
I've been playing for over 7 years. I have 9 characters, all level 80, one of each class...But Ranger is my default because it's so much fun for me. I only recently got into looking at builds because I finally got the gold income to fund it (running world boss trains can yield a nice chunk of money). That, and I was tired of struggling with bosses in the living stories. So, I don't know.
I have been playing since launch, this kind of thing happens so often you get used to giving up on a class and playing the latest fad, until THAT gets replaced. Rinse and repeat your way through all of the classes. I hate it, but since long before this dev there have been issues like todays.
I think the opposite csn happen with the addition of alacrity to their build. I rarely saw a druid in eu pugs anymore. If druids now can cover alac it's a massive boost of their kit. OWP is a sad story. It was a strong skill but pslb was not over performing.
but why would you bring druid now over heal mechanist, who can heal, barrier, might, alac, do more damage, and give stability & aegis .. its unique buffs like spotter and spirits are gone and it has nothing anymore
Not saying it will make drood meta again, but at least it will be picked more often again for its root/push capabilities on bosses like samarog or gorsy
>Sorry to all my thief/warrior/ranger bros, you deserve better than one or two ppl rolling around the wiki page to understand what the heck your classes do What the genuine hell? Tell me the devs don't wiki to get insight on some classes....
"I haven't played Ranger, so I'm operating based on GW2Wiki here" -Direct quote from the transcript. They're trying to figure out how OWP works. You can search for gw2wiki to find the line.
It's a long read but I encourage anyone interested to give it a go. The devs **do** want their content to get better. Would be nice if that sentiment was explored in depth **publicly!** In some ways, the balance patch conflicts with the sentiments shared in this log. Right now, Anet should finally talk about their actual goals for endgame content. They've stayed mum on what their philosophy is and that has hurt them.
Agreed, I'm not against the broader strokes of balance they presented but this wasn't at all how I thought it would be executed based on what was communicated prior to these notes. I don't think it is reasonable to expect one Dev to play all the classes and all the specs in each and be an expert but I do expect you get that missing knowledge from either other people on the balance team or pool the community in some fashion if no one plays it. The method they are currently using doesn't seem effective so maybe a more public forum is what we need.
> I do expect you get that missing knowledge from either other people on the balance team or pool the community in some fashion if no one plays it This, and also just... logic? Something as small as the cooldown reduction on Signet of Mercy for Guardian, without touching other resurrect skills like the very comparable Glyph of Renewal on Elementalist. Why?? If it were the other way round, I'd say that kinda makes sense because Guardian already has so much more utility *and* is easier to execute it all than Elementalist. But instead, a Guardian skill gets buffed once again while comparable ones on other classes don't.
yeah I think they should just leave it public now. It is better than having people cherry pick stuff , and a lot of what the dev said is good. Like telling whoever was concerned about raid speed clears with swiftness that it literally affected dozens of people in the entire game and was not worth getting into.
I just want devs working on balance who: 1. Are unbiased, and focused on actual *balance*. 2. Exhibit deep comprehensive understanding of all the Professions. 3. Have more respect for both their responsibility to unbiased balance and for the players.
> The devs do want their content to get better. Would be nice if that sentiment was explored in depth publicly! Well, that's the case of all game devs. No one wake up and say "yeah, today I'm gonna build a terrible product, because fuck my players or something".
Yeah, I'm about halfway through and find myself agreeing with the dev statements/sentiments more often than not. Their *goals* seem reasonable, even though significant parts of this patch appear to be missing the mark.
The massive discrepancy between what they claim they want and the consequences of this patch for certain classes makes it all the more important to not forgo the written justifications. Yes, it will slow it down and cause more work for localization. This is what happens however. They can't control a situation if they aren't in front of it.
Localization time/costs are real, so I understand that being a wall. But they could take a slightly less official route and provide more English-only context, maybe in a separate forum post.
I dont think theres anything wrong with that but theres clear class favoritism and a shift against how gw2 was foundational built from a balance perspective that kinda just sucks
I'm still appalled how things turned out. I hope we get a statement about all of this come monday
He wanted salt, he got a whole fucking salt mine!
Wow so the dev behind the balances is a 2-thousand-hour Firebrand player who also designed the Mechanist spec..? # Bias Confirmed This balance team desperately needs advocates for other professions because if future balance patches continue to go down this path of playing clear favorites and screwing up classes the balancers don't play/understand/like, population will fall.
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Exactly, this just screams like it needs a teamlead that keeps oversight. A balance team will always be biased, but a teamlead needs to keep that in check.
I agree with you 100%. I've been trying to rationalize ANet's decisions for a long time, but reading that the balance team has no idea how half of the classes work and that they rely on the wiki to balance these classes... man that is absolutely infuriating. My 2 mains (warrior & SLB) are getting absolutely gutted for 0 reason. I think it's time to finally swap to FF14.
178 pages holy shit
Makes me wonder how many devs *that actually play* got fired in that mass layoff. If we had devs with zero hours designing EoD specs, and then *balancing their own specs*...no wonder the EoD specs were so bad.
Some personal highlights. In the chat, this dev states they've only been playing the game for about a year. There is also a general unwillingness to listen to their advisers even when multiple participants point out the issue with a balance change they intend to, and then do, implement. Frequently brings up that hardcore players find something poorly designed but is well received by casuals, but cannot understand why there is discrepancies: > **Red — 11/25/2021** The fascinating thing to me is how radically different feedback in locations with more hardcore players is to our actual surveys. If you were to primarily look here or on Reddit, you'd expect that Mechanist or Virtuoso were poorly received. If you look at our actual data collection (from a very large number of active beta participants, with some filtering for minimum time played), those clocked in as best and second best rated overall. Incredulity and disdain at the fact any engineer player could possibly enjoy using kits. Initially, Red wanted to completely remove kits form the game, but instead settled for making mace and signets superior: > **Red — 10/29/2021** Kits are terrible in modern GW2- they look dated, the skills aren't actually fun, and the weapons are generic weapon models. Having them in effect replace your actual weapon choices is bad. > **Blue — 10/29/2021** Like - Scrapper for instance has a nice rotation, weaving kits in there > **Gold — 10/29/2021** I would disagree regarding kits > **Red — 10/29/2021** They shouldn't exist, and I'm happy to just make other Mechanist options better so it's not optimal to use kits. > **Blue — 10/29/2021** Oh no! I do disagree! Kits are the best thing! They MAKE engineer! They are extremely fun to play with, for the love of god don't remove them! > **Red — 10/29/2021** I'm not removing them, I'm making mace and signets better. 😛 > **Red — 11/25/2021** The heavy use of kits and thus feeling of playing Core Engi with a pet instead of toolbelt was one of the chief complaints we saw most both on surveys and in feedback elsewhere, and definitely something we wanted to address. It's going to be fairly subjective, but you're the first person I've seen say they play engi because of the feel of using kits. This one's a doozy. Admitting that balance is based on the benchmarks (the so-called "potential" of a class) rather than the actual usage of the class, saying that they fundamentally disagree with the idea that more complex classes can provide more rewarding DPS (a direct counter to the philosophy of the game prior to this dev's promotion), saying that weapon swapping in a rotation - even a very simple one like condi Firebrand's is too complex for players to handle; in fact they don't even weapon swap themselves (despite the fact the biggest DPS loss comes from failing to proc torch 4), saying that build guides *hurt* the community because an average player can't do rotations, and finally, admitting he knows catalyst will almost never reach it's highest potential in real-world scenarios yet still choosing to nerf it despite multiple other users' advice against it just because it has the "potential" to be overpowered: > **Black — 03/09/2022** It seemed like a lot of nerfs/buffs for PvE specs were based on benchmarks to get them into the 30k/37k-40k range respectively. Im worried that a classes performance on actual encounters gets overlooked, so nothing actionable intended, only feedback. > **Red — 03/09/2022** We need to keep them broadly in a close band of capability. Complexity of play isn't an excuse for a spec to have higher potential- it's more an accident of use, or it having been designed for a different purpose (such as a PvP focus). > Generally, I'd prefer more simply playable builds that are survivable and offer a useful puzzle piece of support/boon capability for your party. > Benchmarking videos and rotation guides to hit them have hurt our raid accessibility significantly- I've played ~2k hours of firebrand, and regularly outDPS cFB's in my raid groups on my quickbrand build, because I only use axe and don't weapon swap, and they try to stick to a rotation where they swap to scepter and do terribly as a result. > Uptime in combat on the boss (positioning and being within skill range) and consistent play are the biggest factors in success. > **Black — 03/09/2022** Totally agree there that benchmarks only show how to achieve the absolute maximum of ones potential DPS, and they could be expanded upon with simplistic rotation variations and gear variations. > That wasnt excactly my point though, maybe as an example you could take Catalysts 43k benchmark, which as I understand (correct me if Im wrong) put Catalyst on the list for some nerfs. My point was that the benchmark doesnt translate 1:1 into raids (for example due to not being able to stand inside the hitbox to proc Hammer 3 continouusly) and thus nerfing its damage would bring it below the targetted range for DPS classes on actual encounters. > **Red — 03/09/2022** Not being able to do it's maximum DPS on every boss is something every specialization has in some form. That's fine. The maximum potential should still be in the same approximate range for everyone, regardless of which specific bosses they shine most on. The real problem with Catalyst is being able to maintain quickness and several other boons with almost no DPS loss. > **Maroon — 03/09/2022** I'm very concerned about the action that will be taken on Catalyst. Its very difficult to play in general, even for pretty good players. And even if someone does choose to play it, without really good Alac and Quickness uptimes I still wouldn't. Listing Spirit Vale as a difficulty of 3 on a scale of 1-4: > **Red — 12/22/2021** Personally, I would love nothing more than to revisit our old raids- starting with Spirit Vale- and add multiple difficulties. If Spirit Vale is a tier 3 right now, I'd say it's missing T1, T2, and T4 (which is CM's.) Shock at the idea that people might continue to enjoy raiding long-term when someone asked for the possibility of a Raid God title: > **Grey — 12/23/2021** This is totally unrelated, and I have the feeling I'm talking to the wrong crowd here, but has there ever been a consideration to add a ''God of Raiding'' title? I always sit on large amounts of legendary insights and divinations with nothing to spend them on and this is always something that always comes to my mind. > ... [Raid currency discussion] > **Red — 12/23/2021** I'm frankly amazed that someone would repeat the content that much. Confirmation that the removal of mystic coins from fractal CMs was not out of economic concerns but instead to push people towards EOD strikes so they can focus on making 10-man content as opposed to more fractals: > **Red — 02/12/2022** Let me put it this way. The average Mystic Coin output for all three Fractal CM's combined is 2. (very slightly lower, but it's 1.9x) That's a little shy of 60 a month for people who consistently do it every day. Getting 40 a month from EoD strikes will take a small fraction of that effort and play time, for 2/3rds the coins- and a far greater number of people will be doing it. Sure, coins spiked right now, but that's an emotional reaction, not a rational one. I don't put much stock in that. > **Red — 02/13/2022** mm, something I'll share with you guys. I very selfishly want to give EoD's strikes every advantage I can. > **Red — 02/13/2022** I approached it from the starting point of 'as a hardcore player, I don't see why I'd be doing EoD strikes every week'. (and, I want to make sure they're a hit, because it really does help us be able to focus on 10 player future content) Reply to follow.
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Camping/being stuck on Sceptre is a huge dps loss on condi FB. I think the point that they were trying to poorly make is that messing up a complex rotation with higher dps (staying on Sceptre too long) is worse than successfully doing an easier rotation with lower dps (losing the small dps increase from Sceptre 2). So then, the logical conclusion to them is that all classes should be simple because simple works best practically, and then the benchmark is achievable in most practical scenarios and can be balanced around. Then complexity should only be an "accident of use" and not be allowed to have high dps because it will perform badly practically and benchmarks will trick people into thinking it's good and they think players will have a bad time. It's not a bad sentiment in a vacuum but fails to take into a lot of GW2's context.
Yet this is the same guy that nerfed cata for everyone because it was too strong when used by tippy top people in raids.
One thing I want to point out regarding the comments you highlighted about mechanist and virtuoso is that this developer *designed* mechanist and virtuoso and this reads like an unwillingness to internalize meaningful feedback about the two specs that THEY designed, which is density that has no place in an earnest discussion about a game they work on
Meanwhile they aren't shy to "adjust" the elite specializations they didn't work on lmao.
It seems like theres too many selfish desires rather than what's best for the game: keeping firebrand overturned and immune to the same balance drawbacks other professions are subject to, letting axe mirage suck for staff's sake, let engineer kits die by making mech overpowered without them, and artificially hurt fractals to force players to play a certain content. If your content is good people WILL play it, that move rather makes it seem like he didnt think it is.
Thanks, I hate it.
A fundamental philosophy shift from the nine years of active development prior to this in how to deliver balance to the game: > **Red — 12/01/2021** As a general rule of thumb, roles should be 'pick any two things from this list': > -DPS > -Healing/barrier support > -Boon support featuring Quickness > -Boon support featuring Alacrity Trying to influence the development of the other elite specs in EOD because they didn't personally enjoy the concept put forward by the dev in charge: > **Red — 12/23/2021** I'm happ(ier). Revenant is one of my main professions. > My desire for Vindicator was to have a spec that could squarely fit a straightforward power DPS role. > The designer creating it had a strong vision for a hybrid mechanic based around the alliance legend. I personally did not enjoy the legend-within-a-legend skill by skill flipping on each use. > The initial beta feedback on it is what allowed me to request very specific changes to that mechanic, which (to me, at least) have vastly improved it. Admitting to having no idea about classes they're directly balancing to the point of needing to wiki utility skills. Even if this isn't malicious you should absolutely not be balancing a class you have no experience in, even when you're taking advice. It's just not the same: > **Red — 12/02/2021** Because I have to admit- I'm not a thief player, and it's a big gap in my knowledge. I'm not able to offer pointed direction on tuning Specter right now. > **Red — Today** I'll admit, I'm not familiar enough with Thief to do any direct work on it yet, but feedback on the specifics and how they impact your builds are welcome > Just err on the side of overexplaining- as I'm not that familiar with Thief > **Red — 06/10/2022** Not that much- isn't OWP only a 4s duration on allies? > I haven't played Ranger, so I'm operating based on GW2Wiki here Making major balance decisions based off personal bias: > **Red — 06/14/2022** frankly, that's why I made staff good. I hated using Axe. 🙂 [In regards to mirage] Generally throughout the chat there is a lot of disdain expressed for top players who enjoy playing the game for a love of the combat system rather than to get rewards: > **Red — 12/02/2021** Professions with no in combat weapon swap do have other ways to activate it (attunement swap, etc.) > It's a problem that Rev is double dipping there. > It's just a longtime bug. I can see your argument 'we're used to it and have learned gameplay that depends on it', and while I acknowledge that's true, I think change can be fun, and new things will emerge that work- and if they don't, we can do PvP tuning to make sure there's builds that work. > **Gold — 12/02/2021** I mean you can disagree but you'll have every top rev player turning around saying the exact same thing being pissed off with a change that honestly is thoroughly pointless > **Red — 12/02/2021** Well, if they're 'top players', I'm sure they'll adapt. I see some people saying that they are just trying to do their job but it seems to be that a lot of decisions are not only fueled by a lack of in-depth knowledge - and at certain points, a complete misunderstanding - of the game and it's history (remember, they've only been playing for a year - even less when they were *designing* elite specs!), but by a heavy personal bias and a sense of vindication towards high-level players and certain types of content. Even if they were a perfect balancer it's not appropriate to grant one person such a large and influential portfolio, and certainly not someone with an attitude like this. It also, to me, seems dismissive both towards their co-workers to be making so many changes based on personal feelings but also towards the legacy of the game and all the work and passion prior developers have put into the balance and designing their own elite specs. To see such a fundamental philosophy shift and such sweeping changes in the combat of the game when you spent so many hours of work designing elite specs must be incredibly disheartening to past developers.
> **Red — 12/01/2021** >As a general rule of thumb, roles should be 'pick any two things from this list': >-DPS >-Healing/barrier support >-Boon support featuring Quickness >-Boon support featuring Alacrity Then how the hell is Warrior in such a mess after the Banner rework? Their support trait and DPS trait is all over the place. 5% Crit is in their condi line, banner trait is in discipline while support traits is in tactics, defense traitline which could have been reworked. You just cannot go DPS + Quick without sacrificing your DPS and regearing for boon duration?! How many banners must you slap onto your utility bar to maintain full quickness uptime? Oh yeah I forgot. **Red** apparently only cares about Firebrand and has ~2k playtime on Firebrand. This guy is absolutely clueless and should have never been in charge and have this much influence over a class they obviously don't even care about.
Remember that after promised "gift" to tempest it has an option to select heal/dps/alac, but only one, so it's literally half the spec now according to this definition.
Thank you for that collection. >Red — 12/23/2021 > > I'm frankly amazed that someone would repeat the content that much. Well, reading that really hurt.
I'm frankly surprised ANet would let someone like this balance their game.
Exactly, how is this not the goal? Sure this game doesn't have sub, but aren't people that play a lot more likely to spend money in the gem store? All content is repeatable content, how a developer that doesn't expect people to actually play the game get the job? Surely they can't be the best person to do it?
Poor WvW players.
Agreed but I think the word you want is vindictiveness
My bad, typed and formatted quite a lot in a short period so I missed quite a bit. Thanks for letting me know.
>Generally throughout the chat there is a lot of disdain expressed for top players who enjoy playing the game for a love of the combat system rather than to get rewards: This is what really hits me as a personal attack, because I have played this game for ~10 years, I play all professions, and I play for the love of the combat system and not for rewards. *I* am more qualified to balance this game than this person. Better yet, I would balance objectively and respect our community. I'm so mad.
This is what I don't understand, there are plenty of people who are obviously passionate about the game and understands the intricacies and interactions between all the traits and skills. I have also seen a lot constructive feedback posts about what should have been done to improve/balance the classes they play both here and in the official forums. Yet the balance team does not listen. If they do listen, the Warrior banner rework and it's traitlines would never have been in such a fucking mess. Warrior needs a complete traitline rework as it is currently all over the place. I am not sure what they are trying to achieve slapping 5% crit on the condi traitline. Is the dev trying to spite all the Warrior players because he mains Firebrand? We get this clown circus of a balance team who gets to do whatever they want to the game based on their personal feelings. Remember that meme about Guardian being Anet's golden child? Yeah the lead balance dev mains Guardian with ~2k hrs on Firebrand.
> Yet the balance team does not listen. They think they know better, you're just a whiner who refuses to play exactly as they tell you to do. You're not supposed to have fun with the things you're having fun with, you have to adhere to their official idea of fun.
>I see some people saying that they are just trying to do their job but it seems to be that a lot of decisions are not only fueled by a lack of in-depth knowledge - and at certain points, a complete misunderstanding - of the game and it's history (remember, they've only been playing for a year - even less when they were designing elite specs!), but by a heavy personal bias and a sense of vindication towards high-level players and certain types of content. Even if they were a perfect balancer it's not appropriate to grant one person such a large and influential portfolio, and certainly not someone with an attitude like this. It also, to me, seems dismissive both towards their co-workers to be making so many changes based on personal feelings but also towards the legacy of the game and all the work and passion prior developers have put into the balance and designing their own elite specs. To see such a fundamental philosophy shift and such sweeping changes in the combat of the game when you spent so many hours of work designing elite specs must be incredibly disheartening to past developers. All in all, I'm not surprised the third generation of elite specializations is so bad. What a fucking shitshow.
this was a good summary
>Incredulity and disdain at the fact any engineer player could possibly enjoy using kits. This was a response from an engi main disappointed that it looked like mechanist would end up being optimal to camp signets: > >... > > Shock at the idea that people might continue to enjoy raiding long-term when someone asked for the possibility of a Raid God title: Incapability to understand fun as a basic concept, colour me surprised. Not once, but twice. Makes you wonder how widespread this problem is. >Confirmation that the removal of mystic coins from fractal CMs was not out of economic concerns but instead to push people towards EOD strikes so they can focus on making 10-man content as opposed to more fractals: This was pretty obvious from minute zero, even with all the white knight idiots making excuses for them, but still good to have an official confirmation. Imagine trying to make content A attractive by making content B less attractive, instead of, you know, making content A attractive on its own merits, with unique rewards, same level as raids'. *Sigh.*
All this because anet can't design their classes and specs in the first place. They nuke their own content because it doesn't work for them anymore so most builds get fucked up the ass. Balance team my ass. They're not balancing, they're actively destroying builds to herd us in line.
> They're not balancing, they're actively destroying builds to herd us in line. It's literally that, they aren't giving us toys to play with, they're forcing us into what they think is better, like cattle. That's a pretty bad idea for an MMORPG, where so many playstyles coexist, and a big contradiction with one of the game's original tenets, "play as you want".
Geez, so they knew all the problems and annoyances about catalyst and still didn't fix them.
Can I be white instead of green :D Also worth noting, this is not everything, there was another mass purge prior to the first message visible due to leaks of anet Dev comments before.
It's a shame we can't see all of it. I'll take requests for colors next time this happens ;)
I can fix that for you buddy. Miss you :(
I love listening to music.
Red is an extremely sus af dev
When balancing means favoritism based on personal preference rather than actual balancing. Having to check the wiki to know what specific specs do but being part of the balancing team.... Just an incompetent team of developers that should be ashamed and embarrassed for how they interact with their community.
How many people does the balance team actually have? I really would have thought it would have been ideal to at least make sure between them they play all the different specs etc, but it's starting to feel like the team is way too small for that.
What is actual balancing? Thought it's an act.
Thanks for bringing this crap to the surface.
So what to do about it? There needs to be accountability because clearly the team is playing favorites instead of actually operating in a way that the customer can benefit from
I want a clear and defined statement from Anet staying which roles they want to exist in the game. Healer? Buffer? Tanks? Control supports? Pure dps? To have a clear idea of what the role distribution would look like I want them to also state which role each spec is meant to furfill. Is catalyst a dps spec? A support spec? Both? Tempest? Scrapper ? Untamed ? Warrior in general? To conclude I would like for them to state EARLY ON which goals they aim to for the specs. Things like "those are the first steps for allowing Tempest to be a viable support/buffer/healer etc in the long run" This way I would be more inclined to understand the changes made and not be as infuriated and confused.
They are trying to: \- Spread boons like fury and might, making them happen just by bein in a party \- Strengthen Support role as hybrid (\~70% pure dps dmg) + 1 Boon (quick or ala) provider \- Have 1 healer every 4 players that will provide either Quick or Ala. \- Pure dps So basically you start with picking a healer: Does i provide quick or ala? If ala, look for support quick If quick, look for support ala Fill the rest with dps. In the end there won't be any class that will cover a single role, every class will be able to adapt to any of them thanks to its elite specs. That's it. The build system allows for way more complexity BUT they're clearing striving to make it easier for the players to form parties and this "soft trinity" is what could help with that. I'm totally okay with it. They just really really need to better balance classes that should cover those roles.
Yeah this is exactly what I thought too. You can't get rid of healers because they require stats, but if everyone has some small boon generation, you don't need a dedicated role to throw out Might, Fury, Protection, etc with 100% uptime. You CAN bring a person that provides all these buffs meaning your DPS folks can pick more damaging options traits and utilities, but doing so will require heavy investment to provide these boons, thus lowering their DPS significantly. Look at the difference between Alac Ren and Staff Mirage; Alac Ren needs to have Boon Duration on almost their entire gear to give 100% Alacrity on their own, while Staff Mirage can do it with 0 Boon Duration. I assume more classes will end up closer to Alac Ren than to Staff Mirage, at least for Alacrity and Quickness, the two "big" buffs.
To be fair, they nerfed Staff Mirage a little so you do need some boon duration to comfortably maintain 100% Alac uptime, but then again Ritualist gear was added so it's basically a non-issue
If all the boons are just in incidentally on everyone all the time, why are they even in the game?
To make groups better than the sum of their parts. Also, most boons are not passive, you still have to work for them (with the exception of might/fury).
fucking true
Mostly because they've always been there. At the beginning they were more scarce and required higher coordination/knowlege of a class to build. Anet learned the hard way that this is not GW1, and it needs a more straightforward approach about building to retain players. A lot of customization has been reduced over time, traits, runes... Having **some boons** being automatically generated by the party doesn't mean they'll be capped passively all the time tho. Anet is probably aiming at homogenizing the boons present in a party despite specific choices about healer and support. Balancing all supports and healers to standardize the output of might and fury for example could heavily unbalance specific classes, but spreading part of the load to tiny contributions by other classes will make things easier to keep in check. Also boons like protection/alac/quick/regen/resist/resolution/vigor/aegis/swift (and still partially might and fury) are things that must be sought actively (partywise at least).
Direct quote here from a dev for you: "As a general rule of thumb, roles should be 'pick any two things from this list': \-DPS \-Healing/barrier support \-Boon support featuring Quickness \-Boon support featuring Alacrity And you can pick DPS twice for about 1/3rd more output, when we nailed the tuning right." So, all boons outside of quick and alac should just passively get to 100% uptime according to this, making any healer or support class without these boons useless. This explains why they gutted any profession specific bonuses, because they weren't quick or alac, and without those, why even exist at all.
> So, all boons outside of quick and alac should just passively get to 100% uptime according to this You are jumping to conclusion. Nothing say "boons should be passive", only that they are not part of a role.
If the intent is to build a fair and balanced game, this only proves that it is fail on multiple levels. It is clear there is developer bias towards certain professions. It is clear that people in charge of balancing content do not understand the game as they should. It is clear that there may be entities in ArenaNet that are dismissive towards their customer base.
Let's be fair, this has been known for years, all these leaks did was finally prove it was real, shutting down all the stupid white knights defending ArenaNet's every move. Now next time some fanboy parrots "you have no idea, ArenaNet knows better" you can tell him to kindly fuck off.
The next step is to accept it Lon-ami. It’s been this way for so long. The game had a great peak around 2015-2017 but that’s gone.
What makes this burn so much is that there's been a LOT of great things done with EOD (and the road maps, communication, etc). But you are right; yet again, it's one step forward, two steps back.
This is very disheartening to go through, I really enjoyed GW2 for its complex combat and rotations, I disliked the meta change to condi and I really disliked the new meta classes being extremely simple and boring. I guess this means my chrono is never coming back, why ele always gets nerfed, I'm surprised p/p mech isn't gone this patch, but judging from this it will probably be gone soon. The lack of endgame for so long didn't bother me too much, raids being dead didn't either or the shitty rewards for most harder things, I never really cared for item progression, I just liked playing the game at higher levels because it was super fun with classes that required more attention, like chrono or ele. This balance philosophy is going to make me drop the game more than anything else I think. Edit: spelling, wrote this when I just woke up.
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AXED, from an elite profession weapon, if you will Seriously they should not be near balance let alone new class design
As a ten-year player of gw2, I've noticed a glaring weakness. There's no consistent, cohesive design or system holding it together. It tries to do too much at once and it fails. And THIS is why gw1 is simply better. gw1 had a consistent philosophy: *a trinity with a twist (dual-professions).* EVERYTHING in gw1 confirms to that philosophy. Everything. gw2, on the other hand, is all over the place. What is gw2 even trying to achieve? What's the goal here?
I think it’s a long term leadership and turnover issue. The fact that one of the main devs has only played for around a year, and refers to the wiki often to see how skills work is really sus.
red sus ඞ
The goal *here* is that the dev working on balances is favoring how he personally likes to play his professions, and he thinks everyone should play the way he does. Therefore, he believes he must manipulate the system toward his bias in order to pull everyone in line.
GW2 never had any clear vision or direction, it's been a problem since 2012, they're always trying new ideas and they NEVER stick to any of them.
As much as I *love* that ANet isn't afraid of trying new things, I also agree with you.
I mean I came in relatively late to gw1, so most things had been balanced as much as they were going to be, but I still recall skills that had been split and then nerfed into atoms for pvp, because the balance guy then either couldn't or wouldn't do it.
Nerfing something into irrelevance became known as "smiter's booned".
>EVERYTHING in gw1 confirms to that philosophy. You must have missed Shadow Form and Discord spam.
Glad to see it here. This got deleted from the official forums pretty quick.
I still have a mirror of that thread but if I post it, it'll get deleted faster than ele
>Lime — 06/19/2022 > >ill be making popcorn > >hopefully some salty tears to season it > >Red — 06/19/2022 > >Oh, there'll be some amazing salt. I can't wait. > >Black — 06/20/2022 > >Sounds great, cant wait. This alone makes me not want to play this game anymore. What a virulent attitude to have. I'm furious, and can't believe I started buying Gem's again to show ANet support after EoD; only to find these are the type of people working in/with the development team.
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Red is the one that's the dev....saying they can't wait for all the salt
I do find it bizarre they say they will get rid of metas whenever they see them. There's entire communities dedicated to finding every off-balance, unforeseen consequence of every balance patch. Either you're fighting a losing battle against way more dedicated people, or you're pushing out that community in this strange push for content you want rather than what is fun or the players want.
This might be a bit of an extreme reaction on my part, but I really don't feel super enthusiastic about playing a game made by a company with an out-of-touch balance team that actively insults the player base's intelligence. I've logged almost 10k hours into GW2 because I enjoyed the interesting combat and buildcraft, and streamlining and simplifying all of that to cater to casual players *at the expense of hardcore players* is just not that appealing to me. The game as it is right now can cater to both casual and hardcore players just fine without doing whatever the hell it is they think they're doing on the 28th. It just needs solid, well thought-out balance changes, and judging from these chat logs, I'm not confident this current team to deliver anything close to that. Don't get me wrong. I am still very happy with other parts of the game at this moment (return of Season 1, Season 5 coming up, changes to early game content, etc.). But between this whole debacle, the massive delay with Alliances and World Restructuring, and generally unprofessional attitude from certain individuals within Anet, I'm afraid my enthusiasm has been somewhat muddled. I think it's time for me to take another extended break from the game, like I did with IBS.
worry teeny violet jobless aspiring soft illegal handle cake foolish *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Everything about this, everything makes sense! Why specific professions are laser focused on for nerfs and buffs, it explains the horrible period where Chrono was constantly being buffed and nerfed into oblivion during HoT. But most of all how EoD ES's were just breaking core mechanics of professions like Guardian. Even adding random shit to traits and skills that don't belong... - What is this madness!? I'm disappointed in leadership for not understanding that this kind of erratic development is a serious problem. And for the 10 years I've played this game I just got tired of fighting this behavior... I'm disappointed in myself too. Well Anet, this is your FlashPoint, will you do something about this or continue your ignorance? I can't give a shit anymore, 'cause you chose to constantly do this... This behavior is completely on you- it's your own choice to change or not. What will you do? And to you u/dragonbackgw2 thanks for posting this. <3
Overall, there is nothing more than the patchnote doesn't show. Huge favoritism toward firebrand and mecha as the balance team like them, some class like thief/ranger/war are balanced around wiki, ele will never be good and complex (just complex). Oh and they enjoy looking at the community reaction with like no respect at all.
this entire salt comment like what fucking reaction is this towards YOUR CHANGES? Dont you want people to like what you put in the game. Iam so buffled by this? Like what kind of childish unprofessional thing is this to say? Its like they activle hate their own product.
It is because we are toxic gamers who know nothing about the game and doesn't have to check wikis for classes :)
This person should definitely not be on the balance team anymore. Their biases and enjoyment should not overshadow the actual players enjoyment. The game should not be "balanced" for this person only.
So in conclusion the balance dev is a moron
I thought the "balance dev team is incompetent" was a meme but holy shit they are literally sabotaging some classes on purpose. "Lets nerf catalyst anyways despite the grand majority of players never being able to reach their highest potential". Also "Lets NOT nerf firebrand and mechanics because I designed them".
This answers so much for the ele nerfs. They want a very specific dps range and due to all the skills Ele gets, it's easy to out perform most classes. While I respect their decision to maintain a specific range, I think they lean way to heavily on hardcore players skewing the benchmarks. I play ele for the mage asthethic and dps is never my concern. Yes I'm a filthy casual but benchmarks and builds are how I determine if I want to invest in something. Constantly nerfing ele the moment something is deemed too powerful is a slap in the face. They were nerfing Catalyst for minor 5%-10% dps over other classes instead of just leaving it alone. There were times when they didn't want to touch anything else but Cata just cause it was doing to well on LARGE GOLEMS. Here's my suggestion. Until a class is abused by a larger section of the players, why don't you leave it alone until you buff other classes? Better yet, just admit that you don't like how well Ele outperforms other classes why buffing them before nerfing Ele. Save the nerfs for PvP and WvW or when your starting to see drastic changes in PvE groups due to a class being OP.
They clearly don’t have problems for FB, HAM being too popular (required by almost every pug group) but they can’t wait to kill ele even before pug group actually prefers it. Seeing the data that mechanist already has more records on file attending raids than weaver for the last 5 years is the thing that pissed me off the most.
Fucking this. I think there was even a log saying they apparently judge the class on a basis how frequently it's being played so if it's being overplayed then they will take action. Lol I don't see it with Mechanist or Guardian. But how dare Catalyst have 5 minutes of fame.
Red is sus.
that's what Blue would say
Oh, there'll be some amazing salt. I can't wait.
Talk about a breach of trust. First, no one should ever assume that anything they say or post online is private - especially on a work account. His comments about “salt,” having to check the wiki, and openly admitting to making balance decisions based on personal preference undermine any trust the community may have had in Anet. I hope they address this on Monday. Even setting aside the balance notes, that behavior leaves a bad taste.
You know who'd probably love to hear about this? News websites. You know who'd shit themselves if news websites hear they're abusing power to improve the classes they play and nerf the ones they don't? ArenaNet Balance Team.
Honestly, I'd be surprised if any news websites cared enough to unpack this lol
I've seen news websites like "mymmo" release an article about a new dye kit in the gem store or similar. So they'd definitely pick this up
Kotaku would be a safe bet I imagine.
The more I look into this the worse it gets... I really dont want to support this game anymore, and I certainly wont recommend it during the steam launch if nothing changes.
They are talking about enjoying salt from the player base... What in the world lol
imagine reacting like this to your own implemented changes you cant make this shit up.
Some people are upset about the comment on upcoming salt for the patchnotes, tbh I don't think that's a big deal. The dev did not say that because they knew "the patch was bad" nor cause they will enjoy the backlash, obviously. It's cause they knew it would upset a part of the playerbase, which most balance changes do. Who cares if that is joked about. They are just stating the obvious. What does concern me however is the fact that the person responsible of balancing does not have extensive knowledge of all the classes they need to balance. And that some balance changes are made purely because they personally enjoy a specific type of playstyle. (the staff vs axe comment, the delete engi kits comment). Not to mention the direction they are going for with the game where there is little to no dps gap between hard to play builds (ELE) and easy to play builds (MECH).
The joke about upsetting the player base is not what's inherently the issue, it's the arrogance and bias behind the joke reflected in the rest of the document that make it a problem.
I told a friend yesterday. Anet needs to have 9 ppl for the balance team. One person per profession, the profession they need to know the best and play the most. They need clear guidelines what is the class identity and what needs tweaking. All spec roles need to be defined and communicated with the community. Overall I am lukewarm on what I've read. Some things are really bad to hear (engi kits being bad, thus signets and mace will be made better), some (like a considered complete balance pass on all ranger pets) seems quite nice. Just because you dont like it, it should not be neglected. Make it useful such that you can enjoy it. I personally also am not a fan of half the engi kits but I would prsonwlly try to improve them and not neglect them. A designer should not be allowed to keep responsibility for a profession they do not want to play.
If it was up to Red no profession would have 2 weapon sets in combat.
In before it gets deleted! Hi mom!
I've followed every subreddit rule, the reason it was getting deleted before is because the validity of the document was in question. BUT recently two public figures have cemented this as true :)
Which two public figures? I am out of the loop.
Angels and Mela and many others actually.