Guild Wars 2 Balance 2024. | (And How to Fix It in 2025)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.พ. 2025
- Hey There! Come Join Us! | Streaming: / pseudoalias Weeknights on Twitch & TH-cam: / @gw2pseudo @ 9:00pm (usually)
-------------------------
-------------------------
Links:
-------------------------
Guild Wars 2 Balance 2024. | (And How to Fix It in 2025)
-------------------------
Timestamps:
00:00 Guild Wars 2 Balance in 2024
01:20 PvE #1: Slow Balance Patches Create Stagnant Meta Classes
04:50 PvE #2: "A Line in the Sand" and Power Creep
06:25 PvP #1: Un-nerfed PvP Relics are dumb
08:30 PvP #2: Interaction windows between classes are short
11:52 WvW #1: Every Class Feels the Same
15:08 WvW #2: Concentration and Expertise are Not Balanced. At all.
19:07 Global #1: Relics are OP.
22:18 Global #2: Homogenization isn't Balanced, Good or Fun. Diversity is.
-------------------------
| Footage Credits: |
Fintooth: • |GW2 PvP| Ranked Willb...
Engel: • Video
Shadow Crackers: / @andhika-2009
Taygeta: • GW2 WvW - Support Scou...
MuklukTH-cam: • 🔴26-Dec-2024 Mukluk Li...
Dj Dragon: / @djdragon5000
Rektyu: • GW2 WvW Roaming - Spea...
GW2 Chief: • GW2 WvW OP guardian ma...
FeintFate: • [SC] Temple of Febe/Ce...
Casual Elitist: • Cerus CM | Temple of F...
REMagic: • [UNIT] Legendary Cerus...
Roborkop "Rob": • Celestial Willbender S...
Ama: • [Wipe] Harvest Temple ...
Homage: • GW2 PVP Monthly Meta R...
-------------------------
Music: Roa - Nightfall, Roa - One Thing,
/ roamusic
-------------------------
As always, let us know if you have any suggestions!
| #shorts Videos also available on TT as well at: / gw2_tyriatribune |
| More Guild Wars 2 Resources Always Available At: www.TyriaTribune.com |
-------------------------
This is a promotional channel #shorts for New Guild Wars 2 Content & Items. So always feel free to let us know what we can do better!
Keywords:
| guild wars 2,guild wars 2 gameplay,guild wars 2 pvp,guild wars 2 обзор,guild wars 2 trailer,guild wars 2 классы,guild wars 2 necromancer,guild wars 2 classes,guild wars 2 reaper build,guild wars 2 steam deck,guild wars 2 ost,guild wars 2 open world builds,guild wars 2 review,guild wars 2 reaper open world,guild wars 2 world 1 zone 3,guild wars 2 song,guild wars 2 revenant,guild wars 2 gvg,guild wars 2 boss,guild wars 2 legion go,asmr guild wars 2,guild wars 2 прохождение,guild wars 2 soundtrack,guild wars 2 enchanted music box,guild wars 2 sylvari necromancer,guild wars 2 the seraph,tengu guild wars 2,guild wars 2 boss music,new world guild wars 2,guild wars 2 core necromancer build,guild wars 2 christmas music,guild wars 2 multiboxing,guild wars 2 necromancer face mark,guild wars 2 хилы,guild wars 2 secrets of the obscure ost,dark traveler guild wars 2,guild wars 2 end of dragons pvp elementalist,guild wars 2 грифон,guild wars 2 princess,guild wars 2 pvp wvw,guild wars 2 все классы,guild wars 2 blind,guild wars 2 mesmer chronomancer vs mirage,josh strife hayes guild wars 2,guild wars 2 renegade open world,guild wars 2 gameplay ita,guild wars 2 воин гайд,guild wars 2 fractals ost,guild wars 2 trading post,guild wars 2 lets play long live the lich,guild wars 2 addons,guild wars 2 gardien fr,guild wars 2 warior,guild wars 2 pvp tier list,guild wars 2 parody song,guild wars 2 blue prophet shards farm,guild wars 2 jormag weapons,lenovo legion 7 guild wars 2,guild wars 2 firebrand,guild wars 2 2 million dollars hack,guild wars 2 guide,guild wars 2 raid deutsch,guild wars 2 ranger solo,guild wars 2 berserker build,guild wars 2 engineer bow,guild wars 2 raidings,guild wars 2 core elementalist,guild wars 2 character creation,guild wars 2 "core" elementalist,guild wars 2 revenant renegade,guild wars 2 cold war,guild wars 2 burstzerker,guild wars 2 searing ascent,guild wars 2 new event,guild wars 2 rx 5700 xt,rx 580 guild wars 2,guild wars 2 revenenat solo pvp,guild wars 2 mesmer healer,guild wars 2 warrior open world,guild wars 2 vikings,guild wars 2 vale guardian ost,guild wars 2 obsidian sanctum,habilidades talentos guardabosques guild wars 2,guild wars 2 razziafelis,guild wars 2 gameplay hd 7850,guild wars 2 janthir wilds,
Reminder to Everyone: *It's OK to Have Different Perceptions + Opinions on the Internet!* ^^ | I made this video just to get my thoughts in one place and to hopefully open the door to some positive discussion. 😄 ++ Happy New Year All!! \o/
Virtuoso: *full ranged dps with no downtime*
ANet: let's nerf warrior's only good ranged tool.
To be fair it was very busted, but to also be fair Virtuoso is about 8x as bad. 🤣
Range is the keyword. Up close and personal virtuoso folds in harder 1v1. Warrior, while not a brain dead get outta jail free profession to boss with, has all the tools to survive a nasty 1v1 in your face.
Is virtuoso still super strong?
@Mounthuapleb5890 www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1htugtv/2024_wingman_end_of_year_review/ | aka yes. But there's a Balance patch preview this Friday.
Totally agree that class identity is disappearing. Every class shouldn't have every skill.
Or every boon. Not without massive build investment at the very least.
@@GW2Pseudo agree, this is what killed the guardian's top tier support role. They just gave everyone quickness.
It's not about that. I hate the uniformity too but I think people are to blame too. When you start to gatekeep content from certain classes it's not fun. I remember the time when Necrons were kicked from groups because no Necro please. Same for thiefs. Or engineers. Sure they were performing worse but people hate this poor performance and also hate balance. How is that working? I don't say this is better maybe they should double the damage on classes that can't support over those that can, I don't know. It needs to be a valuable tradeoff. I trade support for heavy damage, or I trade damage for support. I remember the games that used trinity model. At least those were obvious. Dps does dps, different tricks approximately the same numbers, tanks were tanks and healers were both healers and support. It was better than all classes performing all roles. There is nothing wrong with a selfish dps class, but it needs to have self sustain and hit like a train. But alone is dead in a raid, you still need buffs and support, healing, tanks, etc. That is the ideal output. But it seems the community itself threw you in the bean when you played a selfish class aka vanilla necro or vanilla thief. The thief was particularly bad because it was too easy to kill. Instead of reworking the classes properly they went the lazy way and made them the same aka support dps. They didn't even get the balance right either. I remember when chronomancer was the only class with alacrity. That was good and enough. They should have left it like that.
Really looking forward to your thoughts on the February patch.
This is everything I've been saying for about 3 years now, all put in one place. Dope vid honestly man
The main reason I grew to truly dislike WvW is the boonball meta. Nothing worse than sitting in a keep watching a 40 man squad roll up and start knocking. There's no point in building siege because they literally deal no damage to a boonball, I just have to sit and watch as they tear our walls down. I beg for our boonball to come and help (if we even have one) and hope they come. Even being IN a boonball is not fun, I sit and tank everything with perma boons.
The most fun I've had in WvW is one unorganized squad attacking against an unorganized defense. It feels like a true battlefield and it's possible to punish mistakes and target people down. Building siege is more impactful. That, or small group roaming, like 3 - 4 people.
The weird thing is, siege used to matter wayyy more too.
And I 1,000% vibe with that last bit, and I think my roamer friends do the same. WvW shines where you have small skirmishes that allow for player expression. 😂 Having a perm "nuh-uh you can't interact with me at all" wall of yellow anti-counterplay stuff on someone's bar just makes you go "Welp guess I won't try."
Honestly a really solid take. I appreciate your way of looking and analyzing things. I’m subscribing!
Welcome aboard! Just trying to add positively to the discussions I think to community should be less afraid to have!! 😄
yeah , the current problem with meta is not about how much damage classes do but how EASILY they do it compared to others, some classes have to put oput rotation to heal others while some of them doesnt and can use utility when they want to
Yeah, exactly, have u seen 30k dps 1 button afk hammer core guardian? Meanwhile i'm on ele playing the god damn Etude Symphonique for a bullshit 18k dps
No, the issue is that the Virtuoso meta / Skillbender roamer meta has been in place for over a year? At this point it feels like the devs deliberately avoid nerfing their preferred specs
That is what it feels like' to be sure, but the root cause is definitely their slow balance cadence for that.
But at the same time I give CmC enormous credit for not making Ele completely busted. So I guess we'll see if they can step it up a notch' in 2025. 😄
@@GW2Pseudo It was completely busted in PvP. He only nerfed it because the competitive community got vocal enough about the issue. (signet catalyst)
Is it true theyre working on guild wars 3?
@Mounthuapleb5890 Yes-ish, but the project people are speculating could be GW2 ust got "funding allocated" last year. So expect 5-6 years *minimum* with how long MMOs take to make before anything materializes from that if at all. 🤣
If there is not a proper Willbender nerf in upcoming balance patch, I will think twice before stepping into WvW or PvP.
@Valantati I would still rather deal with thiefs or harbingers than getting oneshotted in full minstrel by willbender. Maybe even better, almost killing him before he just pops that bloody elite, go invuln and port 10000 range away.
@@Valantatithis is true. And guild wars 2 will always have a meta
on weapons being available to all elite specs, I wholly disagree. To me, the identity of an elite spec should be it's spec mechanics, not the weapon. Take reaper, a lot of players don't even play it with a greatsword (especially since spear is basically another greatsword but faster...) and ultimately, the identity of elite specs on necro is obvious: shroud. Reaper has reaper form, harbinger has harbinger form and scourge has it's shades instead. All elite specs follow that formula, they change a core mechanic of the class. For mesmer, it changes either clones (mirage,virtuoso) or shatters (chronomancer,virtuoso) guardians change virtues, Revenant get legends, etc. To me, the biggest thing I dislike about balance in this game is it's unambitious and a pure number game. Oh they up or nerfed a skill 10-20% for pvp? whatever, it plays the same. No new things to experiment with. I wish they did more things that aren't always stronger, but reward synergies. Take Abyssal Chill and Insidious Disruption, two condi focused traits that reward you building a character a certain way. I wish more relics worked like that, altering build diversity. There's the relic of the demon queen that I like, not because of increased healing reduction, but because it poison on cc. on my condi reaper, it synergizes with insidious disruption, shivers of dread, terror and deadly chill to transform CC skills into great condi skills. like, I love using spectral grasp on a condi reaper, so fun. Is it more powerful to take insidious disruption and terror over plague sendind/blinding darkness and lingering curse ? no, usually not, but it's fun! In power builds, I find that new relic of the stormsinger interesting because, again, it rewards catering your build to a specific playstyle, movement skills, but the relic damage is pretty underwhelming so it feels bad to use... Other things I'd like is simple changes to revalorise underused weapons a lot of players want. I play necro and I wish mainhand dagger was either A)condi focused by adding bleed on the auto and 2 skill or B) healing focused by sharing the heal from the 2 skill. it's all it would take to make it perfect imo. Then they could also up axe by making it something more interesting, because who use it anymore? Like, I like that it's a range weapon without projectiles, but that's about all it got going for it. Also they need to fix the necro spear, it's so boring. I can tolerate imbalance if it leads to interesting things, it's boring unchanging everything that bores me.
And disagreeing is completely fine! Judging by the comments that I'm getting whether or not people seem to a fan of the shared Weaponsmaster training (myself included) seems to come down to which of the base 9 they play. Classes like Engi, Ele and even Necro gained a ton of versatility while classes like Warrior and Thief got largely nothing or redundant tools. So I 100% get that.
Fun is a big factor in games. And if every piece of your kit, like you mention later feels redundant or boring a lot of the time the reaction is somewhat: "Then...why?" lol 😄
Relics are a way of boosting older players over newer players. Especially when the best relic changes quarterly.
What a well put together video tbh all of these points seem very valid.
Thx Berry! I tried & I'm not right about everything. But "GW2 Balance" is a passion of mine, so I figured I could hopefully contribute somewhat positively to the discussion! 😄
one of the hardest things for me to get into with anyform of combat in this game, is the boon stacking meta, it being defining of your skill, im fine with your gear and skill determines what level content you can enjoy, but these days range is useless because if you not all on top of each other stacking boons your dead,
And some people are just salty their stuff gets nerfed over & over: Cue every comment under here that says "Guild Wars 2 is Dead" while they continue to play it because it's dope.
they don't play it because it's "dope", they keep playing it because there is nothing better around. that doesnt make it a good or even perfect game, that just mean the rest is even worse.
I've quit this game months ago and didn't come back ever since. I'm sure there are more people like that.
Class flavor in 202X would be lovely yes. Couldn't agree more
ikr 😂
I was screaming from the rooftops during the Rifle Mecha meta that Virt was even more OP. It just didn't seem that way because Mecha was so easy to play.
To be fair, Virt has also been reworked like x3+? times. The free invuln and self-sustain on it are just things that make it massively easier than other SPS classes, even ranged ones. There's competitors sure, but nothing as versatile.
I was farrr too drunk to understand any of this on NYD. Glad I rewatched it lol 🤣 Solid job mate!! I agree with most of this
Thanks! I probably didn't nail' all 8/8 100%. So if you have a sec, pop over tho the poll on the channel over here: th-cam.com/users/postUgkxeajEhvSFd3gWM4ewbSS6qjEkV2A1hTk_?si=82Nqtnt6JTa1py4R and let me know how I did! I too, can always improve!! 😄
As of last patch the stats from GW2 Wingman (raid log site) show Virtuoso is the number one most played class on every raid boss (normal and challenge and legendary mode) except for four - Amalgam, Qadim1, Qadim2, and Sabir. It is the most played fight on every strike challenge mode as well. On the fights where it is not #1, it's is often number 2 or number 3. Chronomancer occupies the #2 or #3 slot on every fight in the game. The class is a fucking problem.
That is surprising... I would think Q2 at least was Virtuosa heavy because all Pylons are always Virtuosas as all you do is take Mimic Blinkd on default build and that is all... perhaps swap one trait...
Yeah I saw that right after I posted this video, and found that extremely funny. Color me unsurprised, it's clearly an outlier right now. 😅
I took over a full year off of gw2 because I noticed the gw2 dev team was doing very poorly back then, got very upset about it and tried to correct the problem by complaining like this.
We all know this isn't going to change anything, the gw2 devs don't care what you or I think when it comes to balance. They have numbers from *somewhere* and that's all they're going to use to balance the game. Ele summons will stay the same, necro signet of undeath will stay the same, chrono wells will never be usable underwater... ect.
All that will never change. All the broken OP stuff will probably change, but never fast enough and they'll either go overboard on it or not far enough and then it stays that way for YEARS, and all the stuff in between will get nerfed or buffed as well because why wait and see what changing the top end will do when you can change everything at all once!
The "new" balance team never really knew how to run this game and they prove it with every update.
You just got a sub because of this 27:05. I share your sentiment about patch balances. I agree with all your points. Great video!
Appreciated, welcome! I know it's easy to say, but I just try to produce content that will be positive+helpful for people, and as much as the game may frustrate me sometimes, "people" includes the Devs. I always expect nothing, but remain cautiously optimistic and I really, *really* hope they can add some class Diversity & Flavor back sooner than later! 😁
I haven't played GW2 in like four years, and just got recommended this video. I am both surprised as well as not that surprised that basically everything that was wrong with profession balance is almost exactly the same as it was back then. And it still sounds like they have the Golden Child issue they had, except with a new balance dev's preference while leaving other professions begging for help.
This made me chuckle lol. Thanks for that. We'll see what happens in January's patch I guess. 😂
I like to think that these problems persist so long because ANet is working on GW3. Let me dream.
I like that. I'll wake you up in 4-5 years if/when it comes out 😄
As a warrior main (call be biased if you want) I still feel like we can't have nice things. The one thing that was being powerful and usefull after they took away banner slave, and made changes and nerfs to warrior GS and other aspects of the class, and the elite specs, was the spear. And even with the spear we still had problems and were forced to play around them, because of how many projectile blocks and reflects there are in wvw and even pvp.
They decided to nerf it. And although it's still usable and playable, is just not... Whats the word. Worth it ? People don't even want you in their groups bexause there is always some other class with a bigger power creep than you, that do more things than you, cover more boons than you.
Why have a condi berzerker, even if it gives quickness, when you can have a firebrand or any other class that does more damage, more boon coverage, and in most times are even easier to aplly all of these than warrior.
And dont get me started on the distance and duration of shit like rangers immobilize, or the sheer ammount of teleports and stealth professikns like Chronomancer and Thief have. It's fucking ridiculous.
Some people have once said to me:
"Oh just hit them, you still have reveal target to take them out of stealth, you can still hit them even if invisible."
Ok then, maybe, MAYBE, if i was top 50 in pvp or whatever else in the whole server. And even if i was everything is stacked against the warrior because of the sheer ammount of dodges, movement skills and enemy dodges they have. And also, guess what, most of the player base is not top pvp players.
Shit even guardian with the last elite spec can now cover stupidly ammount of distance and aegis uptime, yet somehow people say warriors spear damage and dodges were the problem.
As an also biased Warrior player (at least lately) while I don't agree with all of this ^, I can completely empathize with this and see where you're coming from. I have much the same feeling at least. Once upon a time Warrior had decent mobility, raw stats and loads of CCs that others didn't that did damage. But these days, even with 3/4 of those still being true-ish that's no longer enough.
The game has evolved "past" ANet's OG idea of the a "simple but effective" fantasy warrior. With game-wide changes like Competitive CCs no longer doing damage, Quickness no longer affecting movement skills channel speeds, The "Shared Specialization Weapons" basically giving Warriors 3 redundant, largely useless off-hand weapons, and even More widely available damage reduction modifiers, Warriors have become the dust-covered foot soldiers while everyone else teleported part us. Literally. I don't need my class to be Willbender levels of stupid. If just like some actual design effort and Class Fantasy, and actual design effort and follow through, to go into it for once. 😁
It really does feel like Mesmer is just the favorite kid in the Guild Wars universe, for whatever reason. In GW1 the best team comp for solo play is to have 6/7 mesmer heroes because they just kill everything faster, with less down time, than any other class and it isn't even close. In GW2, virtuoso.
Interestingly people said the same thing about Mirage for the longest time, and now Mirage is probably the worst flavor of Mesmer. Idk what tht says about ANet's "favorite children" lol
Nah, their favorite child is definitely Guardian, almost never gets nerved, and you'll always see a Dragonhunter or a Firebrand in any content outside of PvP.
It's Guardian. Without question.
@KryticalError lol. (It shouldn't,) but that's what happens when a profession is the most plated in your game. Gotta say it felt weird when immediately after EoD-launch when Willbender kinda sucked (when the virtues didn't layer.) Until they decided Guard having such a "downside" was completely unacceptable. 🤣
@@GW2Pseudo The sad thing is I actually LOVE every Guardian spec. ESPECIALLY Willbender. But I also abso-Fi3King-lutely hate them. Like, WB and DH are OBJECTIVELY cool. But they are so annoying to play against. Of course it's all matchup dependent and player dependent, but that's true of everything. Just feels like WB especially always sets my jaw on edge when I finish a strong 1v2 or holding my own in a 1v3 / 1v4 and a Willbender blinks me from offscreen and instantly knocks me lol
So, I have commented about this somewhere else already, but I have a feeling that the Willbender problem in WvW is maybe about the novelty of it's playstyle and the abundance of players using it. It's an assassin, but easier to master than thief in my opinion.
If you encounter so many of them, it's just a matter of chance that someone will beat you.
The playing style is rather suppressive, which works really well against inexperienced roamers by inciting a panic. The willbender will try to overwhelm the opponent by just spamming burst. Most of Wbs I encounter play like that, but once you notice the pattern it seems easy to block. When I fight other Willbenders, the pattern is mostly the same. Usually, some block and a bit of movement gets rid of the danger, and then that kind of Wb build is rather helpless, since they waste all on engage.
A soulbeast knocking you over and then pew-pewing you down from 1500 range feels harder to combat if you don't see them early enough. Same for Mirage or Deadeye, which just one-shot you from stealth or simply go out of combat and leave if they at risk of losing.
Also, if a whole group of players goes afk next to a catapult or something like that, I don't think it's a surprise they can get downed easily.
In general, players not paying attention in an open-map-type PvP game mode is hardly a reason to blame certain classes.
Since I have played this class in roaming quite a lot, I can honestly say that it is very strong, but I wouldn't call it broken. The recent nerfs will probably make it harder for casual Wb players to easily overpower other players, which is a good thing. Good players will still down you, regardless of the class.
Every class in this game has tools to beat your average willbender with ease.
There are certain classes I have a very hard time fighting, even if the players are not that experienced, just because that other class is strong too and has tools that counter Wbs well.
For example, a friend of mine with not much dueling experience did some training duels with me. On Reaper, he mostly lost. On Harbinger, he won most of the times, even though he mostly plays Reaper in zergs. Another player who played some PvP easily beat me on Scrapper and Catalyst.
Probably maybe I'm just a bad duelist and get carried by the class, lol
In the hands of a very skilled player, almost all classes can be impossible to beat in duels.
Deadeye, Chrono, Mirage, Catalyst, Tempest, Harbinger, Spellbreaker, Druid, Soulbeast, Willbender, Holo, Scrapper, and Herald are all very hard to fight.
On a different note, I was very confused at first when I suddenly recognized some of Chief's footage, lol. Good choice of examples.
Honestly, I'd like to see them remove gameplay-affecting buffs from food and enhancements (sharpening stones, etc.) completely.
Keep 'em as magic/gold find, XP and gathering bonuses, but remove anything that gives a buff to overall power level.
Edit:
Oh, and even though they've never explicitly said this, and the community is in denial about it, every successive elite spec has been more powerful than the last set in order to drive sales of later content, very much making the game "Pay to Win." This is the reason specs like Virtuoso and Willbender are still ridiculously OP.
Core needs to be able to properly compete with all Elite specs; to that end, those specs should be brought in line with Core, and not vice versa with Core lines being buffed.
I think that was the idea on HoT release (for the elite Specs to have trade-offs.) but they said they're "not doing that anymore" and I have a feeling that comes down to core going free to play.
Honestly, you're right about Elite Spec (and new Weapon) power creep. I'm not saying it's right, but literally every studio does that. And I'm even OK with "no trade-offs" in a perfect world. The problem is that even many Elite Specs still have very real trade-offs while others very much are just "more, better, yeah!" Having a design goal that's well intentioned but not followed isn't incredibly useful.
I've been saying that for a while. The elite specs are a form of pay to win. They are not all that egregious from a PvE perspective, since you need the expansions anyway to get access to most of the content where that's relevant, but I would imagine it's a noticeable difference in pvp/wvw. Also, you can gain access with a rather small purchase and you don't need to sink tons of money into it. So personally I don't think it's a big deal. But it's naive to not call a spade a spade. Especially since the core guide advertised as free to play and not an extensive free trial. Some might call that semantics, but I think it's a meaningful enough difference to influence people's perception of the game.
However I do think that with the new mini expacs not having new elite specs, core classes are getting more attention again. The community discusses them more and the last balance patch seemed to at least include an attempt at buffing core guardian. So maybe we'll see the playing field level out.
@melinnamba I'm also in the rather unpopular position of being actually very glad that they nerfed *most* of the new Spears as fast as they did? Did they go overboard on some? Yes. Do Guard & Mes still need the same treatment? Probably. | But was it ultra-stupid different colors had to buy the newest XPac to keep up even just via the weapon? (e.g. Competitive DPS on Rev? Or having a viable ranged-option on Warrior?) Absolutely. The question is now, where that power budget goes, or if it even needs to go anywhere. Or if the community is comfortable with "throwing the car in reverse" for a while. Only time will tell. 😄
Wvw (half roaming, half zerging) player here. I played from launch til 2018, quit, and started playing again with Janthir's launch. It was spears that got me to play again, not relics, nor ascended food, nor elite specs, nor masteries.
Love most of what you've said here but your arguments on balance cadence resonated with me the most. We get a balance patch, the next most OP thing becomes apparent day 1 (usually whatever was 2nd most powerful before the patch and avoided nerfs), and we have to deal with that for 2-4 months. It's like this in pvp too. This is part of the reason I stopped playing. Wasn't much to look forward to. Just a lot more of the same.
I like your ideas of how we can address that, especially the "anet should just try things", like yeah, more frequent but experimental is better than this 2-4 month stretches of dealing with everuone running bunker, and/or nuclear bursts from stealth.
Thank you for the context for your response!
I don't have all the answers, (I don't think anyone does.) But to me there's very apparent "broken" pieces of builds that they could mess with. I know that when companies get involved a lot of "just do it" changes have to go through committee. But comparatively ArenaNet is tiny, and their. Plus, at this point the stagnation is just as bad if not worse when we get nothing meaningful for 3-4 months imo.
They actually "sort of" kind of beta tested new balance features in the form of the Extirpation debuff that was on Necro Spear 5 for a nanosecond. But that was pretty OP and got yote' pretty fast, and see how upset people got when that was yote' leaving Spear 5 pretty basic.
Now imagine that game-wide for something like energy sigils that literally almost every competitive' build uses. ArenaNet isn't stupid they know that making $ to eat food is important. Energy Sigils specifically aren't on their radar, but they'd definitely have to sneak enormous nerfs like this into larger buff patches/content releases. Which unfortunately just adds to power creep. I'm not sure what the answer is to deal with or work around such a slow balance cadence without making the community riot every other time. But 'just trying stuff' (with explanations) that they can easily 180 is probably a good step at this point! 😁
I'm really disappointed with the devs, I've been back and forth with GW2 for many years and every time I come back the game is in worse shape than before. I agree with all the points in this video but sadly I know nothing will be done about it. For me it's been enough and I don't think I'll be coming back... time to touch grass.
GW2 Remains the best MMO that just doesn't hate you'. But grass is also mega-underrated imo 😄
As a PvE vet(? Coming up on 5y of pve now, seen pre-alac druid/scourge/pre-quick berserker/scrapper/pre-eod metas and have consistently raided and striked through that time) I think most relics aren't really OP, at least in terms of damage and especially boons. Karakosa is an OP healing relic, but you solve the issue by adding an ICD.
At best, we have:
10% strike damage from Peitha (unreliable on most builds, a bit jank on the ones that might be able to proc it reliably)
10% strike and condition damage from Dragonhunter (not a self buff, needs a specific type of utility to hit a target and hit consistently)
7% from weaver/deadeye (weaker but self buff from a specific utility, really only deadeye is usable on deadeye and weaver relic sucks)
7% strike from Claw (requires burning CC which may not be super available in your kit or rotation, i.e. power weaver doesn't want to hit air sw2 or go to air/earth for sw3)
7% strike from Fireworks
Decent condi damage from Fractal (not a percentage buff but only "op" because there's really no competition)
Part of the problem is that relics initially tried to fill the gap from effects like Rune of the Scholar's t6 effect (5% increased strike damage when above 90% hp) but without the drawback (thief relic). Condi relics just have too many issues design wise (blightbringer) or too little damage to keep up with Fractal, which isn't even that OP but just has nothing to compete with.
Some of these relics have really interesting effects, I especially like Cerus relic for being an extra set of strikes as opposed to just a flat buff, but its really, really hard to make a relic like that useful without being too good for something (needing nerfs for the one thing that's OP with it). Another example is the Beehive relic, it could be a really cool option for professions with a lot of poison (not many) and especially condition druid (the 8 additional strikes, which could be increased in pve, could add additional astral power generation for condition druid, which depending on how its done could not be too game breaking, in addition to the potentially good poison damage if buffed) but the damage is just too low, same thing with Blightbringer being a poison alternative to fractal.
Others are just too hard to reliably proc or not worth enough when procced. Relic of the Stormsinger could be really cool for mobility builds like Willbender, and Relic of the Steamshrieker could be awesome in specific comps if made a little stronger (to help push a bit of extra DPS out for having extra water fields in your group, such as a heal druid dropping glyph for the potentially inferior healing spring depending on the fight or having a condition firebrand take time to use their tome water field).
Overall relics as a system just did not try to go hard enough into the more out there or "wacky" relics and it is really hard to make those work because something might be balanced on 9 out of 10 DPS builds but the 10th gets it ruined for the rest of them
Thank you for specifying context! This is *extremely* well-written. ^ And yes, mayhaps it didn't come across in the video, but for PvE I 100% agree relics are great! The customization they afford is great.
This statement:
"Overall relics as a system just did not try to go hard enough into the more out there or "wacky" relics and it is really hard to make those work because something might be balanced on 9 out of 10 DPS builds but the 10th gets it ruined for the rest of them"
Also I agree with. The trouble is then, trying to balance these "wacky+powerful" relics with things like WvW & PvP without making it "unfun" for whatever you're fighting. I think that's why I find a lot of them boring and would rather just get some other equipment variety at this point. But above all, I really hope they shift their development budget away from new, unique visual/effects for relics and add those to interesting Grandmaster traits again as I said. Especially now that they seem to have a new, baller, FX team. Just personal preference on that one I suppose though.
The 6 month balance patch cadence would easily be enough, they just don't touch most of the stuff. Virt isn't busted for 6 months, it is piercing full range dps with distort and other stuff for YEARS now. Mirage doesn't get any play for YEARS. Condi ranger sucks for YEARS in comparison to other condis. Ranger dps doesn't use spear nor maces in PvE, making it probably the most stagnant class. Condi Mech shouldn't outdps harder condi speccs, power virt shouldn't run higher numbers than bladesworn or pholo - but that is what we got and that is exactly what people play.
Well, despite being kinda over-tuned when they came out (they were doing around 42K on just the soulbeast auto attack loop, Ranger maces are very much supposed to be a support-ish weapon but I could see spear on P Ranger possibly. Although that's more of a utility' weapon in PvP with all the weaving stealth.
But you're right about the time period, it's definitely been a bit. The weird thing is there were actually periods when both condi mirage and condi ranger were king. So it's not like there isn't space for both 😂
I'm the type that played Ranger forever, then absolutely fell in love with Revenant when it came out. The versatility, the ability to solo a freaking ton of content just by making minor tweaks to my build (if any were needed at all) - Yes, Rev was tremendously op in many respects. I freaking loved it and mained it hard for several years. I do not play competitively. I think PvP & WvW should be entirely separate game modes with no real "bleed-over" into PvE. Let me be op as hell on a build that can blatantly do too much self-heal & dps/dot in PvE - I'm playing against the game, why do you gotta nerf the crap outta me when I'm just tryin'ta have fun?
I'm not a theorycrafter. I'm not a competitive player. I'm not a streamer. I'm not someone who goes to the game for my social interaction needs. I'm just in it to kill some time and have some fun, and following the storyline then bouncing around the maps randomly meeting new creatures and killing them is fun for me. Apparently people like me are a rarety though :( And before I get flamed, lemmie just say that I've been playing since beta-weekend events pre-release. I've seen how the game has evolved since it started. We've all got our own perceptions of how good or bad parts of the game are, what changes were good, which ones we disagree with.
Revenant is pretty nice because it's somewhat a jack of all trades' when it comes to what you can do. As long as you prep beforehand, you can probably tackle what's in front of you.
TY for the context! Your opinions are no less valid however because you don't do any of those things ^ however. You are very much technically part of ANet's target audience too and that should be respected. Opening the discussion in a healthy manner to members of the community was my primary goal of this video. And judging by the responses I'm getting like yours is say it's working! 😄
Haven’t played the game since I quit in spring 2014 and swapped to WoW but still follow along with new updates. Relics would never sell me an expansion. Elite specs would though. New weapons would too. Playing with new toys in an mmo is always fun and GW2 has usually done new toys very well. As long as the game still has fun zone exploration with cool events full of other people I think players will enjoy it.
Thx for the feedback, genuinely. It's helpful for me to get a barometer on things.
I think ArenaNet massively underestimates the large number of people for whom new, fluid 'balance toys' are a factor. The way the game is now, I could very much see them doing a weapon-less elite Specialization for their next expansion. But this would clearly be the most visually ambitious and require a ton of relative development bandwidth.
I have no idea what the perfect' balance is. But while relics clearly take less dev effort than new specs/weapons, the amount of fun' that they provide seem to provide in general, (to be fair some people like them,) unfortunately seems to be much less. 😂
While the patches aren't fast enough, they also aren't enough by not addressing the glaring issues.
What I noticed over the last 2 or so years at least, is that they use these sparse patches to fix the easy stuff, or simply change for sake of change.
Going off your heal Specter example(bc it's easy to point at); This is exactly why it still needs 2 or 3 times the effort to keep up with other healers like druid and chrono.
They don't fix it probably because it's too much work for an unpopular class(thief) that most people in competitive viscerally hate. The roi is not worth the dev time. With some substantial rework, they would then need to factor in balance for 3 different game modes.
I'd be pretty surprised if there was anything substantial for it in the next patch. But what is more likely to happen is another easy fix to trickle in like the scepter 2 rework last time
I am 1,000,000% biased on this (as possibly the last Bladesworn main in existence) but I tend to agree as well. The "It's not a priority because people don't play X. So no one plays X. So it continues to: Not be a priority." self-fulfilling prophecy, even if that's just gaslighting doesn't feel great.
I noticed this as well as Specter got reworked about ~3 times already, & each rework clearly has a very different vision for what it was supposed' to do + how it was supposed' to do it aka. play. The same goes for Bladesworn. Barring [Tactical Reload] it was actually pretty balanced in PvX and at least made functional sense on release. But as pieces that didn't make sense were crowbarred-into it: e.g. 'Giving alacrity to space' (a 600 AoE) just so people would "play the new spec" took power budget away from actually functional pieces of it's kit. And ultimately didn't even accomplish those design goals. See how: Bladesworns are currently gated out of providing Regen to your group because it doesn't have a Base F1 skill.
While barring an interview with their balance team all I can do is try to understand the why,' of a lot of these changes. I could be wrong of course, but it's things like Specter, Mechanist, Bladesworn, etc. that just seem like such unforced errors where there were objectively simpler, better ways to accomplish whatever their immediate design goals were for that patch.
@@GW2Pseudo Because thieves were never meant to heal >_>
What burnt me out was that Boons became the central pillar of all balance focus. The focus wasn’t on the unique and flavorful. It was on the shared and similar.
Class identity atrophied because updates focused on Boon coverage at the cost of unique features (ex. aurasharing Ele losing it for Alac). Combine this with the slow cadence of encounter design, lacking good variety in what those encounters demand from players, and the game just felt the same all the time. No matter what class, weapon, or build. I just danced to the same tune of stacking boons and going through my rotation.
Like you, I was disappointed by relics when they just became the same boring percent damage additions. I don’t share your optimism it can change, but I hope for your sake it does. The game is just too old and tired for me now.
And breaks/stepping away is also very healthy. I think a lot of people forget that video games are largely for fun. So if you're not having fun it makes sense to not engage with a game. I myself took a break for nearly a year ~5 years ago now.
Even after 11 years. I remain cautiously optimistic though. I expect absolutely nothing, but would at least like to do my small part to open the discussion of balance' to more people. And judging by the number of people who once liked the different class flavor, but who have become 'burnt out on boons:' you're not alone. 😄
The problem with releasing underpowered they found in League of Legends is that if it's not strong, it doesn't get played and doesn't get learned and hence never gets people trying and subsequently forming attachment to the character (class/trait/relic/weapon in this case), so even if they release something weak and then buff it to broken, doing the opposite is better for player uptake. The only way to find out how good something is, is to release it likely overpowered to increase dataset size and convert existing players to the new thing.
Also, I see you there Mr. Release A Stat Combo Which Would Let Me Take Burst Precision On My Warrior And Have 6k Power 4k Ferocity With 100% Crit Chance
How about daily balance patches? Every night the power coefficients of the most OP class automatically drop by 0.1%. Every night.
Tbh I'd play a special event month where everything was auto-balanced for a bit. 😄 Would definitely yield some interesting data.
14:20
this made me laugh so hard
Props to Rektyu for that one I believe. Check em' out if you haven't! 😄
I play necromancer and mostly spvp and have since HoT. The big things I enjoy about necromancer are the play between hp and lifeforce and the brutality of the corrupt boon skills specifically. It's the counterplay to someone who can use an instant-cast 10stack of stability stunbreak. It's the counterplay to the bozo who stacked up aeigis, fury, 25 might, swiftness, and prot that all have no tells. I think if corrupt boon becomes a projectile, people with eyes and permavigor are just going to wait for that big spooky claw to come flying at them before they hit their dodge key.
Now granted. I don't hate most of your other suggestions. I don't fully agree in some aspects, but I like ESPECIALLY the changes to concentration idea in wvw. Boonballs are boring. Even as a necro with a well of aoe corruption I think boonballs are boring. ... aside from the rare cases where 5 people get their stab corrupted and scatter like bugs with the light turned on. That'll always get a giggle out of me.
In no way did I expect everyone to *100% agree* with everything I said, different people are different after all. I'm just glad people seem to be getting some positive discussion out of it. 😄
Re: Boon corruption apologies if it sounded like I'd prefer "all" boon corrupt skills to be projectiles. What you're describing of play-counter play in PvP 100% makes sense, especially because there is an actual animation that the necromancer does when you cast these skills (however small.)
I was more speaking about potential *new* tools tools to deal with the boonball meta in WvW. Similar to Spellbreaker's bubble, largely impactful skills would need effective "counterplay-it-this-way" indicators, even if the counterplay is "don't stand in that." 😂
(As a ranger( One of the big things that’s bothered me is how for the majority of content you don’t have a reason to change your weapons. Decima I really liked, because ranged privilege goes really far if you are in the arrow group. So I finally had a reason to swap my hammer for my beloved, normally bad, longbow.
*Class flavor/fantasy* is actually a HUGE thing to remember the importance of in whatever game mode(s) you play.
I'm guessing you play most PvE (which is 100% perfectly reasonable) because longbow has remained quite viable in the other 2. But Greatsword is actually on a similar spot actually run in basically all the game modes for Warrior. 😂 Greatsword, on Warrior. So I 100% empathize.
I would like them to remove the power skill coeficient so the dmg numbers in tooltips are not totally useless
and the rework of conditions in a way that they act as soft CCs only not as a type of dmg
Now that's a hot take
What Anet can do to balance game:
Rework Berserker. Please.... 😞
But to be completely honest.
The only problem I have with this game is:
Almost everything run Berserk/Viper gear. I'm not talking about supports or anything else. It's a problem in every single game where max damage is available. I would love if berserk prefix didn't exist in the game so you have to make a choice between higher base damage/crit chance/hp/healing/thoughness, etc. Instead we just run damage and spam skills all the time. Utility skills are mostly for defience bar... Hammer Berserker and it's values are a joke... Why? It looks so cool and it's utter dogshiet
You may wish to specify next time which you're talking about: Berserker (the stat) or Berserker (the specialization.)
As it is now, I think the game would 100% collapse if they removed berserker stats. But that might be another interesting experiment' to try for a week and see what happens. Other games are balanced around normally not being able to crit cap in and game mode, and one of my friends is constantly bringing up how weird it is that you do so in GW2.
But re: a Berserker (specialization) rework. It's actually been reworked like ~3+ times already. 2 of which basically deleted it from PvE then PvP/WvW respectively. I do agree that spamming zerk skills (especially Axe-Zerk F1) is a poor way to balance it. Especially for how cool some of the others look. Rupturing Smash (Hammer-Zerk F1) is probably my favorite skill in terms of animation in the game, and it's basically never used. Be thankful for what you have though. I play Bladesworn, and it's animations leave, ... let's just say, "a lot to be desired" imo. 😂
I think virtuoso getting to use their utility skills for utility is in fact how the game should be. it shouldn't be stupidly overtuned as it is however.
the whole boon system is a mess. permanent alac and permanent quickness were a mistake.
The interesting thing is, based on more recent interviews, the game director: Josh Davis agrees re: Quickness + Alacrity.
I just have no idea how they roll that back at this point and get the community to accept that. 😂
24:50 This is exactly what I've been saying since SotO came out. I'm glad the weapons are getting nerfed honestly, but bring back interesting Grandmasters please!
I'm 98% sure they're going to do a weapon-less Specialization for the next expansion too
Historically I've spent a lot of time in WvW but since I came back at the end of SotO I've mostly been playing PvE/open world and as a casual player that was never into build-crafting I can also say the power creep is insane and it's a problem. I thought I had an ok build still coming back on Reaper but after looking online and adjusting a few traits I basically doubled my output and at one point I know I saw the number 80k flash on my screen which I thought was impossible. People are encouraged to make their own builds to learn but the difference in output between those and the curated builds you find online optimized for boons is too much. Also all my knight gear is outdated because as a power main only zerker or celestial gear is relevant and I don't have to worry as much about taking damage with an "all boons"-shield.
I feel like everything that has been added since the beginning of the game is now a shrub grown out of control and the patches are the devs pruning tiny twigs from it, in the long run it doesn't make a difference to how the game feels and all the game modes are suffering for it. As my hot take I would like a complete rework of all traits and weapons to bring everything back to normal levels. :D It would also give room to plan for new specializations which is something people have sorely missed and maybe even a direction for what the devs want with the combat system going forward. Yes that probably means you also need to nerf a bit of the newer content, but compare that to older open world events like the chak gerent where the boss is instantly nuked and everyone sits and stares at a wall for 10 minutes waiting for the timer to go down and for me at least it would be worth it. Additionally, I would love if combo fields became relevant again somehow but I doubt it lol.
TY for specifying your game mode, contextualizing your answer is extremely helpful!
Knight's is pretty outdated yeah, even since HoT dropped. But regardless I definitely agree on the shrub analogy. I would also be in favor of a simpler/sanity PvX nerf patch, but part of that would be convincing the community to accept it and not riot. And judging by the reaction that happened the last time they tried something similar some 2y ago, there's 0 chance they could pull that off with ought hiding it in a larger (amazing) content drop.
I enormously concur on combo fields though. They are one of the coolest, most *unique* mechanics this game has in terms of combat. And while I don't want every class to turn the ground into a sea of rainbow vomit exactly, they seem massively underused in 2025. Especially on the new tools that we have gotten like Relics/Weapons.
Nuclear take, but some class identities are just straight up bad. They dont exist very well in a post EoD/SoTO meta where we had the boon homogenization and weapon master. Being that a lot of elite spec design held the weapon in mind as part of its identity, removing it has highlighted a lot of problem areas that Anet doesn't have the time/resources to handle. Some identities need a massive tune-up. Hell, a ton of the core traitlines need reworks because they're full of hot nonsense that no one wants to use, or are just ridiculous in how strong they are given the game mode (think Guardian giving Aegis when it gives itself Aegis)
I'm a primarily PvE raid guy, so a lot of this is just complaining for the sake of it, but i think this game is long overdue for some systems makeovers, which it might never get give the cadence of balance and content updates
That's honestly a good take, not really nuclear at all imo, I largely agree. Part of the reason I started making videos/this channel at all was to attempt to understand and explain (both to myself and to other people) why ANet does what ANet does, and tragically a lot of it just seems to come down to what design priorities actually to 'do' in any given patch.
Do I think that the boon homogenization' thing removed a ton of class flavor, took far too long to settle, and could have been done in a better way? Absolutely. But do I understand why (likely to keep new players in the game longer) they did it and do I think it was, on balance, probably good for the longevity of the game? Also yes 100%. The same goes for the celestial/default level 80 / level-up gear, even though it basically killed build crafting for ~3 years.
All I can do is believe (hope) that when ANet asks for "constructive feedback" they mean they actually want it and do my part to get the discussion going in a positive way if I can. And then hopefully they listen to the people making rational points like yours ^ more than the minority yelling and screaming at them. 😂
I agree, thief needs a new identity.
Rant and a little history lesson from a big Guild Wars 1 GvGer and Tomb/Heroes PvPer and a Guild Wars 2 Scrapper Enjoyer:
In GW1 Arenanet learned the lesson that 'too different' can be detrimental to the health of your game when they introduced the Assassin and Ritualist. They were so wildly different from the base classes that the health and balance of the game was in a bad spot for a long time.
In GW2 the opposite seems to be happening. They seem to be afraid to deviate from the base concepts in the game and give specializations 'cool' things. It ends up where Professions feel like Paint Jobs for your character. If I pick a Necromancer I get Necromancer animations but I'm not providing anything different from a Warrior or Mesmer. The part about some specs losing their identify now that weapons can be used across specs hits the problem on the head. If the only thing Scrapper had going for it was it used a hammer....was Scrapper really ever 'cool'?
I've loved ArenaNet since GW1's release. I have hope they can figure it out, but some of these issues have been around a long, long time.
That's actually really interesting about GW1. I have a lot of friends who played it & that's never come up actually.
I really like when ANet is clever. And the only way to truly be 'clever' is to try stuff and fail sometimes.
While the HoT specs were defiantly less ambitious than what came later, both Scrapper and Spellbreaker were comparatively pretty simple on paper. The difference is that Scrapper was stupidly OP in the PvP meta at the time (I'm not saying Berserker wasn't, cause it was) so Scrapper got gutted and basically never recovered, while Spellbreaker which came later, only had [Full Counter] destroyed on it over & over, but otherwise mechanically aged like fine wine because it turns out boon removal in a boon meta is pretty good. Berserker, meanwhile, enjoyed almost 3 years in the dumpster after it was nerfed horrifically and repeatedly, only to somewhat recover last year.
I'm sure you know all this already and I'm not asking ANet to add more not boon-buffs. I'm just hoping that one day Specs like Scrapper, Specter, and even Bladesworn get the reworks that they deserve. The "cool" factor is big in games and at least 2/3 of those if not many other Specs in the game could definitely use a fresh coat of "cool paint" to say the least.
Bit of a nitpick about wvw boon uptime. Most of the reason why we run in a tight ball has to do with stability and healing. Its asking alot of a healer in a 20+ group to find damaged targets before they go down in larger fights so players need to stick to where they/we can find them. Stay on tag to get heals. In order to stay on tag they need stability. Any half decent group has a strong selection of pulls and getting pulled off stack means a quick death. Quickness doesn't have that much use for the stack except that boonstrips tend to remove quickness before stability. So good concentration helps certain builds have good stability coverage. It is a necessary and dedicated job to keep stab up. I am worried that if concentration gets nerfed in wvw pulls will simply become king.
That's great feedback thank you! And honestly a perfectly reasonable fear to have.
To that I would likely respond with yes: For any sweeping change (even like my Removal of Energy Sigils' one) it would likely be Hell as people adjust to the new meta & some classes or healers would likely struggle with said change(s) more than others. Removal (or more realistically reduction') of WvW Concentration would hurt my roaming builds immensely let alone many boon/heal supports in zergs. However, this would also, at least in my mind, add sone 'design space' back to having to specialize more in Stability on classes. Maybe for example they could make something like Revenant or Necro the hypothetical "stability provider" for your subgroup by juicing the aoe stability duration numbers on Jalice or Warhorn skills. And/or nerf all of CDs of all the pulls in WvW in conjunction with putting something like a +50% stability duration rune or relic in the game so it requires effectively more "build power budget commitment" to do either pulls or stab as effectively as before.
There is no magic bullet' to any of this. And I am likely wrong about a lot of it. But part of the reason that skills and even builds *don't feel as impactful* as before, in ever game mode, is because Offensive Skills (and conditions) have gotten stronger and Defensive Skills (and boons) have had to rise to counter the former. And unless we all admit that stuff is not only probably "out of hand at this point, but through the window and in the process of escaping the yard" power creep can only go 'up' from here. But realistically I still think they should hit the stacking damage reduction/damage outputs things before they try messing with anything mechanical' like stability. 😅
20:27 I was watching a wvw stream the other day and the commander was like "I want a relic of the driver so I can survive longer" like damage reduction (from both receiving and giving lol) and maybe immune to pulling/moaing? that would be interesting but only can be equipt by the commander xD
Macro relics that interact like that would definitely be interesting. Imo that's less out-of-place on a Grandmaster too. -- That's somewhat what old [Deathless Courage] seemed to do when the virtues on Willbender didn't layer. (e.g. Basically invalidate your outgoing and incoming dmg for a bit when you pushed F3.) It even has the teleport on it too to get you ahead of your Zerg. 😂
I think chefs being able to apply value with their profession by crafting ascended food items is awesome. Should the buff given in WvW be so great? Maybe not but the idea of being a spec chef and buffing your guild by cooking high quality meals is both realistic and immersive. I don't think this mechanic should be removed but tweaked to make it more fair and balanced
That's a good point honestly. The crafting professions (except maybe scribing) have since really lost most of their communal value. And I do always complain that ANet doesn't really think about how players will end up using the systems that they put in the game to interact with each other. I, personally, still think that damage reduction modifiers "only taking the greatest" value though wouldn't really lessen this though as there would still be other (quite good) options for crafted food.
It's by no means a "magic bullet solution" though. Because, who knows, this may actually have the opposite effect where high-protection uptime zergs and classes just take "the next best modifier" (which is usually the -20% condi duration one.) So they may become even more un-counterable. Still it's a very valid point that you bring up.
I think I pretty much agree with almost everything you said in regards to PVP and WvW, and that's coming from someone whose main trick is montaging "1 shots" - I definitely think ANET has been too slow to move on things like MEGA OVER REPRESENTATION or UNDER REPRESENTATION with amulets, stat loadouts, runes, sigils, relics, builds, and mobility. And I think the game would be WAY more fun if damage and tankiness and boon permanence were all toned down and brought closer to what feels manageable. That doesn't mean I think there should be no one shot builds or no bunker builds. And mobility is fun, so I don't want to see all mobility extremely nerfed or removed. But some things scream they should be either toned down significantly or reworked for the long term health of the game. I mean, remove Willbenders completely, tho. Other than that, I think some number tuning and some occasional reworks will get us into a good spot.
100%. It's fun when you use/make something enough that you can recognize the parts of it that are kinda nuts. For example, I build tons of concentration on my builds, and I'm the first to admit that "yeah, this is kinda dumb." lol
People forget that a lot of "balance" and "class flavor" come from 'build investment.' i.e. "How much of my flexible build budget/tools do I have to invest or give up in another form to-do X or Y." The more utility side-grades that things get, effectively "for free" or at least "for less" investment eventually leads to things feeling diluted.
I don't think there's a magic bullet' to fix this. After all half the battle is finding some way to get the community to accept a big(er) nerf patch at all. But I do think, especially at this point. Toning down some of the massively over-performing tools that classes have in PvX, in order to maybe steer the car away from the Overpowered Balance-Cliff that we're hurtling towards would probably be a good thing. 😄
Let me tell you about WARFRAME. There's this mission type called "Survival." As you take down enemies, they have a chance to drop a "LS pack" that restores 4% LS. There's a Warframe called Nekros. It has an ability where it can "break down" the corpses of enemies for potential extra loot. For a period of time, it was impossible to go longer than 10min in Survival without a Nekros on team, nothing could clear the enemies fast enough to get enough LS packs. i'd like to think that DE (the owners of WARFRAME) had to come to terms with the fact that if someone decided to bring Nekros, the team just wouldn't have to worry about Life Support. But if no one brought Nekros, you didn't have to use specialized builds to keep LS up.
OH, LS = Life Support lol. Sounds kind of familiar yes. I'm always interested in how other MMOs in the space evolve as well. Curious, did they end up nerfing Survival and/or Nekros and was it done well/good for the game?
if every class have everything than you will have a problem, because the other classes will lose what they had to compesate the disajustment in first place.
Mhmmm. People often forget that if you buff one thing you effectively nerf something else' by proxy.
Not only there is no real diversity but some classes are still clearly stronger than other.
GW2 balance at this point is basically "Never ate a cake and still don't have a cake".
100%. I'm still unironically waiting for Bladesworn to be finished. (Not joking about this.)
Also now I want cake, so thanks for that.
I'm a new player and don't know what relics are.
Lol good to know. 😂
But just so I'm not entirely unhelpful: They're an equipment piece that gives unique effects. That used to be attached to the 6th slot of your runes.
I say this as a very avid build crafter that are used a lot. I think any xdmg amp relic is bad because in every game mode if you’re any type of power dmg most are running thief or fireworks. For condi it’s mostly two as well and healer you start to see a few more choices. But most aren’t going to want to learn the deeper mechanics on why power guardian crit caps with resolution. Or even that point. It’s a copy paste. If the idea is for build diversity then the old summon runes would need to come and akim and fireworks alike would have to got
I also disagree on energy being needed but it’s blob v blob. Maybe when it goes back to pof maybe it will have more uses
I think, for better or worse, damage amplification relics are a "necessary evil" at this point, because if you don't have them you're just going to apply whatever does the minor-est amount of damage extra in PvE. (Say, Relic of the Fractal on a power DPS for example.) The +% relics are a way of normalizing these numbers somewhat, even if there boring.
And re: summon runes, they messed with target cap. Which is something modern ArenaNet seems very sketchy on, especially for WvW. I miss them too though! 😂
I feel like Anet has painted themselves into a corner and they don’t know how to get out of it. Since the layoffs, I have thought that GW2 has been “sort of” in barely more active than maintenance mode. I hope they are working on GW3 with a new game engine and I would love it if I could migrate my characters from GW2 into GW3, but that’s pie in the sky wishful thinking on my part. I just hope that the GW franchise is worth the investment it will take to make a GW3 that is better than GW2 and I worry that there might not be enough of the original talent still working for Anet, to pull off creating a new MMORPG on the same scale and quality of GW2. I’ll probably stick around for many years to see what happens, because I still enjoy GW2.
Well, that's why I attempted to give a couple suggestions for the various mode(s) that I think might help! But regardless, I think the "still enjoying Guild Wars 2" part is easy to skip over for a lot. As frustrated as I can get some times at GW2 (and I too take breaks,) video games are for fun after all, and I play this one (and make content for it) because I enjoy it! 😁 If I didn't I wouldn't, simple as that.
Re: GW3 With what I know about development pipelines, for better or worse, I guarantee it's not coming any time soon. Since it was just getting funding allocated ~last? year, and that it'll likely be done kind of mmo that's 4-5 years tops. I still doubt it'll look anything like Guild Wars 2 though. Maybe (hopefully) it'll retain the combat system, but I'd guess the underlying engine and structure will be completely different.
@ Yeah, I hope that some or all of your suggestions as well as those from WP and other GW2 content creators, will be implemented by Anet, while we are waiting for GW3 to be released several years from now.
Very interesting video! but here is my concern about the energy thing, i also live in WvW/PvP and make content (Mostly as a Ranger Soulbeast) and i can tell you that if, lets say they implement that without doing some extra stuff first... the game will be even more broken because currently there are certain professions/builds that have a bit of too much and then invulnerable. Let me explain what i mean: There are things far more unfair and broken/tonned down than this, like willbender's toolkit being just too much and on top of that having so much invulnerability windows and yet if you learn the match-up it becomes very doable. Same with eles, you can run a glass-cannon build and get away with it but not due to how many dodge rolls you get, mostly because you have a plethora of blocks and invulnerability, similar thing with mesmers... We start to see a pattern here, and the real issue is that even when you find the windows to kill those matchups, they have a free get out of the jail card ON TOP of all the other tools. Currently the evade thing is just a real issue with or against most thief specs because on top of the perma-stealth and one shot capabilities they can evade and dodge roll forever in those few windows that you have to kill them. To further sort of advocate for my point, when i started i was extremely confused and frustrated but after a while and also going over my own game-play i understood that the real issue was me. I really believe that things right now are not as unbalanced as to be a problem (Stormsinger needs a nerf tho). I think we have fallen into the trap of just pretending that if i get rekt its easier to attribute it to cheats or something being broken, you can't imagine the amount of times i have been Dm'd with the, nice cheats bro just because i space my buttons and dodge rolls and skills properly... and when i offer to go over the game-play because i was recording, they just insult you and nothing else. THAT is the real issue, players refusing to learn. When i started, everything killed me without a chance of fighting back, now i can deal with ALMOST anything and also, as you get better players and fight against better players... yeah, the fights are not over so quickly, even when 2 glass-cannon builds are happening, since movement and spacing are the most BROKEN/IMPORTANT skills in this game and yet a very low part of the player-base tries to improve on those. My conclusion: If you take away those sigils and essentially nerf the evading/dodging capabilities without toning down some of the previously mentioned stuff, you will only increase the gap and make the meta even more pronunciated towards what it is essentially already overturned because why would i run a class without popper evade options that doesn't have easy access to mobility/blocks/invulnerable when i can literally play some of the mentioned before and have all of those... like... sure, i can dodge less but guess what? i still have more broken defensive tools than you do on top of my absurd mobility and damage!
I'm getting a lot of really well thought-out responses to this video & I love it!
Re: Stormsinger (largely unrelated) yes it shouldn't be able to crit.
Re: Energy Sigils, I also largely agree with your analysis. But I still want to see what would happen if they tried it for a PvP/WvW season. One of my friends is actually back in the game who is quite skilled and plays a metric butt-load of Ranger as well. So we've been dueling & chatting a fair bit about current balance. Energy sigils are basically mandatory on every Ranger kit to be viable, because like Warrior, it has a lot of forced-movement skills, effectively forcing you to learn your setups' and get good.'
However, unlike Warrior which can basically be a brick Wall with it's Stances and Aegis right now, Rangers often don't have as many (or as many low CD invuln s in their kit.) But remember they do get evades on their forced movement skills, stealth, 1500 range, and even optional teleports, which Warriors do not.
I'm not trying to say "Oh whaaa my class is worse" I'm saying that an Apple is an Apple and an Orange is an Orange. They're different by definition. If energy sigils, (which are far & away the most OP sigil in the game) were removed, even for just say, ~3 months or so sure yes, it would likely be Hell for some classes, possibly Ranger, definitely Mirage, etc. But I do think that Energy Sigils are vastly muddying-the-waters and making it more difficult to pin down "the pain points" of over-performing builds like Willbender, or identifying Fun aspects that are lacking from other classes because they can "just run energy sigils" + whatever now. As with all things, I'm open to being wrong on this ofc! After 11 years I'd just really like to test this theory even just to see if the Devs would do anything meaningful with that data. 😄
@@GW2Pseudo Hey man! sorry for the late answer to this, been slammed with work! i do agree that it could be interesting to try it out, but absolutely not for 3 months, i don't think most players that really need those sigils to stay on par with other specs have to spend more than 2-4 weeks to see if it becomes unplayable or simply need to adapt, whatever the result might be im certain that the first wave will need adjustments and it would hurt to make ppl wait 3 months, for better or worse.
RE: slight nitpick about the ranger points xD, In my opinion, some of the things you mentioned aren't true at all, starting with what you said about the range advantage, let me elaborate:
While it is true that if we use longbow we have a lot of range... it is equally true that there are so many block sources and projectile deflection that makes it actually not that strong, alongside the fact that most specs, including the mentioned warrior have insane gapclosers plus, the longbow its by far the weakest weapon for the ranger, making it in paper super good but in practice very hard and frustrating to pull off.
in PvP i am tempted to agree that Energy is close to mandatory and even more so on higher ranks, altho i have been only close to plat and i lack some more experience.
In the WvW department however... dont get me wrong, im not saying i am the best ranger, but i am tempted to say that i am the Soulbeast that has tried and made from scratch builds that are working and capable of dealing with anything, lots of ppl picked them up and work for them too and in a lot of them, im not running energy sigils. Basically because i already have high vigor uptime. I understand that slamming energy there is NEVER a bad choice and i get the point of it but i just wanted to mention that if i can run without them and have great results, and apparently some others too... maybe the problem is what i said earlier, ppl get too comfortable with some things and shortcuts instead of actually timing some skills.
As a final conclusion, i also don't agree with the sentence you said about the sigils muddying the waters and make it difficult to pinpoint some issues. Sigils or not, i can clearly see some of the over tuned things from long, looong ago. And i believe more experienced players do so even better than i do. Once again, i think the number 1 issue its lazyness and i think getting rid of a tool that allows certain specs to have a fighting chance against over tuned things without actually adjusting those first... its really dangerous, i would suggest perhaps a nerf in the sense of limiting it to just 1 for example...BUT i agree with you in the sense that i would like to see an attempt to change things for sure!!😁😁
First of all, I'm glad yt recommanded me this great video
While I agree on a lot of things you said, especially the issues, I kinda disagree with some of your points
You make a great point about damage reduction stacking (btw the anvil is 1% armor so it doesn't multiply with dmg reduction), but I don't really like your idea of having only the highest dmg reduction source active because it would make perma prot classes feel even more powercreeped
I'd love to see prot reduced to 20% dmg reduction, no more damage reduction food, remove perma damage reduction traits (hello salvation ???), etc
If we kill dmg reduction then we can deal with classes like wb dealing way too much dmg
For boons in wvw, in zergs I feel like rn you mostly want to hide your stability behind boons so it doesn't get corrupted, rest is placement.
Another thing, every single target skills feels very frustrating, imo virt is extremely toxic for zerging in that regard, you're just getting harrassed for the whole fight, not fun.
I do not claim to have a good fix for this but I think I'd like to see boon corruption order generalized, with stability in last for exemple. By doing that you can reduce the amount of boon spam (or we'd have a big issue), remove boons from like 80% of skills, make boons feel more precious. I've heard ideas like, make boon duration for allies lower which I like a lot too
I think that would be healthy for roaming and dueling as well? idk balancing boons give me a headache
As a vet I LOVE having 6 new relics, that's literally the only new fun stuff for theorycrafting, I'm obviously very biased cuz I loved relics from the start, but new relics is the thing I'm the most hyped for rn. I would like to see more sigils, like you said 2 relics, 2 sigils, 2 runes (maybe not runes), and imo you make a great point about grandmaster traits, please give us fun stuff, even if it's not meta, give class identity back so I don't have to wait for relics, ty
About runes, there are some number issues with them, in particular the boon/condi duration %, they give way too many stats for no reason, also why are they %s, instead of concentration/expertise? makes no sense to me, but anyway I agree with you on the concentration/expertise having too much impact, I'd like to see them nerf the amount of stats required, 15 = 1% to 30 = 1% for exemple
Finally sigils/relics are not balanced enough, you make a great point about energy sigil being OP for exemple, but still, I think energy sigil is great, OP yes but great, this sigil still requires some decision making, it's not just a dmg modifier that you don't even care about when you play, it's something that adds up to your gameplay which I think is good. However maybe bump the CD to 20s (so you can't use it on both weapon set), also looking at you, dodge regen food. Another thing in GvG sigil stacking was an issue, anet removed the stacking but this kind of sigil imo shouldn't be in the game, "your next hit gives 3 stacks of poison for 2 billion years? surely that'll be fine"
I probably forgot some points but I think this wall of text is alrdy too big, anyway great vid
Healthy discussion/disagreement is why I made this video and started this channel in the first place. The GW2 systems are a passion of mine and I was pretty sure a lot of other people felt the same. 😄
A more standardised boon removal/corruption than "last in first out" explanation would be welcome. My friends have tested it a fair bit and even that seems to sometimes vary from skill to skill and class to class. Granted I don't Zerg much, or drive, so my perspective on this is basically worthless but. I think the answer to all of the WvW boon stuff might actually be skills, equipment pieces, (possibly relics?) etc that target/rip specific boons. But I also see stacking these getting out of hand pretty fast. So again, I don't have all the answers. Maybe their addition in conjunction with a stability duration boosting rune, since we still don't have one of those, or something.
Re: Energy Sigils though, just my personal opinion here, but I'm going to dig-in my heels a bit here and say yes, with the existing numbers that they have (25/50) endurance refund on their current 10s cooldown they are unbelievably stupid.
This is not due to only their existence in a vacuum however. It's because ArenaNet has had the unfortunate escalation of leveraging more and more "free power" on to your dodge button (which is already basically supposed to "counter" pretty much every other single button push in the game) which has also become available to more & more specs. i.e. First it was Warrior and Ele doing damage on Dodge, then Daredevil, Then Mirage, then Holosmith, Vindicator, then basically everything getting bonuses with boon traits, relics, or both. While CCs loosely counter dodges, you can think of it as the dodge button basically being the best button on your bar for competitive. And energy sigils effectively add "another push" of this button every 10s.
I like your suggestion of every 20s instead of 20, but then this handicaps Ele, Engi and Bladesworn wayyyyyy harder than every other class so that's kinda out. Another alternative I've heard is make Energy Sigils simply give + % passive Regen while you're in that weapon set OR grant 5-10s of Vigor. Both of these seem much more acceptable to me because the real strength of energy sigils is that 'the refund of flat endurance' stacks on top of/outside of the +100% endurance rate any class can achieve via other existing modifiers such as Vigor, +% Endurance Regen traits, etc. Mini rant over lol 😄
@@GW2Pseudo that's why balacing boons is a headache for me xD
Dodge traits are soooo bad imo, I mained engi for a long time and always hated explosive entrance, so yeah I completely with your point there. As for ele, engi, bsw, I think the solution is just to add another type of energy sigil so they have an alternative (flat passive regen like you said for exemple), or just take one for the team cuz honestly they have a ton of traits that give vigor/passive endurance regen/endurance
But yeah underrated subject imo, it's nice that you're giving it more visibility
@rektyu7035 More (different) sigils is also a decent idea, the problem with that then becomes when something like a Vindicator equips both types and you literally can't interact with them. 🤣
And yeah, biased as I am I agree. Guild Wars 2 having such a strong underlying combat system seems to be something a lot of people care very strongly about, but don't really know how to sit down and constructively discuss/comfortably disagree about. I'm just trying to do my part to get more people open to the idea, because, even as the comments on this video have largely shown there is a HUGE wealth of experience and feedback that the Devs can pull from if those people are just given the opportunities to share their experiences. 😁
There is a more radical for the current game, but better from a top down perspective way to deal with zerg 100% uptime boons. Just break up zergs. Give reasons to take smaller fights. 5 10vs10 fights across the map is probably better than 1 50v50, and adds way more tactical flexibility. It's really annoying to see brain damaged commanders run into the same fight 20 times while team three caps the entire map if you're trying to unlock things in WvW, but commanders just don't care about anything you can get from WvW because they've already unlocked everything and they're just there to try farm bags in their favourite mode. If winning the map mattered from a reward standpoint, suddenly it wouldn't all be hunting mag bags.
That in turn would flow on into being able to home in on individual class balance and fix egregious stuff like Thief and Willbender, because suddenly you are able to balance around more or less the same thing with regards to how a class plays.
Everything feels the same when you roam. When you duelled the harb and my druid from your last stream its like oh we cant kill each other. Lets just walk different directions now 😂
Pretty much "/sleep" Also Happy New Year!! 😁
I'm mostly a new player to this game. 3500 achievement points. But I've spent 6k hours in ESO. And there are similar problems. Their version of guardian - Templar - is literally useless and unplayable in PvP. So please-please-please, don't ruin my willbender here, I'm just getting used to how things function here.
But holly cow, this burst gank meta is a big bs. On another hand, in ESO I could have a 15 minutes duel and it ended because we both get bored and move away from each other.
It actually doesn't matter for me as a new player, if I play some "op" spec. It's not OP in my hands. Just nerf some high end intricate specifics, if you really need to.
That last bit is actually kind of how Willbender was at-launch: Where it still had all the tools that it does now (minus the stomp for downed players) but the passives from the virtues didn't layer. So essentially you had to just choose whether to be offensive or defensive' at any point and couldn't just do both simultaneously. To be clear as well: I don't want nerfs for anyone that aren't fun.' I got to experience how much that sucks first-hand when they dumpstered Mirage by giving it 1 Dodge for nearly 2 years and when they dug Bladesworn's grave. There is always a way to make something both mechanically fun & viable. Usually even by just tweaking the numbers on a skill.
Also Welcome to Guild Wars 2! The game's great and the community is pretty chill here over all. So feel free to ask any questions you might have! I'd be happy to help answer if I can!! 😄
On the PvE aspect Anet managed to allow a lot of viable build to be played for all content which is quite impressive. But at the same time their balance decision doesnt make sense. They have killed Rifle on Engineer and Rifle Mechanist in all gamemode (quite frankly Mechanist is quite bad in all non PVE gamemode and requires much more work to be able to do what other spec does in less button) but kept Virtuoso relatively untouched just because Virtuoso is not as popular as Mechanist back then. But still, you can play all profession and almost all spec for all PvE gamemode.
I will skip PvP because I barely touch that gamemode. On WvW though, I am surprised no one is talking about the mobility powercreep and the excessive mobility some class (Thief and Willbender just to name a few) have. I used to use terrain as a weapon, houses and tree as shield but these days, these things means nothing when a Thief or Willbender can just instant teleport to your location and burst you. I used to save up some movement skill just so that I can create distance if needed, but now what is the point when a Willbender or Harbringer can just dash towards you, burst and then dash away again with little to no CD. And I wont even talk about exploit that has been in the game since forever and havent been patched. Honestly if PvP is considered by some a "dead gamemode", WvW would sure be the "forgotten gamemode".
Mhmmm, and as you said I do hope that there's space for some unique class identity to be added back to various Professions.
But feature creep (like everything having ultra-mobility) as you mentioned is also a huge issue. In the vacuum of power creep it would be fine. But Things like Harbinger Sword skills just go further (600) than the tooltips say (450)? So not really sure what's going on there. Maybe on paper Necro is supposed to still have at least "more limited mobility." But then again they were put in to the game ~a year ago? So maybe fix that at some point so your execution matches your design documents, or at least change the tooltips so we know which one it's supposed' to be. 😂
If they nerf virtuoso without adjusting Cerus, new players will have it stricly harder. I dont think they can do that
Yup. Move the line in the sand but also the shovel back a bit. Both would need to happen at once. Otherwise we can "only go up from here" at least in PvE.
@@GW2Pseudo If you want to balance the DPS you need to consider DPS Tax.
Catalyst vs Mechanist is fun comparison.
pMech 38k Benchmark, Alac pMech 32k Benchmark. 15,8% dps drop
cMech 44k Benchmark, Alac cMech 37k Benchmark. 15,9% dps drop
pCata 47k Benchmark, Quick pCata 40k Benchmark. 14,9% dps drop
-Mech is more sturdier with more hp and access to sift signet
-Catalyst on other hand has 1200 range while Mechanist is Melee Locked
-in terms of boons Catalyst might have it better if you know how to play it
-on other hand Mechanist is easier to play
The current Virtuosa is a problem in the same way the Rifle Power Mechanist was a problem but it is much worse because Mesmer utility is god tier and the Virtuosa currently does much better DPS than Rifle Power Mechanist ever did! You either Nerf Virtuosa Benchmark below 33k or buff Power Rifle Mechanist to do 46k Benchmark, because that is only Fair. The Rifle Power Mechanist has worse utility than Virtuosa and otherwise is identical to each other .... in reailty both builds should do around 38k Benchmark.
What are we Taxing Virtuosa for?
1. Easy to Play
2. 1200 range
3. Durable
4. God Tier utility
5. Taking 1 utility basically has no DPS tax
What was the problem with the Rifle Power Mechanist? AFK Benchmark was 28k and you could easily smash your head against keyboard to do 38k without using Grenade Kit as that was 42k benchmark. Meanwhile Virtuosa is Benchmarking 42k and it is easy to reach 38k and you can take 1 utility almost for free! The difference between cMechanist and cVirtuosa is question do you want to play Melee with easier rotation or do you want god tier utility with 1200 range?
@xezzee Mhmmm, this is a well written post ^. But it's also the free invuln that does a lot of heavy-lifting for Virt on LCM and HTCM. I was simplifying it for the video. There are many factors that go into what determines a "meta" class in any gamemode is. In an ideal world 'DPS Tax' is one of these, as at least in theory simpler rotations on tankier classes should perform overall slightly worse, but in no way is this always the case, and it used to be much more disparate. On some cases an easier' rotation can put-perform a more complicated ones: See Fresh Air Tempest.
At the end of the day, it would be just nice for the health of all game modes if we could have more frequent balance patches to address the outliers. All we can do is give them positive feedback & hope lol. The real question is whether we want power/utility creep to go up or down from here. 😄
Great vid but im gunna stick my neck out and say I love relics 😂. 3 stick out in my mind as being way OP though. Stormsinger, rivers, and demon queen.
6 per patch is too many though. I think the 2 relics, 2 runes, 2 sigils idea is better.
Also cool to see some of my footage used
Liking Relics is perfectly fine! I love that the 6 slot can be separated now. And I love the other 'good' ANet has done these past 2 years like the Wizard's Vault. But with such a fast deluge of them (some with new, unbelievably flashy animations while the relic itself is borderline useless) this just seems like misspent development budget that we're reminded that we paid for every 3 months.
And yes, there was absolutely 0 chance I was going to be able to get all this footage myself. So definitely free plug for Homage ^ !! Check him out if you want an actually quite refreshing and positive look at PvP! 😄
I made this (and most of my videos) just because I think this is an important discussion to have. And judging by the actually amazing comments so far, it's actually sort of working!
I wish they went back on making runes meaningful to have 2, 4 or 6 of. I miss being able to mix and match instead of being 6/6 the only way to build your runes. Other than that they have an issue where they added so much defense with boon balls that everything needs to be so powerful to burst through that.
My hot take is that they should make most buffs Self-Buffs on PVP/PVE and the few group boons are MINOR versions of the buffs. Then make the Self Boons have longer cooldowns so that every character has burst windows and defense windows.
EDIT: Also hard agree on them making every single character give boons basically just made everything so formulaic.
I hate that most if not all elite specs have literally 3 trait lines: Power - Condi - Boon. It's so dumb, there's no choice or build creation there.
There's a couple tunes that can be "better" like that. But yes, as a build crafter I find variety is very nice to have in gear.
I don't think self-buffs only would exactly work in PvE, especially the way their balance cadence / game is now. But it's an interesting take. Honestly they could definitely start playing with target cap in WvW at the very least for over-performing support boon skills.' While I'm largely not a fan of this, because target cap is already so inconsistent, ANet has already started doing this on Offensive Skills like [Scorched Earth]. So if they don't have the development budget to carefully pull the good levera' I suppose they could always pull a bad lever' on these lol.
@@GW2Pseudo My problem with target cap is that the meta stays the same, it just shifts from "3 FBs 3 Chronos" to "5FBs and 5 Chronos". You'll never not want to cap your squad on boons because of their power... It will LOWER diversity not add
@Jimbr16 That's also an interesting point. I don't Zerg much anymore, I just watch clashes from an outside perspective, so my option probably isn't worth much on this. And changing boons from 5>3 targets also "doesn't particularly feel good to play" for standard sub squads either. Because say, you pressed your 'stability button' but someone in your sub got pulled anyway.
I 100% don't have all the answers here, but if say tomorrow someone asked me "How do you fix WvW forever?" my somewhat cop-out answer would probably be: "Try to look at when there was both play AND counterplay from a Zerg composition perspective and go from there." Heck bringing back 10-target cap Spellbreaker Bubbles for a week might not even be the worst thing, just because it at least introduces some active "don't be in that" play, & to see if the current meta could withstand it, or if it turned out to be just as OP as before. 😄
@@GW2Pseudo Yeah, honestly I'd rather they remove boons entirely, see what the game is like that and start slowly adding and balancing the game like that.
Boons being about twice as powerful as your gear and base stats for dps and tankiness is insane to me from a design perspective.
Do that and the game goes back to being about what skills are being used and how to counterplay that.
I love gw2, but i quite because of PVP. The concept of Spvp in gw2 is great, everyone start with the same power level and gear grind dosent metter, but somehow the balance is just bad. Common thing when im trying to play that i have to fight against the same team 4-5 times in a row wich means not many ppl playing pvp i guess. WvW is another topic, i dont like zerg pvp, i did enjoy roaming for a while but its always the same. Some classes are just to OP. I love gw2 as i said before but the pvp here is somehow wierd for me.
What you described sounds exactly how a *lot* of people I encounter describe PvP/WvW.
Despite having one of, if not the absolute best combat system in any MMO (which makes you want to enjoy it) PvP, at least on NA, has a low population because of all the drama/slow balance.
So a lot of people turn to WvW roaming. However WvW is very deliberately overpowered comparatively, and is not balanced for roaming at all. This can be fun because you can craft some extremely interesting builds. But conversely this can be extremely frustrating as the play-counter play difference is also much wider between some builds.
There are ways to somewhat work around these limitations. But, for what it's worth, at least know you're not alone in your experience. 😂
I left the game about a year ago. Just got fed up with having to buy stuff to keep up, then having to remake every class after updates.
You know what is a bad class balance? I tryed elementalist, rev, warrior, mesmer, basically every class in the game in structured PvP. Was silver hardstuck, didn't understood why my skills wont land etc. Than I just leveled up necromancer and got myself into gold, then in plat. Yeah, climbing to plat was still tough for me, but I still don't know a lot of mechanics.
Second comment to not add to the previous rant: I really like your takes on energy sigils, power reduction and the stupid amount of boons in zergs.
Even though my main classes kind of rely on this (Firebrand and Dragonhunter in Zergs, Willbender in roaming), I would like to see it change. It's just annoying that everything relies on who has the bigger blob.
Out-skilling other groups that just spam boons has become harder and harder, since they can just negate everything and then blob you down.
But I guess, if Anet really cracks down in this, all of these blob players will protest very loudly.
Also, I wish for cele stats to be removed from WvW. Not only nerfed, but fully deleted.
Getting so many extra stats just creates unengaging gameplay with condi-tanks.
Edit: Fully agree on the class identity thing. "Bring the player, not the class" sounded good to me, but it feels like they deleted the identities a bit too much. I really like role compression in WvW, and to grind to get good at this role.
Cool video, I vibe with your temperament and this type of content in general. Since I am a relatively new player I will chime in and say that I think relics can be quite fun but I clocked them immediately as pure power creep put into the game solely to make buildcrafting more interesting for veterans. I wasn't aware just how many they have been adding though-it does seem egregious and will contribute to bloat. But at the same time, I think needing to acquire these relics via achievements or other explorations into other game modes is really healthy for the game in other ways. As for WvW, I have my own sort of mechanical hangups as a new player, but your veteran perspective on the actual stats, gear, and buffs was really interesting to me. It's not at all uncommon for these older MMOs to struggle with homogenization, ie maintaining their class identity while keeping everything semi-viable. ANet does seem to have serious issues with not nerfing clearly broken shit though. I wonder where that comes from because surely the feedback they get in that regard is quite loud and clear.
Thanks! & Re: "Broken shit": Not to mention their internal metrics must be screaming at them as well. If I had to guess, and we do a lot of the time, I'd say it really comes down to their hyper irregular balance cadence. (i.e Sometimes we get 3 balance patches in 3 months, sometimes we have to go 4+ months with nothing at all.) But combined with the fact that their "design goals" seem to vary and change from patch to patch like a leaf on the wind. For example, EoD specs: Patch 1 Get them out. Patch 2 nerf the over-performing PvP stuff, Patch 3 put Cele in the game and prep to scrap all EoD class identity and make loads of the Specs technically be able to give whatever boon for PvE.
This is somewhat reductive because, as I said, I was actually a fan of changes like Cele, at least for PvE (because it makes the game MUCH more accessible to new players, and more people playing the game means that literally everyone wins. But the I think of the OG Bladesworn or Willbender dev crying in the corner over all the work they did engineering a class that thematically made sense *and* was balanced/had balanced trade offs that made sense, before their Specialization was nerfed/buffed to being un-recognizable respectively, and I wonder if all that design work couldn't have been spent doing literally anything else.
Thanks for the feedback though. It's helpful to hear what newer players especially are thinking! And also to always helpful to remind myself/others that many other MMOs are just as baffling if not worse in terms of consistency. I give ANet mad props for better communication lately. It can always improve though.
biggest problem with this mmo is arena nets balancing for sure, remember how they changed scrapper to only give quickness when doing blast finishers? yeah... but then quickness firebrand be like "Press button and give quickness", they just don't follow their own logic, and this happens with a bunch of other balancing decisions, also about the power creep... yeah it's just really bad, gotta love how Soto pretty much introduced even more "Meta playstyles" to classes that didn't need it lol, then we get the spear builds and everythings changing in the build sites 😂😂the continuos trend of power creep definitely hasn't stopped, and it just makes older expansions feel terrible to play.
To be fair I've heard that some people like Engi Blasting for Quickness. But conversely I can't stand "just casting Dragon Slash" on Bladesworn and you give alacrity to literally the whole world. Imo it's out of place and doesn't fit the class fantasy at all.
Somehow it still has the best combat system 😂 tho. They just need to use it so it makes sense.
it's the exact same way i feel about it, realizing theres other classes that give quickness better and easier, just doesn't feel very good xD, thats not to say scrapper doesnt have other utilities though, but it is true, gw2 has the best combat out of any mmo ive tried 😎
@@Raindrop511Definitely. Just trying to help & be constructive here & the discussion in the comments so far has been pretty solid so far.
Let's hope 2025 is a better year for Balance 😁
I thought i was a really bad player for the longest time because i was either dying instantly or doing 0 damage. Turns out its more sad that the game is broken and this is just Guild Wars life
Here's the real secret: Everyone's a 'bad player' at some point 🤣 Some of us, like myself, are still there lol.
For the pve part, hard specs should do something like 15% more dmg as easy specs. Otherwise everyone will camp the easy specs like virtuoso and pTempest and then we will only see theses specs been played. cVirt should have never go upper than its 38k/s of EoD period and pTempest shouldn’t go upper 40k/s. We’re on a power Mechanist rifle meta like, everyone got lazy and it sucks.
At the very least the top-performing specs should in no way also bring the most utility. Not without sacrificing some of their DPS anyway imo.
For me as a new Players I'm going with you in your's idea and for a new players it's really not helping to have to look for everything in the wiki but it's not an problem.
For me the thing that's make me a little bit rage is the facts that you take time to make legendary ( obviously ik ) but wen you see that's the 2 thing that's you get for doing its is the right to swapped stats whenever you want and you can used it in every class that have the same armor or weapons useable but for me as a player from some other MMO that's not really that good ( FOR ME again ).
I know that's a really helping thing for swap character and everything but i think legendary can get some help from adding some stats buff, just a little like 25 or 30 overall stats, something like that's or some ppl gona have more ideas or better ideas I'm open to hear about
Have a nice day or night and hood luck for you adventure 😊😊
You too! It's always helpful to hear from new players as this game (is old) but is still pretty great.
Legendaries (and Ascended Gear) are ~10% more stats than exotic gear that you can "just buy off the trading post." But indeed they are more of a convenience thing' as they let you freely use them without swapping Legendary Gear between characters, and Change Stats + Sub any gear in or out of em'.
And the Wiki for this game *is* quite huge, but it's also incredibly well maintained for how old this game is imo. Little known fact you can also type: "/wiki might" for example to bring up the wiki page on "might" for example in Guild Wars 2. But I agree there's probably a more modern implementation that could be done theoretically for this.
😄 Thanks for the feedback & Good luck to you was well! Feel free to always ask any questions you might have here!! ^^
More frequent balance patches doesn't help in the slightest if those patches don't actually BALANCE. It is easy to tell that any given patch is flawed is to notice the percentage change in any particular aspect. If something is changing by 50% it isn't a balance adjustment it is a complete rewrite.
New stuff needs to better than all existing things in order to drive the people who must be the best, to buy the extension.
I'm not saying everything should 'do' everything, but especially in Guild Wars 2, there are ways to add tools to add new Specializations/Gear Tools that simply afford new options. But that's the thing they should be options' and require build investment/budget where you give up or miss out on something else.
But correct. Balance Patches should also, ideally, "not suck" lol. 😂 One of the bigger problems that I see, that I would hope more frequent patches might help address, *is* when they change something by 50% and never revisit it again. Whether it's spear damage, cooldowns, or tait damage numbers: there has to be a number between +/- 0 and 50% that makes a thing "balanced" and I would c(h)ope that more frequent patches *that didn't suck* would help prevent the problem of introducing a tool in one patch, nerfing it out of existence the next, and it never being touched ever again. 😂
Thing is, anet doesnt see problems as problems. They just nerfed alot of corrupts and boonrips *caugh* nullfield. Take the thief sword 2 or staff-abuse in wvw to exploit yourself into keeps and stuff. Exists for years. They just dont adress it. Even if there are tons of videos explaining how to do this exploit on youtube+ forum posts. I just dont think they are rly into balancing / fixing stuff at all. And yeah the relicthing is just weird and not rly thought through of them either. Feels like they just are the new thing for the sake of adding something new. Playing since release btw.
Question. Do you think current Anet balance team is capable of fulfilling your suggestions?
Capable? Yes. Willing? No.
Capable? Yes. Willing? I have no idea. Their design patch goals seem to vary so wildly from patch to patch. One month they'll try a drastic nerf/buff, and if it doesn't work out the next they seem to go "Oh well we tried!" and never iterate on or touch those overperforming/underperforming things again. I'd love to know why.
Why are a lot of people are crying. I only ever play thief and hb, and never touched virt. I've played all the hardest pve contents and Virt being extremely strong never affected my ability to do damage with my class. Also Its a lot better now how most classes can give out quick/alac compared to the time when it was just chrono. Qhb is still extremely good, other classes being able to hand out those boons really didnt affect how I hand out my boons and keep my team alive.
Going to push back hard on "every class feels the same". Warrior doesn't play anything like an Elementalist, Elementalist doesn't play anything like a Theif, Theif doesn't play anything like a Reverent. Classes applying the same boons doesn't mean they play the same. That's like saying every character in Street Fighter plays the same because they all have throws.
That's not a bad take Oceanbat I'm glad we can disagree on stuff.
Tbh I don't like the "Press Class Mechanic X to do Y boon" thing whether it's in the support line or or a Grandmaster, I honestly preferred when they were trying to give it to Banners & Spirits etc. at least then you saw the Visual Representation of whatever was going you boons. But that also probably would have been worse.
I don't think there's a magic bullet to any of this. But I will say I want more interesting Grandmasters than "give boon X" on Specializations back. But ofc, as you know, super not biased on that. 😂
as a firebrand i do agree we should be only one having every single buff in the game 😂🤭 (also our reflects are fine) but they could nerf concer/buff strips to a degree that could be healthy for the meta.
how tf did you crank this out when you only recorded it like 2 days ago !?!? lol
Oh you know
0 content
0 immersion
0 balance
None of the core pillars to make any game exciting is being addressed correctly in gw2.
What content do you enjoy? I genuinely ask because all of my friends seem to enjoy/play different stuff. 😄
Actually, I think the game is amazing, but arenanet should really get rid of quickness and alacrity. Those two stats alones are ruining the game. And maybe tone down the support role in raids and other stuff diminishing boon sharing from all professions. That alone would open space for them to be more creative and prevent the meta creep, I guess. Also, I agree with the energy sigil. It's busted. I can't even play Mirage without it, and that's totally shameful.
Im a relatively new player, returned 2 years ago. I dont care about relics (or any new slot things they want to add later), wouldnt mind it being deleted. I think they should stop powercreep, limit around 30k mark and I want the rotations to be easier, if I want high APM Ill play Starcraft.
Relics by themselves being separated is nice. The #s going up forever isn't sustainable though as many fights we're designed around classes doing ~maybe 20K DPS. Just FYI there are some low-er amp builds that absolutely slap rn. Check out my Auto-Attack 0-button Deadeye Build: th-cam.com/video/0aVUu0SK9L0/w-d-xo.htmlsi=Wjqe7PQCELdFjCq_ or Fresh Air Tempest if you haven't! The former is great to learn mechanics of fights on & the latter does Competitive DPS rn and is like 6 buttons. (It's also what I play in DPS in PvE because frankly I suck at it these days.) 😂 But I get what you mean.
agree all
I'm not always right about everything, no one is. But I definitely tried! 😄
From wvw perspective i feel from the begining in gw2 we never had like the holy trinity and suport was also dps in a squad the hardest part of playing a guardian pre HoT was to get a hold of celestial gear since u basicly had to charge ur quarts crystals😂 but to be honest PoF tho having the longest meta run of elite specs in wvw in hindsight was not good at all to the gamemode imo its like the suport and dps roles had switched places where back in the day u maybe had 30% suport and 70% dps now u hav 70% suport and 30% dps
I still need to learn more I did thief to 40 did not like it like in other mmo did a 80 ticket on revenant loving it so far did the ,last expansion to get flying mount and not doing story… I have a virtuoso to 80 but need hero points still so far not liking it to the renegade for ow don’t care for pvp as of now
Glad to have you enjoying Guild Wars 2! 😄 If you have any questions please feel free to ask, it really is a solid game overall!!
Gw2 is a bad state has feel like the game has no dev team, cause they take almost a year to make changes that some are so minimal and takes 5 minutes to fix, class balance is not there, there is classes that are being deleted sorta say cause they provide nothing useful for the group content and when you try get into x content they kick you right away been there, games should not go around meta's that is biggest mistake, this happens cause of the poor balancement they do, there is been classes nerfed like 3 times in a row to a point that werent played by no one, classes should be free to build how they like and not based on metas created by the dev team, i would like to have more customiseable feel to my class, i get so many weapons to choose but can only pick 1 or 2 cause if not i wont perform well due to again lack of dev team brains, pve content is lacking massively, new expansion feel very low quality not only on story but in content it provides for the price, i mean i love the game been playing it for years but recent years its been L's after L's and they dont seem to care much.
(i forgot to add wvw that is literaly destroyed by the new system, alliances were formed the best players are all in the same team wiping the entire matchs constantly, again another L' created by dev team)
I don't see why we can't get a patch every 2 weeks. I don't get why we can get hot patches to fix broken things for pvp or wvw. We already know Annette is almost putting all their eggs in the basket for guild wars so why can't we get these things. It makes sense to get these things.
Because $. The somewhat depressing reality is that Balance Patches do not directly drive sales regardless of whether they are good or frequent. While they are one of the most exciting things for me, (and likely lots of people watching videos like this,) most of the people playing Guild Wars 2 do not care about, or even notice when a balance patch happens. If you want to work to change this try to share what you like about this game's systems with your friends, and give the Devs constructive feedback.
Guild Wars 2 has, hands-down, the best combat system in any MMO, I agree that should be worth more. 😂
@@GW2Pseudo they need to start polling like osrs. Patches should correlate to sales because a lack of patches and balance should translate to less frequent players. But idk if that's the number or just my opinion. Problem is there's a lot of boomers that just chase AP and care about no other content which is absolutely wild to me.
BUFF WARRIOR NOW!
Don't say that, you'll get it nerfed again lol
i just want quickness and alacrity gone
You just said "things are too tanky while doing too mutch dmg" and you solution is to ........ nerf energy sigil? Wait what? xD. The problem is the boon spam/Condi Spam in comb with defensive class mechanics..... i think the energy sigil is the shortest end of them all ...... 😅
Yes, Think about it. Energy Sigils enable both full glass' and full tank builds' to live wayyyyyyy longer than they should, shortening the windows for and amount of counterplay to either.
If they removed Energy Sigils both ends of the power spectrum would require significantly more build/power budget investment to be able to do either at the same level. Which seems to be what most seem to want, and a solid first step in the right direction. I'm open to being wrong like I said. But at this point ANet should just try more balance stuff' that they can easily 180 on if it doesn't work at this point.
Good video but, they reality is that ANET does pander, they have listened to a lot of crying over the years (muh player retention fears). So in their attempts to make everyone a winner they really stopped caring about risk/reward and simply try to make everything equally rewarding. Why ever play Power Herald (dead since 2020) when you have Willbender, Necro with its new mobility, etc? Yes, homogenisation is a symptom of that.
(Either way, Id rather have a patch that unfcks other specs from their past stupid changes than a nerf to WB and such. It is actually not that oppressive. This perpetual "nerf/remove what I dont like" cycle is also largely responsible for the state of the game).
The community was in fact largely responsible for the shtty Feb 2020 patch. It has gone downhill ever since. Back then, it was no problem to burst down a slop tanky, Minstrels build. Their hyper-fixation with balance is what started fckin it all. Pretending that this is something other than an MMORPG.
Also, boons are never going away until they can address the perpetual vomit fields all over the ground pulsating damage and CC. And they know this. It is an arms race. The game is unplayable without permanent Stability and Resistance.
They simply haven't had a real philosophy or direction to follow for years. Instead, they seem to balance and even design around Golem benchmarks and Monthly tournaments (and random crying posts). It is pathetic.
Other things:
1. Relics were a great change. Most of them are pretty decent. If anything, damage modifier ones shouldn't exist.
But 6 per update is a lot, yeah.
2. The new weapons are so overloaded. They keep trying to cram the equivalent of elite specs into them.
They need to stop that, and they need to nerf all the current spears even more, before they continue to "balance" (nerf) classes and builds around them.
3. PvE is still as depthless as ever. I don't see that ever changing. Their target audience seems to be the lowest common denominator: That's why certain PvE builds are so broken and easy to use. So that everyone can complete most, if not all, of the content.
-
4. WvW is a lot more salvageable than sPvP. It is over for that mode. Conquest was never that good, sorry pseudo-esports bros.
But the combat is still great, which is a shame because of everything else.
I actually agree with a lot of this ^. I don't think relics were bad' I just think 6 per 3 months is a waste of design/balance budget at this point.
But regardless of personal preferences, yes: Everyone loves a nerf patch except when it's their stuff that's nerfed. However *I have 0 idea how to convince the community that"nerfs can be a good thing," whatever game mode(s) we're talking about, other than making videos like this.* BECAUSE people unintentionally/intentionally attach the investment time/a sense of self worth (for some reason) to what they play in games. Heck, look at how many people I got vehemently defending Virtuoso in the comments of this video because I had the audacity to say that it was a symptom of the slow balance patch/meta power level problem.
For example I run *tons* of concentration on my WvW builds and I'm the first to admit that it's AWFUL for any time of "competitive" balance. In no way do I have all the answers, and am far from perfect, but if we want to salvage the balance of this game people need to be open to admitting that their own stuff might be a little over-tuned. In no way is ANet blameless in this, but no matter what they do that's not on them that's on the Community. 😂
botom line they need to rework all traits.
I dislike the fact that me as elementalist need press 10 buttons do 26 point rotation to archive same damage what warrior with 3 buttons. And everyone put that in ur face, this class is dead meta, ur shet, learn to play... :). Kinda the arena pushing you to switch profesions you can't stay on that you love because in time it gets nerfed.
Make Grandmasters Great Again [MGGA]
Every-single class and every-single spec has cleared both HTCM and LCM. As for LCM/Cerus specifically, Condition Virtuoso is only 'meta' because it is incredibly easy to play with modest (quite low relative to other dps benchmarks) damage. Most players are not good enough to complete both the mechanics and play a class to at-to-near benchmark damage. So, Condition Virtuoso helps with that skill gap. Many other specs are actually far more advantageous to take in LCM.
Some examples:
* Tempest is a better class to play on LCM than Virt if you can dodge (real problem: bad players cannot). It has better cleave and lets you stay near the boss;
* Scourge has as much utility and more survivability than Virtuoso. It makes sub 10% a joke;
* Deadeye has better cleave and has an 'easy' version that can also clear both LCM and HTCM.
The actual biggest issue with endgame content currently aren't the dps classes--it is the hordes of 'omg I'm a support main' players, who do not understand basic mechanics and think they are doing 'great' if they press a heal button. I think this is reflected in your comments about engi/warrior not being 'good enough healers' around 4:25. Both engi and warrior have heal cleared all content (including LCM and HTCM). However, it does require more skill to use these classes in this content.
The biggest takeaway for anyone looking to clear difficult content in GW2 is that you have three options: (1) be extremely good on a class you one-trick and feel is not 'represented--that still fills a role effectively (can cleave on LCM/do appropriate damage on HTCM); (2) create your own group to clear the content; or (3) adapt, be a team player instead of complaining, and learn the easiest classes to clear the difficult content.
For PvE this is a discussion of what a stagnant Meta is, how that feels, and what that means in terms of 'required' (or at least expected) power-creep for the game's future. I just joked that it's "aka. The Virtuoso problem" because that is what people are most familiar with as it happens to be the one that's been in the spotlight here for the longest. Virtuoso is not "necessary" you're correct in that regard. But 93% of groups have 6 just because it means you're going to be able to prog "hard" content or just get your weekly clears done that much easier. And is that not what "A Meta" is by definition? (It's what's most used for X or Y content.) People have been saying that they want more reward for playing 'harder' piano classes (Ele, Engi, Deadeye, etc.) for a while. So is that not exactly a good thing?
The main thing, as you said is Virt is "easy"-er. It gets a free invuln on it's DPS kit, cleaving range, and can also bring Utility / Do roles (aka. Portals) that the "meta" of the one other "hard" fight (HTCM) in the game demands (again most' of the time.)
Even taking utility out of it though, say in terms of damage, do you think it's "healthy" for the future of the game for *anything* (Warrior, Virtuoso, Ranger, whatever) to be able to do 43K+ dps easily from range, especially when original raid fights were designed (and balanced) around classes doing max 20? There's no wrong answer here. "Yes." Is an entirely acceptable answer to that question, especially with the caveat/rationale that "it will get newer players into older raid content." But if that's the answer we need to be prepared to live in the reality of aggressive power creep that we all sanctioned. There's no "magic bullet" solution to any of this as people seem to think, but it's an important discussion to be able to have because everyone is different and has different perceptions of what is "right" and what "needs fixing." 😄
Respectfully, I don't think that's the point that Pseudo's making. It's not about Virtuoso specifially. He probably could have phrased that better, it's about the meta of power and feature creep without build investment. There will always be a Meta' at Doing X' in any game, or anything really. Virtuoso just happens to have the easiest DPS *AND* Utility in the 2 high en PvE fights right now. Willbender is still king in PvP. But neither are particulatly useful in Zergs in WvW where Firebrand an scourge still dominate.
It's more about the game environment that both Homogenization of Boons/DPS in theory creates. I.R. now do we now go up' or down' from here? Do we add Portals to Ranger, Revnant so they can do the same things Virt can and further the power/creep/Homogenization of the game? Or up the ranged, cleaving DPS of Necromancer? Or are we willing to eat the bullet and take either some of the "free" or "free-er" utility i.e. Portals, Invulns, DPS away from Virt in order to preserve Class Identity and avoid even more Aggressive Power Creep. Once upon a time Dhuum CM was considered "Hard, Prestigious Content." If we don't turn the car around HT, LCM and even the next LCM will eventually be trivialized as well.
@amethystcloud8515 Exactly.
@@GW2Pseudo respectfully, if you think cVirts can do 43k+ dps at ranged easily, you don't know what you are talking about. The benchmark barely hits 43k at the golem, and the vast majority of players are going to be at 70-80% of that. There are exactly 0 raid fights in this game that benefit the group taking a virtuoso for ranged dps over a superior (higher dps) spec, of which there are many (21 of them). I do agree, that yes, old encounters have become power crept by ALL specs (not just virt).
1:29 Virt does indeed have cleave and 1200 range. Range doesn't really matter except for what, two fights in the form of Cerus Legendary mode and Kaineng? Three if you wanna kite on Q2 I guess. It does have cleave but idk, better watch out for the cleave of unload thief or it'll steal your lunch money. Having distortion is both stupid and funny lol
2:24 There's no reason to not pick virt as a damage class? footage shows how there's multiple people on damage not playing virt. It is a good class, that's for sure but you can take power tempest, you can take condi mech, you can take power cata if you're one of those crazy people that only wants damage or you can take scourge and have a 900 range revive and a bunch of barrier per dps gamer for example. You'll do very similar damage and each of those also brings other stuff to the table.
2:33 There's no reason to talk about willbender in pvp/wvw in the pve section.
3:06 No reason to talk about wvw and pvp in the pve section.
4:10 Heal warrior or heal specter being bad? Yeah they are. Well, you can say that they aren't bad but that they are in a different (worse) league than other healers. Considering that the staff for warrior came out in february of last year I wouldn't say that it's the balance team that's not fast enough but that they are fine with warrior being a bad healer. There have been multiple balance patches since we all knew it was not in the best state and its continued being in a not great state. Unless there's some comment from some random twitch chat from Grouch or whatever saying that they wanna make those two better, with how much time has passed, I'll consider this a decision the balance team took instead of saying that they aren't fast enough to change it.
I also wanna add that while they are in fact the worse healers out of every option, you can still clear every single fight and every single cm with them.
4:51 Once all your boons and all the mechanics you'll deal with have been covered, you will always want the maximum ammount of the best class that you can get. There is no mechanic preventing you from picking six of anything. You can delete virtuoso from the game and everyone will play cerus lcm with six scourges, or with six tempest, with six [insert the best class here]. The only reason this is not happening on every single fight is that most of the other fights are not hard enough to push you to want to have the best chance you can. This is not a problem, this is a design decision. No ammount of balance can change this without a combat system rework (which is ludicrous at this point in the game's life).
To add a bit to this, it's neat when the meta changes and there's new stuff to play and enjoy (and you can say that it's not fast enough for your taste) but this is already happening. Since HTCM released there have been moments when everything you saw was rifle mech, or bladesworns, or sure condi virt. There's also moments when condi scourge was doing 50k dps. We had power tempest doing a ton of damage on an easy build, we had rev spear doing stupid numbers, we had double pistol willbender with a whole bunch of burning for a moment. Except for mirage and arguably weaver, there is a reason to play each elite spec; to play each class. Each one of them can clear every fight in the game.
Do you not want to see specifically a virtuoso on your pug runs? that's fair, it has been a very good build for quite a while; but lets not pretend that the balance of the game is not in the best state it has ever been. I was there when the only real dps build was tempest and I don't wanna go back to pressing F because someone downed and accidentaly stealing a conjured weapon instead of helping.
I think you're missing my point, so I'll try to Summarize it: I am not picking on Virtuoso, specifically. OR Willbender, or even Immobilize Druid. These are just examples of each of the 2 points I'm trying to condense for each game mode. PvE Virtuosos are not strictly necessary" for either HTCM, LCM, or even Weekly R. They're just the most common. The same way that Willbender is in PvP now, Catalyst was, or even Bladesworn was when it came out when it could reload it's Healing-Shout skills, which was equally as stupid and bad for the game.
But given this does the power-curve just keep going up since Virtuoso is not "necessary" but by far the easiest, & the most versatile for clears and this is the line in the sand?' (This creating "A Meta" and this discussion in the first place.) The issue is power/free feature creep, and that the Meta has been allowed to Stagnate. It just so happens that that meta laned on Virtuoso and Willbender. So the question becomes: Do we nerf these 2, or buff (could be utility, support, damage or instert-x-here) everything else? Do Ranger and Warrior get portals now, or Necro get an invuln? Or could we maybe require Virt to give up, say, some damage for a portal (as they do with HTCM) or a damage trait in PVE for their free invuln, cleave, range or some combination of the 3? That's what balancing around a Meta means, and that's the discussion I'm trying to foster here! 😄
Will probably get flamed here but, don't care. It was a mistake to introduce "relics" in the first place. Agree, having 100% or permanent boon(s) shouldn't ever happen in game. Now, I don't play PvP, absolutely hate it. WvW, only when I need gift of battle however, I'm working on Coalescence, I'm having to do more WvW for skirmish tickets.
It's a recipe to disaster. Yes, more runes/sigils and give us a leggy aqua helm.
I remember the original "banner warrior" before Anet killed it. Then brought it back but couldn't use any weapon, then had to revamp it to a much weaker build than what it was originally. They these are "balance" patches, I really question exactly what they are... great video, cheers :)
Thx! & Thanks for providing context for your answer, it's very helpful for discussion. To be fair I haven't touched PvP much in JW but I'm a huge WvW nerd. And as a couple people have pointed out here some Specializations could also be massively over-performing as well. Unfortunately all of the interplay between new systems make it basically impossible to determine what's over-performing.
Like I always say I think it just comes down to: *"What's FUN but fair-enough"* at the end of the day. And to me at least, different individual build pieces to play with where builds, & classes can actually interact with each other for more than 1-second windows 95% of the time, seems a lot healthier.
@@GW2Pseudo Indeed. :)