Atomnium.1532's Content - Guild Wars 2 Forums (2024)

Every CC-condi is just a ticking drain on breakbar, no special effect :

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defiance_bar#Control_effects

Chilled is 33 defiance bar/sec

I agree, i'd much rather have abundant stab than having it removed from firebrand and feel like you lose the control of your character frequently, i've never been a fan of repeated loss of control and gw2 can be a pain in the behind when it decides to chain CC you.

But as I said, I'm sure some purist will argue that punishing standing in aoe and not dodging should be part of the experience and it is not a crazy stance either.

I mean Firebrand is indeed very much overperforming in Fractals especially, the value of stab and all.
Advocating for the firebrand stab application to be democratized or removed both have their trade-offs.

Do people really want a world where you are CC-punished a lot and feeling like you are a pinball in some circ*mstancess ?
Do people really want a world where regardmess of comp, CC is non existent because healers provide stab to the degree of FB ?

I'd like the game to not feel like you lose control of your character for 4 seconds everytime a maggot farts, but some people may say that the player should be punished for not avoiding kitten properly.

But anyone who thinks FB is 'balanced' is made of copium.

Oh I'm not excusing or advocating for the devs decision to put such an emphasis on these boons and have the game revolve around them.

What I'm saying is that pivoting away from that design is not a simple toggle. Huge work has to be done afterward to rebalance around the absence of these as the core of certain specs. It would be a big shift, I believe as most here that it would be a net positive to remove them altogether/make them baseline and that numerical outliers can be dealt with after quickness alac would be baseline.

Remember that it took YEARSfor Anet to make enough specs provide them so that we don't have to stack the 1-3 specs that provide it and have some degree of diversity, I'm not expecting undoing the years of design around it to be done in a monthly balance patch, that's what I'm saying. I absolutely believe that eventually, quickness and alac will change or be removed, but I don't think it's likely that it'll come soon™.

I think the desire for those boons to be gone has been heard from the devs at this point, but I'm guessing even if the will to satisfy this community desire was there it would mean like dozens of traits would need to be entirely reworked, a big balance shift that would require massive number tuning all over the place and an amount of work that is unreasonable without impairing the other tasks that developers need to do for content release.

But considering we're at like the 12th thread about this in the profession forum with a somwhat consensus that Q and alac need to go, content creators already conceding that those buffs are not healthy for the game, new arrivals in the game like Preach pointing specifically to that point and saying that they don't like it.

The feedback is overwhelmingly clear.

I'm fairly confident that the devs actually know about the Quickness/Alac conversation but that even IF they would to finally consider it, it would be a pivotal change that would be addressed in an expansion where you can justify pouring more ressources into a core change to the combat like this one.

There is also the gamemode problem. If Quickness / alac speed was really baseline, what about sPvP ? Do we just have gw2 pvp move at +50% speed and move on without thinking of the consequences ? Even WvW.

And wouldnt that feel even worse than now if whenever you entered a pvp match or wvw you didnt have this speed ? It's not really a simple toggle, there are tons of tentacles to what Quickness and alac impact.

Arguably if you dont need huge healing, like in a speedrun even as ritualist, celestial or any semi offensive build you might keep amazing boon providing and be a very effective pick in the high end meta as an alacscourge.

My issue is as said a lot in this post and others, it cost every other possible scourge niche, from the boon corrupt, the 10 target cap, the revives, the dps etc... Basically the Thanos meme 'what did it cost you - everything' is very appropriate here.

They specifically mentionned that shades are kind of a problem in the sense that the mechanic provides 10 target skills while the whole game has been redesigned around 5 target boons, damage target cap etc...

Scourge basically had to let go of some of their uniqueness not to be 'oppressive' as they say, meaning that if current scourge was to have alacrity it could be regarded as such an overpowered pick that we would enter Scourge era 2.0.

The devs clearly have PTSD about years of scourge dominance and are doing everything they can to prevent it from being remotely possible while tweaking it. Problem is that they removed every single positive aspect of scourge so it no longer has any value but as a support.
Any dps scourge would have :

Low-end condi dps
As a support however it might be very good :
With a build like (if you were to translate post patch)http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PSwAg+ZlNweYSMImJm8X5veA-zxIY1ojvMquESPD89gEK7h3y/bWQFA-e
You'd give perma 25 might, perma alacrity, perma fury, perma regen, good barrier providing, good swiftness uptime, some aegis, great CC, condi cleanse and boonstrip, vampiric presence, last rites, minor revive with transfusion, low vuln application, infinite life force, be the most tanky thing in the universe and provide very low dps contribution (still higher than a HAM).

What the patch seems to intend is for Scourge to be a support and a very classic one, probably very strong but pigeonholed into this specific setup while condi and other hybrid gutted to the point of unusability.

Yes, it will no longer grant passive effect otherwise the wording would have been 'In addition to its existing effect' unless proven otherwise.

Low intensity will suffer sadly.

This patch is the worst I've ever seen, and we've seen some stinkers. Every single implementation is a mistake. The desire to make quickness painful to acquire as herald, scrapper, deadeye etc is legit incomprehensible . You've seen a lot of new player feedback, from preach and others who encounter the game, have they said 'What we'd like is that quickness and alac should really be hard to get and on very niche role and specs, so that players are forced to play convoluted builds that no one want to play' ? Is that madness, stupidity, ubris, lack of resources, rush ?

The scourge you just decided to delete from the game and promised to fix it in a later patch. It was mentionned that some pieces might be missing for some specs that are getting a new role.
That's not how you do a patch, you don't break the legs of the favorite character of a player and then promise him that he'll get arms in several months.

The game has legit been going in the right direction, and I'm guessing this is the end of the road for that trajectory.

Do not release this patch. You'll anger a lot of players and delete the good will you've been building since EoD.

Agreed with first response, i don't believe that Quickness and alacrity bring anything to the game but a hollow feeling of out-of-pace combat when they are missing.

I am pretty much convinced in this day and age, that the game would be healthier with those boons removed altogether and the base skill speed and recharge improved.

I was hoping for scourge to get alacrity, I was also expecting its revive potential to have to be nuked to make room for balanceability.

I was not expecting Scourge as an entire spec to be nerfed for this and become trash. Yes shades making the scourge have 10 target is a problem, not having perma 3 shades is a big problem too as the spec was designed around it.

It means that Sand sage now provides a variable expertise and concentration amount making itemisation clunky, it is also a 10% damage received nerf and because of blood as sand makes scourge an underwhelming low damage, squishy condition spec, a weak alac provider that needs to sacrifice everything to get alacrity.

The trade-offs from this patch are not worth it, and it basically kills scourge in every meaningful way but as a pure support barrier-alac healer, and its competing with alacmech for this....

In the end, logging in after the patch would be as a condi scourge :
-Lost 150 expertise & concentration
-Lost 840 barrier / seconds (all targets from desert empowerement counted)
-Lost 6 target on every shade skill and trait except for 20 secondes every minute