I think they’re headed in the right direction with the conditional balancing on some traits. It’s hard with all the traitlines, specializations and weapon confounding combinations to consider, give the guys some slack. Scourge was out of control last patch, so I’m not surprised it got hit hard. Better nerf hard then buff slightly than nerf too little
Comment on Game Update Notes: September 26
necropola@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
They are actually nerfing skills/traits depending on the elite specialization in use. What a terrible “solution”.
Dhuumfire: Reduced burning duration from 3 seconds to 2 seconds when the scourge elite specialization is equipped in PvE only.
Sigmatics@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
necropola@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
They could have just added a 3s internal cooldown to Dhuumfire instead of changing the duration from 3s to 1s on Harbinger and (now) Scourge.
Sigmatics@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Sure, KISS is nice, but I think it fails to handle the complexity of possible combinations in this case
They tried for a long time to keep it the same across game modes, it just didn’t work out for them
rivr@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Let people have some fun.
Anet says “no, fuck you”
Kaldo@kbin.social 9 months ago
Tbf scourge needed a sledgehammer and the rest of the balance changes are indeed more of a small tweak than drastic nerfs.
Also, the argument "it's pve let people have some fun" is very shortsighted. Yeah, it's pve, but most boss fights have become ridiculously easy and our potential max dps is just completely out of control. Something has to be done for the sake of actual enjoyment, content longevity, ingame economy and all manner of other factors besides "some people like a power fantasy". We've had our fun for a month and it was more than enough, time to reign it back in.
necropola@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
Whose?
While I wasn’t playing Scourge myself since June (I’m wating until the Yo-Yo settles), I actually liked that an OP spec enabled players to access/beat content that was (or appeared to be) out of reach for them. Well, that’s over now.
Also, PvE isn’t equal to end game content. For the majority of players PvE means Open World and Story content where condition builds are notoriously slow compared to power builds. Those players probably had a lot of fun (and not a “power fantasy”) until this nerf and are now wondering, why it suddenly takes so much longer (again) to kill stuff.
Drastic changes are never good. Neither Buffs nor Nerfs. Especially for the more casual majority of players who might not even read the patch notes.
Ravi@feddit.de 9 months ago
I think you mistake where the drastic change really happened: on Soto release. Scourge went fully over the top. It’s always important how much dps a build can regularly do, because it trivializes certain encounters and let’s you skip mechanics entirely.
This ofc also affects more casual players too. But if the non cm game is too hard you are definitely doing something completely wrong. You either have very wrong equipment, traits or play the build wrong. But the good thing is, there is a very easy solution.
There are “low intensity builds” for every class that you can play with about 3 buttons. Combine this with cheap lvl 80 exotic gear from the trading post (about 25g for a full set of items) and you are easily in the top 10 damage dealers in any open world meta. This is even enough to beat pretty much all the raids and all fractals.
necropola@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
To give this some perspective: I’m playing Open World builds with quite a bit of survivability and QoL on all 9 professions which means I’m doing about 10K DPS (in a PUGed and hence not optimized strike mission squad) and I’m usually providing either Quickness or Alacrity to the group. This is far from 49K, but obviosuly still enough to beat the content. I’m not doing strikes very often, because I dislike playing circus horse simulator, but when I do, I’m ususally waiting for a Trainming PUG to pop or create my own. I actually like the team work experience and most of the time people are rather pleasant and patient.
Which brings me back to why I liked the OP Scourge. If people were (before this nerf) running a Condi DPS or Alcrity Condi DPS build in Celestial gear (maybe from booster), they would be easily doing more than 10K DPS. Even when rather poorly executed. Which allowed an unexperienced player to feel comfortable with their DPS and learn the encounters (jump through the hoop, when the game “tells” you). This was once true for Mechanists too, but DPS in easy mode/build has been significantly nerfed over time.
And Scourge players who don’t do any end game content (the vast majority) are experiencing seemingly random variations of their DPS in Open World, depending on whether their profession/spec was just hit by a drastic nerf or buff. I really don’t think, that this is good.
The root cause for this is that ArenaNet bases their “balancing” decision on top DPS. i. e. the performance of a teeny-tiny fraction of their player base.