Comment on Game Update Notes: September 26

• 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.

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  • necropola@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    • I’m not saying that “the non cm game is too hard (for me)”. It’s just a fact that not many players are doing strikes and even less do raids.
    • I doubt that gear (even cheaper now from WvW vendor) or the build (various sites to find them, see our sidebar) are the issue. The two things that are mostly holding back people are in my opinion:
      • The game itself does a terrible job at teaching you how to properly play your profession/spec. This is especially true for the importance of boons. It also does not help that the amount of CC you need to break a defiance bar is all over the place (in open world and story).
      • The end game community tends to commmunicate unrealistic (DPS) expectations, e. g. LFG “Strike Mission (Training)” is usually empty and “Strike Mission (Experienced)” is overly picky in what it expects and is full of abbreviatiosn which many casuals won’t know.

    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.

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    • Ravi@feddit.de ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You are talking about a problem that is independent from the dps output of the classes: players aren’t told how core mechanics work. This has been addressed in the recent updates with the adventure guide and the beginning of EoD. You have to seperate this from the damage balance though, because a dead dps doesn’t do any damage, regardless of potential.

      On the dps side of things there are also two main aspects: baseline and maximum potential (floor and ceiling). You are talking about low performing players, that are on the floor side of things. But neglected the ceiling part. If you raise the ceiling (like soto did) you trivialize a huge part of the content for most players. Especially in raids there are mostly mixed groups of players, with low performing and high performing players. If you have just two players doing 80% of the benchmark dps, the group skips entire parts of the fight ruining the encounter as it was intended. This also affects the low performing players, that are in the group as well.

      Now let’s talk about the baseline (floor) of dps. Yes there is a big difference between baseline dps and the ceiling you can achieve, maybe they could tweak this a bit for some classes. But in my experience bad baseline dps often comes from bad preparation or bad support. Before last patch I tried to benchmark the power soulbeast standard build on the golem, with only doing sword auto atracks. I did get 17k dps out of it. That’s more than enough to beat almost all content. You literally don’t have to press any buttons, just do the mechanics.

      Heal and boon dps is another thing. It’s a shift of focus, your dps isn’t that important anymore, now it is keeping the team alive and providing utility. This is traditionally harder than pure dps, because you need to adapt to the encounter you are facing and know the kit you are using. But there are easy variants too, that can provide the core boons without breaking a sweat.

      All in all it’s not “git gud”, but just “git okay”. Invest 15min for preparation once to setup your class and you are good to beat any non cm in the game. If you want to get into raids, strikes and fractals invest another 10mins to watch a mechanics video or go into a training raid before joining experienced groups.

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      • necropola@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Before last patch I tried to benchmark the power soulbeast standard build on the golem, with only doing sword auto atracks. I did get 17k dps out of it.

        I assume you have been using the suggested raid buffs, i. e. Fury, 25 Might, Quickness, (Alacrity,) 25 Vulnerabilty, … and were auto-attacking a stationary target golem, right?

        What amount of average DPS (over the total fight duration) would this equal to in a “real world scenario”, i. e. a PUGed Cosmic Observatory?

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      • necropola@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I think we can agree that the main balancing issue is the huge gap between “floor” and “ceiling”.

        I wasn’t ignoring the ceiling by the way. My argument is that the ceiling equals a tiny fraction of the player base and is hence not as relevant as it appears to be on the forums, reddit, lemmy, youtube, … where it is overly represented.

        And even, if I count in the “floor” of players doing end game content, we are still talking about a minority of the player base total.

        What needs to be done is narrow the gap which means

        • help players to “git okay” (as you put it). But this shouldn’t be mostly rely on external resources. The game can still do far better in this regard.
        • limit the DPS increase you can achieve by reaching perfection. I don’t mean a hard cap, but a flattening curve that throttles individual DPS the higher you go. Which means that the best of the best can still compete against each other but are not as easily capable of carrying an entire squad.

        Meanwhile the “over-performers” could run less OP builds, equip white gear or play naked, if they find the content too easy. Yes, I’m kidding. But just a little. 😎

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