KryTiKaL.3125

I'm not sure on the dev hours point. Microtransactions (mtx) generate a lot of money, more than people may sometimes realize. If you are aware of this creator, Pirate Software, they used to work with Blizzard and they said that Celestial Horse mount, the very first store mount they offered, by itself made more money than Starcraft 2 did. Which is unfortunate, but it illustrates just how much mtx can generate, and GW2 has mtx, but the issue this game runs into is keeping people around. They see bulk increases in population like any other game surrounding releases, particularly expansion releases, but the falloff does seem to happen sooner than others which means that is less people sticking around and bothering to buy gems and use the gem store. Yes, converting gold to gems is a thing, but truthfully more often than not people are just going to opt to swipe their card rather than spend a week grinding out any number of things for the gold they would need for 800 gems, or more, for things like cosmetics or even just things like bag slot expansions, shared inventory slots, bank tabs, material storage increases, etc. You can actually see this over time as to how ANet doesn't seem to necessarily manage their development all that well. Like their priorities seem to be off, like the few times now where people have visibly noticed a sort of decline in quality of updates and focus on GW2 back around the times when ANet was known to be trying to get other projects off the ground only for them to go nowhere and then layoffs or reallocation of talent happens. This is how we got things like The Icebrood Saga...and the complete and utter actual waste of money that little "event" they held surrounding it where they bought some hall, hired a host, etc. Balance really doesn't feel much different to where it just seems like their priorities are not there or are just off, they have repeatedly had "this is our philosophy" posts and they basically didn't stick with any of them. The whole "trade offs" thing being the biggest offender of this habit, which I think some classes really still have not fully recovered from. This kind of feels like another instance of that with this whole "power budget" philosophy they spoke about, as well as the "balance philosophy" post they made a good while ago that I mentioned before where the changes they are making seem to effectively contradict one section where they speak about counterplay. Point being, I don't think its about the hours being put in, I think it is about where the focus is being applied and how they communicate with the playerbase, both things they are historically not great with. The priority of any given thing they are looking to work on. Now per a recent post of theirs they have seemingly been working on a lot of backend stuff and making improvements and changes due to the game now being fully on DX11. Would have been nice if they communicated "Hey, going forward for the time being we will be working on bringing new content to the game, but a large focus for much of our team will be to improve and iterate on a lot of backend systems now that we can work with DX11". Blizzard has issues, oh boy does it have issues, but I can at least personally appreciate the consistency and frequency with which they will actually look for feedback and then actually implement at least some of it. People can hate on DF for whichever reasons they want and it certainly isn't perfect, regardless of any of that they needed it as a "stepping stone" expansion with the changes and additions it brought. ANet is at least doing that with some QoL things, which are a long time coming and are looking for feedback on what next they could implement, good move, but they really need to get more on point with getting feedback and actually listening to the community.

Color-blind Accessibility Options Just general options made available, but particularly options made available for WvW as the team colors directly make issue with one of the most common types of color blindness; red-green colorblindness. Changing contrast of the game, or of the monitor, is not the solution to this. It will make everything else in the game look worse, that is not a real solution to something that this game should have had 6+ years ago. I have played a good number of games that do offer feasible, actual solutions either through options directly relating to selecting a colorblindness type (deuteranopia, protanopia, tritanopia) and it changes the colors of important aspects of game visuals. For instance, Horizon Forbidden West will specifically change important gameplay indicators and only those indicators to be different colors than normal, as well as very specific environment details such as the tall grass where your character can hide. Another solution is one where you just allow the user to select the colors that are most comfortable for them to use. Planetside 2 does this, where it allows the player to select colors for each of the three factions in the game and how their highlights, territories, markers, etc are all colored. In WvW in particular I know this may create an issue with how callouts would work in the team/map chats. Such as "10+ red heading to X objective" and if someone has a different color selected for this then it would be confusing. Players would need to get used to calling things out differently, such as abbreviations for server/team names probably becoming more common. I think its worth risking this shakeup to that status quo as it is just a helpful QoL feature to those that have to deal with this. It is annoying needing to physically mouse over an objective to see who owns it if you are like myself and cannot distinguish between red and green, and I have lost count of the amount of times I would accidentally try to glide in one of the borderlands only to realize my team does not own that particular area. For another aspect of this, I would extend this into enemy combo field/AoE field indicators as they can get pretty difficult to spot or differentiate from others in areas with grass, or just from other certain elemental combo field effects that an ally may have placed down. I'm aware this would probably require the creation of a number of visual effects to select from or just ones that would be applied depending on how this sort of feature were implemented.

You are absolutely not incorrect in this assessment with WoW balance. WoW does have phases where something it just so obscene it overrides everything else in the game, as well as the fact that RMP is still an egregiously oppressive comp in 3s and this has essentially never changed ever since it first appeared. The difference being, I would argue, is that RMP is the only consistent thing that overbears whereas everything else will essentially "have its time in the sun", so to speak. One season it may be boomkin brainless gameplay, another it may be Mage blowing everyone up, or Demon Hunter just out DPSing and out surviving everything else. Same thing goes for M+. GW2 doesn't have these "seasons" necessarily, if something is overbearingly oppressive it basically stays that way until the next expansion with a new Elite Spec showing up, or ANet takes an actual cannon to something and craters the whole thing and it again stays that way...for a long time. I'll take a 3 to 4 month cadence of balance at least making some notion of a physical shift over the silliness that confounds me that ANet does. No MMORPG has perfect balance, never will, but no other studio confuses me more with their approach to balance changes like ANet does. Note, it took them 6 years to address a repeated point of feedback about both Spellbreaker and Mirage that would rein in some things that were oppressive about them both (FC activating burst traits simply from being triggered and not actually hitting and Mirage Cloak needing to not be allowed to be used while CC'd) whereas ANet did anything but that in the interim which gutted both classes fairly extensively (Mirage single dodge being the biggest offender). Also note that in their balance philosophy post a while back they point out wanting to emphasize "counterplay" and yet the rise of the boonball due to their removal of boon strip/corrupt is a direct contradiction of that philosophy. ANet confuses me.

It would depend on the frequency of the boon strips/corrupts. I understand Boons in this game are a huge part of the gameplay and how classes even do the things they do, but there is practically no counterplay to them. It used to be boon strips/corrupts, but everything that does that in terms of area denial (such as Winds of Disenchantment) have all been so heavily nerfed to the ground that boonballing has just become even more exacerbated. If anything they would need to tool things like WoD and other effects to function as "denial", so for instance if WoD were buffed back up to a state where it was actually threatening to stand in, that could function as area denial for boonballing. The opposing zerg either getting severely punished for standing in it or needing to move out of or avoid it entirely. Even with Scourge present, among other classes with similar boon strip/corrupt, the gameplay is just unga bunga into the other group, throwing out damage...as much as zerg players may not want to admit that, that is what it is, especially in the case of boonballing. The only other way I could think of counteracting this is expanding the "Disenchantment" effect that WoD does into other aspects of classes, for some actual denial of boons. The game needs something to function as counterplay and at this point it isn't boon strip/corrupt with how ANet has gutted it.

At this point I think they just need to do a full reverse, stop nerfing boon strip/corrupt and add more of it back into the game. That is quite literally the "counterplay" they spoke about in their philosophy post and yet they haven't kept up with that and simply made boonballing stronger. As for anything else, turthfully, they should be buffing the underperforming things to bring them in line with how the meta has established itself these days. Nerfing as they have clearly doesn't work because they visibly don't seem to know what to nerf, or just don't nerf the right thing. Granted they don't exactly buff the right things either...but they miss a lot more with nerfs than buffs at this point.

BDO has had a lot of QoL and systems changes, though, and offers an absolute mountain of free things in the game pretty consistently, up to and including weight and inventory expansion items, free pets, mounts, gear. However yes, there are some things like the Old Moon camp, weight, inventory space, and a few other things that make many things much more bearable if you spend money. However, lets be honest, with how ANet has designed its itemization for GW2...they are just as equally "money grubby". Just from a single WvW track there are ten separate loot containers that all give 90% the exact same things, with only slight variations, on top of at least 5 other more "specific" loot containers, plus "junk" items that are looted, plus loot bags that you loot from players, all of this culminating in at minimum 15 inventory slots being used up by just these things, not including any extra exotic/ascended gear you may be holding onto, food/utility items, siege blueprints, extra gathering tools if you don't have infinite ones, etc. GW2 does the exact same thing where spending money makes these things more bearable. People really give ANet effectively a "pass" just because "Oh, but gold to gems conversion" ignoring the fact that any newer player, if not having spent money on an expansion, would not feasibly be able to utilize this currency conversion system to alleviate the nightmare that it is to manage inventory in GW2 which is just outright going to incentivize them to spend money, if not on an expansion then these QoL solutions. Sorry...had to vent that... (I am saying this all with the understanding that yes, a company needs to make money and I am not against that) Now on topic, the combat in GW2 is definitely one of the best in the genre but it is, unfortunately, not as well utilize as it could be. PvP/WvW by their nature as player versus player modes does allow it to shine through, but thats also where the issues with balance come into play. I'm all for accessibility, but things like Cele builds and then just low effort, low risk builds are just...not the solution because they get abused by players just looking to eat lesser experienced players as a snack.

I am honestly just at a point where I just resolve to get my Warrior fix in other games as opposed to GW2 considering ANet just routinely ruins how the class feels to play over and over again, and honestly not even directly most of the time...just the existence of other things in the game that they don't give Warrior access to but do so for other classes. Well at least they are working on backend stuff in their engine so maybe we could see them do something much later to address long standing old, outdated, things that hold back the class. Not holding my breath, though.

It is yet another situation of "Warrior gets thing, people get culture shocked by it, people complain, it gets nerfed" meanwhile all of the everything else with other classes continues to persist and isn't deemed "oppressive". Also another situation of Conquest being the worst thing to base balance around because its an old gamemode that mechanically has not been kept up with despite the ever evolving state of the game. In other words, no, Conquest did not withstand the test of time.

Honestly I think it is, at this point, boiling down to lack of understanding of how classes feel to play being important just as much as numbers balance is. They could give Hundred Blades a 4.0 coefficient in competitive modes, it would still hit two times or none at all...because its rooted in place and slow.

What are your frames even dropping to during these meta events? Also bear in mind, running in 4k without the rest of your hardware able to keep up with the demand, especially so with your CPU since GW2 is an MMORPG and they tend to be CPU intensive, then you are going to have a rough time. Another thing to remember is that even with top end hardware, MMORPGs such as GW2 or even WoW, which has arguably more "accessible" graphics, that have areas with events or just high populations of players at any given time are always going to spin your framerate down to probably below 60 FPS. Now if you're hitting the below 20 range then its likely the attempt to play in 4k.

What do you do against daze spam mirage? Also you can intentionally trigger the FC, dodge or evade the attack so they don't get their burst trait benefits. At this point in the game, with the presence of basically most other meta builds on other classes Spellbreaker really is not as oppressive as you are illustrating it to be. Not to mention a simple 3 stack of Stability would completely negate these CCs you're having issues with, alongside any Blinds or Aegis which the majority of builds often accidentally have access to at this point. Warrior has some of, if not the most, telegraphed "core" skills in the game. Their burst skills are either a very visible wind up or leap, their CC skills also have visible windups or delayed activation (such as Bull's Charge and Shield Bash) as well as absolutely everything in their kit being tied to actually needing to hit with the burst skills, not just activate them. You can hard deny any Warrior build just by negating 3 to 4 (half of which they need to build Adrenaline to even use) specific hits with basically anything ranging from Blind, Aegis, Evades, dodges, blocks, and invulns, once you know what they are and their animations you're golden. Now, granted, within the space of Conquest as a game mode FC and Rampage have always been stronger than they actually are purely because the size of capture points is abysmally small for a game with this kind of combat mechanics and the movement allowed so it has created an environment of heavy AoE which functions as area denial since most AoE radius take up most of, if not all or more, of the capture point space as well as just simply rotating away from a capture point if a matchup is "unfavorable" for a particular class. Like I said in another post, any time Warrior seems to have just "a thing" in any capacity people cannot deal with it. And I am not referring to things like Defense Bladesworn or Defense Condizerker, or anything in the past like any time it has had bloated sustain (Shoutsworn) that absolutely needed to get toned down because apparently ANet can't figure what to do with the class. The amount of CC you are talking about on Spellbreaker is quite literally not new to the game. Not even when using Hammer with Staff. Hammer with Dagger/Shield has been a thing, or Greatsword Hammer. Hammer with Dagger/Shield has the same amount of CC as Hammer Staff Spellbreaker. Including a block. Does it have healing paired with these things? Yeah, but with the amount of burst I see the very class you are playing do, not to mention many other classes doing the very same, I really don't view it as being a problem. Ignoring the presence of Cele stats, though...that makes problems everywhere with everything which is why it got removed in sPvP.

They absolutely do have the capacity to facilitate these discussions...but they don't. Which is an issue, a problem, a mistake. When you are developing a game, like it or not, the community cares the most about feeling like they are being heard. When you create an environment where your community feels like they are not being heard they get angry, frustrated. They either lash out at the developers or if it goes on for long enough they basically just give up and that isn't healthy either because the developers need player feedback. It is a necessity. The community is what makes these games survive, GW2 had a good run with that for a time...still does, they are lucky the community is what it is still ingame. However this is despite ANet, not because of them. ANet has not been the example of this cooperation, the community simply latched onto the concept and it has stuck. ANet isn't following that lead...and they really need to. I know this seems like a "nothing" thing for many people probably on this Forum but not having an official Discord at this point...is just weird. Also at this point it doesn't really seem like they even use the forums for feedback, just bug reporting, so what purpose is this even serving? They even had some "secret" Discord a while back where they pulled feedback from specific players about balance and not the community at large...so they were already doing the thing, just in the wrong way. ANet as a developer, in my opinion, is just weird. They do weird things, for weird reasons, for weird results. Weird.

See these are the kinds of topics people seem to not want to talk about. Once we start delving into the problematic design choices surrounding an ingrained mechanic in the game, purely because it is the status quo, people push back hard against the idea of addressing the issues the balancing has created around it. This, however, is something Warrior players have been dealing with for years now because of the simple fact that the ingrained mechanics for the class have been so poorly kept up with in the evolving state of the game. This forum actually has those conversations because of it. Like you said, Thief being balanced around Shadow Arts and Stealth is another one. Mention this on the Thief forums and they will absolutely light you up with "skill issue", same happened for a time before ANet addressed Mirage Cloak on Mirage where the problem with it was that it could be used while CC'd, their initial response to address that (remove second dodge) was silly and the absolute wrong approach. It took them years to actually address and change it properly so that it could no longer be used while CC'd (people still complained about that but that tapered off because shocker they don't need it to work that way). Meanwhile Spellbreaker similarly had Full Counter changed to no longer activate burst traits simply when it is triggered, it now needs to actually hit like any other burst skill (in my opinion they still need to change Longbow to have similar behavior as well). This very forum pointed that out as the actual issue with Spellbreaker's overbearing sustain because it was so easy to stack up Adrenal Health and utilize other burst traits by simply walking into an AoE or getting hit by a clone, or pet, or whichever. I'm pretty sure I didn't see any Warrior complain about that, they simply agreed because yeah...they told them. ANet avoids making the difficult decisions just as I feel a lot of players maybe don't have the difficult conversations surrounding these things, the community reflects the developer. It would absolutely be a risk if they were to undertake reworking Adrenaline as a mechanic, for instance. A huge risk. They could flub it exactly like they flubbed the initial Banner Rework, which I think is the exact reason why people don't want to make that suggestion...because ANet doesn't really seem like they know what they are doing in this area, unfortunately. Think to other MMORPGs and class reworks they have done. For a direct comparison, look at Warrior on WoW. It has evolved several times over the years. An ingrained mechanic it had for years was stance dancing, swapping between Battle, Defense and Berserker stances all to use their different skills. They literally removed that and it has not been back in that form in retail WoW since they did it. The other stances still exist, but they are spec dependent, and there are no skills that are specifically tied to any stance, the stances simply alter the bonuses you are passively benefiting from at that time. This is the issue; ANet likely finds the risk too great to put resources and time towards what would actually need to be done to get some proper changes done to classes and balancing. They would rather haphazardly slap the "solutions" into the new things they add into the game, which has been their approach to everything since the game released. Dungeons not challenging or rewarding enough? Fractals! Endgame not there, huh? Raids! Raids not accessible enough? Strikes! Ranked PvP wintrading is an issue? Automated Tournaments! Warrior doesn't have a Support spec? Staff! This is not good design philosophy. Though I will admit I'm curious what this "surprise" or whatever it is will be for the next expansion.

It really doesn't. This is what happens every time Warrior gets...anything. Any form of additional utility in their kit and suddenly it is "too strong" or it is "overbearing" meanwhile Cele stats exist on basically...anything, we have perma daze Mirage builds, perma immob builds on Druid still exist, Axe thief is basically Willbender but with Stealth, Harbinger is Harbinger, so on and so on. Literally Warrior having the bare minimum of a thing and people absolutely cannot deal with it.

Just to point out, if this were indeed a genuine problem that was generating issues with gameplay across the board with any class that requires these movement skill sin their rotation then would we not have been seeing very similar threads posted in greater numbers beyond your own? It is not as if these skills are new, or that their presence in these rotations is new either. If this were a common issue faced by players then the complaints about it would be more widely visible. I'm curious...do you use the action camera by any chance?