DeceiverX.8361

Has been attempted before, threads got combined, and the ideas either ignored or completely spat in the face of. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Suggestions-Future-Elite-Specializations/page/6#post6072256 Many posts, like the above, were their own threads. Don't waste your time. Better-off home-brewing D&D classes.

So balancing the game, lol. Silos of consolidated power on the elite specs is the real problem, as it always was and will be. As for OP: Can't impact my gameplay if you there's no gameplay happening lol. On a serious note, the idea of unlocking weapons for all professions and specs is a good one; it exposes problem areas immediately and conceptually opens the gates to more diversity. The problem is ANet professions developers are just blatantly horrendous at actually fixing real causal problems with the classes and gameplay systems and consistently goes for the low-hanging fruit tweaks to even up DPS benchmark numbers in the lowest-effort ways possible, the rest of the game, modes, and other builds be damned. This mindset is fundamentally not compatible with the decoupling of all these mechanics because it encourages jumping on the most OP builds and even further inhibits other stuff from using parts of those builds or styles. There's a long-running history by this studio of having NAND relationships between "good idea" and "good execution", and this is just yet another case of "good idea, bad execution."

The profession has generally been one of the most skill-intensive outside of the old SA D/P permastealth build for a super long time. Really nothing new here. It doesn't help a few of the builds you listed just aren't good at dueling other roaming specs. The class requires significant playtime to be decent at, and there's little way around it. Stuff like stealth and mobility supremacy break the game at the highest skill levels. It's just how it is, and how it has been for years. There is no such thing as building around its weaknesses in most cases these days. Its strength has always been the ability to control a fight or blow someone up who was unsuspecting and not maintaining their boons. Since we exist in a perma-boon state now and the infamous damage reduction patch hit Backstab and Crit Strikes build damage by nearly half, it's pretty much all in the control of cooldowns, spacing, and managing resources better than the opponent. In some respects it is still a "Learn to play" issue in that the class is just harder but still can do well when played at a high caliber using builds designed to keep its resources up. The problem is that it just requires significantly better resource management than other professions and will be outclassed by a significant margin below higher skill levels. Revenant is pretty much the "sticky" version of thief that keeps fighting; thief is mostly relegated to reset patterns at this point due to a huge number of damage nerfs over the years. If the latter of controlling and resetting the fight isn't exciting as a playstyle to you, you're not gonna have fun and will feel weak because it's deliberately meant to suck at fighting back directly without a significant skill disparity. Before quitting the game, I switched to Reaper and Soulbeast after thousands of hours on thief, and largely didn't look back because I'm always drawn to high-risk damage dealers. I was coaching long-term necro players into the Top 50 on Reaper within my first year on the class back when there was still an sPvP population. The skill disparity just has to exist that way. With changes to RShroud's consistency and boon dependence, I was not motivated to stick with the game. If you enjoy anything but thief, you probably won't enjoy thief at the moment. Hopefully that changes if ANet ever nerfs boons and/or resupplies the class some damage. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

I mean it'd explain the quality drop but that was a long time coming with the layoffs and failing to retain a huge segment of their endgame community via the various PvP modes, which had stagnated and been on the decline for literal years prior. And the resources committed to build this game vastly outweighed what ANet currently has. Realistically, it wouldn't surprise me if this was dropped in response to speculation about long-term plans for dealing with the RIOT MMO. They can be "working" on such a release with basically nobody on the project to please investors if they really wanted. From a business and stakeholder POV, NCSoft has a TERRIBLE record in Western markets for their MMOs. Like, literally none of their first-party releases succeeded and only GW2 did having just bought the company itself while not interfering with the release of the game. All NC West resources were or are being shuffled under ANet at this point. GW2 did well because of how different it was compared to everything else, and it won a ton of appeal at launch for it. RIOT on the other hand has become the most successful online game company in the world born from western demand in the release of a game in a genre mostly popular in Korea, has lore built with literal Emmy/Annie awards, multiple other wildly successful games, and just announced they're scrapping all of their current MMO work just to start over because they want to make something that unabashedly upends the entire industry and destroys pretty much all competitors in the Western market. Don't think about this as answering passionate players and game makers. Think about this as answering people looking to make money by investing in NC/Anet's future. GW2 has been the X-factor in the Western MMO genre for a while. But let's face the fact it's a 12-year-old game built with dated graphics and an outdated engine even for its release and no console support, while sporting falling ratings and a hug playere churn problem with down-trending financials over the past ten or so years with declining PC games sales. These stakeholders are going to want answers as to whether or not they should believe their money is secure in NCSoft's Western investments. The statement of a GW3 greenlighting--even if no work is to be performed yet--would be something that wildly improves the five-ten year outlook for NC/ANet and their competitiveness when dealing with the slow emergence of what may yet be the "next big deal" in multiplayer games. While I do ultimately suspect a third installment is being worked in some capacity, I think the people dooming over GW2's future due to this announcement are either overreacting because the game still has several years of similar trajectory still in it, or simply have willfully ignored the massive failures of ANet working on the game in the past 10 years that have caused huge community losses and profit decline.

Biggest problem is it is designed for a less-powercrept game. As an attrition/DoT build, the ideas behind Core necro + scepter are pretty successful implementations when accounting for situations closer to core game. Ramp a bunch of long, low-stack bleeds, turn into shroud to tank incoming damage when the enemy engages and punish their boons and abilities to stack offenses. Great. Issue is having any ramp-up time on conditions makes such builds useless in the modern context. It has limited condition diversity and the "low and slow" method of DoT when it's so easy to negate so much of the threat by boons and raw healing. In 2013 when some builds had like... one cleanse source every minute, it was workable. Same for a boon corrupt every 10 seconds that frankly gives less LF per unit of time than Axe and still depends on a condition to be met. 8-12% LF on a 10s cooldown isn't super good for a playstyle that's meant to use LF to draw things out and just act as a defensive mechanic.

Ehh... back before this whole nonsense started with the expansion powercreep, WvW had an extremely healthy havoc and smallscale scene. You'd regularly have to fight over a camp or tower as soon as RI expired. You'd get into a 3v3 and have to constantly watch for a second group of 2 or 3 who might jump in and sweep it all. Everywhere, while the blobs were still fighting. The scraps and game of both cat and mouse trying to predict where the other group is going to go next is the fun part; objectives just brought enemies to a specific spot and disrupted supply chains for the enemy blob. Frankly, less than half the players on the map were usually found in the blob unless it was a particularly big siege or objective defense. The content is us, but if it takes me twenty minutes of flipping camps uncontested to get a 1v2 that's more or less just two boon builds spamming defense until they eventually grind you down, I'm not gonna waste my time. That's effectively no content. I have other hobbies. HoT's powercreep seriously damaged the smallscale scene, and Warclaw and boon spamming from PoF and beyond killed it. There's no action-packed smallscale content and actual map relevancy to enjoy anymore without either totally avoiding fights like spending ages trebbing a random T2+ tower out of range of the sentry effect, or simply getting run over by the big enemy boonball mounted on warclaws because they can disrupt the small siege and be back to their main fight in basically no time at all with no risk of literally anyone dying. In those older days, running 25 people at a skilled group of 5 meant you seriously might lose 3 or more in the process, and that player didn't have a fast way back to the main blob. Yeah, the zergbusting stuff was largely an extreme rarity, but that skillgroup could single-handedly halt the main blob's sweep of the map through striking down ranged DPS or outright kill the commander, even despite wiping. Yeah, see players like myself never really played PvE nor cared about legendaries. I sold my precursors to convert gold to gems for transfers in WvW or for the skins I actually wanted. I don't think I've completed a meta-event since HoT launched and didn't play LW in any serious capacity since like Bloodstone Fen. For the ascended accessories for WvW before they added the vendor and reward track. It's why I quit a while back and mostly troll around here when I'm bored, getting ready for bed, or waiting on dinner to cook or something. There's zero incentive to log in anymore.

Problem is they announced a manifesto at game launch announcing their vision which got everyone on-board, then went back on it. The state of the game right now is quite frankly the opposite of what they announced. There's literally a dev video about boons, specifically stating they designed boons as short term bonuses with VFX tells so that players wouldn't have to watch skill bar durations but rather those short bursts of power to win trades or execute their foe with overbearing force for a brief moment. Now we have impossible-to-read VFX clutter that fails PEAT testing and borderline the only thing that matters being the state of opposing boon status bars. If CoD suddenly dropped multiplayer to favor a stealth campaign mode, people would be equally confused and mad, no?

It's insane to me we have literally 4x larger of a boon duration multiplier and people don't understand how we're in the situation we're in. You can't balance an action game where you need to account for moments of weakness in both yourself and your opponent when some gear jumps something that drastically affects your states from 30% uptime to permanent with extra time to spare. Suddenly builds drop from having 70% periods of weakness to never being weak. It just can't be balanced with how potent boons are. People dropped entire rune set effects and their corresponding stats back in the days of 3-stat gear and spent like 20x more effective gold on a total of 20% boon duration, while simultaneously having less boon access broad-spectrum, because of how strong said boon access was even back in 2012/2013. Just 20% was defining the meta back then.

Problem is if I wanted to play PvE I wouldn't have entered WvW. There's just next to no content for smallscale and what is there is stupid stuff like 2 or more minstrel supports per damage dealer such that nobody dies. Hard pass.

I mean, creating those windows of opportunity is precisely what nerfing boons entails; a reduction in duration. Which is entirely predicated on the concentration stat, which is the lion's share of the problem, since variability between boon uptime is grossly variable between builds. Consider this case of a rhetorical skill without boon duration: 1 second of self-stability on a 2 second cooldown. Sounds OP, right? Well, it's is honestly a pretty mediocre effect on its own because it still makes you plenty liable to getting CC-locked every other second. One remotely good use of a CC skill by your opponent and you get stunned. With a boon duration build, you're suddenly immune to CC forever. More examples: In another case, 5 seconds of bulk Might can let you maybe burst someone down when you align everything right for a combo, burning multiple skills. 10 seconds of bulk might means your entire combo can land *and then some.* If you want to use 10 seconds of protection to give yourself time to recuperate after burning a ton of skills on an offensive combo or negate an incoming burst combo yourself, with boon duration, suddenly you can pretty much just ignore needing to operate on when your opponent is strong and when you are; you just get to stat check them the entire fight. Quickness and Alacrity are overpowered and deserve nerfs or removal because of combat clarity. They exist for PvE and only do harm to the rest of the game. But boons are OP and need nerfing in their quantity of application and alongside the removal of the concentration stat, because having tons of sources even on shorter durations de-values strips and concentration makes these windows of vulnerability and decision-making too short. Adding more strips though just hurts occasional-boon-sources like builds relying only on some Swiftness. Imagine getting outrun by a necromancer spamming nothing but corrupts on you making you on average 50% slower. A thief wants to close the gap and uses Steal, but is running ToTC for the Fury to land a reliable damage combo, then immediately gets crippled again. "More removal" isn't a viable answer when so many sources provide so many boons. Not even all boon removal is created equally. That's really what it comes down to. While I'd still wholly support a game without boons at all, the crux of it is just that there are too many sources and too many methods to modify their durations in extreme ways that make them impossible to balance as-is. They *need* to be infrequent.

So this is fundamentally why there's a disconnect. Your definition of a metagame is inherently indicating a solved or near-solved state. This is often a misnomer acronym of "most effective tactic available." It is not used in academia, and I dislike this definition because fundamentally, the terms are at odds when broken down. A solved game must be provably solved to be considered such with outcomes of either "win" or simply "not lose." When a game is strongly solved, there is no longer a metagame occurring; a solved game, played by rational actors, will not have a metagame *because* there cannot be further analysis to change outcomes. And so the definition I am referring to is in reference to there being a current dominant strategy, but crucially, where there must exist additional available emergent winning strategies at any given time when compared to any other given state--that there is inherently something to do outside of the formal game loop towards defeating it. A healthy metagame subsequently has some significant number of these strategies simultaneously available such that there are a number of unique solutions to a given scenario, each potentially interacting with different mechanics and subsystems in the game's overarching large Complex System. In respects to the way original post, the term "build diversity" is inherently focusing on these discrete elements acutely. Because, as we're seeing emerge in common competitive play now, we're witnessing the dismissal of subsystems in favor of patterns which inherently simplify the System overall; not moving, not dodging, minimizing spacing, removing decision-trees for skill activation, and so on all contribute towards degrading the complexity (as in Complex System) of the game itself. Reductions in these options fundamentally *does* limit diversity, in both regards, through trivialization of these mechanics; not only does it degrade diversity by your own definitions since solvability is being precluded on simplifying what actually makes the game a complex system regardless (because the very nature of these interacting systems are no longer relevant to be considered part of the system itself), but also means there are no divergent or unique choices to deal with the strategy, either. And I'll point out that the term diversity carries many definitions in various contexts. You speak of definition, but verbatim, per Merriam-Webster, it is defined thusly: "the condition of having or being composed of differing elements." The term "build diversity" which I use *repeatedly* inherently means one thing and one thing only: Its options. Its combinations. And in reference to a metagame, means there must be many combinations available to navigate closer to solving the current state of the unsolved game, each with their own limitations and counters to allow a metagame to exist. Your definition of "Illusion of choice" is also just completely wrong. The term itself means is that the person making decisions doesn't really have true control over the outcomes of their decisions, not that all outcomes are equal. In what I stated above, basing all gameplay around the existence of boons and boon systems forces players to still play within those boundaries because boons will still dictate how the game is played, deliberately used, countered, or otherwise. When framed in the context of the metagame, all options not operating in this schema can intrinsically be discarded. Thus, there is an "illusion of choice" to play without these options or optimizing around the boon system itself; the raw combinations exist, but they are not inherently viable solutions and never will be. Players pushing competitive boundaries navigating the metagame are simply unable to further look into those options in pursuit of winning. At best, your idea can corroborate mine if the rhetorical anti-boon measures available would be made particularly punishing considering the relative power of playing with boons has over playing without. The problem here is then that you still need differentiators to ensure anti-boon options are countered just as aggressively by something else entirely, and that some in-between isn't easily-determined. But as it stands, there are no builds which are better playing without boons than those which are, and there is an over-dependence on boons for critical gameplay mechanics like Stability, or professions which were designed to depend on them from day 1. All your proposed solution does is wash the problem around a bit and make things *slightly* better by allowing the emergence of a metagame to remove the presence of boon play entirely, or simply demands that the entire rest of the game be re-designed with non-boon mechanics to be able to absorb whatever counters boons. But that means more unique mechanics... things you advocated against in the very first place. So something must give. And pragmatically, it's boon stacking. Remove permanent 25 might from an attacker and permanent protection from a defender and power damage incoming is basically identical to what it is now. Is activating permanent boon uptime on rotation to swing your stick to do the same exact amount of damage and take the same exact amount of damage any more compelling of a gameplay pattern than just... swinging the stick? Barely, I guess, if you're stimulated by repeating rotations ad nauseum. But I'd say having to navigate the moments of strength and weakness by having entire groups of players have to respond to those brief moments of boons activating from one side or another creates a way bigger disparity in stats and much more compelling gameplay in the demand for decision-making of who should use how much of their resources and when.

I'm gonna just respond in one response because quotes-in-quotes-in-quotes is something I'm not really willing to manage from a formatting POV after a long day of work lol. I appreciate you trying to break things down, but one of my degrees is in computer science. I'm intimately familiar with problem sets and solvability. Honestly, your argument just doesn't make any sense. A complex system inherently is a function of complexity, which is... what you're saying is critical for diversity... which is what you're both presenting in combinatorics of states and then arguing against? I point to combinations of discrete elements in games as being the underlying basis of metagame creation and analysis as is relevant in the subject of game theory. The more easily-computed set of these discrete inputs, the easier it is for a metagame to emerge. This is analogous to the selections of traits, weapons, gear types, etc. GW2 is a complex system, absolutely. Simultaneous movement games with massive positional variable data in two-dimensional space alone akin to the game of "tag" is already in that problem set when looking at things from the Complex System lens, ignoring the rest of everything available to GW2 players. The sheer quantity of possible states of actors in this game is totally irrelevant and so astronomically large and impossible to compute (being this is also a simultaneous game) it's not actually genuine to discuss them in the context of game theory. A diverse environment by your definition is is one where all players randomly cast their skills and movements blindly and at random. This may mimic some biological models, but is is decidedly *not* in the lens of game theory. The very nature of game theory, by definition, absolutely mandates both strategic decision-making and crucially, rational agents. So when discussing the problem set of player interactions where both are assumed, we can boil away many, many variables and are inherently looking for ones which can be controlled for. All those combinations in respects to the players and environments do not actually matter when performed irrationally. This is an inherent assumption required when studying diversity in gameplay balance systems from discrete, quantifiable sets. Again, this boils down to easily-observed things like builds. Builds are inherently discrete systems and are one of the methods (and the sole one relevant to discussion when talking about boons in builds as this thread is about) in how the game is played with strategies devised, and subsequently, a metagame even be possibly emergent. For any such diversity to exist, rational actors must reach possible conclusions N>1 when optimizing for a solution. Diversity as a whole, however, is a much bigger problem, and is measured arbitrarily when considering macro-strategies and repeatedly running meta-analysis on these complex systems. One could mathematically argue that the game is both diverse and balanced with a healthy metagame if there exist strategies which are uniquely optimal to counter the previously-dominant ones with doing something as substituting one class for another with functionally the same identity (a la providing boon coverage). But from a high-level systems perspective, we agree this is not a diverse environment. It is this, where differing mechanics must exist to intrinsically compete with that high-level optimal design. These are profession-specific ones, boon denial, and the likes. It becomes significantly computationally easier to create more diverse solutions when the high-level balance woes become decoupled from the low-level ones. This is the crux of my argument for why boon dominance is bad; being a shared, streamlined system, it inherently eliminates optimal possibilities from what's otherwise in the optimal subset from the high level. As for your late statement about being anti-nerf; the game is powercrept and boons are overpowered because of their application being buffed repeatedly for years. Boon duration is quite literally up by at minimum a factor of four compared to years' past, even when comparing unchanged skills, due to concentration. Many coefficients have been slashed because of the huge increases in raw attack power, critical hit chance, etc., true, but it's all been because stacking boons inflates damage to untenable amounts with no real drawbacks. The entire game is fundamentally not designed with this numbers creep in mind, and it's entirely in the pursuit of the optimal solution of more boons. Strips/corrupts/denial only shifts the problem closer to N=2 optimal solutions around boon play when the baseline for the rest of the game in non-boon-builds has been nerfed on their existence and constant abuse, while doing nothing to expand upon the solution set any further, if not actively stifling it. Viewing game/build diversity as a problem of a complex system where diversity as a measure of unique states in such a mathemtically complex model is inherently flawed because it fails to define scope and simply can't be calculated. Boons are a higher-level problem driving the metagame into a very specific direction which cannot simply be course-corrected until they are removed. Promoting anything that plays into the boon system as a counter either creates only more illusion of choice and not actual diversity in the metagame, or simply creates an identical metagame scenario with some other exploitative system instead. My supposition would be an overabundance of CC and stunbreaks, where boons are the only counter. Then the pendulum needs to swing back and you're back at square one. Which is really what you're describing with the balance philosophy you disagree with, which is what ANet has been doing for years; ignoring game theory and good design principles to further a very specific path of symptom alleviation which ultimately results in collateral damage to other systems taking the limelight of oppressiveness. In the example here, it'd be blanket-nerfing CC, which still hurts more builds than it helps. Sometimes, you need to just remove the bad thing at the source and re-adjust.

Hard disagree. Dodging in place is an extremely powerful mechanic that should be reserved for extenuating circumstances because it actively encourages players to stack in place even more than they already do. Corralling players into small spaces and dealing major attacks this way is also good encounter design to make players think about where they're standing in prior seconds to just dishing out damage and support. Trivializing thief gameplay isn't a good thing for anyone.

Having a role-based system where gameplay is dependent on certain core foundations is far from a niche by definition, specifically if everyone can contribute to it. A niche is covering edge cases or divergent strategies. Things like running extra mesmers for fake portals or thieves in the blob to assassinate high priority targets. Things that can't just be optimally brought into every single encounter from a tactical point of view unless the overarching strategy of the group depends on these play patterns. You mention academic study of [game] diversity, but I'm going to have to challenge that given your stance on the issue. And that the topic isn't really one in academic game theory, specifically because video games like these are so complex and a huge meld of basically all the game theory types such that there really isn't much to study. "Game Diversity" really is an observation on metagames through meta-analysis-of-metagame-analysis, and well, really boils down to an arbitrary benchmark of representation of different strategies based on solely the combinatorial nature of optional discrete game elements and how successful those strategies are in respects to defeating other combinations. Consider your quote: Yet you also admit in defense of your stance the following: So which is it? Anet reduced their observed diversity by removing static trait bonuses and effects. And I want to make it clear, I'm not in support of traits like "When X happens, gain Y effect for Z seconds." I'm talking about traits like "Gain X% damage while attacking a bleeding target." Simple and reliable things, which slowly aggregate into a character's overall function, that players can choose to work with or not. But these work *with* a player's decision to specialize, not totally irrespective--or even in spite of--them. By this nature, boons as a system do not create a sufficiently complex metagame. They create a mostly-solvable optimization problem wherein while not solvable, does get one sufficiently close to solvable. And by your own admission, such dramatically high-level tactics of boon "roles" are grossly-ineffective at creating a compelling game. Even under the assumption of the addition of a rhetorical gameplay pattern where boon-denial builds somehow could be exclusively countered (this isn't possible when all systems choices players interact with--traits and skills--are consolidated to generate boons as a "simplified" experience, instead of non-boon mechanics, per above), the game boils down to rock-paper-scissors at character creation. The nature of combat is settled before the first actions are taken, based on selected strategies. At best, there's some level of psychology in there for predicting what people will choose seeing as it's still an imperfect information game. But I challenge this proclaimed merit again through pragmatism: Games have different designs in how they're made to be played, and ones like these require upkeep and maintenance overhead; this format does not lend itself well to something focusing on real-time action, but moreover a turn-based prediction game. And even under the assumption that we're going to champion Rock Paper Scissors as a viable competitive product (which it isn't, otherwise everyone would be doing it free with their friends and not action video games, card games, board games, etc.), it undermines the purpose of the media being served: the Action RPG. Much like how people don't watch Michael Bay films for amazing screenwriting, they also don't turn to read classic novels for an heart-pounding action sequence. GW2 was designed to be a specific type of product - the ARPG+MMO - and the idea of making these macro-strategies the deciders in how its action plays out really boils the game down to a slightly more blurred version of RPS. Generally, totally missing the target audience with the product is bad for the ability to sustain the game itself. Your defense of your two arguments makes some major assumptions and makes some weird assumptions about 1.) You assume a "normal scenario." This needs definition and depends on varying factors, and is also a problem with the boon system itself being very asymmetric. One second of 25 might and fury on a 25 second cooldown while someone's opponent has no boons used midway through a major damaging combo may be able to end a fight outright, whereas 1 second of might and fury applied each second infinitely means absolutely nothing when the opponent is getting the same constant pulsing 1 second of protection. Most boon durations in the core era of the game were short enough where getting anything to become permanent was just not possible without other characters or very specifically building to a very specific boon, like the old Rune of Speed or grandmaster traits requiring constant attacking and use of skills landing like No Quarter and Forceful Greatsword. In World vs World, groups stacked up before engaging to get area swiftness from Guardian's Staff to last enough of the fight so they weren't kited by people with 25% movespeed signets. The current level of boon availability broad-spectrum is just simply too high. By extension, this extends to Concentration. The maximum all-boon duration increase at launch was around 20% and sacrificed all rune slots, meaning huge hits to stats. And people still paid a heavy premium in gold for them due to how strong boons were even in this era. But this also helped normalize the power of boons as well, making things like reductions to base boon duration easier to balance. Changing a boon to a 4s duration meant it would have uptime of 4-5s, not 4-8 seconds as it does now. With boons so easily-achieved, radical reductions on boon sources can absolutely be performed without much issue, though I still believe fewer sources and removing the Concentration stat altogether to help normalize them is the better course of action. This gives value to burst-of-power effects like the old Blood is Power and Signets of Power traits which came at significant cost for huge gains in raw stats for a very brief window, while still allowing more spread-over-time effects to help push all-rounder builds to exist. In support of my original statement: The "simplification" is failing to achieve letting players make these choices, and simply makes boon builds inherently dominant via extended durations which equal or exceed their cooldowns, often without substantial risk-taking or consequence. Power budget on traits and skills should primarily not be in boons, and any unique effects should be made obvious by character animation. The "Block" skill effect when a warrior uses a shield to block is not visually unclear, despite functionally being the same as an infinitely-fast reapplication of fraction-of-a-second-duration Aegis. I'm going to touch on the merits of this below, and why it's just downright better than making boons so ubiquitous. 2.) It may sound snyde, but... the skills will do... other unique things than just give boons, and do their damage and effects like they did before. Cleave, stunbreaks, mobility, unique multi-hit patterns that are meant to disrupt being blinded, multi-part flip skills, conditions and cleanses, heals, summons, passive bonuses, you name it. Actually-creative mechanics remove the need for boons to be applied all the time, and boons can be either the main driver of the skill (like For Great Justice!, Hold the Line!, Advance!, etc.), or a nice little bonus added from a trait, to provide just an ounce more of specialization. If everyone runs around with permanent 25 might/fury and protection, there's numerically almost no difference in damage dealt/taken to each respective build by nobody having any of it. I already explained why Quickness and Alacrity are bad for the game in terms of clarity and TTK. Only Stability and Swiftness are really essential to maintaining integrity of skill effects based on facets of the core game. Weapons *are* damage sticks. But they're tools and should have resources worth managing. Mashing every ability off cooldown to provide more damage and/or support just to fuel the boon blob and churn out numbers is what we have now. It'd be better to have people actually compelled to maybe save their multi-hit skill for when they get overwhelmed by thieves recasting blinds, save their mobility skill to escape for when the enemy Reaper DCharges in. To block when a Warrior jumps in the air to cast Mighty Blow. To immobilize an enemy who just used a cleanse so they can't dodge your damage. This is dynamic combat where just the very nature of how skills are used interacts primarily with what your opponent is doing. If ANet needs constant boon application to make their PvE compelling such that the fear of removing boons wholesale makes people afraid their weapons just turn into damage numbers sticks, they need better encounter design. But frankly, without all the insane level of support and durability coming from boon builds, I think you'd be surprised just how quickly groups would wipe when they can no longer skip entire phases and facetank a majority of otherwise lethal damage. I'd wager the game would become *much* more interactive and less about optimizing numbers with players unable to access most of their raw stat power with permanent uptime. Based on your comments, I suspect you largely just play PvE. It's significantly less obvious of a problem there because honestly, ANet's encounters largely suck for an MMO and aren't that interesting. They mostly cater to "single big boss HP sponge" that most other MMOs do. So I can see why you think they're necessary. But the boon metas have eviscerated WvW and sPvP, which is what my post is about. When permanent, they actively create an anti-fun environment for competitive play and undermine the game's mechanics just as much as Quickness and Alacrity. Full boons is more than a second whole set of equipment in stats. It's literally more stark than just taking an exotic weapon to combat with white gear and nothing else. And for combat clarity, boons absolutely cut into it significantly more than unique effects. Like the Aegis/block example above, there's no way to really know where a boon comes from unless you know exactly what just happened already. Was it a trait that just activated? A utility skill that got animation-cancelled? A relic? An ally or a stealthed thief nearby? There's no way to tell. Meanwhile, if I care to look, I can mouse over the enemy's effect, and type "/wiki <effect name>" and be taken directly to what the other player had or did that caused it or at the least a short list of things that grant it. Boon stacking makes hacking harder to detect, because I just *don't* know whether or not that 14 seconds of Protection is in their build, if it was on multiple skills activated at once, if it's been modified by concentration, or whatever. There is just so little information about its sources that you simply cannot learn as a new or returning player by engaging with other classes. And that's demonstrably a bad thing when discussing clarity. It genuinely does make the game harder to understand when in the PvP context, and thus, is also self-defeating.

I know what they're doing. Fact of the matter is this: - More skills have been changed from being passive effects and stat modifiers to boons which makes for redundant traits and promotes the horrible metas like celestial builds like we have now. - Boons are harder to balance power budgets for specific builds and playstyles with. I'll use a very simple example: HK makes thief crit on stealth attacks. Burst Precision makes a War's Adrenal skill crit. Old DP makes Necros in shroud crit. MoF makes Mind Wrack crit. These are distinct choices in *how* a build specializes and how it plays. These specific traits can be tuned to be more or less mutually-exclusive with precision/crit as a whole or for specific builds, because they target a specific thing the build is operating around. If all the professions did was "Gain Fury", and a power build overperforms because of crit reliability, suddenly you have a problem where the only outcome is nerfing either the ability to reliably crit for a specific subset of important actions, or nerfing the actual actions themselves. - Boons are impossible to balance duration/power with the advent of concentration. It's a permanently-moving target. - Hyperinflation of boons overvalues corrupts and strips where boons can no longer be something optional to fill in small voids, because the risk of being actively punished or resource-starved while playing builds investing in genuinely rare short-term bonuses is just too high. With boon denial preventing thin-margin builds from being functional, you limit diversity. - Most core game weapons and skills in their respective mobility are still based around most builds not even having permanent swiftness when it comes to things like dash distance and cooldowns. Let alone superspeed supplied by cheap permanent swiftness. - Concentration inherently extending *all* boons makes for shorter windows of weakness in general which makes for less opportunistic and interesting gameplay between players. If you can't capitalize on moments of weakness the entirety of combat boils down to "who's got more robotic and consistently optimized rotations/who uses macros to out-grind the other person." - Quickness and Alacrity are absolutely obscene in their impacts to PvP environments and wildly cut into combat clarity. Combos suddenly become much harder to counter from Quickness negating so much casting time so regularly, and if you're not counting seconds on Alacrity uptime and doing the math in real-time on active cooldown status, you just don't have a method of cooldown tracking reliably, which *is* how high-level PvP plays out. If someone is running lots of both, they have unpredictable combos that can't really even be reacted to. That's objectively bad for any PvP environment. Even an "invisible" 20% reduction is better, because a quicker-than-usual cast can easily be attributed to said trait, also mutually-exclusively locking out others. If the player really knows a lot about the opposing class, they can do really well to know exactly which traits they're running. Short of watching the boon timers, this just isn't the case when all effects feed into a common few buckets. So yeah, even though ANet is proclaiming that they're trying to make skills have a higher degree of consistency and simplification, it's frankly making their game harder to understand in the PvP formats.