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Game Update Notes: September 26
(en-forum.guildwars2.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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They are actually nerfing skills/traits depending on the elite specialization in use. What a terrible "solution". They already did more or less the same for Harbinger instead of just adding a cooldown (of 3 seconds).
And Scourge gets nerfed hard again (Harbinger only slightly). After it was nerfed to the ground in June, then brought back again, then buffed even more (with the expansion), ... and this current nerf will most likely be followed up by a significant buff again. This is getting silly.
Those changes range from 30% to over 60%. WTF!
It's PvE. It's not competitive. Let people have some fun. And when you really feel the need to adjust something, don't use a Sledgehammer.
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.
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 drastic buffs nor drastic nerfs. Especially for the more casual majority of players who might not even read the patch notes.
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.
Edit: Low Intensity build source
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 (average over the entire fight 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 Training 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. Even MightyTeapot suggested to play Scourge (now) when you are thinking about getting into raids.
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.
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.
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 while wearing a full set of Ascended Berserker gear, 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?
Yes I just did the easy thing and used the standard golen setup for benchmarks.
I don't think you can just convert the dps to any actual encounter. It strongly depends on the fight and how long you can stick to the target. It just shows how much damage is possible without doing anything for your rotation. However you can see that you can probably reach about 30% of the benchmarks just by auto attacking (on some builds). Once again, there is no shame in using an easy or low intensity build to fulfill your role. Gw2 is very easy in most aspects and elitie level skill isn't required for basically anything.
Is it not even possible to estimate this for the Cosmic Observatory case? I'm surprised. My guess would have been around 5K.
With experience you can probably do it. But there is no formula for it. My guess would be around 8k, but you can get unlucky with mechanics or get good/bad support, so it's not that reliable.
If you want to see how you perform, I recommend the golem in the aerodrome. As a boon dps I usually run a more utility orientated build in that fractal to boost my groups dps.
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
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. 😎
Or maybe I have to wait until GW2 goes into maintenance mode like GW1 where overperforming professions/builds, e. g. Mesmers, are no longer nerfed. So I can run a meta hero team with 5 Ineptitude/Energy Surge Mesmers, a Blood is Power Necromancer/Ritualist and a Soul Twisting Ritualist or have it less OP but with more flavor and include a traditional front line. a Minionmancer and Monk healers.
Yeah that's a good goal to get to. But that's also hard to achieve, without making skills feel weak, because you basically have to make auto attacks very strong.
We can totally agree though on the teaching of mechanics. Gw2 has a lot of mechanics per encounter, that seriously reduce your dps output if you don't know how they work. We rarely have classic "punching bag" bosses like other older mmos. Anet did a good job with the two new strikes though. They are very easy to understand, so easy that you can beat them on the first try.
Why would this require auto-attacks to be stronger? I don't think that the average player (apart from the very lazy. Yes, I know those exist.) is only (supposed to be) using auto-attacks. I think that most players like to use their (impactful) skills. What makes it hard or rather makes a huge difference in DPS is that timing matters a lot, e. g. Blight stacks and their consumption on Harbinger.
I'd also assume or rather hope that less experienced players are making slightly more defensive gear and trait choices which allows them to make a few (minor) mistakes during the course of a boss fight without getting downed or being a constant burden for the healer, i. e. trade some (max) DPS for more survivability.
Anet says "no, fuck you"
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
They could have just added a 3s internal cooldown to Dhuumfire instead of changing the duration from 3s to 1s on Harbinger and (now) 2s on Scourge. The PvE/PvP/WvW split of skills is bad enough (though probably needed), but look how messy a complete description of the Dhuumfire trait/skill now looks. Such a violation of my beloved KISS principle.
Addition: Dhuumfire duration on Harbinger is still 3s in WvW and PvP (but only 1s in PvE). Am I expected to understand this?
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