Who are these changes for?

BananaBender

Disclaimer: I'm exclusively an endgame PvE player, so this is written from that point of view

After going through the patch notes, I'm just left wondering what's the goal with all these changes? Okay, there was a lot of ult gain in the game, but why was that a bad thing? Having a tons of ultimates didn't make the game worse, more boring or trivially easy, so what's the point of these changes? The only thing this causes is even more of a gap between the higher end and lower end groups, because adjusting strategies and playing around changes is much easier for players of higher skill level.
For your average raid group this is so much worse, since you no longer have the flexibility of massive ult gen that you used to have. I assume that upholding a good major force uptime is going to get significantly harder for many casual minded groups.

Changing unique passives which gave skill lines unique qualities, into a passive that offers you literally nothing, just feels bad. Healers used to use potion cooldown reduction glyphs to get more out of the Catalyst passive, which to me felt like a nice small thing that made it feel different from other builds. Now it's a passive which doesn't give you anything. Pearls of Ehlnofey and Trample are significantly better options for a good uptime of Major Heroism, meaning that once a unique passive is reduced to being literal deadweight.


This is how I see the raid comps playing out if these changes go through:
Casual players/pugs, there wont be much of a change as ults tend to be a free for all

Mid range groups/Most HM progs, you will be punished by bad uptimes significantly more now as there wont be extra ultimate coming from numerous sources. Groups relying on barrier rotations etc. will have significantly harder time trying to fit everything in with major force uptimes and the barriers. Messing up your rotation and buff uptimes as a healer or tank will hurt the group significantly.

Higher end groups/Scorepushing, setups for supports will become extremely boring. Majority of supports will be on horn, or your group drop major force entirely and forces DDs into 3 crit damage lines. There will be a slight dps loss because of the reduction in atronachs and colossi. Maybe some poor DD will have to slot those. In any case this wont reign in the massive power creep at all. It will just make the game less fun for everyone involved.




So my question is, what are these nerfs aiming to achieve? Clearly to reduce ultimate gain, but why?

Rohamad_Ali

The Dev notes say this;

Over time, Ultimate has become more and more accessible to players, greatly increasing the frequency in which these combat altering abilities can be activated. This has allowed for strategies that hyper focus on the generation of this resource to amass and creep up over time, creating cases where some Ultimates can be activated incredibly quickly. We're going through many sources of Ultimate and converting effects over to the Major and Minor system so they still offer powerful bonuses, but with a much more controlled ceiling. We've started with class passives in efforts to make it harder to stack their effects with subclassing in mind, while also trying to mitigate the need to gain this effect from things like scribed abilities or consumables.

tsaescishoeshiner

It makes sense to cut back on ult gen with players being able to stack multiple ult-gaining skill lines, but they should have come with adjustments to Minor Heroism and Major Heroism from other sources.

I understand why they don't want class Ultimate passives to stack with one another, but a lot of sets and skills provide Heroism that now need adjustment. Or else they're pointless.

On the other hand, this is a considerable buff to Decisive now (but maybe not still good), with ultimate gains ticking multiple times for each passive proc.

sleepy_worm

How many specific overperforming ultimate skills does this balance and how many does it leave in the dust? Reducing access to 90% of the possible skills that were not a problem seems a bit misguided.

Soarora

It does puzzle me. The people that power creep mostly affects aren’t optimizing ultimate generation from passives. Maybe because people are using barrier more instead of a damaging ult? I feel like random barriers was never the right move anyways…?

MincMincMinc

tsaescishoeshiner wrote: »

It makes sense to cut back on ult gen with players being able to stack multiple ult-gaining skill lines, but they should have come with adjustments to Minor Heroism and Major Heroism from other sources.

I understand why they don't want class Ultimate passives to stack with one another, but a lot of sets and skills provide Heroism that now need adjustment. Or else they're pointless.

On the other hand, this is a considerable buff to Decisive now (but maybe not still good), with ultimate gains ticking multiple times for each passive proc.

No it doesnt make sense. Oh this is strong because you can do it is not a good reason. Ult gen builds are basically useless except in niche group scenarios.

Eliminating a potential build path in the game is never a good thing. It just pushes everyone towards one single path without exceptions. People complain that template pvp is bad, yet dont see the live changes like this pushing you into a template.

YandereGirlfriend

MincMincMinc wrote: »

tsaescishoeshiner wrote: »

It makes sense to cut back on ult gen with players being able to stack multiple ult-gaining skill lines, but they should have come with adjustments to Minor Heroism and Major Heroism from other sources.

I understand why they don't want class Ultimate passives to stack with one another, but a lot of sets and skills provide Heroism that now need adjustment. Or else they're pointless.

On the other hand, this is a considerable buff to Decisive now (but maybe not still good), with ultimate gains ticking multiple times for each passive proc.

No it doesnt make sense. Oh this is strong because you can do it is not a good reason. Ult gen builds are basically useless except in niche group scenarios.

Eliminating a potential build path in the game is never a good thing. It just pushes everyone towards one single path without exceptions. People complain that template pvp is bad, yet dont see the live changes like this pushing you into a template.

Well said!