tomofhyrule wrote: »

Gabriel_H wrote: »

The game has dozens of skill lines, hundreds of sets, multiple ways of dealing with most mechanics. The current drive is simply to find the highest damage possible and power through the mechanics, rather than simply solving the problem. The former sucks a lot of fun out of it for a lot of people. Lets try the latter for a while and see how that goes.

This is truly a noble concept, and is the way that new strategies are found.

In single player games.

But the one thing that nobody bothers to explain when saying "ugh you don't have to do meta!" is how do you find a group to do the content that will allow everyone to play off-meta? You can't really say "lol just don't follow the meta!" and expect that you'll be able to get into any group without getting at minimum vitriol thrown for not willing to work with others.

sarahthes wrote: »

Arc gives cleave, pen, a unique 5% damage done buff, and easy access to major prophecy, along with a pretty cheap high damage ultimate.

Nightblade gives crit, weapon damage, and the chance for free ult gen plus a very cheap ultimate and an execute.

Everyone should be running both Herald of the Tome and Assassination in group content unless on a support DD that requires other lines. Pretty much trolling if you aren't because you're looking at free damage and saying "no thanks!"

These posts go together so well and it's poetic to see them posted back to back.

M1SHAAN wrote: »

Also, saying that people can choose to play off-meta is not a counterargument to the argument that the current meta is too unbalanced. The whole issue with an unbalanced meta is that there's too large a power differential between meta and non-meta builds, which increases the social pressure to conform to the meta. Sure, I could "make better friends" (which btw as an autistic person is nontrivial), but even when I'm in groups that don't enforce meta builds, if we're struggling with the content and I know I could be doing 20k+ more dps with a beam build, I feel like I'm letting the team down. I'm in one prog which has no class restrictions whatsoever, as a support z'en dps, and I still feel guilty that I didn't take the Herald line so I could beam in trash. Even if most of the progress that must be made is in the mechs, knowingly not doing your best feels bad.

If the meta is equal enough, the low/mid tier endgame runs will often accept the entire plateau rather than trying to find the zenith. I've seen a lot of runs asking for herald/assassination/flex because the third skill line doesn't change the dps enough to be worth specifying. I dream of a meta where picking 3 dps lines is close enough to meta to be the only requirement for my level of endgame.

I want to highlight this, because this is the main issue that many people (and even the devs!) don't get.

Do you need to run meta to clear the content? No.
Do you need to run meta to get HMs/tris? No, but there will need to be some logic in your build choices at that level and some builds may not be able to cut it.
Are the others in the group required to keep you if you don't want to run meta because you don't like it? Nope.
Is that toxicity? No.
Are you therefore expected to run meta (or something close to meta) if you intend to play with others? Kinda yeah, unless you're a misanthropic [snip] who doesn't care about other people.

I always like going back to my "group project in school" thing. Say your teacher assigned a group of four for a group project, and one of the members isn't checking the group chat, isn't doing their job, and ends up turning in their part of the project that's full of spelling mistakes and isn't even on topic. Do you go to the teacher and accept the bad grade "because they did what they wanted to do." Or do you complain that their selfishness brought you down?

I'll even extend all of this to support roles too. Sure, tanks and healers don't need to worry about our DPS, but now we have to slot certain skills to make up for all of the passives that the DPS players throw out, and then the rest of our bars get packed with other buffs we can source. I learned how to play on my main, and I like my main the way he is. I got every 4-man trifecta in the game on him as he is, and even the first 5 trial tris. And now I have to throw out 90% of what I like about playing him because I'm required to run certain skills for certain buffs. It's 1) not fun, since I have very little input on how to build my own character, when I did before, and 2) completely different, so not it's like learning a brand new character and skillset from scratch, along with the muscle memory that that entails.

Funny how "Play the way you want" became "Play the way you're forced to, or just go screw around in normals since groups doing higher-level stuff won't want that." I'll also blame a lot of this on the lack of a "mid-tier" trials community - we have several normal runs to farm leads or gear or the like and nobody really cares what you bring there. And then there are the raider discords with the sweaty progs. Most of the communities designed to get people into standard vets folded for some reason that definitely has nothing to do with blowback from U35 and the game's trajectory since then.

(Sidenote: don't give me that "but but but the meta always required everyone to play the same way" business. Yes, PvE NBs and Wardens-except-healers weren't really seen, but it was totally possible for a really good player on an off-meta setup to be able to keep up and even surpass Arcanists... but Arcs were popular because it was high damage and high cleave with a really easy rotation. I have a DB log where only 3 of the 8 DPS were Arcanists, and the three non-support DPS non-Arcanists even were 1st, 3rd, and 4th in DPS. As for healers, yes, every group had a Warden, but the other healer could flex a few different classes except DK, and tanks had a decent split between Warden, DK, Necro, and Sorc each for different reasons)

That Twitch stream that shall not be named proved that ZoS fundamentally doesn't understand their own combat system.

gamergirldk wrote: »

They need to buff the weaker skill lines,not nerf the top 3. But we all know they will not do that. They will just nerf and then all will be equal weak.

No thanks, the game unironically needs a fat stat squish across the board not more powercreep through "buff everything" approaches.