GU100: The (Good?), the Bad, and the Ugly

Among other things, GU100 has brought us two new mechanics. Resolve, and Heartbinding. I realize that we're basically always in a "live beta" environment at this stage of the game, and player feedback is critical for the devs. With that in mind, some brief thoughts and suggestions for both of these mechanics...

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Heartbound: From early explanations of this, we expected some kind of minor buff to come with it. I don't think anyone expected 30 Fervor. For a "free" (no effort required, just choose someone and touch the item in your GH) feature, this seems grossly out of whack with the way itemization and character progression have been going. In one fell swoop, you just gave everyone at endgame a 150%+ increase to their Fervor (assuming already using 15 from status merchant necklace group proc and 4 from belt for most people). Power inflation here is pretty steep, and it's essentially going to be across the board. At the very least, even if you don't go have one of the pair refresh it every half hour during raids or in between heroics, it's still 15 Fervor, which is a huge chunk compared to people's previous baseline. I think we'd have been overjoyed to have even 5 Fervor; 15 or 30 just seems uncomfortably overdone.

Suggestion: Drastically scale back the power of this buff, and add additional "useful" benefits instead. Large XP bonuses, moderate in combat HP/Power regen, small amounts of static combat stats (casting/reuse, Ability Mod), etc.

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Resolve: I'm not going to address the item-based Resolve; I think that's fine as a new mechanic, and lends itself to some dev tweaking and balancing to get the right progression curves. HOWEVER, the other half of this mechanic, the raid buff, deserves some critical analysis and focused community/dev discussion.

I'm going to try to keep this statement as polite as I can: The attempt to make underutilized classes more valuable in raids by overloading the amount of Resolve that they bring is one of the most frustrating and ill-conceived MMO mechanics that I have witnessed in the modern gaming era. I try to keep a positive attitude towards dev teams, because balancing class value in MMOs is a damn hard job. However, in this case, it feels like they've sent a stark signal to the community that they've just given up on attempting to fix balance and class desirability through normal means. This is intensely concerning and disappointing to your raiding community, who relies on you to give us basic tools of flexibility in raid encounter and general game design; tools that we need as raid/guild leaders in order to keep our members enjoying this game.

There is no "upside" to this mechanic. There is only grumbling and frustration. Imagine how it feels to be a class that is suddenly on the list to get sat out of raids because their value to the raid force has been suddenly marginalized by another class whose only true value is the fact that they bring everyone a bit closer to hitting the required encounter Resolve. This is an unacceptably myopic and sloppy way to shift the metagame. You are only going to induce resentment in your playerbase. For guilds who do not have the same exact 24 fixed people participating every night (i.e. most of them), or who occasionally run a bit shorthanded, you are only going to piss people off.

People don't want to play Bruisers [or crusaders, inquisitors, etc] in raids? That's fine. The world isn't over. Just fix those classes organically so they offer some real/direct/tangible/meaningful benefit and are more desirable against their subclass counterparts. Your playerbase is more than patient and can wait for you to have the time to do this tweaking.

Suggestion: Please, please, from the bottom of my 25+ years in MMO/RPGs heart, consider removing this mechanic and implement Resolve entirely via items. If you don't, you have set in motion a mechanic that is undoubtedly going to push many of your endgame/raiding players away from this game as they grow to resent the awkward friction and hassle that it causes.

what he said.

took the words right outta my mouth

Well .. there is not that many warlocks running around but guess what? we got shorts side of the stick with this resolve buff - 5 point Resolve of Plague bringer ... but guess what overplayed swashies got +15 so go figure
+30 Fervor indeed to much but what really bite me is different stats
basically even solo items have stats along lines 4.6%SDA, 294PoT, 24k AMOD (or flip PoT for 160CB and SDA for flurry). Drop from easiest raiding boss produce earring that been superior to the earring that drops from Forged Golem
Another thing resolves total value - okey we are may be not the top 10 or even top 20 game wise guild but we are very decently decked some are even running with Eth runes (no hammer yet ) are currently working on killing psionists and past forged golem (say 1/3 into T3 or so) - after all buffs in ppl having around 280 resolve .... while bosses have 350 (at least some) - so unless it been expected that you have fully mythical gear I don't see how the hell you can hit mark 350? and even than mythical ranged - 6, mythical hat - 5, okey for some reason weakly reward from ToT - 7 and meta collection reward - 7 (and obviously relics are 7)

OP is spot on.

I'm not a raider, but I agree. Not liking the new Resolve buff, but for other reasons than stated above. One being that my friends and I discovered that the buff is stack-able with different people of the same archetype (ie@a fury and a templar) in the group, but if you have two of the same class (ie@two rangers), the Resolve is split between them and not stacking, This basically dictates that if we want maximum Resolve in the group, we cannot have two of the same class grouped together, yet this may at times be what we can come up with to run our dungeons.

Also, how is Resolve affecting agnostics? Anyone lower than level 100 does not have any Resolve at all...so does that mean they will have little affect on the mobs because of this addition of Resolve to the game? It's a question we came up with yesterday as we tried to run Shard of Love agnostic and found the groups of mobs taking quite a long time to take down, where the single mobs were still fairly easy. It was brought to our attention later in the evening, however, that Shard of Love agnostic was 'broken' and a fix was going to be completed with the down time this morning, so we have yet to see how that change has affected the agnostic.

One of my favorite movies! Ennio Morricone ftw!



On topic: The sun shall shine tomorrow

Please fix raid buff resolve spells (or remove them for preference). My guild was duplicating 9 player buffs tonight with toons peeps are sort of...attached to... Telling peeps that they can't raid zones or do harder mobs because they're the wrong class (because of one raid required only buff) and they need to level up soemthing totally different isn't the way we want to run our raids

I have asked the devs several times now in various threads for them to put out a detailed blog post describing the thought process behind why they wanted to implement it this way. I fear that we won't ever get the truth out of them.

Leave everything the way it is. Kowtowing to a subset of players always leads to some sort of unbalancing. That's partly why the game is in the state that it is <cough, myth hammer cough>.

Here's the thing with Heartbound and the raid resolve buff, and I'm going to say it as politely as I can: If *you* don't like it then just don't click the little icon there that enables the buff. If *you* don't like heartbound, don't use it. If you're the RL - then tell all your raiders to not use it.

Yeah, it gives a lot of power to people, but perhaps its going to be needed to clear Zek? Unless you're saying you've already cleared all the raid content in a couple days because you took advantage of the buffs? Or maybe its just conjecture and speculation?

That's the thing about a bucket of blue crabs: they'll never escape. There's always that one blue crab that will see one of them trying to climb the wall, and pull him back down.

How is this scenario even new? Low resists for the zone: you can't raid. Wrong runes: you can't raid. Too many scouts: you can't raid. This has been going on since the dawn of MMO's. If you're raid leader excludes you from playing in those reindeer games, maybe raid with someone who will? Or better yet - raid with someone that will *help* you gear out. Sadly, I think those days are long gone; and so are the days of raiding in Visionary MC gear. Looks like some work / effort will be required.

We got the heartbound night before last night but didn't think to use it before raid. Got to love the idea of forcing guildies to pair up and then making them pop back to guild hall every 30 mins for a single buff....Wonder if we can get frequent flyer loyalty tokens

The scenario is not new. Dumping 9 players or forcing them to swap to new mains midway through an expac (and fully regearing up to raid standard, as well as learning a new class) because there is a guildie of the same class and therefore they have the wrong duplicate buff for the raid force would be.

Maybe some peeps like working, grouping and raiding on their toons for half an entire expac's lifespan far without any issues then being told "tough, go reroll, grind up and then go redo all the heroics again and again if you want the guild to be able to kill higher resolve stuff" ,,,,,, If so and you're one of them reading this post, then please look up Eden Guild on Thurgardin server as that's the kind of dedication any guild leader would want. Minimum requirements are aged 18+ and not suffering from fullbore raving psychosis (plug plug)

All I can see at the moment is me having to take peeps into a darkened room, one of "Da Boyz" holding a crossbow to their noggins and me saying "Citizen Z, our Citizen X is the same class as you and does 5% more dps, therefore in the name of raid force optimisation you must reroll if we want to kill mob A as a guild. Of course we'll help you with regearing into class V". Do you reckon I could get away with an evil overlord laugh at this stage or should I wait till they start crying?

Granted we have to do that sometimes anyway (usually for different raid balance reasons) but having the underlying reason as being your raid buff is duplicated, therefore the player who is V. slightly better gets the raid spot and you have to reroll? I can see myself getting lynched by my own guild

Finishing this post with a plea to kill the duplication issues on the resolve buff.

Failing that does anyone have any tips on how to change my human raiders into emotionless cyborgs who won't go nutzoid on my butt when I tell them to swap main classes because of the resolve mechanic?

Finishing the puberty timeline.. wife and kids.. mortgage.. leveling their own "resolve" in RL ? Idk. I stopped raiding half way through ToT and don't forsee myself getting back into it for a while: at least until the itemization is looked at / etc. Regearing / reworking toons halfway through was terrible, and I won't again. That whole fiasco appeared to be a knee jerk reaction to the outcry of "my raid gear is only 1 percent better than heroic stuff" squeaky wheel. It got oiled - and wow, did it. A bajillion dps we put out now. I do like how GU100 is more challenging (hard), I think they could have done it without resolve stat at all though.

Maybe instead of resetting abilities, granting a boatload of fervor they could take the OP's suggestion and add it to the best raid drops: Suggestion: Drastically scale back the power of this buff, and add additional "useful" benefits instead. Large XP bonuses, moderate in combat HP/Power regen, small amounts of static combat stats (casting/reuse, Ability Mod), etc.
I can picture it now: The souls of many in Iredread unleash Ethereal Experience! (5 percent XP buff proc)

That is not a productive approach to game balance and long term game health. "If you think it's too overpowered don't use it." Really? Are you kidding? Thanks for your insightful feedback. /facepalm


The "always buff, never nerf" mentality of some players is why devs are sometimes fearful of making changes that would actually be better for balance in both near and long term. That mentality is why we never have smooth itemization curves, and why player power somehow needs to increase exponentially or people have a fit. Someone recently joked about people doing 10 billion DPS parses soon... I laughed it off... it's not really funny anymore. When you give everyone a 50-150% exponential power boost with every content pack, you immediately trivialize almost all of the content that came before it. This is why games begin to feel stale so fast, because "old" content is never worth doing. This is the terrible MMO treadmill that we're all on, all because you people can't be satisfied with realistic rates of power inflation over time.

Also, you never addressed the main thrust of this thread, which was class-specific Resolve buffs and the ridiculous place that raid leaders are in right now, having to effectively sit some of their loyal roster in order to sub in underutilized classes. Do you happen to have any gems of wisdom you'd care to direct towards that issue?

what do you mean, "you people" ?

Smooth itemization curves rarely happen because there is a certain element of players in the game who thing raiding = "work" and that their opinion matters more than the other players. They tend to talk down to others and complain about issues that really don't matter - like this raid buff and resolve. I bet not a word was said when that myth hammer hit the raid, did it. Bet everyone uses that OP pos. Can't have both sides of the cake. Take away the fervor buff, sure - take the hammer out of the game. Drop the resolve? Sure - take the reset runes out of the game. But those are yummy, and can (mostly) only be obtained by a raid force - not a filthy casual - so they're fine.

Raid leaders have always been in the position to pick and choose who gets to come along, and who doesn't - that's not something new that has to be dealt with. It has always been, and always will be about the haves vs. the have nots (do you have XX item / resist etc) RL have always had that responsibility. Now there's something new and exciting to add into the mix, which is clearly designed to stop such rapid progression through content.

It's the outcry of a subsect of players that produced such a stat inflation, not anything else. If making the appropriate adjustments to your raid force to incorporate these changes is too difficult, then maybe just roll a bruiser, or better yet - a swashy since I hear they get 15 points of resolve as their buff.

@OP Here's a gem of wisdom: go raid the new content and tell us how it went. Then you could base a discussion on something more than conjecture and damaged egos. Provide some positive feedback like such as:
Normal T3 raid gear only grants 300 resolve with buffs - the first named's resolve is 450. Something along those lines. Versus "its too hard to pick out my players for raid because math" or "give filthy casuals an XP buff instead of fervor"

#gitgud

I don't see 30 fervor adding THAT much where you have hand picked items that went from 80pot to 800pot. If anything is wrong with the heartbound buff it's that it only lasts 30minutes. But I'm married and the wife plays and we are retired from raiding so we welcome these little scraps from the big kids table. It's something our little family guild benefits from together. Especially seeing as we've been struggling with MC and gear drops for a while. For what it's worth it's probably a good thing that the invigorated pieces are so obsurdly random and scarce or we would have burned through the tidbit of content at a ridiculous rate and hit completion inside of a month.

well those 30% adds to all dmg , so a raid person would do 30% more damage regardless of equipment or buffs on him
that is a huge increase and is way to much

So balance the raid gear. Why punish everyone else? There is already a 10x gap in DPS between heroic and raid.

Now here's the kind of drivel worth logging in just to put on ignore. Zedd... take a look at everything you've written here, and apply it to the kind of "you people" who think everything you've written here.

On the plus side it made shard of love more relevant than house fluff.