Just let condition damage and healing be able to crit also and benefit from precision and maybe +crit damage too. The reason behind is crit damage, although becomes strong when paired with a fair amount of power and precision, is too reliant on these two stats while condition damage and healing are pretty much standalone stats. Instead of nerfing zerker gear, my suggestion will balance things out and elevate other gear stats into the current zerker tier.
funny how they didnt say nerf….but we all know its a nerf. says alot about player mentality on anet.
if crit dmg needs a nerf. why? where is it OP?
if u need to nerf it…
who will it affect the most/hardest? (thief obv)
and will you make reparations for the nerf like putting thief in mid HP pool or w.e. needs to be done?
guardians get perma vigor but thieves get cut and cant. heavy armor should NOT have vigor at all. period. if thieves dont have protection/aegis/high tough/high hp/high armor/invulnerabilty/stability/blocks wowthe list goes on….then heavies Should NOT have vigor and long swiftness. period. long swiftness and vigor should be only for mediums and under. warrior/guard should never have any ONE skill that gives more than 5s of swiftness. yyyyyyyyyup. its fair.
Don’t to throwing insults at the guardian just because Zerker gear is getting nerfed. A heavy armored class with almost no ranged options (scepter doesn’t cut it) no soft crowd control, and Almost no access to swiftness unless we want to run retreat after the staff got changed (its only really good for zerg play as for as SoS)
What is wrong with guardians having the ability to get vigor and dodge? Do we get boarder line over powered stealth for WvV roaming? Do we get the damage output or access to resetting a fight when we want. Last time I checked a thief could out run us easy, or wear us down with their extremely fast “Initiative” regen. Oh and you get access to poisons and for a while had the full on overpowerd Poison share build. QQ me a river when you have played a class. Trust me I might main a guardian, but I have all 8 at 80 and the grass isn’t always greener cause we get Heavy armor, vigor and Aegis. Learn your classes bro
“We have now left Reason and Sanity Junction. Next stop, Looneyville.”
@Josh looking at the ‘High-level overview of planned balance changes’;
What is the direction?
Are we looking at further separating balance between the 3 game types?
This could be good for each area but I see it isolating each game type making it harder to move between them as they’ll start to feel like separate games.
If berserker gear becomes useless in PvE (It will most likely still be king) I will be sending support a rather long letter, basically demanding my 200+ laurels and 800g+ which has been spent on ascended berserker gear :’(
All nerfing berserker gear will do is punish better players, not make other gear more viable.
Shouldn’t you be buffing up the other gear sets to be on-par with berserker gear? we all know conditions and support need a lot of love for PvE, however, nerfing berserker gear is NOT the answer.
All nerfing berserker gear will do is punish better players, not make other gear more viable.
Please be careful with statements like this. There is absolutely NO proof that wearing berzerker gear makes you a better player. It doesn’t require as much skill to zerker as everyone makes it out to be, it’s not hard to learn boring encounters so that you know where to stack and when to dodge that slow, hard-hitting attack.
My name is Skeletot and for the last few years I’ve been trying my best to obtain the power of Grey Skull. However, much to my demise He Tot is way overpowered and makes it impossible for me to take over Eternia…….I mean Tyria. So my proposition is that you make me more powerful than ever, preferably invincible, and I will invite you to all the summer parties at Castle Grey Skull.
Thank you in advance for your assumed cooperation,
All nerfing berserker gear will do is punish better players, not make other gear more viable.
Please be careful with statements like this. There is absolutely NO proof that wearing berzerker gear makes you a better player. It doesn’t require as much skill to zerker as everyone makes it out to be, it’s not hard to learn boring encounters so that you know where to stack and when to dodge that slow, hard-hitting attack.
Yet it seems to be too hard for most of the community…
My biggest hope is, that ANet remove “+ x% crit dmg” from all gear, it destroy so much and is – in my eyes – the mainreason for the domination of the berserkerbuilds.
Also do I agree, that this game need more counter against stealth, but I would prefer instead to rework this mechanic. Longer duration but rarely usable. Because stealth was always one of the strongest mechanics in onlinegames and the need hence a corresponding counter. Either skills or another mechanic like Revealed, which is too weak.
BTW: Why is the thief so heavy addicted to stealth?
This class should be more build around mobility and akrobatic and not stealth. (why? look upward.)
In addition, Acrobatic is a traitline, that cant competitive with Shadow Arts.
Also seems me, the steal mechanic not very useful. Its to weak for a classmechanic and mesmer are currently better in stealing than thieves.
I quit this game for 2 months when you added 4 sec reveal, I came back when it was reverted in WvW, now if this is another nerf to my thief I will be quitting and never coming back.
I played WOW for 5 years and never once quit or got angry about any balance change they made, but already some of the changes you have made to the game just make me want to uninstall and never play an Arenanet game ever again (thats putting it politely).
How about you kids at Anet look at conditions and their application instead of wasting our time patch after patch with non-sensical new trash or bugs/fixes that should have been dealt with months ago.
Berserker meta? LOL
Condition Meta boys. There’s a reason you step into an spvp match and find 10 hambow warriors, or condi necros, or condi pu mesmers, or condi regen bm rangers. notice a trend?
There needs to be either A) immunity timers on condition applications or A stat or a combination of stats needs to aid in the defense/duration of conditions on said player and not rely solely on cleansing skills.
It’s been months of this crap. and AI is over the gd top. The players barely even play anymore.
this is economic based decisions. more AI = more players able to play at a higher lvl and enjoy the game. more enjoyful gamers = more money spent. more money spent = more revenue.
ever wonder why we went from hundreds of thousands of collective build combinations in gw1 down to a few thousand tops in gw2?
ever wonder why the skills have timers rather than combinations or pre requisites like from gw1?
ever wonder why there is no healing class? (hint: its not bc they want tomake each play more self reliant but they wanted to make it so its less group reliant)
so many things i could name off but ill stop bc i think u get the point.
I’m also worried. It’s very late in the game, especially with ascended armor the way it is, to be making enormous changes with how various stats work. If this coincides with ascended armor being able to assign stats like how legendaries work, that’s one thing. But ascended armor is a huge investment to have a full suit invalidated in a single patch.
I wouldn’t have even bothered with any ascended anything if all it was good for was useless pvt. I probably would have quit by now out of boredom. As it is, the only reason I log in is to work on crafting more zerk ascended pieces and do a fractal clear for the daily for a chance at a ascended weapon chest. If this goes through like I’m pretty sure it will…I guess I’ll have more free time on my hands since I won’t be wasting my time in GW2 anymore.
My biggest hope is, that ANet remove “+ x% crit dmg” from all gear, it destroy so much and is – in my eyes – the mainreason for the domination of the berserkerbuilds.
Also do I agree, that this game need more counter against stealth, but I would prefer instead to rework this mechanic. Longer duration but rarely usable. Because stealth was always one of the strongest mechanics in onlinegames and the need hence a corresponding counter. Either skills or another mechanic like Revealed, which is too weak.
BTW: Why is the thief so heavy addicted to stealth?
This class should be more build around mobility and akrobatic and not stealth. (why? look upward.)
In addition, Acrobatic is a traitline, that cant competitive with Shadow Arts.
Also seems me, the steal mechanic not very useful. Its to weak for a classmechanic and mesmer are currently better in stealing than thieves.
i COULD agree with everythign you say.
if u drop stealth… u have to give thief these things:
1) medium health
2) higher toughness atleast a little
3) blocks
4)protection boon
5) aegis boon
6)invulnerabilty
7)stability
u also realize thieves have no choice but to play stealth. atleast a lil. it gives them 90% of their defense… which is fine but stealth kills us in pvp bc we cant cap and we leave our teammateshanging.
our vigor was nerfed….. yet guardians, which are a heavy class with heavy armor and slow supposedly, get full perma vigor. see a problem with this? thief = no perma vigor with vigor nerfs and agility/mobility nerfs and heavy kitten guards with full perma vigor and perma swiftness. its kitten backwards. im just saying be ready bcif they nerf stealth and crit dmg …. thieves are going to get a HUGE buff. i mean HUGE. if not its the end of alot of players. trust me on that )
I’m also worried. It’s very late in the game, especially with ascended armor the way it is, to be making enormous changes with how various stats work. If this coincides with ascended armor being able to assign stats like how legendaries work, that’s one thing. But ascended armor is a huge investment to have a full suit invalidated in a single patch.
I wouldn’t have even bothered with any ascended anything if all it was good for was useless pvt. I probably would have quit by now out of boredom. As it is, the only reason I log in is to work on crafting more zerk ascended pieces and do a fractal clear for the daily for a chance at a ascended weapon chest. If this goes through like I’m pretty sure it will…I guess I’ll have more free time on my hands since I won’t be wasting my time in GW2 anymore.
same here. iom a thief so a dmg nerf woudl hit my class the hardest since dmg is all we have. yes we have stealth but its useless for helping team/guild/zerg etc. its selfish skill that hurts in pvp.
How about anet stops touching what we already have and ADD some counterplay to all professions that lack it?
I mean, adding skills and traits that could temporarily shut down combat advantages would not only increase build diversity but make combat less stale. The way they go about balance is like hitting a totaled motorcycle back into shape.
I will agree that, in theory, nerfing everything will increase build diversity because whatever you choose is going to suck around the same severity. However, arenanet has not nerfed everything and has thusly contributed to the changes in the meta.
So I shall say this again…. leave what isn’t broken alone and start adding some more skills. If those new skill need a slight tap with nerf bat, then by all means do so but understand that breaking everything is not your only option.
35 secs cooldown on a heal skill is far too long, especially when compared to your other heal skills. Having closely examined all 8 new healing skills, I would only consider using the Guardian, Ranger and Elementalist new healing skills. The cooldown for any heal skill should be in the range of 25 secs to 10 secs.
Anti-Toxin Spray
This new heal skill is also underpowered. I did not even use it for the living story it was designed to be used for, its that weak. The problem with it is it only removes specific conditions. I would either simply increase the amount it heals for or have it always remove 3 conditions. It could target the 3 specific conditions it was designed for first and if it finds 0, removes 3 random conditions but no bonus healing. If it finds 1 specific condition then it removes that plus 2 random conditions etc.
I’d like to know if anything is planned for how min-max focused the game is getting. In spvp you generally have only bunkers and roamers, while in wvw you have gvg or 1v1 specs only. In all cases there’s typically very little thinking involved as you just stack up traits and utilities that focus on one aspect of combat only and call it a day.
There’s not a lot of point having so many options if the only effective ones look more like the pre-built checklist based specialisations from WoW. It leads to a lot of no-skill rock-paper-scissors gameplay as well.
Are you doing something about the heavy profession discrimination present on LFG tool?
Its not the berserker dominance its the profession dominance…
Its currently the worst PVE issue of this game…….open LFG tool for a minute and you ll see.
GW2 balance:
A PvE player is supposed to avoid a 1-2 second 1 shotting aoe.
A WWW player is considered uncapable of avoiding a 5,75 second aoe for half his health.
I have to add my voice to the number of people who are worried about the critical damage changes.
You should be fixing the useless traits of classes like the ele and the under-powered or overpowered skills (killshot/backstab) instead of nerfing an entire game mechanic people have gotten used too and invested a lot of time around.
Also since berserker gear affects different classes in many ways there will be horrible imbalances. Classes already behind the power curve will be really behind, and classes on top will still be on top, but by less of a margin.
Yeah once again Light armor classes will end up nerfed, because where they can shine is with damage, and once there is a damage ceiling they will be countered effortlessly.
Anti-Toxin Spray
This new heal skill is also underpowered. I did not even use it for the living story it was designed to be used for, its that weak.
Players may use the skill then.
That’s what I’m talking about. Guild Wars 2 is balanced with a constant fear that some things might “be too good” (ahem Ride the Lightning/Utilities in mist form) that we discarded that new healing skill immediately, even in the context of what it was made for, because honestly it was made worse than all we already had.
Anyway, every classes needs traits and skills that are “a little too good”.
It’s safe to say they are going to try and nerf it, it’s what they do. It’s sadly also getting increasingly safe to say that they don’t know what they are doing.
Just read the ele forum… Every time they change something it has disastrous consequences; like a ground targeting underwater skill or a “buff” to promote offensive traits that nerf the defensive ones.
Good thing i recently bought a clerics set for my ele! Now it will become the new meta and everyone will AFK at bosses thanks to my superior healing.
Seriously, if you’re going to nerf berserkers, give clerics a nerf too. a few days ago i streamed a no dodging clerics run (And ended up getting banned for unacceptable behavior??) and we didn’t go down once. (With the exception of maw, since you still get insta’d there) Clerics and healing power is extremely broken and needs a harsh nerf.
This Friday at 2PM PST (22:00 GMT) we’ll be hosting another episode of Ready Up. I’ll be joined by Game Designers Jon Peters, Jon Sharp, Karl McLain, and Roy Cronacher.
In this episode we’ll be talking about a few of the things the Skills and Balance team is working on for the next balance update, including:
As a heads-up, we won’t be running a Q&A segment during this show like previous episodes of Ready Up. However, feel free to leave questions/comments below and I’ll use them to guide our discussions on Friday.
We’ll see you then!
Why changing critical damage??
Ok almost everyone runs it in dungeons, but in duels/pvp/roaming wvw condition builds still dominate..
If crit damage gets nerfed you just buffed condi builds..
I feel kinda sick about this when i have spent SOOOO much time and gold into my set but also my Weapons AND traits EVERYTHING is based AROUND berserker stats…
:-(
If berserker becomes kitten and condition builds even dominate more in duels/pvp/wvw roaming i delete this game! there where never problems with these stats in that area of the game.. i hope you just talk about dungeons and thats it..
Because what i think berserker amulet also lacks crit damage…
Its +20% crit damage in pvp…!! compare it with condition amulet.
In wvw i get 100% crit damage / pvp with traits just 35% crit damage
In wvw with condi gear i get 1200 condi / in pvp i get also 1200…..
Wanted to ask about critical damage/critical chance.
Right now critical damage and critical chance are shared stats, that means that any skill i play has the same chance to critically hit, and the same damage multiplier.
But power does not have the same property, every skill has own scaling parameters, and that makes sense.
What if instead of having character stats “critical chance” and “critical damage” we would have just two primary attribute precision and rage(for example), that would act as power to critical chance and critical damage of a skill? SO every skill would have its own critical chance and critical damage.
I see these cons and pros:
Cons:
This makes game slighlty harder to understand because of new mechanic and a little bit more slightly harder to understand because of increased variety.
Large tooltip size increase.
Pros:
This approach is more consistent(primary stats act the same)
This approach gives more flexibility in skill creation
This approach allows to finetune skills easily
This approach makes sense(rogues should have bigger crit chance than warriors with hammers)
What is your opinion on this approach? Are your changes similar to these, if not, how are they better? Imo i believe that the game should become deeper over the years, because you can’t keep the old crowd of invested people interested without providing deeper expirience, so this would be a fine change in my opinion.
Wanted to ask about critical damage/critical chance.
Right now critical damage and critical chance are shared stats, that means that any skill i play has the same chance to critically hit, and the same damage multiplier.
But power does not have the same property, every skill has own scaling parameters, and that makes sense.
What if instead of having character stats “critical chance” and “critical damage” we would have just two primary attribute precision and rage(for example), that would act as power to critical chance and critical damage of a skill? SO every skill would have its own critical chance and critical damage.
I see these cons and pros:
Cons:
This makes game slighlty harder to understand because of new mechanic and a little bit more slightly harder to understand because of increased variety.
Large tooltip size increase.
Pros:
This approach is more consistent(primary stats act the same)
This approach gives more flexibility in skill creation
This approach allows to finetune skills easily
This approach makes sense(rogues should have bigger crit chance than warriors with hammers)
What is your opinion on this approach? Are your changes similar to these, if not, how are they better? Imo i believe that the game should become deeper over the years, because you can’t keep the old crowd of invested people interested without providing deeper expirience, so this would be a fine change in my opinion.
Well here’s is my idea:
You have power to increase your weapon damage
You can have precision to crit..
But there should be a stat to increase the crit damage..
Ofc you sacrifice allot of defence stats, but hey thats a risk/reward…
Condition builds can do both
Call it: berserker
Ow nvm just remove crit damage… and all get condition gear + condition weapon + condition class, no point to hit like a kitten with your HUGE greatsword where you can just fear someone to dead and still build into defence also.
Ofc they dont say a nerf to crit damage.. but saying a change to crit damage cant be good…
And yet the WvW meta involves wearing full defensive gear and still steamrolling everything in your path. Buffing defense will just make this dumb meta even more lolworthy.
Pvt gear probably became popular to survive the insane amount of burst damage in pve. If they change zerker in the way I think they will then there would probably be a shift in meta since the disproportionate burst damage will be gone.
No, the PVT meta was brought about and driven by the WvW zerg meta and the heavy condi meta in pvp.
Currently we have the bunker/PVT/condi metas primarily dominating WvW and spvp, with the same PVT set ups also able to do all the content in pve, often with just as much if not more face roll ease as is leveled at zerkers. And yet because some people are crying about zerkers being able to run dungeons faster then them if they know what they are doing. We will now see even more hegemony from the likes of PVT. Awesome.
Zerk had the potential to dominate in one specific aspect of the game, speed clearing pve dungeon content. It seems that some people could not get over the idea that they couldn’t run CoF 1 in their pwnsauce WvW gear as fast as a group who bothered to optimize for the specific pve content they were about to play. As such the latter group is getting the shaft.
If people think nerfing zerk stats is going to promote build diversity, they are in for a rude shock.
Runes and sigil rework: critical damage removed.
Critical damage changes: removal
New stat combinations for PvP (amulets): critical damage removed = new
High-level overview of planned balance changes: removal of power.
Is there some plan to break heavy classes’ dominance over pve?
Cause this game was supposed not to have a trinity to avoid people having to wait for specific classes to do parties…yet all we can find in the lfg is “looking for guardian” or “looking for warriors”, as they are the only wanted classes.
-What is/are the most likely new weapons Thieves will get when new weapons for classes come? (I hope Greatsword, so I can teleport around with a giant sword and backstab people through their whole chest XD)
By the way, while you can’t give an exact date yet, are those balancing going to be introduced before the end of living world season 1 or will they be part of the feature update that was mentioned after it?
My question: Why you changed SoS on Guardian last balance update? Huge number players said it is not good idea and that it will do more harm then good. And we never got any good responce to it.
Now we see that it really did more harm then good and we still dont have any responce to it.
So please can we finaly get responce to this controversial change?
Is there some plan to break heavy classes’ dominance over pve?
Cause this game was supposed not to have a trinity to avoid people having to wait for specific classes to do parties…yet all we can find in the lfg is “looking for guardian” or “looking for warriors”, as they are the only wanted classes.
AoE dmg should be decreased compared to Single target dmg, to break the hundred blade warriors only meta.
Or at least include some “heretics” in the living story who terrify warriors by telling them the truth about Hundred Blades: the popping big numbers aren’t the actual dmg on hit, but the dmg dealt since the activation of the skill.
Maybe if they acknowledge this, there will be less “lfg fractal – no necros” party advertisements.
Please consider it from a PvE and WvW point of view, in how many 100’s of hours and resources in gold, laurels, possibly real money via gems players have spent getting there berserker gear.
A lot will quit, rather than be forced to make new armour sets/weapons/trinkets and redo there appearance.
Its easy to change gear in PvP.
Very, very hard in PvE and WvW.
truth be told, in my eyes it becomes even more visible that the main part of “balancing” is to ensure recurring revenue for the company. (thus yes, it a balancing of some sort, but more related balancing the investor report of the mother company maybe)
i´d expect that a peak in gem purchases could be detected following the introduction of ascended (ie convert to gold and to buy the non ascended mats required).
what once was about real gameplay ´balancing´ in old mmo´s nowadays looks more like a biz generator/sustainer ensuring continuous investments through the community into the game. to be honest, i´d rather pay monthly instead of this.
It’s hard to think of ways to change crit damage without completely insane changes or completely lackluster changes. I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone was given a base 50% crit dmg, crit dmg being removed from gear, and increased coming from traits, food, etc. it would be a buff for every build, slow the pace of pure DPS (not that doing so is necessary), and, if they add a defense stat, increase margin of error for players still interested in pure DPS builds ( which in PvE has the potential to lessen even further the need for support).
Then again they could take the Signet of Vampirism route and put ICD in crits.
When I read about critical damage changes, it felt like I had swallowed a stone. I’m trying to be a doomsayer, as there is no sense in getting upset over something that hasn’t happened yet…
I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.
In spvp/wvw, if you run berserker, you have no defense and quite low hp. It comes with a price. High dmg for low survivability.
If you nerf crit dmg, you will force many of us to play the cheesy condi meta, because who really wants to play a squishy build that doesn’t deal good damage?
All our hybrid builds will suffer too.
I hope you won’t do it. I’d rather stop playing your game than becoming a lame condi PU mesmer.
Could be interesting. I know there are several that I (personally) consider less than useful.
Critical damage changes
I’m sure it’s crossed your minds, but please remember that changes to this stat will also likely impact Valk, Assassin, and Cav gears.
High-level overview of planned balance changes
Always interested in this personally. I would love to see you guys perhaps allow us, your sizable player base, to do some of your testing for you. Not talking the grand sweeping changes, those should be kept to small scale testing. But smaller ‘tweeks’ perhaps to things like skill coefficients would be fun. It would also offer you guys a much larger feedback pool from which to determine if your are progressing towards the end goal you have set. One would think that you would be able to datamine the information from players use and then continue adjusting as necessary, potentially via hotfix type patches, thus allowing the progression of the balance to happen at a slightly faster pace.
Don’t look at me like that. Whatever you’ve heard, it’s probably not true.
I personally don’t really care what changes are implemented (I’ll just adapt to whatever you give me), but just one thing … if you must change things like what Berserker’s gear does, make it so that we don’t have to craft / acquire completely new equipment. Thanks!
A stat or a combination of stats needs to aid in the defense/duration of conditions on said player and not rely solely on cleansing skills.
