Guild Wars 2

I REALLY hope you give all players using any gear with + critdmg (berserker, valkyrie, cavalier, celestial, …have i forgot something?) the option to change stats. Otherwise i, and possibly a lot of other players, will be kittened.

Iavra.8510:

I REALLY hope you give all players using any gear with + critdmg (berserker, valkyrie, cavalier, celestial, …have i forgot something?) the option to change stats. Otherwise i, and possibly a lot of other players, will be kittened.

Yes, you lose 10% of your crit damage. It’s the end of the world. Your char will fall over the dead the moment you press an attack.

Carighan.6758:

If I may, I find the renaming of Prowess -> Ferocity to be rather pointless.
I agree with the other change, making it a stat and all, but why not keep its name? It was called Prowess before it became Crit Damage.

jaywalker.2469:

ANet I just can’t agree with your philosophy when it comes to profession balance. Please buff the weak don’t nerf the strong.

That is not a useful general rule. Why would you not nerf? If you just buff continuously, everyone ends up in an unstable power balance + the non-PvP game becomes continuously easier. How is that helpful?

They have already come up with so much new PvE content of decent difficulty and a casual player will not be able to catch up with updates at this frequency; and the old dungeons are already so much easier than they were during launch. Players who are preoccupied with the new content wouldn’t care less about dungeons now unless they want that gold from CoF 1 or those tokens for their legendaries.

When you nerf a so-called OP profession, the underpowered professions will still be unhappy, and on top of that you make the professions that used to be OP unhappy. Why would you do that?

Also, when a profession is called OP, it is only because some players of that profession found out ways to play it well! What’s wrong with playing their profession well?

Carighan.6758:

Iavra.8510:

I REALLY hope you give all players using any gear with + critdmg (berserker, valkyrie, cavalier, celestial, …have i forgot something?) the option to change stats. Otherwise i, and possibly a lot of other players, will be kittened.

Yes, you lose 10% of your crit damage. It’s the end of the world. Your char will fall over the dead the moment you press an attack.

I’m losing more than that. I’m assuming that Celestial Critdmg will get nerfed to the ground compared to berserker/valkyrie/cavalier. I spent an awful lot of time to grind for ascended Celestial stuff and won’t accept having to trash them.

/edit: Also Shatter builds lose up to 50% of their long term DPS because of Vigor Nerf so i might even reconsider to completely rebuild.

Iavra.8510:

Carighan.6758:

Iavra.8510:

I REALLY hope you give all players using any gear with + critdmg (berserker, valkyrie, cavalier, celestial, …have i forgot something?) the option to change stats. Otherwise i, and possibly a lot of other players, will be kittened.

Yes, you lose 10% of your crit damage. It’s the end of the world. Your char will fall over the dead the moment you press an attack.

I’m losing more than that. I’m assuming that Celestial Critdmg will get nerfed to the ground compared to berserker/valkyrie/cavalier. I spent an awful lot of time to grind for ascended Celestial stuff and won’t accept having to trash them.

/edit: Also Shatter builds lose up to 50% of their long term DPS because of Vigor Nerf so i might even reconsider to completely rebuild.

Yep. I wear Celestial Helm with Divinity/Traveler Runes on all my Power Based Characters (4 out of 6). The nerf will be really huge.

After viewing the twitch and preview, I am just very disappointed about Arena’s words.

Game have gone against all its said/promise in the past.
1. Play how you want,
2. Minimum grinding

Now even Critical Damage we have to farm, salvage, earn it all over again from zero ? Just because some group of people complain about WvW or PvP ?

What does it have to affect Dungeons, and PvE Events ? Keep the nerfs separate ! Make the setup completely separate. Just like PvP and Normal map.

I was this close to quitting this game 4 months ago. Until updates of Ascended and new Fractals instances. With this nerf, I will definately be getting ready to move on to a new game.

Fix the bugs, don’t touch what is already good and what people are already using/happy with. You only kitten off your customers (us gamers). Imagine you are staying in your house happily and suddenly the government force you to move?

DON’T TOUCH PVE, Just scale down proportionately WvW damage like PvP. So we get less on a spike damage.

The basic impression I got from the stream is that they have no idea what they are doing and what the results for the gamers will be. So much changes to skills and prefessions to nerf that again and change them again. None of these people on the stream play your game btw.

honestly as much as i love my berserker gear critical damage needs a cap at least 100% or 75% dps builds would still be dps builds

Nerfing vs buffing isn’t just about balance between builds. If they only buffed and never nerfed, we would have crazy power creep. Everything else in the game would need to be scaled up every few months just to keep up with the damage inflation.

I agree that Ferocity is not a great name, but for the same reason that Prowess and Malice are no longer used. It’s not very descriptive or intuitive. “Critical Power” would have been a sensible transition from what we have now. Unless, of course, Ferocity has a secondary function they haven’t told us about yet…

The fact that Thieves were completely ignored on the “ready up” doesn’t bother anyone else?!

Didn’t surprise me that they talked allot about warrior since they all main warriors (except Josh) and they clearly said it out loud in the stream but bypassing the thief profession like that shows the respect they have for the thief community. Not that we don’t already know how they feel about thieves but acting like that in a live stream is unprofessional and offensive.

Volrath.1473:

The fact that Thieves were completely ignored on the “ready up” doesn’t bother anyone else?!

Didn’t surprise me that they talked allot about warrior since they all main warriors (except Josh) and they clearly said it out loud in the stream but bypassing the thief profession like that shows the respect they have for the thief community. Not that we don’t already know how they feel about thieves but acting like that in a live stream is unprofessional and offensive.

Yes, they wasted a lot of time joking instead of talking shop, and it got worse in the last few minutes. Yes, they need to take a course in PR and presentation skills. Yes, it was unprofessional.

But given the poor time management they already exhibited, skipping over most of the thief changes was necessary. They were running out of time, and the Warrior Healing Signet issue is one that they needed to discuss, because many, many players have been very concerned about this skill for months now, and the forums have been overflowing with discussions about Healing Signet.

One other possible reason could be that they mentioned they are reworking some game mechanics in ways that they can’t discuss yet, and this will affect the Thief more than most other professions. Therefore, perhaps they were at less liberty to discuss the reasoning behind upcoming changes to Thief than they were for other professions. So perhaps they are reconsidering how (e.g.) stealth works, except that it won’t be ready yet for next week’s update.

I will wait to see it all on paper and feel how it goes once live. My main concern is that the Devs on the livestream did not really explain things particularly well and did not give the impression that they were on top of their game.

Saying that they nerf Crit dmg because “we feel it was too high” (or something similar) is no explanation at all. Giggling, mumbling and half finished sentences did not help get much clarity.

So I hope that the high level of confusion at the moment is is due to the bad quality of the stream’s delivery, but that things will make more sense once on paper.

Unfortunately the real issues were not addressed… (Defiance, lack of fight mechanics, poor AI, underwhelming Condi builds in PVE, etc.)

Zel

I respectfully take offence at having my Mesmer build and play-style called ‘cheesy’ by the devs when they talked about the upcoming changes to Deceptive Evasion.

I’ve always enjoyed a non standard build and play-style with my Mesmer in PvE. As almost in defiance to the idea that Confusion isn’t viable in PvE I built mine entirely around Confusion & other conditions just to prove it wrong.

DE proccing clone death traits on dodge is (was I suppose) the backbone to my build and play-style strategy, and made it just barely viable in PvE with regards to damage output. I also found the play-style interesting, fun and definitely not ‘cheesy’. To me ‘cheesy’ builds rely on passives so heavily that there is no reactiveness left to the play-style, it’s simply auto-pilot, no dynamic trade offs with costs of actions, no positional awareness required…it’s just too easy. I absolutely disagree that this is the case with builds using DE clone death trait proc’s as a large part of their damage such as mine.

A lot needs to be quickly and skillfully considered in a fight if you are using DE as a damage generator. For instance:

• Is the clone that will be overridden in range of the target?
• Should you use one of your dodges just for damage or should you hold off in case you need it to avoid an attack?
• If you have 3 phantasms out is it worth it to sacrifice one for the on-death trait conditions, and which one would be replaced?
• Is it better to follow through with an attack chain (like scepter 1) or interrupt it to dodge?
• Should you dodge and shatter for a needed quick stun when your illusions are away from the target?
• If your target is running but next to a clone, should you dodge in order to cripple them?

Now instead of having my clone on-death traits controlled by my dodge I am forced to use skills like Phase Retreat or Mirror Images just for their clone ‘overriding’ properties, as well as being even more chained to the scepter 1 auto-attack.

My entire play-style was so off-handedly dismissed as ‘cheesy’ and then made so completely impotent by the Deceptive Evasion nerf that it makes me suspect that not a lot of thought or reasoning went into this upcoming change.

I may not know how much work is required to change berserker. But is it worth that effort?
On one hand there should be no differences between PVP and PVE. On the other hand they are made… Standardization vs chaos. Should i be amused about the developers helplessness?

The game was built for zerker. PVE pov oc. And once you get to know the mechnic of foes and how to dodge them berserker is the best for you. Then this effective playing is becoming “meta” but “meta” does not require skill! Right, so we have to fix the meta in order for variety to “shift” it elsewhere

In the end of the day. Those who play zerk will stick to zerk because it will remain the best at least until condi gets buffed. Then a swap would make sense.

Iavra.8510:

Carighan.6758:

Iavra.8510:

I REALLY hope you give all players using any gear with + critdmg (berserker, valkyrie, cavalier, celestial, …have i forgot something?) the option to change stats. Otherwise i, and possibly a lot of other players, will be kittened.

Yes, you lose 10% of your crit damage. It’s the end of the world. Your char will fall over the dead the moment you press an attack.

I’m losing more than that. I’m assuming that Celestial Critdmg will get nerfed to the ground compared to berserker/valkyrie/cavalier. I spent an awful lot of time to grind for ascended Celestial stuff and won’t accept having to trash them.

/edit: Also Shatter builds lose up to 50% of their long term DPS because of Vigor Nerf so i might even reconsider to completely rebuild.

You forgot the amount of laurels it had cost espacially if slotted with WvW infusions.
As well as the huge amount of money, prestine fractal relics, guildmarks and time.

This patch is going to make almost everything ive done since the release of ascended gear obsolote. This is the first time since beta i consider to quit and if this goes live without refund im done with gw2.

I dont mind a 10% damage nerf, but this is going to far.

Zelu.1692:

I will wait to see it all on paper and feel how it goes once live. My main concern is that the Devs on the livestream did not really explain things particularly well and did not give the impression that they were on top of their game.

Saying that they nerf Crit dmg because “we feel it was too high” (or something similar) is no explanation at all. Giggling, mumbling and half finished sentences did not help get much clarity.

So I hope that the high level of confusion at the moment is is due to the bad quality of the stream’s delivery, but that things will make more sense once on paper.

Unfortunately the real issues were not addressed… (Defiance, lack of fight mechanics, poor AI, underwhelming Condi builds in PVE, etc.)

Zel

They said during the stream that they couldn’t change everything at once and that other changes are coming but they have to wait until they see how the ferocity change shakes out. So, the defiance issues, lack of fight mechanics, etc. may or may not be part of the future changes they haven’t mentioned. It sounds like some people were expecting them to spill all the beans right away, and pretty early on during the stream they said they wouldn’t and couldn’t. So, let’s make sure people are aware of this tidbit during the ongoing discussion. You can take issue with the fact that they chose not to mention how these crit changes fit into future plans, but at the very least acknowledge that they said they were being intentionally silent on the matter.

It’s funny how they announce buffs for the ele but didn’t mention the double nerf on crits happening with the celestial gear stats and how once again ele’s will be the most affected by that.

Gambit.8425:

Gulesave.5073:

(snip)

Other MMO’s tie together new gear tiers with new, harder content. Not in GW2 though, they made ascended gear grind so we got something to strive for, which add about the crit damage they’re now removing cause it’s too strong for CoF p1.

I assure you, the devs are not redesigning an entire core attribute solely on the basis that the tiny subset of players who both have ascended armor and grind CoF1 are going through that one piece of content a few seconds too fast.

Tweaking CoF or ascended crit damage would have been much, much, much easier.

Re-posting this since it’s very relevant to this thread.

I had to go back and watch the whole 20 seconds about this on the stream to try to decipher their rational behind the Mesmer trait Deceptive Evasion nerf (42 minutes in btw). This is what I could make out that they didn’t like about Deceptive Evasion:

• It proc’ed ‘on clone death’ traits
• It disrupted the flow of your clones (no idea what that means)
• It forced you to either ‘cheese it’ (again, no clue what this means) or
• It interrupts your game-play (still no idea what specific type of ‘game-play’ this inhibited, especially since on-clone death builds make this an integral part of their game-play)
• It feels broken (very subjective, but ok)
• You have your clone, you’re attacking and you’re there and it’s changing all your positioning (???)
• It can replace Phantasms. No it can’t. (Yes it can.)

So to me the only thing that makes any sense is they feel the ‘on clone death’ traits are too powerful. Why they think this is anyone’s guess as they really didn’t say.

Good bye Zerker build. Welcome the new Ferker (Ferocity) build.

Make us grind 100,000 more mats, salvage all of them, to get back the 10% loss.

Arena, you guys can be smarter than that. Easy solution is just play the game like we do, and important is to take off your arena hat, and see if you enjoy it as a gamer or frustrated over it.

If ArcheAge is out, I will definately check it out. You just lost a fan. Gw2 is my first Arena mmo. You manage to get me on board and like it at first.

Now Good bye, if you keep this up. I’m not buying Wildstar no matter how good it is after hearing the horror what Ncsoft is doing to your revenue.

With this i think I can understand why Gw2 is in this state of budget as all profits goes to Wildstar.

After reading approx. 1/3 of this thread, I get the feeling for the most likely scenario being that +% Critical Damage gets changed to +% Magic Find :O

Edit: Critical damage now is an account bound stat gained from salvaging ascended quality gear…

can I find a transcript of the changes somewhere?

I’ll return on POE….

End of the story. Worst balance team ever in mmo world (i play necro from the begginning).

Gorni.1764:

can I find a transcript of the changes somewhere?

http://dulfy.net/2014/01/17/gw2-ready-up-skill-and-balance-developer-livestream-notes/

PS: just make a real questionnaire on GW2, maybe it will pull off your blinkers.

Wasbunny.6531:

I respectfully take offence at having my Mesmer build and play-style called ‘cheesy’ by the devs when they talked about the upcoming changes to Deceptive Evasion.

Same. And as bad as the (IMO excessive) nerfings are, what’s even worse is how cavalier they seemed to be about the whole thing. I didn’t listen to it live, but I’ve read the transcribed comments, and they come across to me not as based on decisions soberly made after a great deal of thought and analysis. Rather, they decided something was “cheesy” — about as subjective and meaningless a term as exists in gaming — and burned it to the ground.

The changes are nerfs to nearly all mesmers, some more than others, and appear to have been done with little consideration to balance or secondary effects.

I’ve done my best in my time here at GW2 to stick up for the developers when I see what I feel is unwarranted criticism. But destroying builds because they are “cheesy” is not something I can rationally defend.

And removing entire playstyles from a class without providing new ones is bad design. Period, end of story.

Is it just me or do balance changes happen based on spvp play? When listening to the live stream it seems like most example or reasoning behind their decisions seems to be based on spvp.

Might be way off base but that is what I took away from that stream.

KOPPER.1458:

Is it just me or do balance changes happen based on spvp play? When listening to the live stream it seems like most example or reasoning behind their decisions seems to be based on spvp.

Might be way off base but that is what I took away from that stream.

It’s always been solely based on sPvP.

Wow Anet, are you serious? Is this your answer? I’ve watched your livestream and omg, are you guys even trying? Joking about your own balance, telling us how OP some classes are and how everyone needs to roll a warrior?! If you can’t fix your own mistakes, at least don’t joke about this! Seriously!

Kiriakulos.1690:

It’s always been solely based on sPvP.

Not entirely, but far, far too much given that:

1. 99% of players never set foot in there; and
2. sPvP has major flaws which are a good part of the reason for point #1.

Qaelyn.7612:

Wasbunny.6531:

I respectfully take offence at having my Mesmer build and play-style called ‘cheesy’ by the devs when they talked about the upcoming changes to Deceptive Evasion.

Same. And as bad as the (IMO excessive) nerfings are, what’s even worse is how cavalier they seemed to be about the whole thing. I didn’t listen to it live, but I’ve read the transcribed comments, and they come across to me not as based on decisions soberly made after a great deal of thought and analysis. Rather, they decided something was “cheesy” — about as subjective and meaningless a term as exists in gaming — and burned it to the ground.

The changes are nerfs to nearly all mesmers, some more than others, and appear to have been done with little consideration to balance or secondary effects.

Same for me.
Apparently ‘cheesy’ is almost every single Mesmer build as most builds are affected by their changes.

They failed to understand why the unique class mechanic (shatter) is becoming more and more rare outside competitive team tournaments and are often not in those tournaments either.

They failed to do anything for a profession that in a competitive team tournament is:
Definitely not a must have, viable but a thief is basically better, with babysitting you miiiiiight be able pull off bringing a Mesmer.

Maybe they should consider that it is actually NOT funny that the majority of them play a warrior and therefor appear to have a limited insight to the other professions.

I don’t really know if the whole “they mostly play warriors so they’re biased towards them” thing is fair. Seems like an assumption that then gets passed around as if it were fact.

But I DO see the contrast between Jon Peters posting on the forums that they want warriors to be only slowly and carefully adjusted so as not to make them too weak, and the “la-de-da” attitude they seem to have towards basically ruining an entire mesmer build, and weakening many others.

It’s VERY disappointing. And sorry, but really makes me question the faith I’ve had up until now in Arenanet’s interest in class balance and ability to achieve it.

On a related note, can someone tell me how it’s “cheesy” to apply conditions to an opponent when a clone is summoned, destroying an older one, but it’s NOT cheesy that warriors have a weapon skill that applies a torment that basically can never be cleansed because it keeps reapplying itself and only has a 15s CD?

Qaelyn.7612:

I don’t really know if the whole “they mostly play warriors so they’re biased towards them” thing is fair. Seems like an assumption that then gets passed around as if it were fact.

Maybe a bad joke on their part then.
Their actions and choices in terms of balance speaks for themselves though.
Give the signet a strong active also and reduce the passive with next to nothing.

I honestly don’t even care if they leave HS as it is if they fix the other problems. Warriors should have high sustain as they are a front-line class, but they should not also have massive condition application, condition removal, immunities and mobility.

The mobility is IMO the single biggest problem. It’s excessive and needs to be fixed. It’s not reasonable to give one class the highest sustain and nearly the best ability to chase and disengage whenever they want.

Qaelyn.7612:

I honestly don’t even care if they leave HS as it is if they fix the other problems. Warriors should have high sustain as they are a front-line class, but they should not also have massive condition application, condition removal, immunities and mobility.

The mobility is IMO the single biggest problem. It’s excessive and needs to be fixed. It’s not reasonable to give one class the highest sustain and nearly the best ability to chase and disengage whenever they want.

I don’t disagree with you. (I get the feeling you think I do though lol).
Balancing other aspects of the Warrior does however not seem to be a priority for the next balance patch even though warriors are one of the most dominating professions atm.

The only thing we do know for sure is that there is going to be a slight change to the signet passive and I honestly don’t think that will be enough.

Wasbunny.6531:

I respectfully take offence at having my Mesmer build and play-style called ‘cheesy’ by the devs when they talked about the upcoming changes to Deceptive Evasion.

The more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that all the “cheesy” comments sounded like resentment, like somebody who had maybe got his kitten handed to him one too many times by Mesmers.

Anet will you please STOP knee jerk nerfing the necromancer? It’s like you’re throwing all those years of experience out the window. you need to give the game time to settle before doing these balance changes. In fact, I remember ya’ll releasing a statement saying you wouldn’t do that, so why are you nerfing minion masters the INSTANT they become popular? It’s like you don’t even take your own advice.

Are the bland mob specific sigils also going to be reworked next patch alongside most of the other sigils?
I mean the ones which are like +10% dmg to destroyers… +10% dmg to ghosts… +10% dmg to svanir, +10% dmg to undead etc.
Really boring and rarely used.

Wasbunny.6531:

I respectfully take offence at having my Mesmer build and play-style called ‘cheesy’ by the devs when they talked about the upcoming changes to Deceptive Evasion.

So much this. How is an active override of a passive trait considered cheesy in anyway? I love my clone death build (scepter/pistol + staff) and how I have to keep track of which clone will pop when I dodge. Scepter auto-attack chain is just too slow to allow me to actively utilise clone death traits. So sacrificing a dodge in order to proc a clone is an interesting way to play. It allows me to be more reactive instead of relying on Phase Retreat. With the nerf to Mesmer vigor generation it would have been even more interesting as endurance recovery will be much slower making the decision to burn a dodge more difficult. But now we will never know

I honestly think the nerf to vigor on Mesmer is enough.

When is this going live btw?

To Arena

I started playing active again, because of the Ascended where I have something to work for to improve my build and play style. Dungeon and Guild events with members is what I look for now. I have even played less dungeons and higher end contents. World Boss is a lag to dc at times. So a waste of time, not a fan of World Boss Event anymore, reminds me of frustrating skill queue and lag spikes in WvW.

Effective DPS is a form of support. Key to this game is to be efficient and fast, and cycle less on your cool-downs.

Is arena taking back your words on No Trinity builds ? I have helped alot of players since 2012 get thru hard dungeons, and i have also face many dishonest players who just rage quit and taking advantage of Magic Find in dungeons.

Honestly I have stopped and avoid using LFG and even from gw2LFG.com site over a year ago.

I plan to buy at least 100 USD every year, to support the game. But I changed my mind last year

What should be done

1. Improve support builds without nerfing the critical hit damage. Make different tiers of combo easier to access for newbie players. As most new players are not familiar with the rotation and also will not be smooth on the controls.
2. Change the champion/dungeon content mechanics not to have the one hit down mechanics.
3. Allow us to re-use the same exotic, and upgrade it to Ascended.
4. Keep PvE/Dungeon completely separate from WvW. Make WvW like pvp – no stats on armor, fix trinkets. only thing the get is the skins from PvE and usable for WvW.

Having us to SALVAGE materials to gain the secondary stats like Magic Find will outrageous if its applied to Ferocity to gain the secondary stats. Game is already grindy enough.

Take one out, and you lose a lot of players like myself immediately.

You are aware most of the players that understand your mechanics and know how to maximize the play style are the pillars that help your Gw2 community be competent to enjoy more challenging contents.

Arena did a great job 5 months ago to bring back interest to the old players, now you got me back to the state 6 months ago, where I would be eagerly waiting for ArcheAge, or any other mmo (except WildStar).

Overall from the Living Story of Scarlet and World-boss/Champion boxes was good, until it recently because a spam race like hungry piranha’s, just spamming auto attack to get some hits, creating mindless zergs to farm.

What we have so far now is:

1. Zerk Wars
2. Grind Wars
3. Lag Wars
4. Bored Wars
5. AFK Wars
6. Tag Wars

Coming up next – Support Wars, everyone on support roles. Let’s heal the champion to death with precision healing.

KEEP WvW and PvE changes separate Understand people are complain about skill balance because they get easily downed with a op build in WvW. Yes Arena needs to fix PvE bugs as well and some of the weird silly mechanics or really really annoying contents.

Instant fix to balancing problem in WvW, *REUSE BACK PVP mechanics in WvW. LEAVE PVE out of this.* Since there is no problem now with PvP setups.

Cheers,

UmbraVictor.9842:

I plan to buy at least 100 USD every year, to support the game. But I changed my mind last year

Why do people feel the need to include this kind of stuff?

I only see most ranting/crying about op builds in WvW. Hence we gave this last push for this nerf and balancing to take place.

Let everyone use back the same pve skins, their armor looks/legendaries. But retain the stats same as pvp. Problem FIXED.

Some are just sore losers.

jaywalker.2469:

When you nerf a so-called OP profession, the underpowered professions will still be unhappy, and on top of that you make the professions that used to be OP unhappy. Why would you do that?

Well, that’s a player problem if they cannot stop and think for a moment to realize that X vs X is the same balance as Y vs Y (assuming Y > X), and in most cases actually a better one because it’s more stable.

There’s plenty argument for “mostly nerfing”, when it comes to game balance:

• Preserves PvE balance. If everyone always gets buffs, you also need to invest endless hours continuously buffing and rebalancing PvE mobs against damage they were never intended to receive. Easier to just nerf the class which ended up doing more damage than you anticipated.
• More stable PvP balance. If damage and utility across the board is lower, any imbalance makes less of an impact, making the whole balance framework less unstable.
• Usually, you have 1-2 positive outliers, and 1-2 negative outliers. According to player feedback, you have 1 positive outlier (Everyone but Warriors cries about Warriors) and 8 negative outliers (everyone cries they’re the weakest class). Nerfing is a lot less work if you want to listen to player feedback, plus if you were to want to this via buffs you’d have to give everyone something – they all complain after all – and that includes plenty classes which are fine. WoW frequently had this problem and the devs talked about it often enough – you had to buff perfectly balanced classes because in the eyes of the players, they weren’t actually balanced.

Ofc, it has the big downside that players consider it Bad™.
But then, they show the exact same reaction when you buff a different class. Worse, if you do it instead of buffing them.

So really, as a dev it doesn’t matter all that much. People complain. On the forums. They always do, no matter what you do.
But people continue to play. And that’s the feedback which matters.

You nerf something, people continue to play, people adapt, the numbers on wins/losses align better with what you intended. Well then, good change.

jaywalker.2469:

Also, when a profession is called OP, it is only because some players of that profession found out ways to play it well! What’s wrong with playing their profession well?

In that case, isn’t it impossible to buff something because you’d have to force the players to play it well?

Just refunding the stats with critical damage isn’t enough if you mix and match pieces for your optimal build. For instance, my necromancer uses ascended clerics weapons, zerker armor, and celestial trinkets. Assuming they do refund us, I’de be screwed out of 10 days worth of mithrillium and a large amount of mats if my new set doesn’t make use of clerics weapons.

Anet is no longer making small logical changes to an underused stat on easily obtainable armor. These are massive changes to popular stats on time gated and expensive armor. All ascended gear should have the same features as legendary weapons (even if it’s one use) if anets balancing practices can reach all the way to the stats on our armor. Doing anything else when they were the ones insisting on adding such a frustrating grind to the game is only asking for angered players.

I don’t mind such large changes to the game if they’re handled properly, but anet already failed in that regard so I’m preparing for the worst case scenario. Previewing something so controversial so early without describing how large it’s effect would be, ways to work around it pre/post-patch, or options for those who want out is the reason I’m not playing the game till the patch drops and will choose to out right quit or not once it does.

I still find it weird they think the elite skill of the engineer with a massive cooldown is in need of a nerf. I dont think I have heard anyone on my server complain that this skill is so OP that it needs the nerf.
Now I have heard enough complaints about Dhuumfire, but to completly destroy the grandmaster trait and make it useless is not among the solutions I think.
I do hope they would reconsider if these decisions are what’s really needed in the game.

I am incredibly confused. The only think that changes by adding ferocity is that it will take 10% more time clearing a dungeon. I do not see a single reason why would anyone want switch to a different set up than “zerk warrior” when it still does the job in the most optimal way. Second of all, are we really talking about making more build diversity? For how long have been players asking to make conditions actually useful in PvE, making changes to max stacks, the way the stack deal with PvE, etc. Instead… we receive a patch that is supposed to increase build diversity by actually doing nothing more than nerfing a stat……

Also:
- still no precursor crafting
- nerfs to classes still based on a game mode that the vast majority of players completely ignore

Its obvious most ascended LIGHT wupwup and celestial user will quit if they don t change the plan.

As i said its not athreat but deleting 1000 gold Worth equipment is not something you do lightly…

And putting ferocity as other stats means a 20+% NERF to a single set making comparable to 2 tiers lower with different stats.

(again 644 only in damask for the armor…add other materials, weapons, recipes, trinkets etc)

I mean if you were a dev what would expect deleting so much (UNWANTED) “progression”…

You don t only commit the mistake of adding grinding where the system is not designed for it, but also you don t even care?
Only possible answer…we already paid enough but we can still be used as a test server for eastern launch…..

Carighan.6758:

Sorry LordByron, but what is the big deal exactly? Stuff gets buffed and nerfed all the time, and in theory, you’d have to re-gear every single time.

Numbers:
zerk gets nerfed 10%, celestial more than 20%

Swapping to exotic mixed will be 10% better than celestial moving the equipment 2 tiers lower.

Its the same unprofessional mistake done with ascended armorsmith light VS heavy
Heavy required almost half the timegate……(not even debating damask cost)

I don’t truly see where the big deal is, sorry. :$

I mean yes, Celestial gets weaker, happens. Nerfs happen all the time in MMOs. If they were to buff Dire gear, and it’d become the best, you’d still have to switch gear.

I would hardly call it “invalidating time invested”. And mind you, I hate Ascended gear with a passion. But meh, not like I’d re-do any gear over this. So I’m a bit weaker after, so what? Happens.
I mean if you don’t enjoy playing the underdog every once in a while, not sure MMORPGs are the right genre, due to their ever-changing balance.