Guild Wars 2

I am trying to understand why such skills are being nerfed.

I can understand when we have skills that are very strong and unavoidable. but this one confuses me. The argument was if you stood in the poison field you would stack poison for days, but surely you’d just move?

Poison isn’t that hard hitting as a condition, it does lower your heal, but that’s what tactical condi cleanse is for.

I just find that all avoidable skills such as lingering aoes, or immobile units should be punishing.

I am sure this affects other classes, but at no point do I find Turrets a threat because I see a Eng drop loads at a point and I spam aoe and destroy them or walk away.

Surely that is the concept of the action based combat?

its not a simple case of “dont stand in it”. currently, you merely have to be hit by it to be perma poisoned.

plus, an engi can easily cc someone and get 2-3 poison field ticks. you can also overlap the fields, since theres 3. with the typical condi builds, youll have at least 70% extra duration, meaning instead of 5 secs / tick, you apply 8.5 secs / tick. getting 4 applications of 8.5 sec poison is a 34 sec poison.

engis also have a multitude of cover condis. that are constantly refreshed. if you miss out on cleansing the poison because you get the burn, bleeds, vuln, chill, confusion, or blind… well then you enter a downward spiral of being unable to sustain through repeated condi applications. so basically, super long duration poisons can easily force full cleanses. and in the absence of a full cleanse, it can be totally crippling.

the intention is that poison should be used tactically.. either as cover for other things, or just before a heal in lieu of an interrupt. stacking duration w/ low base damage means its weak as a damage condi. easy-to-land 30-60 sec duration poisons? theres nothing tactical about that. and right now even power engis with only +30% duration can perma poison. i do it all the time in pve against bosses who cut your condis in 1/2.

this nerf will make poison grenade more tactical, more about locking your enemy in the fields or timing the use correctly. 5 sec / tick is silly. 3 might also be. its still gonna be perma poison in condi builds with only like 4 ticks hitting.

but wait! theres more! the community doesnt actually want real reasoning for nerfs, theyd rather put on tin foil hats and find a scapegoat! so heres the real reason:

long duration poisons and cover condis hard counter warrior healing signet. now warriors will have an easier time fighting meta builds that could have given them trouble before. #warriorbuff2014

Poison nade is a bit insanely good. Poison is fine but that thing has a huge radius and its ticks are long. It soo helps with downed foes. Often I can wait a long time to stomp because of it.

Plus, it isn’t like the engineer lacks other good ways to apply poison with the e-gun.
I can live with a modest change. Hope we get some modest changes that will make gadgets and turrets usable again.

That’s nice and all, except…
—-the whole point of said skill is applying poison, as the damage is negligible. It does just that. And it does so on a 25s cooldown (20 if traited). And the build you’re talking about must both have grenadier and either food or other sources of condition duration – basically, be specialized upon it.
Basically, they’re nerfing it because if you heavily specialize and trait upon that kit, it ends up being strong.
That’s like, the point of specialization.
Also, they’re nerfing even the base kit, not only the traited version. Way to go to make it even more useless, heh.

And i still have to see a single other class being balanced upon being fully traited. What about making warriors’ shouts damage allies by default? After all, if you have the trait, they end up being healed anyway.
That’s the logic we’re talking about, after all.

If they’ve got issues with grenadier, they should nerf it, not the base weapon. And demote it to master if it ends up being too weak for a grandmaster trait.
Instead of nerfing the base weapon all the time and require a grandmaster trait to get the “balanced” version.

A different kind of change in this situation is to make it so that the poison fields don’t stack with each other. The main reason their nerfing it is because all the fields stack on each other, effectively tripling the power of the ability (only doubling if untraited, but no one uses grenades without grenadier).

If the fields didn’t combine with each other and each tick their poison stacks, then there wouldn’t be any issue at all with poison grenade (in fact it might even warrant a slight duration boost to the poison application). It would make it so that you’d want to have the poison spread out more around the field so that it has a better chance of hitting people, whereas right now it’s best to “shotgun” them point-blank on someone so that it effectively “spikes” them with poison.

When they make the change they have planned, it will still be optimal to “shotgun” the grenades, it will just be weaker overall. But then using them at range to spread the poison fields around is also even weaker, and it actually increases the necessity for the grenadier trait (not that people wouldn’t take it regardless of anything else).

If they did make it so the fields don’t satck, they would have to figure out a way to get different engineer’s poison grenades to stack with each other, just not one engineer’s poison fields stacking with each other. There would still be and advantage to shotgunning the grenades since the opponent has less time to react to the volley and you can dump the AoE where you are instead of further away (i.e. if you’re defending a node).

I’m guessing there would be more technical limitations in the way of them preventing the fields from stacking. I think it would still work out ok if they just reduce the duration as planned, but I’m not convinced it’s the best way to address the other stuff that is just problematic with grenades in general.

Because getting 1m 21 seconds of poison because you got root spammed in poison clouds makes sense

FreekPalmer.2839:

Poison isn’t that hard hitting as a condition, it does lower your heal, but that’s what tactical condi cleanse is for.

Real rich coming from an engi who can lay and blast his own waterfields. The condi meta is far from balanced and things like condi clearing broken for some classes over others.

Well, maybe people shouldn’t be standing still for 5s in the middle of a skill that has the sole purpose of applying poison over 5s and complain for the obvious aftermath (that is, getting poisoned badly).
Does it happen because you were immobilized? Well, it means you failed to dodge said immobilize, first and foremost.
Also, if we were to apply this logic to anything else, we could nerf anything. Hundred blades? It does too much damage if you get hit by the whole skill. Ice Storm? Such high damage. And so on.
You aren’t supposed by get hit for the full duration to start with.

Dynnen.6405:

Because getting 1m 21 seconds of poison because you got root spammed in poison clouds makes sense

If you got root-spammed anywhere in pvp, then a few poison ticks are going to be the least of your problems. I’d wager that the warrior up in your face swinging away for thousands of damage is going to be more threatening than poison.

Anyway, yes, the direct damage of poison grenades is really low. The AoE markers are shown to you before the grenades land, and the only way you get the full duration is if you stand where all three circles intersect for the entire duration of the poison, which is really really stupid. We’re talking certifiably stupid, here.

Balancing the grenade kit with the assumption that everyone has it traited is a dumb way to do balance. Specialization is supposed to be strong. Grenades are strong against stationary targets. If you are stationary against a grenadier, you should die because you’re playing right into their hands. There seems to be this balance strategy recently where if a build is incredibly strong when it’s supposed to be strong, it needs a flat nerf across the board and I don’t agree with that at all.

FreekPalmer.2839:

The argument was if you stood in the poison field you would stack poison for days, but surely you’d just move?

So, basically, an Engi gets a free point decap every time they throw their poison nades on point? I’d say the reason for the skill’s nerf is quite obvious as far as tPvP is concerned.

The skill was ridiculous strong… it’s nerfed so it would be closer to balance. The game is going towards balance no matter if you wanted it or not. You like to play everything which is OP? GW2 isn’t then for you.

Tulki.1458:

Dynnen.6405:

Because getting 1m 21 seconds of poison because you got root spammed in poison clouds makes sense

If you got root-spammed anywhere in pvp, then a few poison ticks are going to be the least of your problems. I’d wager that the warrior up in your face swinging away for thousands of damage is going to be more threatening than poison.

Anyway, yes, the direct damage of poison grenades is really low. The AoE markers are shown to you before the grenades land, and the only way you get the full duration is if you stand where all three circles intersect for the entire duration of the poison, which is really really stupid. We’re talking certifiably stupid, here.

Balancing the grenade kit with the assumption that everyone has it traited is a dumb way to do balance. Specialization is supposed to be strong. Grenades are strong against stationary targets. If you are stationary against a grenadier, you should die because you’re playing right into their hands. There seems to be this balance strategy recently where if a build is incredibly strong when it’s supposed to be strong, it needs a flat nerf across the board and I don’t agree with that at all.

Quoted for truth.
Especially about the grenadier part.
If you have to spend a grandmaster trait on it, it is supposed to be strong. Not balanced. That should be the base weapon.

I think a lot of people missed the point.
There are lot’s of other skills that are similar to the poison nade that every class has to deal with. I just question why this one has been picked on over others.

Poison nade isn’t over powered as such. I can appreciate it if it was the case that the first tick added 1.5 mins of poison but its 15 seconds. that is quite a bit I admit, but not over powered.

There are so many other things that cause issue in this game.

Also the part about playing an OP class is a little invalid as there are many many ways to counter a nade engineer.

I just wondered why a class with so many bugs that has a viable ability is getting hit.

It confuses me. Also I hate the idea that because there is a lot of planning and CC to control a fight from one class it’s suddenly OP. That’s not really the case. If you wanna see OP try Warrior Hammer hitting for huge damage and CC. That’s a little weird, again that has been addressed.

Finally I would like to point out that I never complained about the Supply crate nerf/net turret nerf because I can see that being an issue combined with nades. It just seems a double nerf for something not that much of an issue.

Just another dumb nerf because of hurrdurr spvp. This stance from arenanet is just making me so kittening sick and tired. Its like im back to playing WoW, where everything PvE, Battlegrounds, got balanced around the níche gameplay of Arena. That only managed to draw in a relative minority of the playerbase.

Same kitten here. Nerf Engineers in pve, nerf them in wvw… why? Because of something that happend in a super specialized spvp gamemode. That consists of a grand total of ONE kittening gametype.

Sorry, these devs have made it abundantly clear. They are either unable or unwilling to properly balance their own game.

And the reasons are getting absurd. “i was rooted and got poisoned for a loooong time”!
So? If you were rooted against a zerker Warrior for the same amount of time you would be dead already. And no amount of condition removal is going to help you then. Its not like Poison actually deals a lot of dps.