Guild Wars 2

Hi,
In this thread I would like to illustrate how Anet’s balancing has had some unforeseen negative impact on the gameplay with just one example related to my main class.

Critical damage nerfed by 10% + nerf on equipment make it around 25%-40% nerf to critical damage.

Immediate consequences:
For the elementalist: Celestial and runes of divinity is broken, best trait line is much less effective

Globally:
The meta has shifted completely toward condition damage, entire guilds are running cnd dmg only builds.

This is somewhat tolerable even if it makes the game less fun to play. However add the following elementalist nerf into the equation:

- Mist form, removed the ability to heal, cure conditions or use utilities while in mist form

And the result you have is a complete game balancing failure.
Case example from yesterday:
Zerg fight, train rushes at me, I’m at full HP…. I use Mist Form and move away (invulnerability skill).
For the next 3 seconds I am stuck in Mist form as my health is drained away by necro conditions from a pure condi zerg. I cannot heal, I cannot fight, there is nothing I can do, my invulnerability skill is now a death sentence in face of the new meta, I can only die and run all the way back.

To put it bluntly, this sucks. It’s didn’t happen before all the nerfs. The small mistake Anet made nerfing Mist form has become a complete disaster at balancing in the new condi meta. But worse than being a mistake in balancing, it makes the game LESS FUN.

Truth is in face of the new condi meta Mist Form is a broken skill. A perfect example of what not to do when balancing classes in a MMO.

Hopefully GW3 will learn from these mistakes.

Feel free to add other examples of balancing that has lead to similar results.

Well OP, I’ve only been on SoS for a week, but I don’t fully agree with you about everything. Yeah the hammer trains are punishing to us peripherals, but you just need to learn how to dodge it and not mindless walk into static fields without stab. The hammer train can’t turn in mid leap, so use that to your advantage and dodge it.

As for a condi zerg meta, I haven’t really noticed it when fighting Mag or FA, but my guild always has boatloads of cleanses, so thats probably why. Every so often we might be assjammed by a group with 10 necros, but thats life.

Any way as for the rest of your post, I’m not sure if I wholly agree with you. Didn’t anet raise celestial’s base stats to offset the ferocity change? And as for mistform, if I can’t heal or use utilites in deathshroud or plague, I don’t see why eles should be allowed to do either of those things in mist form. Granted mesmers can with distortion, but thats different because they have to sacrifice damage in order to use that panic button. And aren’t most staff eles traited so that they get a single cleanse from cantrips? And theres also lemongrass to help with the condi spam if you really feel like its that much of an issue.

Most people would argue with you that the meta has shifted away from condition damage, especially for zergs. I personally feel like I do way more damage to an enemy guild on a power necro spec than a condition spec, and the chill and weakness and whatnot is just extra stuff that helps alot but I never really even spec for anymore.

Anyway for examples of over class balancing look at 1. The mesmer glamour nerf that reduced them to a ganker utility bot in WvW, and 2. The necro dhuumfire nerf (and nerf of several unrelated skills to compensate for it, before reworking dhuuumfire and leaving all the other nerfs in place).

engineers got the same nerf

Locks all skill slots, including the tool belt.

I actually wonder if the class has a decent stun breaker.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Elixir_S

a thread complaining

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/Elixir-S-nerf-broke-engineer-mechanics/first

the class hit hardest by ferocity was (hidden killer) thief, and they didnt lose more than about 20% damage.

on an ele, the worst case scenario is around 16-17%.

stop with the bad math, stop saying you lost 25-40% of your damage.

Xillllix.3485:

Hi,

The meta has shifted completely toward condition damage, entire guilds are running cnd dmg only builds.

is this about gw2?

I’m not trying to be rude, but this sounds more like venting than constructive feedback. Some of the conclusions you have made just aren’t conclusions that you can come to.

Xillllix.3485:

- Mist form, removed the ability to heal, cure conditions or use utilities while in mist form

And the result you have is a complete game balancing failure.
Case example from yesterday:
Zerg fight, train rushes at me, I’m at full HP…. I use Mist Form and move away (invulnerability skill).
For the next 3 seconds I am stuck in Mist form as my health is drained away by necro conditions from a pure condi zerg. I cannot heal, I cannot fight, there is nothing I can do, my invulnerability skill is now a death sentence in face of the new meta, I can only die and run all the way back.

To put it bluntly, this sucks. It’s didn’t happen before all the nerfs. The small mistake Anet made nerfing Mist form has become a complete disaster at balancing in the new condi meta. But worse than being a mistake in balancing, it makes the game LESS FUN.

What are you talking about ? All invulnerabilites should have worked that way since day 0.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Invulnerability
It does not prevent damage from existing conditions,

The fact that you were able to heal in Mist form was an unbalance by itself, since mesmers, engi, etc…. can’t.

Want an example of over balance? Ranger shortbow nerf.

Back in the day shortbows had a 1200 range. This was nerfed because the Ranger’s longbow was deemed worthless in comparison and ANet thought the reason we didn’t use the weapon was because the range difference was superficial. So they nerfed it down to 900 to make longbow and shortbow feel more unique.

Shame because it took them another year before they changed longbow and it’s still arguably the worst weapon choice for Rangers.

You should give up asking for balance in WvW.

@OP:

So you want to take a class that is currently really strong and make it better?

Atherakhia.4086:

Want an example of over balance? Ranger shortbow nerf.

Back in the day shortbows had a 1200 range. This was nerfed because the Ranger’s longbow was deemed worthless in comparison and ANet thought the reason we didn’t use the weapon was because the range difference was superficial. So they nerfed it down to 900 to make longbow and shortbow feel more unique.

Shame because it took them another year before they changed longbow and it’s still arguably the worst weapon choice for Rangers.

More like Ranger nerfs in general, which made the already weakest class in the game even weaker.

please do remember that all professions skills balances are focused around 5 vs 5 team arena conquest mode, not WvW or PvE.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

please do remember that all professions skills balances are focused around 5 vs 5 team arena conquest mode, not WvW or PvE.

Yes, a strange balance philosophy as it only positively affects a very small minority of the player base. But from what I have read, it is true.

Thanks.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

please do remember that all professions skills balances are focused around 5 vs 5 team arena conquest mode, not WvW or PvE.

Which is incredibly foolish considering less than 10% of the playerbase actively plays that mode. If you want to balance around such a mode, despite them being the minority, you make seperate balances for all 3 modes, not just lump them all together. That’s not only a sign of foolhardiness that leads to wrecking the balance in the other modes, it’s a sign of laziness.

The meta… has… to… condition damage?

You typo’d and meant AWAY from it, right? Because you know, condition damage is unused in any useful game format, it doesn’t scale beyond pointless, staged, 1v1 fights.

(edit)
That being said, agreed that the balancing focus is way off. Considering that WvW is the much more played (in numbers) PvP-mode, shouldn’t balance be based on army fights, like in DAoC? I mean they took the main PvP mode from there, they advertised that heavily, makes sense to take the balance-focus, too.

The Pistolwhip nerf S/P thief. They increased the initiative cost by 1 in pvp. This basically destroyed the set for most thieves apart from a teleport in 1-shot build. In doing so Arenanet may not have realised but it pushed many thieves to S/D evade spam acrobatics build instead. So which is worse S/P stationary burst that can be avoided? Or S/D teleporting evade spam combined with boon steal? The answer is obvious to me and probably to many of you also.

Ele is completely OP at the moment. Too much of everything with might stacking and celestial stats.

Wait wait, so, zerg v zerg, and you died to conditions…were you squirreling off away from your zerg or something? Condis are weak as hell in large-scale WvW because they get cleansed so quickly. I’m a little confused as to how you supposedly got so many stacked on you that it killed you.

If your zerg wiped and the train took the stragglers that couldn’t run away fast enough out, then that’s not a problem with conditions.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

please do remember that all professions skills balances are focused around 5 vs 5 team arena conquest mode, not WvW or PvE.

Me either was thinking the same
Until ready up balance philosophy.. They agreed that balances should ve done to all game modes? And they said it with transparencely..
Or am i wrong? Uhh ileap bug fix?

You have elementalist completely backwards. Cantrips were exactly what was needed to be nerfed to bring the DD bunker in line, being able to use a single utility slot and have a 100% chance of getting your heal off on a class whose principle defense was in their healing was one of the most imbalanced things in the game.

Unfortunately the key there is that it WAS a class whose principal defense was in their healing. Because they for some reason couldn’t admit what was obviously the problem the devs had to systematically go through and nerf every other facet of our class’ defense, and then just left the giant mess from their experimenting once they finally admitted the actual problem and dealt with it.

Elementalist is still OP. The innate sustain is too much. The problem resurfaced again due to celestial ammy and might stacking

Markus.9084:

Xillllix.3485:

- Mist form, removed the ability to heal, cure conditions or use utilities while in mist form

And the result you have is a complete game balancing failure.
Case example from yesterday:
Zerg fight, train rushes at me, I’m at full HP…. I use Mist Form and move away (invulnerability skill).
For the next 3 seconds I am stuck in Mist form as my health is drained away by necro conditions from a pure condi zerg. I cannot heal, I cannot fight, there is nothing I can do, my invulnerability skill is now a death sentence in face of the new meta, I can only die and run all the way back.

To put it bluntly, this sucks. It’s didn’t happen before all the nerfs. The small mistake Anet made nerfing Mist form has become a complete disaster at balancing in the new condi meta. But worse than being a mistake in balancing, it makes the game LESS FUN.

What are you talking about ? All invulnerabilites should have worked that way since day 0.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Invulnerability
It does not prevent damage from existing conditions,

The fact that you were able to heal in Mist form was an unbalance by itself, since mesmers, engi, etc…. can’t.

Mesmer invuln lets you heal and do all normal actions. It does, however, cost upwards of 40% (potentially higher, depending on what you’re doing) of your active DPS, also depending on your build.

Azo.5860:

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

please do remember that all professions skills balances are focused around 5 vs 5 team arena conquest mode, not WvW or PvE.

Me either was thinking the same
Until ready up balance philosophy.. They agreed that balances should ve done to all game modes? And they said it with transparencely..
Or am i wrong? Uhh ileap bug fix?

Ready Up is a marketing ploy. Most of the stuff being said there is stuff that the people going on have prepared for (but it’s not scripted). A lot of the times, they end up defending the Warrior profession and then moving the discussion away from how strong Warriors are to what weaknesses they have, whenever the idea that a Warrior is too easy comes up. Additionally, they never address a lot of the major, or even minor issues for professions.

Major Issues that come to mind:
Ranger Sword.
Animation locking, 5 mobility skills within a mainhand weapon. Lots of animation locks. Animation locks. Did I mention not being able to… oh sorry, I was in an animation… move?

Mesmer Band-Aids (4 +1/2, iirc)
Temporal Curtain infinite swiftness in BWE. Band-aided to only APPLY Swiftness and not stack Intensity (because boolean values are hard to code, mind you).

Shatter ICD were a direct response to double shatters (a special bug that was produced when shattering at least twice at the same time causing them to “double up” and cause both shatters). Actually this wasn’t even fixed with this. It just stopped the macro-Mesmers from dealing 18k damage in a quarter second (by using 4 skills AFTER spawning 3 Illusions point blank). This bug was still reproduceable by having an enemy run away from your clones as you shattered them. They would chase indefinitely (as long as the enemy didn’t run too far from where they spawned) and eventually shatter. I managed to get a triple shatter off which almost instantly killed a guy.

Shatters. Illusions attempting to shatter will automatically destroy themselves within a few seconds if they have not yet reached their target. This is actually a big one. This does fix the aforementioned double (or more) shatter bug, but it also introduces a new “bug”. Keep in mind this isn’t actually a bug, but it does affect the QoL of a Mesmer. If you’re using Staff Clones and are playing a Shatter Mesmer, you know how important the position of your Staff Clones are. Staggered daze shatters and other small nuisances put the great Mesmers apart from the trigger happy ones. WIth this, it’s actually better to be trigger happy and use less skill because it actually hits the opponent.

Glamour. You don’t see these [often] anymore for a reason.

Fifth! Triumphant Distortion: Because constantly killing something every 3 seconds is something a Mesmer can do.

Can’t really think of anything else… brain juice dying. Power… shutting… down…