Guild Wars 2

Where’s Thief? You missed that one. Unless you didn’t notice them because of their permastealth.

Aren’t the profession changes a bit too few? Can we expect anything else added to this list?

The changes to the guardian healing skills won’t achieve anything. Healing breeze is broken/useless by design and Litany of Wrath would need to be an instant cast to be taken seriously.

Is this so that all the feedback since the stream can be complied into one place? Most of this has been discussed at length and there are transcripts from the Stream in each profession forums aswell as this one.

Elementalist changes I am fine with. Is there more though?

Is focus being looked at or do you feel that focus is fine?

We want Thief! We want Thief!

Are there still plans to revamp Ranger sword?

Thief was hardly mentioned during the Jan 17th Ready Up stream, much less any changes discussed concerning them.

oZii.2864:

Is this so that all the feedback since the stream can be complied into one place? Most of this has been discussed at length.

Elementalist changes I am fine with. Is there more though?

Is focus being looked at or do you feel that focus is fine?

Personally, I think cantrips need their CD a little lower. And Auras need to proc per 1/2 second instead of 1 second.

Other that these changes are terrible. I am not exactly sure how that will improve our sustain? We have to go extremely defensive because our damage mitigation are either on a long CD or don’t work effectively to mitigate damage or we don’t have enough on damage mitigation. I am still not sure how any of the suggestions improves elementalist sustain.

Essentially, we have to wait for months for barely any meaningful changes. Am I mad, nope, am I surprise not really.

Hello Karl,

instead of finetuning skills for engi kits like the toolkit which is essentially at a strong spot and even box of nails had its moments I would like to see you focuss on certain underused utility skills that are not kits like:

• Personal Battering Ram (aka bad flamethrower)
• Utility Goggles (aka bad med kit)
• Elixir C (aka worst condition removal of engi despite being mainly that)

For example I would like to see:

• Personal Battering Ram removing conditions in some way so that it opens up competitive gadget builds
• Utility Goggles getting a better toolbelt, longer Fury duration or a tad more immunity
• Elixir C getting cooldown cut by half but only converting 2 conditions

Karl McLain.5604:

• We expect that in the most extreme power DPS focused builds this change will account for a maximum reduction of about 10% damage.

There’s been some confusion about this.

Is this 10% less Critical Damage? (i.e. 120% critical damage down to 110%)
Or 10% less damage overall? (i.e. 5000 attack down to 4500)

Will vampiric master actually scale with healing power or will it “scale” similar to our other life siphon traits?

EDIT : Added for visibility
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Feature-Build-Balance-Preview/page/5#post3570656

Ranger sword is awesome, leave it be.

Kiriakulos.1690:

Will vampiric master actually scale with healing power or will it “scale” similar to our other life siphon traits?

It will scale just are terrible as everything else the Necro has i bet.

CptAurellian.9537:

The changes to the guardian healing skills won’t achieve anything. Healing breeze is broken/useless by design and Litany of Wrath would need to be an instant cast to be taken seriously.

Bingo!

Unfortunately even though you have a valid opinion about both skills, Anet will push those changes through anyway. The result will be the same situation we have now: No one will use healing breeze or litany of wrath.

So… That’s it?

For a couple of months of waiting and we get this?
Please communicate? Is it everything? You basically repeated the stream and then some by forgeting about thieves.

This doesn’t feel very fair and what to discuss if you post nothing new?

Karl McLain.5604:

Profession Changes

Elementalist:
Our changes for the elementalist focus on increasing sustain while maintaining the delicate balance between damage and durability. We achieved this by adding more defensive effects to a few main-hand weapon sets.

• Signet of Restoration: Removed the split on this skill so that the signet passive heal amount will be increased in PvP to match the current PvE amount.
• Armor of Earth: Reduced recharge from 90 seconds to 75 seconds.
• Water Trident: Added 3 seconds of regeneration to up to 5 allies in the radius.
• Burning Speed: This ability now evades attacks.
• Frozen Burst: This ability is now a blast finisher.

Curious as to how ANY of this will actually HELP Elementalists? If you want to improve sustain – A good place to start would be looking at our pathetic health and Armor. Why is it they are the ONLY class that is Low Health and Low Armor? Sure at the start with the power they had i could understand but since then? Damage Nerfed, Healing Nerfed, Mobility Nerfed? what exactly have we gotten as compensation for all of this? Nothing

Just like how these are NOTHING changes, they won’t help us have “sustain” because guess what? We will STILL be forced to trait/build defensive or we die in seconds. So doing that forces us to have lower damage and STILL die fast. We go Zerker? We die fast, sure might get out some ncie damage but a SINGLE mistake will mean we die.

Again, i don’t see the Sustainability you seem to be after…

“Based on your feedback, we decided to revert our proposed change to Deceptive Evasion.” – THANK YOU!!!

> I feel like Ele will need a few more buffs in the survivability department to be viable in high-end PvP.

> The nerfs to warrior are perfect IMO, it should bring them to an acceptable level in PvP (not sure about WvW).

I’ll ask the question that’s probably in everyone’s mind right now,

IS THAT ALL?

Cuz if that’s all I feel HeartStone calling me…

Thanks for hearing our cries to leave Deceptive Evasion alone.

-Every Mesmer

I feel warriors will also get permavade like thiefs if they can get every 5 secs +50% endurance refilled ….. I dont want that, because they already can have dodgeroll-crit-dmg over 1.5k …. horrible

by the way ….. WHERE ARE THE THIEFS CHANGES?
I want the promised pistolwipe changes and the "other good things, the thief will have " you talked about in the last livestream.

Karl McLain.5604:

Engineer:
We feel that the engineer is in a decent place right now, but we did take this opportunity to scale down a few outlier skills in terms of potency. Net Turret’s immobilize duration has been lowered to reduce the amount of lockdown after a Supply Crate drop, and Poison Grenade’s poison duration has been lowered to account for poison field stacking.

[sPvP]

• Engineer is indeed in a good position here and A.E.D can really need a reduced cast time, I doubt it will be enough though small steps are usually a good choice.

[PvX]

• Turrets.
  After a series of nerfs and changes to turrets (even if aimed at supply drop), will there be any bugfixes for them? It’s hard to tell what will/has become of the net turret or any other turret since you never see them in action for very valid reasons.

• Mortar.
  Name one part of it that does work as intented. There has been a lot of constructive feed back, so where are we on this matter?

[Pve]

• Scaling with ascended gear or any stats at all is not very common among our utility and elite skills. What is your opinion on the hobo sacks issue? Some people even claim to recognize toilet paper attached to them…

I understand this goes down to the core mechanic of engineering but could you at least give us a clue where you want to go from here?

Ive calmed down a bit about net turret, its somewhat justifiable but I would really love it if you were able to split the net turret in supply crate apart from the utility skill one, as the utility skill is still getting a bad nerf considering its rof is at 12 seconds.

I do however, like how tool kit has been fined tuned. After this small buff to it, I feel like every skill in that kit will now be useful, thats great balance right there After tool kit, I’m hoping flamethrower is looked at next, it needs a lot of love.

Necromancer:

We never asked for dumbfire in the first place, although we got it; for a attrition class this seemed a strange addition. Then fear got nerfed due to it being OP in conjunction with a trait we never asked for. Now the same trait is being allocated into uselessness with being only used in conjunction with DS (1).

Can’t we just get rid of dumbfire and re-examine the class? Someone there must see by now it is/was a failed experiment.

Sina.9208:

Aren’t the profession changes a bit too few? Can we expect anything else added to this list?

They probably listened to the tons of complaints-thread about just about every change and why it shouldn’t go through. :P

Karl McLain.5604:

Necromancer:
One of our goals with the past few balance updates has been to add counterplay to various skills that lacked telegraphs. With necromancer, we’re changing the way that Dhuumfire is activated – allowing players the opportunity to react. This will also allow the necromancer to carefully plan their burning application. We’ve also adjusted some values for Minion Master builds based on player feedback.

• Putrid Explosion: This ability is no longer unblockable.
• Training of the Master: Reduced the damage increase to minions from 30% to 25%.
• Dhuumfire: This trait has been changed so that it will make Life Blast inflict 3 seconds of burning with a 10 second recharge.
• Vampiric Master: Reduced the effectiveness of this trait by 10%. The healing portion of this trait will now scale with the necromancer’s healing power stat.

Just curious, do you EVER plan on giving the class ANY attrition? All i see are nerfs, nerfs and more nerfs. When will you accept that just as you were told that Dhuumfire was a TERRIBLE idea, truly shocking.

It isn’t wanted by ANYONE. Moving it to be tied to Life Blast only further nerfs it and condition build and thanks to your overzelous previous nerfs – it will STILL be taken in condition builds due to the nerfs that have been used on everything else the class has.

Power"mancers" STILL won’t use it as there other PLENTY of better options. The cool down is toop high, the duration is to low for something that is affected by:

1) Terribly slow projectile
2) Life Force Requirements
3) The fact most builds other than fully blown DS builds use DS to get off Doom, Life Transfer and Tainted Shackles and then get out

Has the fact that the Condi builds will be forced to drop attacking, applying conditions and everything to jump into DS which is rather poor as it is on most condi weapons thanks to low LF generation and try to get Dhuumfire to proc from a projectile that is VERY easily dodged….

Are the Siphon traits EVER going to be made useful? If not, PLEASE remove them and give the class something less crappy and is actually USEFUL…

That’s it? I thought the livestream was just a few of the changes that would be coming…

The changes to sigils/runes could be a huge change though.

Maybe they are waiting to see what happens with that first?

Can Litany of Wrath be re-examined? Despite being a meditation it’s still not instant, which defies the very purpose of being a meditation. If it’s going to have a cast time then it needs to not be counted as a meditation (and should give a damage bonus and heal extra to make up for the loss of meditation traits), and if it’s going to be a meditation, then it needs to not have a cast time.

There is currently no reason to take this skill over shelter in pretty much any situation, which means it’s failed its purpose in providing options. In builds where Litany would excel, like a high-damage, meditation traited build, shelter is even better because the amount of damage you avoid through the block is way more than you’ll heal trying to chase people down while litany is active, plus the damage you take while trying to cast litany.

Filosophi.7251:

Thanks for hearing our cries to leave Deceptive Evasion alone.

-Every Mesmer

Terrible decision in my opinion, if they happily nerf other things that simply dont need to be nerfed or was over nerfed why is it only certain classes get nerfs removed? Bias?…I think so.

Arkantos.7460:

I feel warriors will also get permavade like thiefs if they can get every 5 secs +50% endurance refilled …..

It’s a bit ambiguous, but Sigil types will have independent cooldowns, not individual Sigils. So two of the same on-swap Sigils will still have an 8 second ICD on them.

Otherwise we’re gonna see a whole new kind of double Fire Sigil spike meta.

Will there be any positive change towards the boon duration runes? As it stands the 2x water/monk/traveler runes already give up a very large amount of stats to get their +45% boon duration, I’m worried that pushing the bonuses towards 4/5/6 rune sets will make these runes significantly less powerful.

Can we get the noted for Thief up as well? They are currently missing.

Since you insist on adding huge telegraphs to Warrior Skills can you at least keep the cast time or the range reasonable, the nerfing of pindown to uselessness aside?
eg revert evis range/skull crack cast time

Just my word about critical damage.
Awesome idea, to unitarise the statistics (only boon duration and condition duration will remain % values) but….
Name. This topic was brought many times b4, and honestly, 1st name for “crit. dmg” was PROWESS, than for clarity most of the attribute names were changed to better reflect what they actually do (for example elementalist’s primary attribute was called inteligence, after the name change its simply attunment recharge rate).
so we had good name Prowess, changed for more accuracy and clarity to Critical Damage, which will in turn be changed to ferocity.

Please consider changing it back to Prowess.

Soooooooo… Did thief literally get forgotten then edited in after?

Josh Davis.6015:

Thief has been added to the list. Sorry about the copy/pasta fail.

Congrats. Will there be more? When is it coming?

Just a reminder to everyone asking “is that all”, the devs already said the balance patch will be the first step in correcting some issues. It would be great if they could throw a boat load of changes at once to make everyone happy but that would most likely cause more issues (and break things) than it would fix (have seen that happen in other mmo).

Of course that doesn’t mean you can’t ask for more to be included, but at least be polite about it (and constructive).

Peace…

Easy guys, this obviously isn’t all, but the stuff they can confirm is ironed out and ready to display for us to give our opinions and feedback. They mentioned in the stream they have a lot more changes but can’t share them due to being very likely to change before patch.

Thank you thank you for reconsidering deceptive evasion. I was rather baffled when shatter build were singled out as cheesy when PU phantasm builds are what I see complained about.

I’ll sound like a broken record, but I don’t want this issue to fade into the background – look at necromancers in reference to PVE. I understand most of necro balancing is about pvp but trying to play a necro in dungeons and seeing patch after patch of nerfs is frustrating. They need some serious love.

Hi there,

Regarding the changes which affects equipment and runes, i believe there should be someway to swap the attributes of the affected items in someway like you did when you removed the Magic Find since people may want to reconsider their builds.

People who have mixed Berserk + Celestial may now be feel somehow cheated because they have invested their money in a legit way (according to the current meta) to max their crit damage, and now you are planing to nerf that.

Consider this because some items affected like the superior divinity rune, ascended stuff etc… are not cheap at all and changing your gear to adapt to the new meta is…well..in some cases really expensive and it feels quite unfair to nerf stats on asceded stuff.

Also i believe thief should get some rework since the class is specially focused on Backstabs and crit damage. If you are changing the way crit works, then you should balance the profesion which closely rely on that stat.

Karl McLain.5604:

Profession Changes

Elementalist:
Our changes for the elementalist focus on increasing sustain while maintaining the delicate balance between damage and durability. We achieved this by adding more defensive effects to a few main-hand weapon sets.

• Signet of Restoration: Removed the split on this skill so that the signet passive heal amount will be increased in PvP to match the current PvE amount.
• Armor of Earth: Reduced recharge from 90 seconds to 75 seconds.
• Water Trident: Added 3 seconds of regeneration to up to 5 allies in the radius.
• Burning Speed: This ability now evades attacks.
• Frozen Burst: This ability is now a blast finisher.

“Thank You More Please?”

Keyword being “delicate” in your post, precarious is another that comes to mind. Balance doesn’t objectively belong in that sentence at all. I’m sorry to say a band aid is insufficient when attempting to staunch a critical wound…

With viper trap for ranger now being a field, does that mean it will actually hit 5 targets now?

Karl McLain.5604:

Profession Changes

Elementalist:
Our changes for the elementalist focus on increasing sustain while maintaining the delicate balance between damage and durability. We achieved this by adding more defensive effects to a few main-hand weapon sets.

• Signet of Restoration: Removed the split on this skill so that the signet passive heal amount will be increased in PvP to match the current PvE amount.
• Armor of Earth: Reduced recharge from 90 seconds to 75 seconds.
• Water Trident: Added 3 seconds of regeneration to up to 5 allies in the radius.
• Burning Speed: This ability now evades attacks.
• Frozen Burst: This ability is now a blast finisher.

NEW

• Glyph of Storms -> Sandstorm, This skill is now combo finisher Whril.

where are the pistolwipe changes, you guys promised?!
Thief with only 12 INit. Need a better manage on their inititative bar, a promised separated pistolwipe would increase that.
DO we now have to wait several weeks for these Little class changes?

Zlociutki.9165:

Karl McLain.5604:

Profession Changes

Elementalist:
Our changes for the elementalist focus on increasing sustain while maintaining the delicate balance between damage and durability. We achieved this by adding more defensive effects to a few main-hand weapon sets.

• Signet of Restoration: Removed the split on this skill so that the signet passive heal amount will be increased in PvP to match the current PvE amount.
• Armor of Earth: Reduced recharge from 90 seconds to 75 seconds.
• Water Trident: Added 3 seconds of regeneration to up to 5 allies in the radius.
• Burning Speed: This ability now evades attacks.
• Frozen Burst: This ability is now a blast finisher.

NEW

• Glyph of Storms -> Sandstorm, This skill is now combo finisher Whril.

Still doesn’t fix the whole sustain issue they are claiming to be fixing. Also I don’t know why that skill isn’t combo finisher it screams combo finisher.

Karl McLain.5604:

Hey all,

As promised, here is the balance preview for the first feature build that will launch after the first Living World season ends. When reading through these changes please keep in mind the overall scope of the update – rune/sigil and critical damage changes included. The changes listed below are similar to what was mentioned on Ready Up on January 17th.

When posting feedback, please try to abide by the following guidelines:

*Be constructive. Discuss, don’t argue.

• If you think a change may cause issues, say why and give examples. Try not to argue with others – make your point and then accept that other people may have different points of view.
  Give examples: I had 2000 toughness but still got hit by X target for roughly Y damage.
  Be concise. Our time is limited and we can’t read walls of text because it will prevent us from having the time to read as many posts as possible. Bullet points or numbered lists are very easy for us to read!
  Be specific. “I expect this change to accomplish A, but I think it will actually accomplish B”. The more specific you are, the better we are able to understand where you’re coming from, what type of content you play, and it helps us to understand the context for your feedback.
  Be objective. Keep in mind that just because you may not like something, that doesn’t make it bad. Others may have differing opinions. They may play a different type of content, or they may play a different profession, so be objective and keep in mind – we have to balance the game for EVERYONE, not just you.
  Be respectful. This goes for your fellow community members as well as for devs. Respect the ideas and opinions of others.
  Be mindful of scope. It takes design, development and testing time in order to make a new feature or revise an old one. Keep scope/work/time/resources in mind when you make your suggestions.
  Be mindful of context. Power creep is something we’re trying to avoid. Sometimes a profession may not receive as many increases as other classes. A lot of times, this is because that class is already performing very well in the current state of the game. So keep the overall context/state of the game in mind when giving feedback.

For the people replying on this forum.

con·struc·tive
adjective
1.
serving a useful purpose; tending to build up.
“constructive criticism”
synonyms: useful, helpful, productive, positive, encouraging

This means stuff like “Is this it?” is probably going to not achieve anything. On that note:

I do feel that Eles need a bit of a buff to their damage in spvp specifically. Them being in the lowest tier of armor and health really makes a huge impact on them especially given their high level of complexity to achieve decent results.

Armor of Earth probably could use an even lower cooldown. I’m sure I’m missing some important variables, but comparing them flat out to Warriors, who are in the Highest tier of armor and health, having a stance that is on a lower cd, similar duration, and gives them complete immunity to damage seems a bit odd, especially since the mixing of different utility skills makes Warriors (even if they were in the lowest tier of health and armor) much more defensive than Eles. Berserker Stance and Endure Pain in particular together do more for a Warrior, than Armor of Earth would do for an ele, regardless of what it is combined with.

Although this isn’t so much about Warriors, but using them to point out the Eles bad place atm.

Ranger sword needs to be reworked so you don’t go flying everywhere if you don’t have a target. I really want to use it in WvW but it’s too much of a dueling weapon as of now. Sword is only good for having one target at a time and focussing on it.

Will the planned change mentioned on the livestream to 1h Sword auto attack for rangers be included? Being able to move/dodge anytime during the auto-attack chain.