Guild Wars 2

well theres always this bit that was said:

As promised, here is the balance preview for the first feature build that will launch after the first Living World season ends.

wich means its not all the changes to be made j ust that they cant overhaul the whole game at once

it is better to simply release bit by bits seeing how everything fits in and adjust accordingly before changing something else. or so i think i dunno what this guys are actually doing but its too early to asume things

Tyops.5894:

I intend this to be a constructive comment.

Where is the rest of it?

Seriously. You have a newly launched balance subforum as well as 8 dedicated class subforums with laundry lists of suggestions, constructive discussions of balance issues, and extensive lists of bugs and other longstanding issues. How is this short list of minor patches even remotely acceptable? ANet I feel that you are not doing enough to address the concerns over balance expressed by your population.

As an aside to this. I understand that ANet is very concerned about power creep. One of the consequences of this is that ANet uses a “nerf first” approach to balance, hammering down the nail that sticks out to even out the balance of various classes. In general we very rarely see a set of buffs where nerfs would do.

Sadly, one of the main outcomes of that approach is that every balance patch I want to play a little less. Something is taken away almost every patch (a build, a gear set, a rune set, whatever). This is a destructive approach to patching with the hopes that players will make somethings out of the shattered remains. In the long term this isn’t good for the health of the game. You need to generate excitement for patches, not dread.

This list of patches is extremely underwhelming given the quantity and depth of the issues that need to be addressed for every class. Please stop addressing the low hanging fruit and start tackling the major issues with classes (i.e., dumbfounding trait lines, useless traits, deeply flawed class mechanics, poor weapon sets).

By the time this patch comes out you will have had almost a full quarter to address balance issues and this is just simply not enough.

All of this ^

Its clearly beyond the point of them not knowing about the problems. Anyone that has actually played the various classes (I would hope this includes developers) knows of their various bugs, glaring deficiencies, and inequities. Even if they haven’t played the classes (and various trait/gear sets) over the past year or so….the forums are full of of this information.

These issues are honestly not so complex that they can’t be fixed. It just requires actual allocation of resources to provide valid, logical, fair resolution to the issues. It requires willingness to acknowledge issues. It wouldn’t hurt to engage in honest communication with players on the forums and having the courage to say no to bad changes.

Examples:

Why is it so all important to nerf vigor in pve…when you have so many one shot mechanics and classes that have to dodge to survive (low hp classes like guards/thieves/eles)? The only answers to that I can think of are attempts to force zerk players to use survival gear, or pvp balancing that is not being split from pve. Both of those two possibilities are equally bad.

Bad trait lines like guardian: zeal. There is no way that you guys don’t know why guardians do not trait this. There is no way that you guys can think that it is okay to have unavoidable (minor) traits for symbols when at least half of our weapons don’t have a symbol. How easy would it be to reorganize that?

Over the top super classes like warriors that you can’t help but know about, but somehow can’t find a balance solution for. Bottom of the barrel classes like necromancers that are absolutely despised in any marginally challenging pve dungeon/fractal. All you would have to do to fix necros for dungeons is provide some valid melee/cleave/power options…maybe add in some mobility for the melee weapon sets for them.

Please stop targeting and nerfing things that are not broken…just to avoid fixing the things that are broken.

hi,

another kinda sigil question. since the “on-crit” sigils are getting buffed to 100% chance,

a) are they going to keep their current cooldowns? or get higher cooldowns (preferably keep their current or shorter cooldowns /wink wink nudge nudge)

b) are “on-crit” traits also going to get 100% chance procs? or are there other plans for the traits. (basicly, the on-crit sigils will render the on-crit traits totally weak, considering that the traits are in the 30% range mostly, some 10% some 60% chance)

c) how will the on crit sigils stack with the on crit traits, such as the bleed sigil plus the bleed trait for ranger?

P.S. where’s the spoiler forums? ;-)

Hello Karl and Anet’s balancing team,
Here are my comments about the elementalist’s changes.

I’m a bit worried that you’re choosing to buff already strong skills, instead of picking underpowered skills instead. This goes especially for Water Trident. If you want to give more sustain to scepter, please, look at Rock Barrier and, especially, Dust Devil. If you keep buffing our best skills forever, then you’ll put elementalists at a situation where buffing the underwhelming skills might come at the risk of making the class overpowered. This is unfair.

However, I think buffing the already strong Burning Speed is justified, for a specific reason: you’re giving a new active defense skill that does not depends on defensive stats to be good. This is something that elementalists really need, and I can’t see this kind of change making sense in any other MH dagger skill, so making burning speed even stronger is justified in this case.

For Water Trident, it is just excessive. I can understand that you want us to take the grandmaster Cleansing Water trait, but no one will take it anyways. The 5 second cooldown has ruined that trait, because it’s unpractical. You’re asking for elementalists to wait 5 seconds before using Water Trident to make use of it (after proccing on elemental attunement’s regen). Sometimes, it will simply, randomly, not proc, because it was automatically put under cooldown from the new water’s adept trait that gives regen on being critically hit, without the player not even realizing it under the heat of combat.

As it is now, Cleansing Water is almost always a worse option than the master trait Cleansing Wave, with some clumsy exceptions.

If you want to promote this trait and make players use it again, consider instead reverting the nerf and removing the cooldown or, alternatively, reduce the cooldown from 5 to 3 seconds, so that switching to water, proccing on elemental attunement, dodging on water, using heal nº5, and finally using Water Trident or Glyph of Harmony can actually make the later skills remove a condition with the grandmaster trait. This sequence usually takes around 3 or more seconds, but usually not as much kitten seconds, and elementalists don’t have the privilege of waiting doing nothing, which makes the grandmaster trait at the current 5 seconds cooldown very weak on practice.

To strengthen my argument, please, keep in mind that our condition removal was further nerfed last patch, when you made soothing disruption and cleansing wave both at master tier. This made it impossible to have both those two traits and cleansing water slotted in the same build.

As long as cleansing water trait is kept with its clumsy, hidden CD, players will shun from having several different sources of regen, due to fear of some of them not reliably proccing the effect due to the hidden CD. And because cleansing water’s main appeal is that it is meant to proc on multiple sources, no one will invest 30 points in water for the sake of a cleansing water trident every 20 seconds, when 1/4 of the effect of Evasive Arcana offers as much cleansing and more healing for half the cooldown.

About Armor of Earth, I’m glad you realize our weakest cantrip needs buffing. However, instead of making its cooldown directly compete with Mist Form, and considering it is generally weaker than Mist Form except in few situations, I would suggest to push the cooldown even lower with a slight nerf to the boons to compensate for it. So instead of 75 seconds cooldown, I suggest 60 seconds cooldown and protection and stability last for 1 second less.

Finally, and going into Guardian’s new heal, I think the casting time reduction is important, but won’t do anything by itself. The playerbase is being very vocal on this, and with reason. No one likes useless changes, because they’re usually a waste of time for both players and the devs. I understand you don’t want to make heals instant in this game. Making the casting time even lower, or/ and increasing the healing from 20% to 25% are possile solutions to further push this skill. However, another problem with this heal, is that the traitline that improves meditations is also the traitline that makes shelter increadibly stronger with the might on block grandmaster minor trait. I’d say that it’s about time to shave shelter by giving it 5 extra seconds of cooldown, and maybe the trait could be revised to only offer 3 stacks of might, instead of as many as the number of blocks. still, the medidation heal is still incredibly weak, being a weak heal even when fully traited, and that should be revealing enough to prove that a slightly lower casting time won’t be enough.

Overall, I was hoping for something new we could discuss. This thread is currently just a recap of what has already been said and discussed. I can understand you don’t want to spoil the new skills yet, but what about a preview for all the individual changes done to sigils and runes?

Rezzet.3614:

well theres always this bit that was said:

As promised, here is the balance preview for the first feature build that will launch after the first Living World season ends.

wich means its not all the changes to be made j ust that they cant overhaul the whole game at once

it is better to simply release bit by bits seeing how everything fits in and adjust accordingly before changing something else. or so i think i dunno what this guys are actually doing but its too early to asume things

That’s the thing, it takes them 3 months to boot “a bit”. With this tempo it will take em 3-4 years easy to get it right. By then we’d all have forgotten what Guild Wars 2 is.
Decisive action is needed, now and not tomorrow (figure of speech). If they prolong this there might not be anyone left to fix the game for.

Thedenofsin.7340:

Mesmer Nerf:

I know this is part of a global adjustment, but it is, without question, a nerf to Mesmers.

1) This is a double-edged sword, as it nerfs Mesmer survivability and damage output.
2) Mesmers are not meta-viable now.
3) Mesmers currently get eaten alive by thieves in tPvP and need all that dodging just to not die to thieves.

Given thieves hard counter Mesmers today, with all the vigor that Mesmers have at their disposal (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im3-jm3mCHI&t=6m10s for Helseth, one of the best Mesmers playing today, getting trained 100%-0>0% by Sizer), I think this change is not good unless it is counter-balanced by some kind of survivability buffs for Mesmers.

I too would like an answer to this question. When thieves got their vigor nerfed, it was with the following explanation:

…We have also somewhat reduced the effectiveness of high evasion thieves by reducing vigor up time and adding some cast time to the Shadow Return skill on the sword. This prevents these thieves from evading too much and too easily dealing with being disabled (stun, daze, fear, knockdown, etc.).

What is the explanation for the Mesmer considering:

• The Mesmer is not evading like a thief.
• The Mesmer is easy to punish.
• The Mesmer is not in the meta.
• The vigor change means both less damage and less defense.
• The Mesmer is not compensated in any way for this change.

@Nike

I think Viable and Competitive are the same thing.

We use Viable here as some kind of weird synonym for ‘functional’. But how I’ve seen it described is more like ‘one of the options in a meaningful choice’.

So, the stuff people have debates over? Probably Viable. The stuff you can kind of dismiss out of hand without a second thought? Not Viable, even if it can complete the content.

These might be considered bugs but there’s one or two that need fixing because

Warrior

-Can you please make it so that mace main hand’s counter blow blocks all projectiles when NOT using “missile reflection” trait. Right now without that trait it will only block 1 projectile. Sword offhand blocks all projectiles with or without this trait (this was fixed a few patches ago. It had the same issue as mace main hand).

-When a warrior has “fast hands” selected as a trait there’s an issue with your weapon swap going into cool down when you enter water when in combat. This doesn’t happen with any other class. When I enter water and I need my spear, I cannot swap for 5 seconds every single time. Puts the warrior at a disadvantage big time because he cannot swap weapons when needed.

-Longbow Burst (Combustive shot) took a big nerf a few patches ago. The radius of the field is too small even if your adrenaline is at 99.9% The radius should be max as long as you reach the third bar of adrenaline. It sucks to use combustive shot only to find out that your bar was at 99.9%.

Thief

-I feel cheesy on my thief using the trait “blind foes when using a skill that stealths you.” When I’m on my warrior I notice how powerful this blind is. Even with melandru runes and condition reductions foods the blind lasts too long. The thief can basically perma blind you. This trait needs a cool down or needs the blind duration to be cut in half.

A thief can spam cloak and dagger on you and blind you constantly. You have no way of stopping the next cloak and dagger with a stun for instance, because you’re blinded. Swinging at the air no longer clears blinds. There is no counter play to being blinded constantly like this and it’s really bad game design. Please fix this!

Please give us a one time change on all ascended gears, just like the change in magic found items.

Too much time and resource is spent to make a full set of those, thank you.

Karl McLain.5604:

Sigils:

• All sigils now have independent cooldowns, meaning you can use two on-swap sigils, or an on-swap and an on-crit sigil at the same time. You will not, however, be able to use two sigils of the same name at the same time. On-kill sigils that provide attributes, such as Sigil of Corruption, will not be able to be used simultaneously with other attribute modifying on-kill sigils.
• Two-handed weapons can now be slotted with two sigils.

Sounds great. Will you be adding in-game information reflecting the limitations on sigils of the same type? That’d be really helpful in making sigil mechanics transparent. The first place I used to look for that info was the “help” feature in-game, but adding it to the tooltip would be good if it’s not too cluttered.

It’s been beaten like a dead horse but there are 2 glaring flaws with this approach.

Ferocity: This is clearly intended to change the PvE gear meta away from berserker. It will not do that. People will continue to emphasize berserker gear. Everything will still be zerk stacked. It will just take an extra 30 seconds to kill things. Nothing short of changing fight mechanics will push people out of the zerk and stack mentality.

Vigor: Actually like this. Vigor seems slightly too available, but the method of the nerf is not good. At 50% uptime (up to maybe 70% with the correct boon duration foods), vigor is going to be very spiky. It will not force players to plan their dodges better. It in fact will take “planning” out of the equation altogether, since without actually watching the endurance meter like a hawk, people won’t actually know if they can dodge. Instead of nerfing vigor uptime, an equivalent nerf to vigor regen rate would be much, much more desirable way to push towards the same goal.

I am all for changes that avoid power creep and encourage players to play smarter. It’s better for everyone, but neither of these will accomplish that as intended. The vigor is ALMOST there, but not quite. The Ferocity change however, as noted above, is WAY off the mark. It is worth waiting until the time and resources are available to improve the fight mechanics to discourage zerk stacking , instead of just changing the meta to make content people already find monotonous and grindy to take longer.

At the very least, celestial needs its intended ferocity amount bumped up. Based on wh at we’re being told. celestial is going to lose substantially more of its crit augmentation than berserker will. For a set of gear that requires people to put in additional time, effort, and resources on a personal level, it is unacceptable that for the second time in a row, a global stat nerf unduely singles out this set. It needs to stop.

“Warrior:
Our changes for warrior focus on providing telegraphs to stronger skills and to reduce the passive benefit gained from Healing Signet.
Healing Signet: Reduced the passive heal by 8%.
We’re looking for ways to incentivize using Healing Signet’s active without increasing overall sustain. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this”

How about when activated, the warrior gains +200% healing every 1 second, based on the passive hitpoint regeneration for 10 seconds, but is cancelled early if they take damage. This should influence players into trying to avoid combat, or increase their usage of blocking when in a pinch in battle. It would also suit the theme of the healing signet providing a constant regen on health.

Karl McLain.5604:

after the first Living World season ends.

Is there a date for this or estimation when it ends? Some of us don’t care enough to follow the Living World.

If you are intent on nerfing Net Turret for the sake of Supply Crate, then please return it to the original fire rate of 10 seconds.
Is this skill even used outside of the crate?

And please fix the abundant bugs with turrets. I’d like to try to incorporate them before the game is obsolete.

Little question about stacking on-kill sigil (bloodlust …).

With the new feature, will we lose the stacks when we will equip a new weapon which hasn’t the stacking on-kill sigil ?

I have 8 fully geared professions but I mainly play necro and engineer. Given necro damage and healing is being nerfed in this patch I would like to see more damage mitigation added in return.

Currently we are the only profession without a decent skill to escape from bad situations in WvW.

For example on my other professions I have:

1: Thief: Instant teleport + Stealth
2: Warrior: 1200 movement (rush) + 600 movement skill (sav leap) + 600 movement (bulls) + Blocks + Invulnerability + Berserker stance
3: Guardian: Invulnerability + Blocks + 600 movement (leap of faith)
4: Ele: Teleport + Invulnerability
5: Mesmer: Instant teleport + Stealth + Invulnerability + Blocks
6: Engineer: Invulnerability + Blocks + Stealth + 900 movement (rocket boots)
7: Ranger: Invulnerability + Blocks + 1100 movement (swoop)

(This list is not exhaustive)

As I understand it, the necro is supposed to have low mobility because it is meant to have a sustain/attrition style game play.

However, I wouldn’t expect a sustain profession to have the:
- worst stability (none – unless you spec into a grand master trait)
- worst blocks (none)
- worst invulnerability (none)
- worst endurance regen

Death Shroud is basically a meat shield and it does nothing to stop incoming stuns, immobilises and burst – when you are being focused you can’t regen life force because you are perma stunned/knocked down due to lack of stability/blocks/invulns.

Death Shroud is not an appropriate replacement for block/invuln/stability.

Spectral Walk is also unacceptable because of the lack of immunity to stuns and immobilize. So you can start the spectral walk but then you get locked down and it’s over.

This is from a WvW “immobilize meta” perspective – sPvP may be different – in PvE I have no issues.

On the point of vigor… I get that you are trying to reduce the number of dodges in-game, but this needs to be done on a class-by-class basis rather than as a blanket-approach. Lighter classes such as the Mesmer inherently need more mobility and evasion compared to, say, a Warrior.

Countless

Dhuumfire change really isn’t well though out at all imho. The things I don’t get are as follows:

• why is it in the spite trait line in the first place
• why are you hooking it in to death shroud?
• Why isn’t it in the DS trait line in the first place? I’d prefer it if it was moved and something decent given in Spite trait line instead because…
• …why make both grandmaster traits in spite so weak with this change? I mean cast spinal shivers? honestly? a GM trait? Too funny.

As others have rightly pointed out, putting 3 second burning on to a slow moving projectile that requires you to a. have enough life force b. switch to DS c. be up close enough so that it isn’t easily dodged d. have enough time to make it even partly worthwhile by getting out of DS and following up with epidemic or whatever…just seem to make it worthless. I can’t see it being anywhere near worth it for that 3s of burning, the cooldown might as well be 20 – 30 seconds because thats how often you might get the chance to get it off with the mechanics of the game anyway.

Seriously needs more thought there. I guess this is prompted by PvP complaints? Not spending a lot of time there (and if I did I wouldn’t be playing my necro) but I don’t see any issues with it in PvE and WvW.

Question regarding DE for Mesmer

• Are you leaving DE alone for good?
  or
• Are you leaving DE alone for now because you don’t have a solution you can implement in the time frame you have to work with?

If the latter

• Can you please clearly define exactly what it is you hope to achieve with a future DE project.

It’s hard to give much feedback without knowing the P’s and Q’s of what ‘bringing things in line’ amounts to.

But, while you’re taking a look at Runes, minor clarity suggestion?

Quite a few Runes reference skill mechanics from other classes which is a bit confusing as a new/mid player experience. (ex: ‘Radiation Field’ Rune of the Rata Sum, ‘Magnetic Aura’ Rune of Earth, ‘become mist’ Rune of Vampirism).

Suggestion: Could you get a popup of the related skill’s tooltip to show up along with the Rune’s popup?

Litany of Wrath: Reduced the cast time from 1 second to 3/4 second.

Won’t matter, still won’t use it, unless it becomes instant. It will just set on the shelf

The runes and Sigil changes are a well needed breath of fresh air. Thumbs up to that. This has been real problem for my necromancer since the beginning. Considering necromancers defenses are very lacking in every category except for raw health, having sigil of energy was a must on my staff at all time. The problem was that even though sigil of earth doesn’t say it has a cool down, in truth it does. And it has disabled my sigil of energy in critical situations when I absolutely needed that extra dodge. This has been the cause of a lot of frustration and unnecessary deaths that could have been avoided. So good on you Anet! This is a superb change and I look forward to that.

On another note, a bit more negative mind you. The necromancer still has major problems with defenses and CC. And this patch doesn’t address these problems in the slightest. The Nerf to dhuumfire harms PvE condi builds when they already suffer from the 25 cap. How might we be compensated for this major loss? I’m concerned because although I’m in the camp of ‘never wanting burning in the first place’ I do understand that the damage boost was needed. The extremely slow life blast attack in a lot of cases can’t be used in PvE because you need to be able to continue to apply the bleeds.

I have a lot of concerns about this, especially considering last time you did a major change to the necromancer, the death shroud nerf, our survivability got even worse then it was. As PvE player, I was upset about that and I still feel the same way about it now as I did then even after you told me not to jump to conclusions about it. I feel there is a major problem with our defenses right now when I literally use my allies as meat shields to survive some of the harder content. And that I can’t revive allies without going down while my glassy mesmer has multiple ways to save an ally without bringing a res skill.

I’m also very conerned about the lack of synergy the necromancer’s Death shroud has with other mechanics we have. Such as Life stealing. Death shroud has a tone of problems that need to be addressed. Much of the community has become rather bitter because of this as well. When high level PvP necromancer players have to abuse a bug to get a uninterrupted stomp on someone while other professions just get to stomp without abusing a bug, this is also a problem.

So I guess I will ask this, seeing as I know these problems will not be addressed in this patch. When can we expect to see major changes to death shroud? They are sorely needed and I would like to know.

Talyn.3295:

Litany of Wrath: Reduced the cast time from 1 second to 3/4 second.

Won’t matter, still won’t use it, unless it becomes instant. It will just set on the shelf

Agreed, all Meditation skills are instant (which was the main idea behind them) yet this one is not.

Either change the cast time to instant or you will find out that people will still not bother with it as in its present state it is just not a viable alternative to Shelter.

Please check Elementalists in WvW with the Meteor Shower + Tornado combo. I’ve personally seen 9k meteor hits against 3700 armor. It’s probably the most overpowered thing in large group fights in WvW right now. Tornado’s power boosting mechanic should not be effecting abilities cast before the transformation.

And to a lesser extent, check Necros with Lich Form + Wells. Same mechanic, just not as potent.

I count December, January, and February in the amount of time you’ve had to come with substantive changes for ailing classes like the Ranger in PvE.

And all I can see is an anemic list of changes. What gives?

The change to Burning Speed makes no sense. Burning speed is the damage staple of an elementalist. As an elementalist, because your autoattacks do terrible damage, you need to spam a chain of cooldown skills. And a large portion of that damage as DD is a burning speed.

Which means timing burning speed, a gap closer and burst opener as a defensive skill makes no sense. It’s just like making Swoop evade.

Alfador.7649:

It’s been beaten like a dead horse but there are 2 glaring flaws with this approach.

Ferocity: This is clearly intended to change the PvE gear meta away from berserker. It will not do that. People will continue to emphasize berserker gear. Everything will still be zerk stacked. It will just take an extra 30 seconds to kill things. Nothing short of changing fight mechanics will push people out of the zerk and stack mentality.

It’s goal isn’t really to shift PvE away from zerker meta, at least not by itself. The main reason to do it this way is to normalize the way that Crit damage works as a trait with every other trait in the game, so that scaling can be more effective, and so that there can be more options in how crit damage is put on things. Additionally choosing to reduce the maximum value by around10% is a separate thing, and something that has to happen regardless of what the content looks like, because crit damage stacking is currently too good period. So no, with the current content there won’t be any change to meta as a result of this, but this change has to happen in advance of whatever content changes they may want to make, so that the content can be balanced around more sane numbers.

It does what it’s supposed to do, it’s just not the whole solution.

Vigor: Actually like this. Vigor seems slightly too available, but the method of the nerf is not good. At 50% uptime (up to maybe 70% with the correct boon duration foods), vigor is going to be very spiky. It will not force players to plan their dodges better. It in fact will take “planning” out of the equation altogether, since without actually watching the endurance meter like a hawk, people won’t actually know if they can dodge. Instead of nerfing vigor uptime, an equivalent nerf to vigor regen rate would be much, much more desirable way to push towards the same goal.

You can still maintain at or near100% vigor uptime, depending on class, even after these changes. You just can’t do it with a single 5 point minor trait. You get 50% uptime from the on-crit trait alone, but you can still get vigor from other sources.

It’s more that you now have to build for it if you want 100% uptime. That’s a good thing.

Also, I will say that the idea that people don’t already watch their dodge meter in high level play isn’t very representative of how the game is played, and is certainly no different than it is with cheap 100% vigor uptime; you will still run out of dodges if you’re using them too quickly, even with vigor. Reducing vigor only reduces the number of dodges you get to take over a long enough time horizon, and has no other significant gameplay effect, other than, potentially, changes to builds.

At the very least, celestial needs its intended ferocity amount bumped up.

This is happening: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Celestial-Ferocity-nerf/3567702

Zenith.7301:

I count December, January, and February in the amount of time you’ve had to come with substantive changes for ailing classes like the Ranger in PvE.

And all I can see is an anemic list of changes. What gives?

The change to Burning Speed makes no sense. Burning speed is the damage staple of an elementalist. As an elementalist, because your autoattacks do terrible damage, you need to spam a chain of cooldown skills. And a large portion of that damage as DD is a burning speed.

Which means timing burning speed, a gap closer and burst opener as a defensive skill makes no sense. It’s just like making Swoop evade.

Making Burning Speed evade means you can’t be dazed or stunned or immobilized when using it to close a gap. It’s not something you use for the evade, it’s something that’s made much stronger by being immune to being shut down on response.

Karl McLain.5604:

You will not, however, be able to use two sigils of the same name at the same time.

Interesting. I didn’t see that in the reddit cliff notes. Good to know.

Karl McLain.5604:

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.

I sorta see the reasoning, but it doesn’t seem like a good idea. Taking a Grandmaster trait and making it apply to a single skill that’s out of the way? Very odd move. It doesn’t seem like that trait should be where it is if this change goes through.

Karl McLain.5604:

• Burning Speed: This ability now evades attacks.

Interesting change. I’m not really sure this is going to accomplish much. The skill is generally used for damage not mobility so it helps prevent the skill from being disrupted.

Honestly, the sigil changes excited me more than the ele changes.

Karl McLain.5604:

poison field stacking

Can’t say I’ve heard mention of this in wvw or pve. I’m a little concerned how fields in general are setup. I don’t think any profession should have to worry about stacking tons of field effects to be effective. If poison field stacking is a problem, they maybe that’s a better location to make changes and not the base skills.

Karl McLain.5604:

• Litany of Wrath: Reduced the cast time from 1 second to 3/4 second.

Awhile ago, a couple meditations had cast times. Those cast times have long since been removed. I don’t understand why the logic behind doing that doesn’t also apply to Litany.

Bear on the job.6273:

Please check Elementalists in WvW with the Meteor Shower + Tornado combo. I’ve personally seen 9k meteor hits against 3700 armor. It’s probably the most overpowered thing in large group fights in WvW right now. Tornado’s power boosting mechanic should not be effecting abilities cast before the transformation.

And to a lesser extent, check Necros with Lich Form + Wells. Same mechanic, just not as potent.

As a note, Meteor Shower is on a 20 (best case) second cooldown. Tornado is 150s. If you’re dying to a 5 second cast 6 second long skill (MS is 3.5s Tornado is ~1, MS lasts 7) or even taking any real damage, you should really rethink how you’re using dodge rolls. While the Elementalist takes 10-12k in Retaliation damage no less…

The fact that Elementalists have any other options over the honestly terribly boring healboonball (GWEN) meta should be applauded.

Moving to an actual suggestion, I’d like to see boon removal bumped across the board. Right now, there’s no way to manage your opponents boons, and given how easy it is to get them, and the exponential nature of their stacking in larger and larger groups.

Boon Removal Changes:

• Mesmer – Null Field: remove 1 boon on enter/exit field (1s cooldown) and raise the on-pulse to 3 boons.
• Elementalist – Unsteady Ground: If not knocked down -> Remove 3 boons on passing across (This makes Unsteady Ground useful in an opening, where you might remove stability on your enemy if they run in without thinking)
• Ranger – Trap Potency (GM Skirmishing Trait): Remove a specific boon per trap:
  • Spike Trap – Removes Swiftness and vigor
  • Vipers Nest – Removes Regeneration and Protection
  • Frost Trap – Removes Retaliation and Aegis (Becomes Unblockable)
  • Flame Trap – Removes 5 stacks of might and Fury
  • If a Elite trap were ever created this should remove Stability and 3 other boons.
• Thief – Master Trapper could have similar effects given to it. I don’t know the skills well enough to suggest specific boons

What this does, is create more roles and a counter meta to the boonball that really enforces a larger number in zergs/groups across the game.

I’ll also flesh this out into its own suggestion shortly.

Karl McLain.5604:

Profession Changes
[stuff…]

Sigils:
• All sigils now have independent cooldowns, meaning you can use two on-swap sigils, or an on-swap and an on-crit sigil at the same time. You will not, however, be able to use two sigils of the same name at the same time. On-kill sigils that provide attributes, such as Sigil of Corruption, will not be able to be used simultaneously with other attribute modifying on-kill sigils.
• Two-handed weapons can now be slotted with two sigils.
• Sigils will receive a general balance pass to bring them more in line with each other.

[more stuff and another post]

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.

[more stuff…]

First off I will let everyone know that slant that I am taking from this is from an Elementalist (I play other classes, but I keep coming back just like the carpal tunnel…)

• I really like the fact that 2 handed weapons can hold 2 sigils because I always felt that I took a fairly big hit in only having 2 sigils available (in PvE and WvW I would normally put my on kill sigil on trident and just kill fish for a while)

• I cannot help but think that there are a lot more Elementalist changes in the works by looking at the description of what you wanted to accomplish and the changes made (Some other professional descriptions imply the same thing).

1) Could you tell us if there are other changes along these lines, or are the other changes related to something else entirely?

2) Also I was under the impression that there would be a class balance CDI (from the 12/20 Twitch presentation). Do you know whether there will be a CDI in time for this update, or will it be for a later update?

Thank you for posting the information, I appreciate you keeping the dialogue open.

edited because I hit post reply instead of preview post…

So the poison skills were OP… too bad I never knew…

Karl McLain.5604:

As far as the ‘Offhand Empty’ skills go, these abilities were designed for new characters that have yet to gain an off-hand weapon and I wouldn’t count on these sets being changed anytime soon. Thanks for the suggestion though!

As an alternative, consider~

You could add new off hand weapons choices (mace for example) that only fill the #4 and #5 slot and leave the #3 slot as the off hand skill available now.

Aveneo.2068:

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

yea, even in the stream they did not even touch the thief, probably afraid of the kittenstorm that fallow

they already have permastealth, godmode, oneshoot kill… whats next? admin powers?

Sooooo, necros really are not something Anet cares about. Ok, as this is the only class I play, I now really am seeing that Anet does not want me to support them with gem purchases. Thanks. Saved me some money.

Vox Hollow.2736:

@Nike

I think Viable and Competitive are the same thing.

We use Viable here as some kind of weird synonym for ‘functional’. But how I’ve seen it described is more like ‘one of the options in a meaningful choice’.

So, the stuff people have debates over? Probably Viable. The stuff you can kind of dismiss out of hand without a second thought? Not Viable, even if it can complete the content.

The thing is ‘viable’ gets thrown around like its some gold standard, when a lot of people log in and run around in set ups that PvPs would describe as “not even viable”… and yet they’re having fun and are generally satisfied customers. That’s alive. That’s functional. Its just not competitive. It does a disservice to how much of the game works adequately.

Using a better word for the standard being sought – for professions to have more variety in their competitive builds, to have more competitive skills and competitive traits helps better frame the discussion. It better evokes the existence of a spectrum of performance levels rather than trying to create binary states of ALIVE/DEAD.

Binary states do a very poor job of telling you how big or small an adjustment needs to be to move something into the desired performance range.

spiritus.7983:

Aveneo.2068:

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

yea, even in the stream they did not even touch the thief, probably afraid of the kittenstorm that fallow

they already have permastealth, godmode, oneshoot kill… whats next? admin powers?

Wat.

My Feedback

Runes

The revamping of runes makes me most exicited about this balance patch and will probably have the most effect on the overall meta. Hopefully, it will create a lot more builds then it destroys. Looking forward to it.

Sigils

Looking forward to 2-h weapons having 2 sigils and being able to combine more sigils with each another is another great, positive change. Looking forward to it.

One note of caution, when you balance the sigils, remember if you nerf any its a nerf for any player currently with 2 1-h weapons. They already use 2 sigils, so any decreasing of sigils power equals nerf for them.

Crit Dam %

Hate it. Uncalled for. Don’t know why your doing it. You deserve the negative reaction you have got/will get in the future. You don’t care about the amount of time/effort your players put in to getting there gear in PvE/WvW.

All Classes Balancing

I am indifferent, those changes on there own will make little to no difference to the current meta. By and large pointless…

Alfador.7649:

Ferocity: This is clearly intended to change the PvE gear meta away from berserker. It will not do that. People will continue to emphasize berserker gear. Everything will still be zerk stacked. It will just take an extra 30 seconds to kill things. Nothing short of changing fight mechanics will push people out of the zerk and stack mentality.

They specifically said, in the live stream, that normalizing critical damage with ferocity was a necessary first step. To me this means that more changes will follow it.

“We’ve got quite a few more things coming, but are unable to talk about them at this time. Soon.”
"

Are any of these “unable to talk about things” affecting the skill/weapon balance in a major way?

maciora.9542:

• Elixir X should have tornado only and increased time to 20s
• Healing elixir grants protection not randomly.

The common theme of the elixir abilities is their random effect. Just saying.

Warrior
Healing signet 8% nerf paired with power build losing more than 10% (ferocity didn t consider buffs runes etc)

is a BUFF not a nerf.

Elementalist:
RTL <==== everybody knows it was a great mistake, you can t play DD if you have no reliable gap closer and burning speed won t help.

Mesmer:
In order to disincentivate PU build you are nerfing EVERY build….same mistake already done to elementalist too many times….
Put a CD on deceptive evasion if you need but touching vigor will only damage minor builds…..

CRITICAL DAMAGE:
ITs the worse mistake ever done….nobody wants it,
CELESTIAL AND WUPWUP will became trash and you will just wipe months and thousands gold from random players since for them getting any other set of a lower tier will be way more effective.

If you need to go on with this at least do a conversion 1:1 with zojjia, valkyrie and wupwup that is already underpowered.
Adding other stats is not a viable option since would change the purpose of the armor (see low power value)

Karl McLain.5604:

Profession Changes

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.

• Dhuumfire: This trait has been changed so that it will make Life Blast inflict 3 seconds of burning with a 10 second recharge.

Dhuumfire was a grandmaster trait in power tree.
if you specced into it , it meant you don’t have that much condition damage.
it was more like the gravy on the dish… if you managed to crit on your well you got some extra condition ticking.
also, this condition ticking had unexpected synergy with fear/terror.
so fear/terror got nerfed.

with the next patch, you take a grandmaster trait and make it practically useless.
as it will have a chance to proc only on deathshroud skill 1. on an internal CD. ( 10 sec)

so, my opinion on this is
a: revert back fear nerf.
b: adjust Dhuumfire to be master trait and give some useful grandmaster trait instead.

c: how about making foot in grave a useful grandmaster talent and increase to stability duration to at least 5 seconds? or at least combine the trait with shrouded removal?

frans.8092:

Alfador.7649:

Ferocity: This is clearly intended to change the PvE gear meta away from berserker. It will not do that. People will continue to emphasize berserker gear. Everything will still be zerk stacked. It will just take an extra 30 seconds to kill things. Nothing short of changing fight mechanics will push people out of the zerk and stack mentality.

They specifically said, in the live stream, that normalizing critical damage with ferocity was a necessary first step. To me this means that more changes will follow it.

So we should have “faith”?
what s the purpose of this thread then?

This first step is wrong, totally and gamebreaking….will badly ruin www for many reasons.
Will also punish balanced sets

Will we see any chance to change stats (one time) on ascended armor? Because this change is rather drastic and full ascended set (weapons + armor + trinkets) can go up to 300g costs…

Also why is condi armor is not touched? Condis meta is ruining this game atm, why nerf direct dmg builds?

honestly, these few changes will change nothing.

• PvE Zerker cornerstacking need zerk warrior guardian remains the same
• Condi meta remains the same
• conditions are still beyond useless in pve
• existing bugs remain AGAIN (I doesn’t even take in account how much new bugs will be added with your ’adjustments)

Maybe its me, but gw2 balance feels more and more out of control. And it gets even worser…

i am curious why this balance adjustment has to wait until end of living world season?

do those changes affect the story in some kind of way i do not understand?
i’m sure there is a reason to wait for it, but as i cannot figure it out i wanted to ask what is it?

Karl McLain.5604:

Profession Changes

Elementalist: snip

Engineer: snip

Guardian: snip

Mesmer: snip

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.

Ranger:
We’re going to be fixing a bug with Spirit of Nature that caused it to have an incorrect healing power value. We’re also looking at adding combo fields to existing abilities to allow for more play through different combo finishers.

• Spirit of Nature: Reduced the healing per second while summoned from 480 to 320.
• Viper’s Nest: This ability is now a poison combo field.
• (Added) Keen Edge: This trait is now classified as a Survival Skill.

Thief: snip

Warrior:
Our changes for warrior focus on providing telegraphs to stronger skills and to reduce the passive benefit gained from Healing Signet.

• Healing Signet: Reduced the passive heal by 8%.
  • We’re looking for ways to incentivize using Healing Signet’s active without increasing overall sustain. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
• Pin Down: Added a telegraph animation to the skill. Increased the cast time from 1/4 second to 3/4 second.

If these are the entirety of the changes to go in the Feature patch then simply put, these balance changes should be decoupled entirely from the Feature Patch. The Engineer and Elementalist changes in particular are hardly meta-changing in any strong aspect – roll them into a Living Story release.

Three particular changes can be meta-influencing, and they are the Dhuumfire changes, Warrior 8% Healing Signet HPS nerf, and the Spirit of Nature bugfix.

• These are meta shifting changes ; yet you have chosen to incorporate them into a patch months away despite a stultifying PVP community and into a huge balance shakeup of rebalancing nearly every single Rune and Sigil.
• In case the above sentence did not make it clear as to why this is a bad idea, let me be more clear: Your profession changes will have their effects lost in the Rune/Sigil shakeup. Without a clear indication of what your changes have wrought, you make it harder on yourself and harder on your players to judge the state of the game.

In short, decouple balance and bugfix changes from Feature patches.

Aetherblade/Dhuumfire was your first mistake; Post PAX was your next one. 3 in a row may well be a strike out to deal the death knell to a stultified PVP community.

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.

• Dhuumfire: This trait has been changed so that it will make Life Blast inflict 3 seconds of burning with a 10 second recharge.

With these changes to Dhuumfire, the trait seems more in line with other already existing Life Burst traits in the Adept tier. At best it could be a Master trait. Furthermore, it is lackluster in the limited real estate of Grandmaster traits for the Necromancer, as it seemed so-so to invest into it as it was. I suggest if you’re going to make good on this change, then move it down the trait line to maybe Master and give a buff to Spiteful Spirit as a replacement Grandmaster trait

Speaking from a largely PvE perspective, I have never had the impulse to “carefully plan” when to apply a fire condition in this game. From what I have heard about the current meta in PvP and WvW, neither would those players with the effectiveness of Soldier’s Runes and Pure of Voice, as conditions are already trivialized to such a degree. Mindful use of conditions requires reasonable opportunity of application. In PvE it is rife with opportunity, while in PvP and WvW there seems to be less then reasonable opportunity.

All this change ends up being is an indirect nerf to Necromancer dps through the narrowing of criteria for additional conditions to be applied to targets for one half of the game and veiled as an attempt to increase counterplay in another half.

May I also suggest some Necromancer improvements…

The Death Magic line is pigeonholed as the minion master line with the Reanimator and Protection of the Horde minor traits. The attractiveness of this line is diminished by it being focused on having the player be a minion master for the line to benefit him/her. I think it would greatly enhance the Death Magic line to move those minor traits to the majors of their tier, as it would allow players the freedom to choose to be a minion master or perhaps maybe more of a death knight archetype through the Death Magic trait line.

tl;dr

Changes to Dhuumfire are significant enough that it should be moved to Master tier, as it looks like a beefed up Adept tier Life Blast trait.

We should get Death Knights with 20 points in Bone Armor.

Cynz.9437:

Will we see any chance to change stats (one time) on ascended armor? Because this change is rather drastic and full ascended set (weapons + armor + trinkets) can go up to 300g costs…

Also why is condi armor is not touched? Condis meta is ruining this game atm, why nerf direct dmg builds?

I think condition armor was not touched since it was to balance PvE.

multiple condition builds acting together step on each others toes (and some classes can’t help but overwrite powerful conditions with very weak ones (i.e. gaurdians setting things on fire with 0 condition damage. They have no choice, but it can still overwrite an elementalists 300 – 1200 condition damage fire).

multiple DD builds stack additively. If I do 2000 DPS and you do 2000 DPS than minus then we do 4000 DPS when attacking the same target. So 5 people all DPS do 5x damage. If they brought a condition damage person it would probably hurt since most mobs would die too quickly, but bringing 2 would really tank their DPS.

Condition Damage is a problem in PvP and WvW because of the HP disparity in Guild Wars 2 between players and monsters. Champion monsters will happily smile away with 25 stacks of bleed, poison and fire. If you put that on a normal person they would melt in seconds (not to mention a low HP class).

Im really surprised No mention about the sword *1 attack for ranger and the lacklustre damage of longbow for ranger