Guild Wars 2

This Post will just include my opinion on balance changes that can be considered in future patches. I apologize for grammar mistakes as English isn’t my first language. Most of what I will write below is commonly known in the PvP community, as I have been a part of recently (also known as “Paw Paw”) , and are well agreed upon. However, I’ll add my own reasoning to it.

I’ll only discuss the 3 Pillars of the NA meta since I feel these balance issues should be urgently addressed before any other major change: Celestial D/D ele, Terror Necro, and Celestial Engi.

Celestial D/D ele is no joke, its balance issues is just mathematical. The way the class can stack might so readily and easily makes the Stats of the class higher than any other class in game, adding to that the sustain it offers via seemingly infinite protection upkeep and health regen and has a decent condi clear for itself and its allies. One can argue it is because of how Sigil of battle gives 3 might stacks per swap, the amount of blasts the class has, and the runes that makes it an easier job to maintain those stacks.
In my opinion Classes that has boon strips such as mesmer/thief can be the counter play to the might stacking as they will strip/steal the might of the ele, but there are other things to take account for, The protection upkeep, the insane health regen it gets with celestial amulet, its own inert health regen, and still manages to deal substantial amount of burns/damage in Fire atunement. This spec requires serious attention and an immediate nerf in the future patch notes (I would love if there was a small patch update just to nerf this lol)

• My suggestion* is to shave the celestial amulet stats and reduce the amount of might stacking sigil of battle can give per swap while having a little shave on the amount of base health regen the class has.
  I will end this section with saying that there is NO situation that a d/d ele does not belong. It can 1v1 and win against most if not all specs, 2v2, 3v3, hold 2v1s for a good amount of time and manage to peel off a fight if needed.

My other class that I will touch on is Terror Necro. Unlike celestial d/d ele, the power of this class does not come from the amulet/sigils. The core of its “power” is from the passive fears that has a very challenging counter play. For a class to have 4 fears in total ( 2 passive fears from nightmare proc and reaper’s protection ) and with the introduction of the new trait Dark path having 8 boon strips every 40seconds and 3 every 15 seconds if traited is just absurd in my opinion.
*My suggestion * is to completley remove nightmare rune active as it has no counter play. Add more tell to the animations of certain necromancer skills (Death shroud 2 has the same animation of a staff auto attack, and Corrupt boon has an extremely hard tell on its active). Finally, slightly nerf the amount Fear damage does…the fact a necro can 100-0 a medium armor class is just too much. Before criticizing me about the animations, these tells are not ment for 1v1s but more for 2v2 or bigger scenarios in which important skills that can potentially turn the whole fight around should be somewhat identified (take earth shaker for an example)

Finally, Celestial Rifle Engi. There has been a lot of complaints about this built. The benefit of the build comes from celestial amulet and the insane amount of CC it offers. I won’t go too deep on the class as its almost balanced. All what needs to be done is have more tell on the rifle knockback, add more of a window on IP as 7 second burn on a 10 second cooldown is just absurd, and possibly increase the cooldown of toolkit block.

A lot of the reason that counter classes to the top 3 are not played in high level play, in NA meta at least, is because they get hard countered by the way current celestial classes play the games (3 point small skirmishes). What is frustrating about the balance changes is it is indeed obvious that these 3 classes have been rampaging in the past 2-3 months without any indication of a nerf. I really hope we don’t have to wait for another 6 months for a good balance change. (Also don’t forget to nerf balthazar runes and mercy runes lols)

Yeah, I agree on most of this… I main an ele and I even think they need a nerf. The fact that I can stop playing a game for 3 months and come back and still own everything I come in contact with, may be the exception is Engi, is somewhat evident at how crazy ele’s really are. Given the last time ele’s where seriously nerfed they pretty much where the laughing stock of pvp, which imo are the thieves of spvp now.

The problem with Anet nerf, is just that… they nerf the &*$% out of the class that only needs miniscule changes. You remove 1 blast, maybe 2 and you have fixed the ele more or less imo. Changing the celestial amulet is just going to change it back to what it was, and no one used the celestial amulet in any serious build as far as I know back when the stats were worse.

Now with the Engi, maybe it’s just cause I’m a ele, but Engi’s are extremely powerful. The fact that you can just throw any build together and play pretty much play pretty effectively is just amazing. Fix turrets, or put a CD on kit swaps and you’ll have yourself a balanced class.

With the terrormancer I think you summed it up pretty well… just fix the amount of fears and it’ll be fine. The fact that Necro’s can just run in and fear you to death is just stupid… The fear mechanic doesn’t even allow the person the Necro is attacking to do anything, I mean you can pop stability and clear conditions, but you can’t really clear all of the fear + all the other condi’s they are putting on you effectively to where you can survive a good amount of time. Even if you can survive, they’ll out live you most of the time anyway.

Anyway, that’s my two cents really if you don’t like my opinions, I don’t care

What I thought was going to be a troll/rant was actually an intelligently put together comment on 3 classes that seem to cause people grief.

Elementalist against Engineers is a 60-40 match up if not more towards an elementalist to win that 1vs1. Regardless of the outcome if they are both playing celestial amulet meta builds, d/d celestial ele will outlast the engineer in a very long 1vs1 and win that 1vs1. Engineer has a fair chance to win that 1vs1 if they time their grenades and land the knockbacks. Regardless of the outcome, its a very long 1vs1 that is usually won by the ele in high levels of play.

It certianly is the on-swap sigils combined with crazy boon duration (and even more might duration on top of that) that make D/D c-ele so powerful. Maybe not even a nerf to the stacks granted by the sigil - but increase the CD to 15 or even 20s so that it can still grant stacks to most classes who try to swap regulary but doesn’t add permanent 300+ power and contidion damage to Eles or Kit Engis who are pretty much guaranteed to proc the sigil every cooldown.

I think Ranger LB #4 (point blank shot) should have it’s animation changed to a big visible “L2P” above your enemy’s character head

Celestial Amulet is fine; no need to change it. The only user of it which is so pervasive in high level PvP is d/d elementalist, which means the profession is what’s broken, not the amulet.

Sigil of Battle duration should be between 12 and 15 seconds. This makes it about equal to Sigil of Force for most users, but still makes it situationally better for builds with boon duration or who weapon swap often.

On top of that, elementalist needs some changes to d/d. Reducing the amount of burning it can put out in the 0/0/2/6/6 spec would go a long way toward keeping its 1v1 potential in check. The duration can be re-added through traits in a more offensive trait line (like fire). Consider a shave to some of the healing skills as well.

Engineer Incendiary Powder needs to be dramatically toned down. In conjunction, buff abilities which can be avoided and require more skill to use so that the profession can still be effective, but with less near-guaranteed damage.

Just remove Rune of the Nightmare from PvP until it can be addressed properly. Reaper’s Protection (fear nearby enemies when disabled) needs its fear duration reduced in the short-term. That way it still works as a defense to break CC chains, but the necro doesn’t have enough time to use as offense as well. Long term it should be completely reworked.

This is sPvP-only, right? Because Celestial is anything but a strong geartype in plenty other things.

Your necro changes would put the class in bottom tier pvp, and show your lack of knowledge on the class. The passive fear proc from nightmare runes could definitely be removed, but Reaper’s Protection has counterplay. You as a player should know it has a 60 second cooldown and activates on cc. That means the only time you as a player might now be prepared to stun break the 3 second fear is when you first attack the necro. The rest of the time you should know what will happen and have stability or stunbreak ready.

Furthermore, what is currently keeping necros in the meta is not those fear procs. It is the boon corruption and ability to really hurt eles and guardians. You couldn’t even name the trait right, the trait is called Path of Corruption and corrupts 2 boons on hitting dark path. That certainly isn’t any stronger than other grandmasters, and requires you to hit dark path, which can be easily dodged or even outrun at range. I don’t know how you think 2 boons corrupted will turn an entire fight. As far as corrupt boon goes, sure it could use a more visible animation, but necros aren’t that strong of a class outside of this one build your asking to nerf.

Last point on necros, reducing fear damage is absurd. You want to remove half of the fears than nerf the damage? The damage that has already been nerfed by 17%? You would be effectively removing half of the theoretical maximum damage from necro fears already and then reducing it even more.

As far as eles and engis go, the problem is clearly with the incredible amount of might duration people can attain. With 15 might stacks, your power and condition damage are similar to that of a main stat on a rabid or zerker amulet on celestial. That is the problem, not the regen, not the protection, and not the fury. It is the fact that you can effectively get the main stats of a full zerker and full condition build with might.

Please no more reduction of terror damage, it’s the only unique thing necros still have. Also balance shouldn’t just be done for the top 100 players, there’s us normal people too and we are actually the majority.

Well let’s not exaggerate with the necro corrupt boon is not 8 strips it’s 5, poc is 2 not 3. Terror necro had its bleeds and terror damage nerfed when they got dhuumfire, dhuumfire was reworked but the bleeds and terror were never readjusted. Reapers protections is fine and you can predict it despite what people who are unfamiliar with the trait seem to think.

@phoenix this game has to be balanced from the top down, if you balanced it any other way the top level play would become absolutely ridiculous, kitten like 5 of one class, etc.