Guild Wars 2

The last patch nerfed Quickness, which in itself is fine.
Before, it used to reduce (almost) all animation times by 50%, now by 33%.(math is complicated, so don’t bother asking, do the math yourselves)
The fact, shortbow on ranger does not get the full effect of quickness is not the issue here, so ignore the “almost” in the previous statement, it was just for the sake of completeness.

The nerf to quickness was then rebalanced by slightly increasing the values of some quickness skills and making them overall more useful.

The three(four) skills in question are:
Note, quickness is not listed as an effect as it should be obvious.

Haste(Thief): Stunbreak, reduces endurance to 0, disables endurance regeneration, 5 sec duration, 60 sec cd
Frenzy(Warrior): Stunbreak, increases incoming damage, 5 sec duration, 60 sec cd
Quickening Zephyr(Ranger): Stunbreak, immune to healing, 5 sec duration, 60 sec cd
Elixir U(Engineer): Stunbreak, Haste OR Frenzy, 5 sec duration, 60 sec cd

text = change.

So basically, these skills pretty much do the same and always did, except, they don’t. They are on different professions, yet ANet applied the very same flat change to all of them, regardless of profession. Simply 1 sec more duration.

The question has to be: Does this even make sense?

Thief: Short bursts, then escaping and re-evaluating the situation, waiting for cooldowns, increasing the effectiveness of one overall burst is the right thing to do. So 1 sec more is fine.

Warrior: Facetank anything and then suddenly burst it down in one huge spike. Warrior was always do or die, so adding 1 more second to the drawback does no harm. Fine.

Engineer: Burst, burst, burst! same as above.

Ranger: Sustained damage? Wait… WHAT? Survival? But we just increased the time, you can not be healed! Deal with it, maybe?
Ranger is no burst class, so why has the quickness nerf been offset with exactly the same changes applied to the 3 big bad bursters? Even worse, it’s the ability with the negative sideeffect affected the MOST by the increased duration. The only saving grace is the added stun breaker, which makes the current state a slight bit short of an outright NERF to the ability.

What I still don’t get is why it has to be this way.
Why do they all need the same baseline duration, cooldown and design? Ranger was never meant to do big bursts. They slowly take down their prey with small bursts and constant pressure. So why did it have the same baseline stats as these other skills again?
Probably because of elixir U previously having a chance to grant Zephyr.
With that off the table, we are free to try something new, right?

The main problem with QZ in its current state is the fact, QZ poses the biggest risk of all the quickness skills. 4 seconds might still have been a time, you can overlook and gauge, whether you will need a heal or not. Whether there might be a big heal from an ally incoming or not. 5 seconds seems ridiculously long.

My proposed change:
Quickening Zephyr:
-Quickness
-Immune to heals
-4 seconds duration
-breaks stuns
-40 seconds cooldown

Alternatively 45 or 50 seconds cooldown… But 40 should be about right.
With this, the recently added stun breaker gets some increased value. Note, however, as a stun breaker, it’s still vastly outmatched by the other quickness skills, as generally, when you need a stun breaker, you probably also need a heal, because spike damage will be thrown at you left and right. Some may argue, haste is a worse stun breaker, cause after breaking stun, you’d want to dodge, but thief got plenty of ways to get out even without dodges, as ranger got plenty of ways to get out of the line of fire even without heals, to be fair, unless you play, like, axe/axe longbow beastmaster build or something similarly ridiculous. The difference is, however, thief can engage again just fine, using the quickness to attack, while ranger would have to run off and wait for a heal.

The change itself will allow the ranger to use short bursts more frequently, which fits the theme of small attacks and constant pressure.

TL;DR:
Instead of offsetting the nerf on quickness with a duration increase on QZ, it would be a better idea to lower the cooldown instead, as this would be more in line with the ranger theme of constant pressure.

Sounds reasonable. Not really asking for too much, and not too little.

I like 45 seconds, same cooldown as Lightning Reflexes. If it was 40, QZ would have an advantage over LR as a stun breaker (ignoring all other factors).

i think the cooldowns could be adjusted for all the professions personally, but i agree with your idea for the ranger as well.

Or alternatively increase normal rapid fire skill speed by 25%. Proc the QZ = 75% attack speed for 5 seconds I can live with. It lessens the nerf on Rangers while keeping a much-needed nerf on other classes (i.e. Warriors, Engineers, Mesmers, Thieves).

Very similar to my suggestion,

Mine was I believe 4s, 40 cooldown, stunbreak, 50% heal.

but even without no healing, it would be a step in the right direction. I don’t use QZ for spike so much as to help apply lots of Bleeding when in the right position with my Ranger so this would work fine.

How about change quickness for the classes that it needed to be changed on?
Most of us saw the video where the devs laughed when longbow damage came up in that recent Q&A and said it needed some love.
Due to the fact we are all stuck having no choice but to use the very broken and somewhat useless pet the change to quickness for any ranger using a ranged weapon is a major nerf.
Other classes have core abilities that are awesome and work great like warriors adrenaline stacked major attack or a thief with sneaky stealth etc etc but the rangers defining and core abilitiy is the kittenty pet that dies within seconds of any encounter in WvW or any aoe attacks everywhere else.
If you want to balance our abilities equally with all the other classes then buff our damage, give us some traits and signets and spirits that are actually usefull to a group and us.
And for gods sake give us the CHOICE to use a pet or have a build that doesnt.

bigsal.7061:

How about change quickness for the classes that it needed to be changed on?
Most of us saw the video where the devs laughed when longbow damage came up in that recent Q&A and said it needed some love.
Due to the fact we are all stuck having no choice but to use the very broken and somewhat useless pet the change to quickness for any ranger using a ranged weapon is a major nerf.
Other classes have core abilities that are awesome and work great like warriors adrenaline stacked major attack or a thief with sneaky stealth etc etc but the rangers defining and core abilitiy is the kittenty pet that dies within seconds of any encounter in WvW or any aoe attacks everywhere else.
If you want to balance our abilities equally with all the other classes then buff our damage, give us some traits and signets and spirits that are actually usefull to a group and us.
And for gods sake give us the CHOICE to use a pet or have a build that doesnt.

There is no changing boons for specific classes only.
That’s the problem of a boon driven system. Having unikittenfects for specific spells would make this possible… But it would lead to possibly unwanted synergies and stacking effects.
It was a design decision to have the game run with set of boons, which are used to achieve any number of effects for abilities, so now the devs need to deal with it and balance around it.
And not flat out stomp all over it, knocking over innocent bystanders left and right…

The main use of QZ was the burst damage which it now doesn’t really do (someone did the math and even with shortbow it doesn’t seem to manage more than a couple extra hits. Any rebalancing of the skill that doesn’t solve that issue is really just changing the purpose of the skill entirely

oh, so changing the purpose of a skill is a bad thing?
It increases your burst, right? still the same purpose.