Guild Wars 2

So for those of you who don’t know, two skills in the latest patch received a first ever seen patch note.
-Enemies are now able to be struck by this skill only once every 0.5 seconds.

The two skills were Revenant Coalescence of Ruin and Warrior Scorched Earth. Now the change isn’t in itself unwelcome as it is reasonable since these skills were hitting some targets multiple times in a single use (which is apparently something people don’t want).

Now, I’m fine with this up to this point, however through testing it has come to light that it extends beyond just the caster himself. If two or more Revenants, for example, cast CoR at roughly the same time at the same target, one of them will hit with the attack, however all the rest that hit within 0.5 seconds are negated and don’t touch the target at all. If you want to see this then you can check out this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMNo6pl0-3Q

So, the debate going on right now in the profession forums is whether or not this is a bug. I can’t help but think it is a bug as it goes against everything Anet has always said about their game…namely that you should always be happy to see another player come to help. As things are now, I’m not happy to see another hammer wielding Revenant or a Longbow wielding Warrior because that means that one of my skills may be negated, not by an enemy skill, but by an ally’s. This is especially noticeable in zerg type content where it is very likely to happen.

So, the question is, is this a trend of a dangerous new design that changes the dynamics of the game entirely, or a bug that will hopefully be addressed. If you don’t play Revenant or Warrior then try to think of it this way. What is your favorite skill? Then, how would you feel if you used your favorite skill and saw that it did not hit because an “ally” used the exact same skill as you a fraction of a second earlier?

from the looks of how they’ve responded to all the topics about this which is they haven’t it was more than likely a on purpose part of the nerf, bad part is it was only because it hit back line glass cannons to hard and they didn’t like it

Invictus.1503:

So, the debate going on right now in the profession forums is whether or not this is a bug. I can’t help but think it is a bug as it goes against everything Anet has always said about their game…namely that you should always be happy to see another player come to help. As things are now, I’m not happy to see another hammer wielding Revenant or a Longbow wielding Warrior because that means that one of my skills may be negated, not by an enemy skill, but by an ally’s. This is especially noticeable in zerg type content where it is very likely to happen.

Conditions suffered from the same thing for multiple years and that affected more than one skill on one class.

Posted over on reddit, here’s a condensed version: It is a nerf not a bug.

Why? Both skills have high damage coefficients, at range, on low cool downs, that hit 5 targets. Both skills are loaded. Many other similar skills such as metor shower are balanced around a long cooldown, and/or having an interruptible cast animation.

Rather than nerfing the cooldowns, the damage or the number of targets they decided the nerf the amount of application allowed in a time frame.

Frankly it would be easier to nerf the damage or cooldowns, and let players hit together like other skills is better route. They could also go other routes like adding a cast time to these powerful skills.

Interesting.

I would think that their code should take the initial source of the skill dmg into consideration, thus each rev should get that first hit, and then each would then be individually subject to that .5 sec delay. However, based on what that video is showing, it in fact does not. It’s simply looking at the incoming damage as “one skill”, not that it’s being applied from 2 distinct players using the same skill. (Am I making sense?)

They need to make this distinction.

I understand why they stuck the .5 sec delay between the cascading hits in there, but they way they did it is detrimental to group play. I might even go a step further and say this is a larger issue than it was with conditions being overwritten originally. At least with conditions you got the physical impact damage (as minimal as that sometimes was, it was still damage inflicted), and potentially a tick or two of the condition’s dmg. Here, we aren’t even getting the impact dmg.