Guild Wars 2

I’m writing this from the perspective of a Chronomancer that has played over 2000 hours since the release of HoT. I’ve raided, gathered 200+ insights and done all the content the game has to offer so I think I can provide an honest impression regarding this boon stack change. I’d also like to express a thing or two about the game and why it is (was?) fun for me.

Like many others, I share the sentiment that this balance patch did nothing to make the game better in PvE. I’m not talking about the massive nerf to SoI; I know it was OP in WvW, but that is not what irks me the most. In fact, I’m kinda learning to like this new iteration of the skill.
What is bothering me the most, and the reason I’m writing this post is the Boon 5 stack cap introduced.
Why is this cap bothering me? For 2 reasons mainly.
The first: As a Chronomancer, this invisible barrier is making my skills randomly half as effective OR totally ineffective half the time. In other words, my skills are being subject of diminishing returns half the time.
As an example: Tides of times being 2 stacks will cause my next Well of Action or Signet of inspiration only give me 3 seconds of quickness a lot of times, granted I am at a over +18 seconds of quickness. This seems to be the magical barrier. Quickness under 18 seconds> your skill will be 100% effective. Quickness over 18 seconds> a LOT of times the skill will be 50% effective.
What happens with my elite skill Time warp? The fact that it gives so many stacks will make everything bad. Seeing my Timewarp active on the field and me inside… and then hovering my quickness icon, and seeing it tick down from 20 to 13s… is probably the most frustrating thing ever.

Example of Timewarp being useless https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdUKwiGjySg&feature=youtu.be

As you can see, my elite skill has been butchered to only grant whooping 4 seconds quickness here.

Now my question is… Why must I have to be Penalized for using my skills and my cooldowns too fast? Why am I being penalized and having my skills be half as useful or not useful at all even though I blew my cooldown? To be honest this doesn’t seem fair at all. This is the equivalent of having a warrior and his skills randomly starting to hit for half of their normal damage only because he exceeded 15k dps.

Regarding the 2nd point that bothers me: I was browsing Qt’s new updated chrono guides, and I found this chart.

http://puu.sh/rQE2I/ce8b55c1fd.png (source http://qtfy.enjin.com/mesmer#DomiRecall)

It is explaining a rotation and how to land it so you don’t overstack your quickness. That is when it hit me and I asked myself “Why in the world do we have to get to a point of making an excel chart so our Chrono skills don’t overlap and become half as effective?” I agree charts are great, and if they help you figure out how to be more efficient with dps numbers and rotations, all is great. But this? This is a chart so we use our skills and specific order so they don’t kitten each other! I am being penalized simply because I’m playing too fast or in a different cooldown order!

Many will ask, “What’s wrong with playing slower?” “Why must you play so fast to a degree your skills suffer diminishing returns?”

The thing is, that’s precisely the reason why I loved this game, its fast combat system. The fact that only Boon classes are subject to diminishing returns is unbearable to me. I don’t see thieves or Eles hitting arbitrary damage caps simply because someone decided that THEY SHALL NOT PASS over 30k dps for example.

Before the patch I could play fast, dodge, watch the boss, appreciate mechanics, do my thing, help, res a downed player, use my cooldowns when I knew were good and useful to keep the quickness love going. But now after this patch, the feeling of knowing that if i blew a cooldown half a second too early it might be useless is just too overwhelming. It sucks the fun out of this game, I feel like have to slow myself down and start ticking numbers in my head, I feel like I have to play with my eyes plastered to the cooldown timers ticking down so I have a small cue to know that its safe to cast something else.
This might have sounded like a Rant for some, and I apologize for it, but I had to take this out of my chest and express how I feel in hopes someone will notice and fix this… It’s the first time since HoT released that i feel i don’t want to raid anymore, and its the first time i feel I want to quit the game because I can’t play Chrono how I want to play it. I don’t want to have to start making excel graphs and play like a robot…

TLDR: The 5 max boon cap has made playing Chrono feel like a bother. Skills have a huge risk all the time of suffering diminishing returns despite you blowing your full cooldown. The cap feels restrictive, unintuitive and forces the gameplay to be slower and more calculated so you don’t overstack your boons.

The whole 5 stack change was a drastic over reaction from the balance team that needs to be reverted.

They also need to make good on what they said and increase the existing skills boon duration so they don’t feel useless.

+1 Thank you for taking the time to post. Most people probably don’t understand these issues and just assume it was a nerf to quickness, when in fact, it affects your whole play style (and not in a good way). As mentioned, almost like if an ele reaches a certain dps marker not only can they not do more dps, but clicking additional attack skills is detrimental because it give no benefit and puts them on cool down. This is a Hooorrrible design. Additionally, this balance patch really messed up time warp as an elite skill. In case many of you don’t know, it pulses 1 sec quickness stacks throughout its 11 pulses. I went to the training area with 100% boon duration. If I cast time warp with 100% boon duration, I get around 18.86 sec of quickness (timed from a stop watch). If I cast well of action immediately followed by time warp, I get about the same, 18.80s to 18.90s sec on quickness. If I cast tides, followed by well of action, followed by time warp I get around 25.8 sec of quickness. You guys can go test it for yourself. If there was no quickness stack cap, the duration should be 22 sec, 28 sec, and 34 sec of quickness. So, basically this patch made it so that if you cast one of your utility skill that grants quickness right before your elite skill that grants quickness, you will get about the same amount of quickness than if you just used your elite skill. I don’t see how you can say this is not a broken design.

I agree a lot of this post (+1 OP), it affects much of a Chronomancer’s gameplay (as a Chrono myself), Mesmers (And Chronomancers) get a ‘subtle’ nerf every now and then. It hurts.

thank you for posting this

Honestly, OP, I have only one reason to answer your whole “rant”: to reduce spamming. Personally, as much as I like the fast paced combat system, I can also sympathize why Anet did this. Spamming skills without worrying a single bit about the cool downs is not very fun I would say and with so much alacrity and quickness being shared with your party or allies whether you play raids or open world I sort of think it also contributes to reducing the visual noise that go along with these game modes. Just my two cents

Something isn’t adding up here. @Xyonon, @Fay, and others have reported from testing on both the mesmer forum and on Reddit that new quickness stacks will only override older stacks that have a shorter duration than the new stack, yet you claim that this isn’t the case.