Guild Wars 2

hooma.9642:

JonPeters.5630:

..

• Air XI – Tempest Defense. Decreased the cooldown from 60s to 25s.
  ….

25s is to much reduction. now u need as example as warrior stability to secure the final blow to an ele via cc. but if u miss u need more time to recharge your stability before the defense is up again.

you obviously dont play an ele.

- Dagger off hand -

Updraft- 40s cd

Earthquake- kitten cd

- Focus off hand -

Gale- 50s cd

- Staff -

Static field- 40s cd

Warrior.

Hammer will take a nerf in damage, i think we have to accept it but whats about Rifle, Greatsword and Axes?

Rifle – damage is placed in 2 longcast skills olny, while volley can be fine as it is a channeling skill, kill shot takes definitely too long time to fire off. Its does lacking any real utility, and is completely outclassed by longbow in every format of the game. Ive actually posted some suggestion changes for it (like making bleed shot the same as marines shot just for example). I also think that placing crack shot in discipline line is a better idea.

Greatsword – some agree some disagree about reworking hundren blades and placing it into f1. But we all agree that arcing slide is useless, Any plans for the future? Also why rush dindt received leap from fiery gs yet? That swing animation is really buggy and keep missing, unlike the leap.

Axe – I think its save to say that aa is fine, eviscarate and maybe throw axe. But what about rest?

Sword – In case of condition builds its fine as it is. Howered in case of power builds offhand and flurry are terrible. Also bladetrail still without -20% to cd’s. Why?

Mace mainhand- I have mixed feeling about changes to skull crack. Mace on its own has 0 mobility, 0 cripple, and all skills are in melee range. Its is also a slow weapon. Also why counter blow dindt get love like riposte?

Longbow – future will show. But placement in traits is still under “?” In my opinion these traits should be merged and placed in arms. Actually its makes sense as longbow is a hybrid weapon so its benefit from both precision and condition damage.

Thief opportunist trait nerf

You just nerfed the thief sustained dps meta in group plays which is one of the main reasons people bring thief in the first place; good single target dps rotation.

barely brings group dps support, no unique dps buffs like banner/spotter/emp allies/etc. And now you took a bite off his single target dps.

First of all, very good job, I like this kind of preview. It’s not only about the ‘what exactly’ but also the ‘why’. This is awesome.

Second, I do not really understand why you don’t just meganerf the current meta. It caused so many players to leave, the players that remained are either trying to tell you that the current meta is nonsens or are randoms like me (telling you a lot of different things). There are a few nerfs of course, but even I see that it won’t be enough to kick passive playstyle/AI-builds/bad ‘risk/reward’ from PvP, which seems to be the main reason for all the quits of competitive teams and players.

Third, 10th december. Why so late?!? It’s nice that you want discuss it, but can’t you just throw out such balance patches more often? Like every two weeks, as you do it for PvE? Of course, you can’t change the whole meta every two weeks, but slight adjustments every now and than seem to be far better, or at least I think so.

PS: Sorry for my horrible English, trying my best but it’s not my mother tongue.

I main thief and overall like the thief changes. A bit worried about the Signet Use nerf as it’s the main source of ini regen in my build, but the buff to passive ini regen should make up for it. We will see, though. This will also make choosing between Infusion Of Shadows and Patience an actual choice rather than having infusion be a must have while still making d/p a viable set and eliminating passive perma stealth builds. Feel like these are good changes overall. All the other class changes seem legitimately good steps as well.

I very much agree with the changes to warriors especially. It accomplishes the goal of reducing their effectiveness without completely removing them from competitive play. It does it in a really great way as well, as it address all of the core issues (besides sustain, below), without changing builds that are not intended to be altered. For example, nerfing Combustive Shot for power scaling while buffing it for condition scaling reduces the AoE potential for hammer builds but keeps condition builds just as strong and maybe even stronger. The hammer damage nerfs are probably okay to get away with seeing as how you didn’t change warrior’s sustain at all.

Unsuspecting Foe I feel is actually mainly a Skull Crack nerf more than a Hammer nerf honestly, but that’s okay. Between that and making Skull Crack able to be reliably avoided, the build is actually much more balanced. It maybe was not overpowered, but it was annoying mechanically to play against. An indirect consequence of this is that Greatsword Mastery is now not really possible to get. This is a nerf to their mobility and 100B burst, which I don’t really feel needed a nerf, but it’s very minor regardless. I imagine a build like 0/20/20/0/30 or 0/30/20/0/20 will be the new norm with all of these changes.

Anyways, regarding warrior sustain: I really think that you should look into it. It’s all tied completely into Healing Signet right now. Relying only on one ability is not very fun, and due to its passive nature it’s also annoying to play against. The only true counter to Healing Signet is poison, which Cleansing Ire makes irrelevant, and burst damage. I realize warrior’s should have a counter, but I don’t think it ought to be tied to their heal only, and their sustain shouldn’t be passive either. I think something along these lines would partially accomplish what I want:

Reduce Healing Signet base heal by about 25% (from 390 to 300 hps, in line with 3 bar Healing Surge), while at the same time increase the healing power scaling so that @1000 healing power it’ll do equivalent to what it does today at 1000 healing power. This change will reduce the inherent healing of non-healing power builds, while not effecting bunkers who choose to take Clerics amulet.

Increase Healing Surge level 0 to level 2 heals, to make it more competitive with Healing Signet. Healing Surge is the only option vs burst damage, which the meta will eventually shift towards again.

Since I want to see active healing, I think making a trait that heals for every bar of adrenaline spent. I don’t want to see this tied to Cleansing Ire, since that trait is so good and it shouldn’t be a mechanic used by bunkers. Putting it in Discipline would probably make sense as a Master trait, or maybe adding it into Burst Mastery. I’m thinking something kind of minor, but able to supplement the normal healing, of around 350 per bar, with maybe 0.3 scaling. With 30 points in Discipline and 200 healing power this works out to about 150 hps if used on CD. It might be a bit too high, but this is the general idea. The point isn’t to nerf warrior sustain, it’s to reallocate it. So 100 hps less from Healing Signet, but you can get 150 hps more with this trait if used optimally.

Anyways, that’s only an idea of what I want. To sum it up, I think it would be better if warrior healing was more active and from more than one source. Great changes overall though.

Mace auto is terrible .Now with Skullcrack increase of casting time there would be impossible to kill anyone using mace.The only thing that was good about mace was the low cast time skullcrack for a little burst.

1. No mention of ranger sword auto rooting still
Maybe a new skirmishing trait that changes the sword auto’s functionality, causes a loss of leaps & a minor dps boost like 5%, this would fix this weapon for pve & wouldn’t affect the pvp functionality at all.

2. It would be fantastic if the pet received a little dmg boost to compensate for ascended weapons/trinkets. (4-10%)

Like the Necro changes. Very suspect about the Thief changes—that’s a “believe it when I see it” after the incessant stream of nerfs coming down the line to viable Thief builds.

But my real beef is this:

Why is everything balanced around PvP?

The logic given for every changelog section is grounded firmly in PvP. It feels like, once again, that PvE builds and playstyles will simply “have to adjust” to these changes regardless of the fact that the changes nerf PvE builds. My S/D PvE Thief build relies on avoiding damage because S/ #2 is insta-cast. Now it’s screwed. Many of the changes make sense in PvP. NOT in PvE. This trend is getting frustrating and not a little disconcerting.

I’m just happy that, for the moment, my Necro escaped this seemingly-arbitrary and unnecessary imbalance.

(One final note: When is the Thief Deadly Arts trait, “Improvisation” going to be addressed? It’s been ignored once again in this round of proposed balances.)

Guardian’s Spirit Weapons needs a change, the way they act now is not good enough.

I will give some suggestions.

Remove the timer, and let them be up until killed.

The active shouldn’t kill them, but I guess there is where traits actually come in.

Increase the health of them a little bit at least.

Spirit weapons could have a shorter cooldown, at least Shield of the Avenger and Bow of Truth, from 60 to 50.

or-

Make them immune to any damage if you want them to have a timer.

The active could still kill them if you have them immune to any damage.

I really love the concept of a Spirit Weapon Guardian, but they way they are now, they are not really needed anywhere at all. Only Shield of the Avenger is used from time to time, and that is in some fractal parts.

Nice Ranger Longbow changes, but can we get Barrage to tick less often but with more damage? It destroys you if you Barrage and then a guardian gives Retal to 5 people.

So about the vigor nerfs, particularly Engineer… I’m assuming this means that you can have vigor up 5 out of 10 seconds (well more like 5-6 seconds). You guys don’t consider a 40-50% nerf a bit… extreme?

Sars.8792:

Water I – Aquamancer’s Alacrity. Moved to Master tier.
Water V – Cleansing Wave. Moved to Master tier.

I liked having both of these always for staff and sometimes s/d ….. intentional nerf ? if not could it please be one or the other

exactly, just like the arcana line changes.

They need to make the BASE attunement cd 10 seconds. Then putting 30 into arcana would give us a 7-8 second attunement cd.

Or they need to just simply make the attunement cd 10 seconds. Then take away the attunement cd passive from arcana and change it to something like a celestial +to all stats. Then they need to remove the Interal CD on Evasice Arcana. Letting you free up points from water so you dont have to go 30 just to get “some” condi removal.

Thief is dead if this patch goes through.

You have been warned.

Overall, I’d say a good patch. Just a few things that I hope you’ve considered.

1. Thief: Infusion of shadows. This will make the d/p build not popular. I guess we will see, but I think you will not see many people playing it anymore. I hope I am wrong about that though.
2. Warrior: Healing signet. I didn’t see any changes to this. It’s a big part of the problem with warriors. I’d prefer to see the base heal but by 25% and the tie to healing power increased by a lot. In other words, if someone runs a zerker or soldier’s build, they will heal for much less than today. If they run a cleric type build, they will heal for more than today.
3. Guardian: Symbol of swiftness. The change to add 4 seconds of swiftness if you already have swiftness is a good change. Reducing it to be per pulse though is a bad move. I’m thinking more about WvW here, but that reduction will force guardians into running retreat in order to maintain swiftness. Not a good move.

I like the changes for thieves that will prevent lots of the permastealthing going on, but can you please do something about the last refuge trait in Shadow Arts? I like the Shadow Arts tree, but I’m forced to get this minor trait that ends up killing me a lot often than it saves me (landing a c&d just after it procs leaves you revealed). It would be greatly appreciated if you could take a look at it.

I’m still disappointed with the ranger changes, only because in this preview there is no attempt to spread out the sources of condition removal rangers have access to, meaning that for a lot of builds, Empathic Bond will still be a necessity, which hurts Power based builds more than condition based builds since it takes 30 trait points away that could have been spent in a traitline more beneficial to Power builds.

The changes to the ranger (and the other classes as well) look great though. I was just hoping to see some additional condition removal added to the ranger so that Empathic Bond doesn’t seem so necessary; preferably an active source.

Spite X – Chill of Death. Increased trigger threshold from 25% to 50% – AWESOME change, but i hope that its actual 50, not 20% like right now despite tooltip saying 25%

Curses VIII – Banshee’s Wail. Increase cooldown reduction from 15% to 20%. – Very much needed.

Death 5 – Reanimator. Decreased cooldown from 30s to 15s. – Please just fuse it with Protection of the Horde and make it at Major Trait, no matter how much you improve it its still blocking the entry into DM line for a lot of players that dont want to have sodding rats running around with them, still ok change/direction, but a better would have been, can proc up to 3 times within 30 seconds, no cooldown between procs, thus allowing for a spike of minions for MM builds on fights with adds.

Soul Reaping II. Vital Persistence. Increased reduction of life force drain from 25% to 50% – Making it kinda efficient, but its still not a good trait plain because of how the 3 main necro setups use DS, Power builds got enough LF generation that sticking in DS isnt a problem (and dagger is a stronger dps tool either way), for conditions its a one off and defensive tool thus only needing 10-30% LF and kinda only being able to generate that much and minion masters in best case use it as a heal for minions.
The degeneration isnt a problem its the difference in how easy, fast and reliably different setups can generate life force (from the fast D/WH, the burst A/F or the reliable n safe Staff with soul marks or worthless/almost non existent on S/D since Scepter 3 isnt a appealing skill to condis).

Things that really need change/fix is Putrid mark (being a 3 cleanse and not cleansing teammates), staff weapon swap/interrupt mark cd, buggy nature of Trident 1 (doesnt hit stuff right infront of you underwater but still can go trough some walls).

Personal wishes are a 1 second boost to Foot in the grave (or making it the SR GM minor) and changes to spite 10 major traits (especially Spiteful Spirit trait not worth it for the slot, but a lot of builds dont have a better option and it kinda is a major blasphemy of the once dear Elite).

Latinkuro.9420:

Zero Day.2594:

JonPeters.5630:

Warrior:
…We don’t mind warriors doing massive damage, or doing great area of effect control…

Well, good thing I already started re-rolling warrior. Still on the fence though as which is better warrior or guard…
(Going from thief to warrior.)

taking it out of context I see huh,

here’s the whole quote ! don’t try to make it sound like something it isn’t, a nerf is still a nerf !

We also reduced the damage on the hammer’s burst skill to separate the control from the damage. We don’t mind warriors doing massive damage, or doing great area of effect control, but we’re trying to prevent them from easily doing both.

My bad, sure you got nerfed, your still effective at doing something, and they “don’t mind” it. Hence re-rolling.

Suggestions for Thief changes:
(keep all the changes you guys are making, and add in mine, you’re doing great ).

Back-stab builds will still be overpowered, let’s reduce the side-strike trait to 2% chance. Reduce a bit of damage on Back-Stab it self. Hidden killer should be reduced from 100% to 25%.
Sneak-attack on pistol, right now stacks a bit too many bleeds. The number of times shot using that skill should be reduced from 5 to 2. The normal attack on the pistol should no longer apply a bleed effect
Black powder should be as suggested, powder, only blinding one enemy without an AoE effect.
Executioner should be decreased from 20% to 10%.
Backfighting increase damage from 50% to 150%, thieves generally fight when they’re downed, so it’s a good idea to provide a buff and expand build options.

Think these would be some solid changes… Would greatly open up thief builds (for instance, re-rolling to warrior build, or re-rolling to guardian build).

Treborlavok.3504:

hooma.9642:

JonPeters.5630:

..

• Air XI – Tempest Defense. Decreased the cooldown from 60s to 25s.
  ….

25s is to much reduction. now u need as example as warrior stability to secure the final blow to an ele via cc. but if u miss u need more time to recharge your stability before the defense is up again.

you obviously dont play an ele.

- Dagger off hand -

Updraft- 40s cd

Earthquake- kitten cd

- Focus off hand -

Gale- 50s cd

- Staff -

Static field- 40s cd

i talked about the DEFENSE PART of this trait. so 40s would imho fitting into the other cooldowns

the dmg increase is always active if the condition is fulfilled

Warrior changes:

These changes will definitely break ALOT of builds on the warrior. Not necessarily a bad thing, but worth pointing out.

My gut feeling is that these changes are a SIGNIFICANT nerf to hammer dps. I’m worried that it’s going to be a little too much. Like others have said, I think to start you should either move Unsuspecting Foe OR reduce hammer damage. And then re-evaluate. Possibly consider reducing the crit chance on Unsuspecting Foe and leaving it where it is, while also doing smaller damage reductions on the hammer. Doing both is swinging for the fences, and I don’t think that the results are going to be positive.

You’re already reducing the hammer’s damage by moving Unsuspecting Foe, I don’t believe the additional damage reductions will be necessary. I’m not just considering PvP builds, but also the tanky warrior builds you may see in WvW, that currently rely on unsuspecting foe to get any relevant damage out of the hammer.

I also think that you should take a good, hard look at the Strength tree, which is pretty much worthless in non-PvE play.

jcbroe.4329:

I’m still disappointed with the ranger changes, only because in this preview there is no attempt to spread out the sources of condition removal rangers have access to, meaning that for a lot of builds, Empathic Bond will still be a necessity, which hurts Power based builds more than condition based builds since it takes 30 trait points away that could have been spent in a traitline more beneficial to Power builds.

The changes to the ranger (and the other classes as well) look great though. I was just hoping to see some additional condition removal added to the ranger so that Empathic Bond doesn’t seem so necessary; preferably an active source.

The trait changes in Nature Magic I’m not sure will have any real impact on anything because, after the nerf to spirits last patch, a lot of their strength comes from Vengeance. On the plus side, you got your wish with storm spirit.

As a thief player, I’m very happy perma stealth will be no more. Honestly that’s the cheesiest spec ever. And I don’t want thief to be only good for cheese or trolling.

I want to be play a highly mobile, evasive assassin who is fast and deadly and is also hard to catch.

I think thieves should be very happy about this nerf. It means we may be good at something else other than killing yaks or ganking lone up levels now.

Can we have some change on Glacial Heart, for guardians? Right now, it’s Master trait that does exacly what a Sigil of Hydromancy does, with a huge cd attached on it and RNG, as it depends on Hammer crits to proc. Could it have rework to make it a bit more appealing?

Something I eagerly look for in every patch notes is if any of the mesmer offensive skills where given larger radius or increased targets. I’m not talking about iberserker or iwarden but instead I am talking about shatters and Mantra of Pain.

I mention shatters because it seems like the illusion will run towards their target and perform shatters #1 #2 and #3 when they are exactly in range which may sometimes completely miss if the intended target is moving away from the illusion. I am lead to think that either illusions shattering closer to their targets or shatter radius being increased would help resolve that issue.

When I saw the improvement to Mantra of Resolve (Power Cleanse) to now remove conditions of allies in a radius I have been interested to see if Mantra of Pain and Mantra of Recovery would receive a similar change. I don’t think it would be appropriate for mPain or mRecovery to be given a formidable radius of 240 but instead ~130(Max 3 targets). Support healing an ally with mRecovery means coordinating standing next to them and mPain could be used to not only help burst a downed enemy but also scare off their pall thats trying to help them up.

mini.6018:

Skull crack is a 130 range ability *130 range * .Do you guys know how hard it will be to land that on a moving target with the cast time being doubled? It’s also a single target skill.Something needs to be given in return here or no one ever in their right mind would use mace main hand.Used to be a good counter to thieves for skilled players but now you are turning it into useless again.Better make the stun 2 sec again imo it would be much much much less of a nerf.

You guys say you want more build variety yet you come up with changes like these that instantly kill 3 or 4 builds and 2 weapon choices.Instead you make rifle/gs kind of viable for pve .I’m speechless.

lol.. +1/4 seconds kills a build? 3 secs stun/daze isnt enough reward?

now it requires some skill. ever tried landing final trust?

I disagree with most of the thief changes, i really must say that you’re ruining pve for some classes because of pvp. If anything, don’t change infiltrator’s retreat, i beg you, being able to use it while casting something else is of utmost importance.

•Arcane VIII – Blasting Staff. Moved to Adept tier.

Wooooot, I’m so happy about this. I never quite understood why you had to put a whopping 20 trait points into arcane just for this. This change makes me a very happypanda

JonPeters.5630:

• Symbol of Swiftness: This skill now applies 4 seconds of swiftness per pulse, rather than 8 seconds if you have no swiftness and 1 second if you have swiftness.

This makes guardian the least mobile class for traveling. Every other class (with very few exceptions) has either an active speed skill that has a down-time of around 50% or has a signet that gives passive movement speed bonus. Guardians have no signet for speed and our only other swiftness skill has a 60 second cool down with only 20 seconds of swiftness (“Retreat!”). I don’t see any balance reason justified for making Guardians slower than every other class, thus making us late to every party. We don’t even have any “fast” proper ranged attacks we can use to reach a little farther due to being at the end of the pack.

Some changes I really did not like:

• Earth XI – Diamond Skin: No. No and no. It is already frustrating to fight against condition immune Engineers and Warriors, we really don’t need further condition immunities. Condition immunities allows no counterplay. Please, don’t take this way.
• Necromancer changes: why further bleed nerfing and no buffs to sustain? Necromancer is still the easiest profession to take down and the only reason it still exists in PvP is because of the condition pressure. I think that keeping nerfing bleed stacks will force any Necromancer to pick Dhuumfire, completely killing variety, and also the little bit of survivability left, on condition builds.
• Acrobatics III – Vigorous Recovery: this change will make the trait useless reducing the overall viability of the Acrobatics traitline.
• Acrobatics X – Assassins Reward: pushing sustainability on a profession that is extremely glassy with no way to reduce damage is a bad choice. Basing that sustainability increase on healing power scaling on the granmaster tier of the Boon Duration traitline is even worse. I don’t think that this kind of build will be viable.

Good stuff. As a ranger, I’m very happy with the changes.

Keep it up, ANet. I just bought gems to show my appreciation for this and the nice krait tower you made.

Bsgapollo.5364:

I’ll talk about elementalist since I’ve been playing it since beta.

The things I will mention are the things I disagree with, everything els is fine.

• Water V – Cleansing Wave: It’s one of the very few condition removals an elementalist has. And for it to be effective he still has to put a lot of points into arcana for it to be good. Even after the buff to the elemental cooldown it would mean you can only remove 1 condition every 13 seconds. Which is not extremly great for a master tier trait.

• Arcane V – Elemental Attunement and Arcane VI – Renewing Stamina: Yes 1 should be moved to a master tier but not both, each one of those traits are almost an essence to have on an elementalist. My suggestion would be to put Arcane VI into the master trait, that way elementalists still have the choice to pick between a slightly less effective endurance regen traits such as Arcane VII ( vigorous scepter ) if they would only put 10 points into arcana.

Although I wouldn’t know exactly which one. I would like to know how other elementalist think about this.

I agree with this observation (running D/D). Cleansing Wave as a adept tier trait was a viable way to get a condition off your back without the need to spec into Cantrips and run something else on the skill bar (at Water magic 10 & Glyphs in my case, which are still pretty weak). If I want to keep my Glyphs and some condition removal, I will have to get Ether Renewal and lose Glyph of Elemental Harmony. This ties in to the changes in Arcana: I am currently having Renewing Stamina & Elemental Attunement as my traits (Arcana 20). I can keep only one, which will mean that I say goodbye to Renewing Stamina. That reduces my ability to dodge (less ways to avoid damage, as I got no buff on the defense side) and (because of no GoEH) I lose off-combat travelling speed by not being able to cast GoEH in Air Magic for the swiftness boon. This is bad for moving in WvW (I don’t see my foes like Warriors & Thieves slowed down e.g.). To be fast, I would have to run a staff, but wait, I don’t even have an off-combat weapon swap …

How can I cope? I could turn down my Earth Magic in favour of Water Magic & Arcana.

Wait? Wasn’t the patch not intended to get people out of those two lines of skills and strengthen the other lines?

PS: An alternative would be to get Windborne Dagger & Vigourous Scepter out of their “only in combat” mechanic, so you can get a passive 25% speed for dual wielding daggers (most classes have 25% passive speed anyway via signet) and reducing the endurance on the Scepter trait to 25% to counter the current passive effect.

This would still be weaker than Renewing Stamina in combat & give the (dual wielding Dagger) Ele some tactical speed while travelling in maps in WvW.

Does the balance team pay close attention to some of the things that go on in WvW? (obviously you guys do somewhat because d/p thief is more notorious in WvW than sPvP)

People have been using that gem-store toy axe to use it’s 600+ range rush on 3s cooldown to move around, seems pretty unfair…

Also within the context of WvW, I think Warrior mobility is way too strong when coupled with high regen, when you can create a 1200+ range gap and use the time it buys to get a 3-4k passive heal off, and do as long as needed.

Could You please make the thief vigor nerfs pvp only? It’s already hard to stay alive in melee range as a thief.

I am in the same boat as LB changes are cool to see but still meh. Ranger’s problem still stem from these major issue.

• Ranger has to trait 30 for condition removal and has little ways to remove conditions.
• Ranger has to trait 30 into most lines just to make Utilities worth putting on their skill bar.
• Pet attacks root them in place, making pet damage akin to a weapon sigil that procs 33% of the time.
• The “Master Archer” class is still lackluster at range in PvP because people gap close almost instantly and render the range builds useless.
• Pet F2 skills are qued behind a pets pathing AI it seems, either that or they are just plain buggy.

I do like the Unbound Spirits being moved and while I am happy Longbow got tweaked it’s still not where it needs to be. Changes to Storm Spirit might make it less used in serious gameplay.

The only thing that makes a difference on the mesmer changes seemed to be the illusion cooldown trait (so you agree it was over-nerfed before). However, merely moving it down seems like a cop out (see paragraph 4).

Confounding suggestions finally makes a difference and adds another do-or-bust build, but since daze doesn’t hinder movement, it is sub-par compared to what some other classes have. If this also applies to stuns, on the other hand…

Mender’s purity looks like a lure for people to take mantra of recovery. The underlying issues of mantras are not addressed. I think it’d be more helpful if we are told what the mantra mechanic is supposed to achieve, other than “something different.”

I personally have issues about inspiration line only having shatter grandmaster traits. It is, afterall, the phantasm line. I prefer a trait that help us recover from having to shatter valuable phantasms. And I don’t mean just giving them lower recharge, but a different way for us to juggle this resource, preferably without having to re-conjure. Something like a phantasmal knight to replace shattered phantasms immediately after shatter so we can continue to take advantage of all those inspiration minor traits could work.

Overall, I feel that the changes are, a bit unlike the last couple balance patches, going in the right direction. Great job!

First thing’s first, immobilize stacking is terrible. Please do something about it.

I do think that necromancer’s Dhuumfire and warrior’s Healing Signet need to be looked at and nerfed a bit. On the buff side of things, guardians need more mobility. If they can’t run away, at least give them more options to catch up to their enemy.

As a long-time elementalist player, I am a bit upset at the poor quality of choices we’ll now have in our water and arcana adept trait lines. Though I understand and agree with the general direction that these elementalist traits are going.

Water – We need to see better adept water trait options. Soothing Wave is still terrible, and should be dropped in favor of a different effect. Everyone will likely choose Vital Striking(VI) or Soothing Disruption(III) for most scenarios now. We need more options. Better options.

Arcana – Quite interesting. The biggest problem I see here is that staff now have Blasting Staff, scepter now has Vigorous Scepter, but dagger is stuck with the virtually useless Windborne Dagger. Windborne Dagger is crappy, especially in comparison to the scepter and staff traits I just mentioned. Please give daggers a better trait. Or just don’t move Renewing Stamina. At least not until dagger has a better trait option. Also, Evasive Arcana is still powerful enough that it’s hard to NOT pick it up. In all honesty, the 50% healing nerf in sPvP could probably be lowered to 60-70% and then applied to WvW and PvE. This would keep the trait powerful, but it’d make me more willing to not go into 30 arcana.

Fire – Not good enough. I really want to be able to go in fire, and making water and arcana a bit less great helps, but earth and air give a lot more utility. The cleansing fire trait is decent, but once every 40s isn’t good enough, especially considering we have no control over when it activates. Burning Precision needs a buff. Increase the chance on critical hit to at least 75%. Increase the burning duration to at least 1.5s. Or increase the duration to 3s and CD to 4s. Overall, we need more utility from our ele traits.

Air – As a dagger/dagger user, I HAVE to get Zephyr’s Boon, as it allows me to have perma fury. I already have to build with enough armor, health, and sustain so that, as a melee user with the lowest health and armor pool, I don’t die very easily. Thus in pretty much all my builds, 10 air is a must. This could be changed by giving us higher crit rate or/and more access to fury via other trait lines, ideally as adept traits. Fire needs better traits, so how about there, hrm?

Earth – Pretty good. I think the new grandmaster trait is quite interesting, though I see very little room in any build to put 30 in earth.

In regards to weapon skills, a lot of abilities in focus need to be looked at, and lightning strike needs to be nerfed (the minor master trait moreso than the weapon skill). Staff still does very poorly in 1v1 situations, though I’m not quite sure how that could be helped all that much, but I feel that it should be addressed.

I’m looking forward to this patch. I feel like, with all the nerfs and more diversity, we may see some very interesting changes to a lot of professions, and perhaps even the meta.

Symbol of Swiftness: This skill now applies 4 seconds of swiftness per pulse, rather than 8 seconds if you have no swiftness and 1 second if you have swiftness.

This worries me. Guardians are already a less mobile class and this nerf will hurt that even more.

hooma.9642:

mini.6018:

Skull crack is a 130 range ability *130 range * .Do you guys know how hard it will be to land that on a moving target with the cast time being doubled? It’s also a single target skill.Something needs to be given in return here or no one ever in their right mind would use mace main hand.Used to be a good counter to thieves for skilled players but now you are turning it into useless again.Better make the stun 2 sec again imo it would be much much much less of a nerf.

You guys say you want more build variety yet you come up with changes like these that instantly kill 3 or 4 builds and 2 weapon choices.Instead you make rifle/gs kind of viable for pve .I’m speechless.

lol.. +1/4 seconds kills a build? 3 secs stun/daze isnt enough reward?

now it requires some skill. ever tried landing final trust?

You must have no ideea what you are talking about.It has 130 range.Basicly it means if you are crippled the target will just walk away out of it’s range while you are casting it.

Don’t give me the final thrust example because it’s really bad..The sword has a leap and immobilizes,cripples and can also be paired with shield for a stun.Seriously you cannot even compare the 2. Mace has nothing of that to help you land it.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

a t s e.9614:

Healing signet needs NO NERF , don’t listen to the whiner . Warrior has no sustain outside of high regen . Those hammer dmg nodes nerf are perfect . But im dissapointed about thief changes honestly , S\D is the only viable build anet

The change to initiative regain baseline is a huge buff to ALL thief builds, so don’t jump so early to those conclusions!

It doesn’t help Sword in dungeons at all as it still doesn’t have any skills worth “spamming” – the auto-attack does the most damage (and cripple/weakness).

But now Sword is going to be even more clunky, as if the annoyingly long after cast on the auto-attack wasn’t enough: now we can no longer quickly remove conditions by double-tapping #2, and no longer do reactionary skillplays to avoid AoE/melee attacks. If you don’t want us to outplay CC by using it, just make it unusable during CC as others suggested – but without adding a clunky cast time that makes it awful.

I really feel like the Warrior nerfs are being handled incorrectly.

Hammer is slow and telegraphed, it should be devastating if you land it…and good players already do a really good job of making it quite a challenging to pull off well.

The problem with Warrior right now is that the buffs to passive regen and sustain, mostly the healing signet buff has made it really easy to survive even for those who aren’t very good. The nerfs should have been there, not HUGE damage nerfs to the hammer.

I can already see what will happen. The complaints will continue, because the sustain from the signet is the problem not the damage, and then the signet will get nerfed too and we will be left with a shoddy hammer and no strong sustain regen option anymore.

Do it right, leave the damage but fix the passive healing first.

Feedback concerning elementalist

The base cooldown of the attunement that you just left is now reduced from 16 seconds to 13 seconds. Attunement cooldown rate now increases by 1% per point in Arcane down from 2%. The end result is that now Attunements go from 13s to 10s instead of the old range of 16s to 10s.

Great change! Thumbs up, that was definitly desperatly needed.

Arcane V – Elemental Attunement. Moved to Master tier.
Arcane VI – Renewing Stamina. Moved to Master tier.
Arcane VII – Vigorous Scepter. Moved to Adept tier.
Arcane VIII – Blasting Staff. Moved to Adept tier.
Arcane IX – Windborne Dagger. Moved to Adept tier.

I can see what you are trying to do there. You want to make it impossible to have both, all buffes AND permanent vigor. But keep in mind: That is a huge nerf and elementalists are very squishy and yet forced into melee range. I can understand that you want to tone down the buff-spam (and I totally agree with you), but especially for the elementalist you need to give something in return. With Vigorous Scepter it would be still possible to maintain a high endurance-regeneration, but as far as I remember, that trait was buggy or didn’t stack with other buffs/traits.
Beside that, the attunement-based buffs just fit the class so perfectly, it hurts a lot to give them up.
And pls take a look on lingering elements!

Water VIII – Arcane Abatement. Moved to Adept tier.

The traits giving reduced fall damage don’t have any strong effect on combat outside of WvW and maybe skyhammer. They are passive and boring, generally, so pls give us possibilities to trigger them without receiving falling dmg – e.g. on some skills like updraft or on special utilities (lightning flash?).

Air XI – Tempest Defense. Decreased the cooldown from 60s to 25s.

Tempest Defense is a defensive grand master trait in an offensive tree, that just doesn’t fit the role at all. Air should be all around single target dps, mobility and some CC. No matter how much you reduce the cooldown, the trait remains bad because it is utterly wrong-placed there.

Air V – Soothing Winds. Increased conversion from 5% to 7%.

Still a very mediocre effect giving you only very low healing power for a lot of precision. How about a secondary effect like giving some few air skills extra effects, like windborne speed (staff air 4), whirling winds (focus air 4) and maybe lightning touch (dagger air 2) so they do heal a little bit?

Arcane III – Arcane Retribution. Moved to Master tier. Decreased cooldown from 90 seconds to 45 seconds.
Arcane IV – Final Shielding. Decreased cooldown from 90s to 75s.

Just too passive.

Earth XI – Diamond Skin. This trait has been redesigned. Conditions cannot be applied to you when your health is above the threshold. 90%.

Great one! Fitting earth perfectly and making some bunker builds stronger, countering the very condition-heavy meta. Yet i’m bit curious, all conditions? Even immobilize, chill, blind and cripple? Or just damaging conditions? If all conditions, I’d think it might be a little bit too strong, countering not only condition builds, but all kind of cc builds.

All in all, I see that you are starting to listen to the community. Some great changes incoming. But please… don’t wait so long for all of these changes. Another entire month were pvp is completly insufferable? Please not.

To all people that think init regen is better now the answer is NO its way far behind from what it was just because of this one change:

Critical Strikes 15 – Opportunist. Increased trigger chance to 50%. Increase cooldown from 1s to 5s.

This is a HUGE nerf CD increased from 1s to 5s means at least 5 less init regen while fighting, This is a BIG nerf on PvP and PvE

Engineer:
Any consideration for applying a CD reduction for setting up turrets?

Possibly attaching it to existing traits:

1. Explosives Line – “Accelerant-Packed Turrets” (Turrets knockback when killed. Only when killed will it’s Recharge be reduced by 30%)
2. Tools Line – “Deployable Turrets” (Turrets use ground targeting. Reducing Recharge rate by 20%)

1A. Reason I say 30% is cause it is a Master Tier trait. I don’t think detonating should count as “kill” cause then everyone will just detonate all the time without bothering to pick them up.
2A. Reason I say 20% is cause it is a Adapt Tier trait, and being “easy access” as you only need 10 points for it.

I only listed these 2 as their base effect is not to appealing by themselves (To me). Add in the reduced Recharge, and you will have more selection of traits for turret specialized engineers.

I main Engineer cause of all the gadgets, including turrets. But I only end up using Heal Turret for 3 seconds: 1 second deploy, 1 second cleanse, 1 second detonate.

“Tools XI – Armor Mods. … trigger on struck …. Reduced the CD from 25s to 15s.”

While I understand that Armor Mods is a grandmaster trait, I feel a 15 second CD would in fact provide engineer with even more aegis than even a guardian. Notably, a more sustained form of aegis vs guardian’s minimum 30 second traited aegis renewal. (Which is only while the virtue is active)

I would curve the Armor Mod CD up closer to 20s.

That OR:
Allow Guardian’s Virtue of Courage passive to stack up to 2-3 Aegis (The ‘Aegis’ from VoC passive would be a different, stackable version of the Aegis boon with a low number cap).

mini.6018:

hooma.9642:

mini.6018:

Skull crack is a 130 range ability *130 range * .Do you guys know how hard it will be to land that on a moving target with the cast time being doubled? It’s also a single target skill.Something needs to be given in return here or no one ever in their right mind would use mace main hand.Used to be a good counter to thieves for skilled players but now you are turning it into useless again.Better make the stun 2 sec again imo it would be much much much less of a nerf.

You guys say you want more build variety yet you come up with changes like these that instantly kill 3 or 4 builds and 2 weapon choices.Instead you make rifle/gs kind of viable for pve .I’m speechless.

lol.. +1/4 seconds kills a build? 3 secs stun/daze isnt enough reward?

now it requires some skill. ever tried landing final trust?

You must have no ideea what you are talking about.It has 130 range.Basicly it means if you are crippled the target will just walk away out of it’s range while you are casting it.

Don’t give me the final thrust example because it’s really bad..The sword has a leap and immobilizes,cripples and can also be paired with shield for a stun.Seriously you cannot even compare the 2.

right cause u cant cast while moving?

u can pair your mace with shield for stun too? so where is the problem?

Query regarding:
Inventions X – Autotool Installation. Increased healing percent from 1% to 5%. * Decreased interval from 10s to 3s.

What’s with the asterisk? Is there a footnote that wasn’t included?

Further question: Is there a possibility that Power scaling is going to be implemented on Turrets? The tooltips say they scale, but their function doesn’t bear it out, which makes me curious as to whether it’s a bug or an easter-egg style preview.

Anything else I’d have to say wouldn’t be on-topic, but if there’s any idea of an ETA on Turret bugfixes, it’d be nice to hear it – it’s nice to see them getting buffed, but it’d be nicer to have them work properly (and maybe have the kinks in the targeting system worked out, as they’ll currently just attack the last thing damaged, such as the last enemy affected by an AoE, bounce, or pierce attack, rather than anything that could really be called an intended target).

First of all, thanks for doing this, I don’t think you’ve ever asked for feedback BEFORE a balance patch before and I think it’s a great step forwards!

Very much like the elementalist, ranger, and mesmer changes. Necro changes are a little confusing though. You focus on little things while ignoring the single overriding issue: Dhuumfire. I think when even people on the necro forums are asking for this to be changed then you have to take notice, and there’s generally a great deal of consensus on a simple and easy way this could be balanced. Either:
a. remove Dhuumfire, or make it do some other condition than burning (torment would be nice, and because it’s stackable you can adjust its balance very easily by being able to play with both duration and intensity), or
b. restore Terror to its pre-nerfed status (when you decreased its damage by 17%) and move it to Grandmaster, so that you can’t get both Dhuumfire, Terror,and Master of Terror. It’s the combination of these three that really hurts.

Aza.2105:

JonPeters.5630:

Guardian:
Tanky and supportive guardians are in a strong position in many gametypes. We do feel that damage guardians are not as powerful as they could be. While we don’t want guardians to be as strong offensively as some of the other classes (given their powerful defensive abilities) we opened up more offensive guardian builds.

• Zeal V – Shattered Aegis. Damage instead of Burning.
• Zeal VII – Zealous Blade. This trait now scales with Healing power (2%.)
• Zeal XII – Kindled Zeal. Increased conversion from 10% to 13%.
• Radiance V – Searing Flames. Reduced cooldown from 20s to 10s.
• Radiance X – Powerful blades. Increased damage from 5% to 10%.
• Valor V – Retributive Armor. Increased conversion rate from 5% to 7%.
• Honor VI – Pure of Heart. Increased scaling with Healing power from 25% to 40%.
• Virtues VIII – Supreme Justice. Number of attacks going from 4 to 3.
• Symbol of Swiftness: This skill now applies 4 seconds of swiftness per pulse, rather than 8 seconds if you have no swiftness and 1 second if you have swiftness.

Mr. Peters,

Very positive changes. Though if you want my opinion, regardless of the kindled zeal change it still won’t be used. Its not that condition damage isn’t good rather guardian only has access to one condition: Burning. So investing in condition damage feels like a waste of investment.

Some possible changes would be: Power is converted to Vitality, Power is converted to healing power, Power is converted to toughness.

Searing Flames = Good change
Powerful Blades = Good change
Zealous’s Blade = Good change

The rest of the changes don’t seem like it will change guardian too much to be noticeable. I don’t want to go off subject to much, but it would of been great if spirit weapons were made viable. The traits are split through out 3 different trait lines, the spirit weapons themselves are lackluster aside from shield.

I always felt if they were made viable then guardian would have more damage options while wielding the hammer and sword. Even before the change that made them no longer invulnerable they sucked, after the change they were even worse.

Looking at the awesome art of guardian wielding spirit weapons makes me sad, because the class never really uses them due to how they are implemented.

I totaly agree with this. Right now im playing with a (spvp) burning/dps build, with 1200 condi damage. I love the burn damage , but you can just feel the missing 2nd damaging condition like bleed or poison. I understand Shattered Aegis is being turned into normal damage, even tho i liked the 3 second burn(1900 damage) in my current burn build.

If we had acces to even 1 bleed/poison condi in our traits, it would make dps gaurds much more viable. Maby you could do this by changing the trait:

Symbolic Exposure, symbols apply vulnerability to apply bleed/poison or
Blind exposure, inflicting blindless aplies vulnerability into again bleed/poison or
A fire inside, spirit weapons cause burning into bleed/poison.

If you do plan on keeping burn the only condi as a guard, buffing Kinded zeal from 10 to 13% is to low to be noticeable imo. With 3% giving extra 80-90 condi damage, thats a 15-20 extra dps per tick. which is nothing. It Is a nice trait if you change it from grandmaster to Zeal, so you can spend the extra 10 trait points into radiance to boost up the condi damage a bit more.

Beside these 2/3 changes, the rest is an ok buff to some of the dps builds, but to small to be effective in tpvp. After hearing from others how the rest of the classes are only getting nerfed, im glad you decided to buff the guardian dps after a long time:)

Velron.3729:

I really feel like the Warrior nerfs are being handled incorrectly.

Hammer is slow and telegraphed, it should be devastating if you land it…and good players already do a really good job of making it quite a challenging to pull off well.

The problem with Warrior right now is that the buffs to passive regen and sustain, mostly the healing signet buff has made it really easy to survive even for those who aren’t very good. The nerfs should have been there, not HUGE damage nerfs to the hammer.

I can already see what will happen. The complaints will continue, because the sustain from the signet is the problem not the damage, and then the signet will get nerfed too and we will be left with a shoddy hammer and no strong sustain regen option anymore.

Do it right, leave the damage but fix the passive healing first.

That’s correct .Mace will be dead .Literally .Hammer will be a bad dps choice even for zerker gear and bad bunker players will still cry against regen.* shakes head *