Guild Wars 2

I only look into my top 4 professions, Warrior, Ranger, Engineer and Mesmer.

Now i know its not final, but I do hope this goes through. I’m ok with most of these changes, and I’m looking intensely on ranger changes specifically, because… well, we all should know what goes in the ranger subforums anyhow

With these changes, IF it gets through, id actually be quite interested in spirit builds now.

And seriously, I like Warrior healing signet as it is.

The mark of blood change is another 33% nerf to our damage with staff. Just like it was a nerf with scepter. I don’t understand their reasoning for these nerfs. Its like they want to kill the builds that dont utilize fear or dhuumfire for condi damage. And because of these nerfs that dont favor builds who dont run those traits, it actually emphasizes and supports going for those traits in order to remain viable.

Things they could’ve done to fix it. Fix fear damage scaling. Or make dhuumfire proc poison or torment. And lower torment stacks. And if you nerf the damage with weakening shroud procs or mark of blood at least give us sustain like all necros want.

Currently the sustain is still bad as we require being near things in order to gain life force. IE: I need to hit you with marks or my attacks in order to gain life force. A smart player can already just engage disengage until you run out of life force and then kill you as you cant build the life force without somthing to hit.

People still get away from necros plenty easy if you wanted us to be hard to get away from. And siphons don’t work in shroud which is a major downside. Healing still doesnt work while in shroud either. And scaling for siphons is a joke.

The strongest builds currently are still going to be dhuumfire even after the nerf and fearmancers. And builds that don’t use those are basically nerfed harder than those specific builds.

Elementalist – Diamond skin change. WITH REGARD TO TPVP

Incredibly happy with this change! As a defensive ele there has never been enough reason to drop 30 points into the earth line. Now there will be some real distinction between Earth – Water – Arcane Bunkers and who favours which line.

Despite concerns, I feel that raw condi classes WILL be able to break through the trait considering the elementalists minimum base vitality and armour stats. 10% of an eles health can be burned through /very/ easily.

This is exactly the kind of incentive we needed to try a new line.

Only going to comment on thief since that’s essentially all I play at this point.

In general I like the direction you’re going with the initiative changes. I think it’ll be healthier for the game. At the same time I don’t like several of the individual changes.

Crit Strikes 15, Opportunist: I really dislike this change. High cooldown, high chance procs don’t scale in any meaningful way – you get nearly full power with low crit, slow attacks as with high crit, fast attacks. As a result those kind of procs encourage burst-centered builds that just want their one proc to consistently fire during the burst. This isn’t a burst trait, however; it’s a sustain trait – and one that occupies a space in the tree that is maximized by further encouraging your investment in crit.

You would be much better served by lowering the proc chance on this and keeping it at a low cooldown (or even eliminating the cooldown and reducing the proc chance further) than making it an obtuse ‘gain 1 initiative every 6 seconds’ trait.

Kleptomaniac and Signet Use: unlike passive initiative gain traits, these are active. This gives them strategic value from controlling when you gain the initiative, as well as add tension since that initiative burst is tied to other effects you may or may not want. Reducing the initiative returned from these traits greatly reduces their strategic impact – their respective skills would no longer be useful to fire off to gain some clutch initiative. Nerfing these to slightly increase base initiative regeneration is probably not a good trade-off for combat depth.

Pistol Whip, Deadly Arts VI, Shadow Arts V, the Vigor changes: these are all really super solid. Shadow Arts V was adding a lot of power to an unhealthy edge case, and dialing that back should allow a bit more power in healthier places. Vigor changes hack at some extraneous power without gameplay. Deadly Arts VI now looks like a model thief proc template (though it will not see much use because Deadly Arts continues to be rather weak on the whole).

I’m a bit on the fence about Shadow Return – in the long run I think it’s going to be healthier for it not to blink you out of danger while stunned, but between this as the nerfs last patch sword is getting gutted and is going to need some love sooner rather than later.

Lotus.9746:

Arcane V – Elemental Attunement. Moved to Master tier.
Arcane VI – Renewing Stamina. Moved to Master tier.

…………Are you kidding me.

Don’t complain, ele needed a nerf, pre-emptively! Just put away your daggers for now: they aren’t going to be viable.

Necromancer sustain is currently terrible because the class cannot heal in Death Shroud.

Until this changes, there is no sustain only kill or be killed, with the addition drawback that every other class has access to out of combat mobility to get out of combat and reset cooldowns which the necromancer doesn’t have.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

DiogoSilva.7089:

The change to arcana is lovely, and it’ll open up a lot of new possibilities, but I worry about some issues that might cripple those possibilities. Here’s a few comments:

3.1. Elementalists rely too much on Elemental Attunement or Renewing Stamina to survive. Although it might be worth trying the scepter’s higher endurance trait now that it is at adept, I think the earth traitline should have a… worthy substitute for elemental attunement’s protection. Maybe it could have a stun breaker trait? Rock Solid could get it, but I fear it could make it too strong. Maybe as a grandmaster trait, and moving Written in Stone down a tier.

The changes we’ve done to Ele are actually going to drastically increase the amount of build diversity. The arcane recharge change really does add the flow the Elementalist needed when not spending points in Arcane. This will now allow players to stray away from spending points in the Arcane line. Ele’s will now experience faster attunement swapping as well because they will be down to 1.5s globals when they have zero points spent in Arcane and 1.2s globals with 30 points.

This makes:
13 second recharge on 0 points Arcane
12 second recharge with 10 points Arcane
11 second recharge with 20 points Arcane
10 second recharge with 30 points Arcane

Dagger ele’s will now have new specs through Tempest Defense, Elemental Shielding, and Shared Auras much more appealing, as well as being able to go up the Fire and Earth trees.

Scepter ele’s will be able to play some forms of condition builds, burst builds with more sustain, and even bunker builds.

Staff ele’s will now be able to get blasting staff from tier one and now be capable of going for a trait such as Diamond Skin, or even Fresh air or high up in the Fire line.

Here are some examples of specs I’ve been messing around with:
0/30/10/30/0 (Tempest Defense, Elemental Shielding, Shared Auras with Cantrips and Dagger/Dagger)
0/0/30/10/30 (Diamond Skin bunker build)
0/30/30/0/10 (Tempest Defense, Diamond Skin, Double Arcane with recharge burst spec)
20/20/0/10/20 (Dps staff build based around sustain from Burning Fire)
0/10/0/30/30 (Generic D/D Arcane build)
0/20/0/20/30 (Generic S/D Burst build)
0/30/0/20/20 (Fresh air build)
Many more..

We thank everyone for their feedback. We are keeping a VERY CLOSE eye on this thread and we will constantly be chatting internally until this release drops for potential things to change.

Why would Anyone want to go 0/20/0/20/30 for a S/D Burst build. Don’t just post things with out playing the class please. Your just pen pushing and have no idea how the changes will impact us for the bad. You don’t even go 30 fire at all.

DanteZero.9736:

vangedas.7358:

Diamond Skin

- this can be absurdly broken. Please, please, do not go with this. Not only pure passive immunity to conditions is very powerful, cheesy and and cannot be counter-played, but this new trait would literally kill specs like trap ranger, not to mention it would hurt necromancers.
Once again, do not go with this trait, it would be a huge mistake.

You do realize we eles have 10.5k base health and have the lowest armor, right? Also, you have to be over 90% health for it to take effect. With such a low base health, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem for other classes.

You don’t understand. Base hp doesn’t really have to do anything with what I’ve said. And if this trait goes through, you’ll see.

Water V – Cleansing Wave. Moved to Master tier.
Arcane V – Elemental Attunement. Moved to Master tier.
Arcane VI – Renewing Stamina. Moved to Master tier.

plz not!
This are the assurance for most Ele

Dear balance team, you need to play a guardian before balance it.

Thanks.

Elementalist I like these changes very much so. Question for Windborne Dagger.
-Will you allow the speed boost to work out of combat just like warriors does?
I feel that it will allow some of the d/d ele’s mobility back while not buffing say a D/F build or S/D build.
The d/d ele will not have to rely on signet of air for mobility and open up more diversity in utility bar.

Firstly, vetting future changes like this IMO is much better than just dropping a set of already-determined changes on patch day.

Bsgapollo.5364:

• 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.

• Earth VII: I would honestly put this into the adept trait tier. Elementalist has very little ways to deal condition damage, for it to work they have to stack into toughness for it to be effective, meaning they would lack a lot into vitality and other departments. There are a lot of better traits to take into earth and personally I would never take that trait, not even if it was in the adept trait line.

The above is IMO pretty spot on.

Arcane V/VI
Reducing arcane dependence vis a vis attunement CD is very needed, but you can’t move both Arcane V and VI to master tier because most (PVP-oriented) Eles will then once again be forced to spec 20 Arcane because they are such important PVP traits. Once you have 20 Arcane, you might as well spec 30 for EA and we’re back where we started. Move one but not the other.

Fire III – Ember’s Might
“The effect of this trait has been changed to Burns you apply last longer. 25%”
Not a great change IMO because Ele can already maintain close to 100% burning uptime solely with signet of fire with +duration%. What kills condi Ele is lack of frequency of application, not condi length per se, therefore a better change IMO would be:
“Reduces the CD of all skills that apply burning by 25%”

Earth XI – Diamond Skin
This trait has been redesigned. Conditions cannot be applied to you when your health is above the threshold. 90%
IMO not great, Eles spend too much time below 90% for this to be worth considering. IMO rethink entirely. eg:
Attuning to earth grants a buff that reflects the next condition. Recharges earth attunement when afflicted by a damaging condition when not in earth attunement. 6sec CD.

In regards to the Ranger Trait Moment of Clarity and Skirmishing in general.

Skirmishing XII – Moment of Clarity. Stun Duration increased from 50% to 100%.

I still think that Moment of Clarity is a pretty junky trait. All in all, rangers have exactly two stuns – greatsword 5 and short bow 5 (both of which require flanking). There’s no real incentive to get it if you plan on using a power build because you won’t really be using those weapons.

The rest of the skirmishing major traits don’t really do much for you in regards to a power build so there isn’t much incentive to push past 25 points for the extra 10% flanking damage and just put your points somewhere else.

-Shadow Return on Sword. Renamed to Infiltrator’s return. Added a 1/4s cast time.

I dont get this nerf at all. This will cause sword to be pretty much useless. An initiative cost for both the initial strike and return would still nerf it, but not make it irrelevant.

nekretaal.6485:

Necromancer sustain is currently terrible because the class cannot heal in Death Shroud.

Until this changes, there is no sustain only kill or be killed, with the addition drawback that every other class has access to out of combat mobility to get out of combat and reset cooldowns which the necromancer doesn’t have.

I would have to second this. I play a very defensive, sustained focused Necro build, and far too often more glass cannon type builds just leave combat after their opening salvo and reset the fight. Meanwhile I’ve blown my cooldowns/life force and they effectively whittle down the build that should by all reasonable account be one of the premier whittlers in the game.

So you want to take away some of the need for eles to go into arcane and you actually do exactly the opposite by moving multiple mandatory traits up in tier you force people to invest even more and even more trait points in water and arcane. Also people who go high in arcane go for “evasive arcane” NOT for the attunement cooldown.
You basically doom us to set ourself in stone with 30 water 30 arcane and 10 whatever, the attunement recharge won’t matter and diamond skin genuinely made me laugh. I wish good luck to everyone who decides to test spending 30 trait points and trying to stay over 90% health in PvP often enough for it to be a trait that justifies the investment and sacrifice of everything else.
I am not even joking when I say this I really don’t know how you guys play ele if you play it at all.

I dont like half of the thief changes but luckily i stopped playing him in september. The changes to thieves kind of ruin evasion and stealth builds on a class that is already lacking build diversity and survivability. The thief class is already at a low point.

Warrior hammer changes were probably needed, although i dont agree with nerfing the direct damage of the hammer skills. The changes to the trait lines probably had to happen like i said, it and maybe even reducing earthshaking dmg, but dont reduce the damage of #4. The hammer is already slow.

Also will you guys please test removing the root of the second GS warrior skill? It makes it kind of hard to hit anything with half a brain in wvw and mobs in dungeons can simiply move out of range easily.

Wish Rangers got even more changes but the ones they got are cool. Hopefully you can increase the base damage of greatsword autoattack or skills in general.

Also Ranger pets still need hp increase in wvw and the auto for sword needs to be looked at. Power builds still arent very viable in pvp on rangers as they are on other classes. Also whats your stance on the shortbow getting it ranged reverted back to 1200?

I have to say some nice changes are coming and I thank you for them.

However, this is going to hit PvE hammer builds really hard. I get that you want to cool them down for WvW but we already have to deal with defiance in PvE making them less then most of the other weapons for choice as it is. This is very very upsetting. Hammers either need to be split of PvE and WvW or they need a CC buff if you are going to reduce their damage this much. Something , anything. . . They are already only half effective when dealing with Champs in dungeons and now i will feel dumb bringing my hammer anywhere at all. Especially in Arah where most of the enemies have permanent stability. I’m realllly hoping there is some room to negotiate something on this one for the sake of those who love to play hammer (enough to craft Mjolnir) and rarely even go into WvW. Major sadface otherwise.

As a necromancer these changes wont effect me too much. The loss of a bleed on SoS is a bit of a bummer. But no great loss in the grand scheme.

Thieves however are gonna get hit hard. Maybe some will learn to play the game instead of relying on HS and BS to infinistealth/cleanse/reset-the-fight-when-losing combo. Ive personally never had too much trouble with thieves, this change is just going to allow me to catch and kill you little rats alot quicker. Lols.

Rktlchr.8495:

I would like to see a solution for a passive 25% speed buff or another way to use swiftness for Mesmers. Currently we have to use either a passive signet that has a random chance to boon swiftness or we have to carry a focus. I find myself a lot of times missing out on sentry/tower caps in WvW or killing enemies when champ farming because the zerg breaks away from me with speed boosts that I don’t have. Even worst is underwater where we don’t get our focus. We have blink but a bunch of other classes have some kind of move that moves them forward faster in addition to swiftness.

Or why is the focus swiftness not “stackable” (ex: cannot put down next curtain until swiftness buff’s over otherwise I’ll we wasting time/the skill. Can’t stack it with other classes swiftness either =/) Boggles the mind.

Thief comments:

Acrobatics XI – Hard to catch. Moved to Master Tier.

I think this should have a 60 second cooldown.

Reason: Moved to Master tier and share the same cooldown as all other professions.

For ele’s I have tried a bunch of builds but I can’t get away from Evasive Arcane. If I don’t have that then I need 30 in water which most of the time is just the Cantrips combo. I did try going earth but it just didn’t beat Evasive Arcane. I wish that could go to Masters but its to powerful.

Honestly not sure this will change my build I’m really hoping it will. Because there is no good stun breakers and you can’t get a lot of damage out without giving up a lot of your healing. (high hopes for Diamond Skin)

I’m running 0/20/0/20/30 right now. I’m pushing the 20 in air just for the crit.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Berullos.6928:

The mark of blood change is another 33% nerf to our damage with staff. Just like it was a nerf with scepter. I don’t understand their reasoning for these nerfs. Its like they want to kill the builds that dont utilize fear or dhuumfire for condi damage. And because of these nerfs that dont favor builds who dont run those traits, it actually emphasizes and supports going for those traits in order to remain viable.

Things they could’ve done to fix it. Fix fear damage scaling. Or make dhuumfire proc poison or torment. And lower torment stacks. And if you nerf the damage with weakening shroud procs or mark of blood at least give us sustain like all necros want.

Currently the sustain is still bad as we require being near things in order to gain life force. IE: I need to hit you with marks or my attacks in order to gain life force. A smart player can already just engage disengage until you run out of life force and then kill you as you cant build the life force without somthing to hit.

People still get away from necros plenty easy if you wanted us to be hard to get away from. And siphons don’t work in shroud which is a major downside. Healing still doesnt work while in shroud either. And scaling for siphons is a joke.

The strongest builds currently are still going to be dhuumfire even after the nerf and fearmancers. And builds that don’t use those are basically nerfed harder than those specific builds.

Thanks for the feedback. A lot of times, when running standard Necro condie builds, the bleeds actually do a large portion of your damage if they are allowed to stack on a target. Burning is nice, and Torment can be decent, and of course Poison brings down opposing heals. But the Bleeds are where a large amount of the sustained damage comes from.

We want to bring down that raw dmg but still allow the Necro the ability to “shut down” targets. Notice we’re not bringing down Chills much, or Vulns, or Blinds. We don’t mind the Necro shutting targets down, we just don’t want them also doing a ton of condition damage on top if it.

For Dhumfire and Terror: we have plans on reworks for those down the road, but they won’t make it in for this patch. We have plans for those, but they’re a little further down the “balance” road.

Thanks for the feedback!

While I understand and know that bleeds cause the majority of the damage. Bleeds are only one condi so the whole stack gets cleansed if you have any passive condi cleanse which most builds nowadays have. Its the condi burst that gets kills far easier than it is by slowly wearing people down by condis. And most people when they start getting low and have a good stack of condis they just run. And necros dont have the burst nor the mobility to catch up. THey just reset and try again.

Bleeds are easy to see and counter and keep track of. The thing that kills people are poison due to the healing reductions and the bursts of condi.

I still think it is nerfing other builds that dont use those traits much greater than it nerfs the dhuumfire/fear traits.

Suggestions in the necro forum is move fear into the grandmaster line and swap with the weakness on crit trait. This would also instantly destroy the dhuumfire/fearmancer build as you could not get both AND the fear duration trait.

If arenanet could please answer this.

How do you expect thiefs to clear the several conditions on them with out continuously using stealth or infiltrators?

Sure signet of agility, and shadow step clear them but only work every 45 seconds… The number if times I’ve died from burning or simple conditions because I didn’t stealth makes me lol

Currently some mesmer skills dont really make sense with their placement. One thing I’d really like to see get looked at is Cleansing Conflagration (IX Master trait in the Domination Line). Typically torch is used in condition builds, and to have to invest 20 points in power to access it is kind of silly (and yes I’m aware that also increases condition duration on that line). Usually for a viable condition build mesmers would invest heavily in Chaos, and dueling for survivability but then we either have no choice but to invest in condition duration rather than dmg if we want to use the torch (which is the only offhand weapon that applies conditions directly – I don’t consider iDuelist bleed stacks as a direct application of condition) or we have to abandon the torch and use the pistol (which isn’t great fighting 1 v X) because the focus (lol) and off-hand sword are typically for power builds and wont have much effect in a full condition build. If maybe it could be moved down in to adept slot that’d be a lot easier for us to access or move it in to the inspiration line where I think it would fit best since it does cleanse conditions and helps survivability.

The other strange one is 25 in Dueling which gives the traits illusions (which should be changed to clones btw since it doesnt work with phantasms unless that’s been fixed and I’m unaware of it) cause confusion when they’re killed. It’s extremely unlikely to have a condition build (since base confusion dmg is useless) that invests 25 in dueling. It doesn’t make sense. Perhaps it can be moved somewhere closer, or in an entire different trait line and you can put something that would be useful or sensible to someone putting 25 points in precision and crit dmg because it seems like a waste to have it there.

That’s my two cents

As for the Warrior Changes:

I believe you went overboard with the simultaneous changes to both Unsuspecting foe AND Hammer base damage.
It should be one or the other, not both.

Also, you’re assuming all hammer warriors will be keeping unsuspecting foe as the reasoning for the Hammer base damage nerf.
Well…what if people don’t keep unsuspecting foe? Then the nerf will prove to be too much.
Or are you trying to pigeon-hole all hammer warriors into picking unsuspecting foe, just to compensate for the Hammer nerf?

All in all, I think that the Hammer damage without any buffs is quite low if you compare its attack speed, animations, recharge time and damage.
Not everyone plays with unsuspecting foe but you seem to think they do.

If you believe that trait to be the real culprit, then nerf the trait, not the hammer damage.

I’m finding the explanations/intentions for each class and the steps taken to implement them largely brilliant. THIS is the pass I had hoped to see mid-October before the first WvW season.

((Thumbs up))

As an elementalist, I am NOT happy with these changes. The direction you guys are trying to go with removing dependency on arcana is absolutely great, but by moving around some of the water and arcane traits my build is going to be completely destroyed. Allow me to explain:

On my ele, I run 0/20/0/20/30 build with S/D. For my water traits, I use both aquamancers alacrity and cleansing wave for my two trait choices. These are both currently adept traits. IF the changes happen…both would become master traits. Meaning I can no longer use both with my current build. I understand wanting to avoid power creep…and I agree cleaning wave may be too strong as an adept trait. But moving aquamancers alacrity to master also is a huge nerf as I always run both these traits in all my builds…pvp, wvw, and even pve. I don’t think having 20% reduced CD on water weapon skills is really that OP, is it? I doubt an ele who goes for the new fire/earth traits would even want aquamancers alacrity anyways because it is only really useful with some healing power.

Same situation with the arcana traits….I use both elemental attunement (as all eles need this trait) and renewing stamina (renewing stamina is an adept trait but I use it in my master slot). Apparently the plan is to move both of these adept traits to master. This, along with the water changes, is a BIG BIG nerf for me. Right now, they are both adept traits. I see no reason to move both to master….move either one or the other. I would say have renewing stamina be the master trait and elemental attunement be the adept….that way people can’t just get the quick vigor trait which is probably why the devs are proposing these changes anyways.

I was happy about some of the ele changes until I thought about it…my build is going to be completely ruined Fire and earth won’t be worth changing the build and playstyle that I love. Seriously…Please don’t fix what isn’t broken I realize you are worried about power creep….but what is going to happen is no one is going to trait for earth or fire. And I will have my favorite build nerfed.

Nature Magic IX – Two Handed Training. Added the following functionality to this trait. Greatsword and Spear attacks have a chance to grant Fury on hit. 50% chance. 3s Fury. 10s cooldown.
Still the only real buff for ranger in this patch. and as a WvW player i still wont play again with my lvl 270+ ranger with kudzu :/

• Elementalists becoming less dependant on arcane HUGE ++++++++++++
• Blasting Staff going to adept ++++++
• Fire traitline redo ++++
• Earth traitline redo +
• Water traitline redo – Potentially problematic
• Arcane traitline redo – Good and bad

I get the feeling that the lack of useful defensive skills in arcane and water will become a big problem for hybrid and bunker builds.

The changes are good from a pure condition/damage build perspective.

Elemental Attunement and Renewing Stamina should not both be moved up the
latter. Water has only Soothing Disruption in adept that is worth taking as a realistic hybid/bunker.

So while you open up for offensive possibilites, you close down quite a few defensive ones.

And flamewall needs a total makeover, please.

P.S. Survivability will drastically drop and it isn’t good currently.

Domination XII – Confounding Suggestions. Changed to increase daze duration by 25%.
— Honestly, not the best improvement. Daze duration by 25% doesn’t justify keeping this in grand master level trait. Better option would be to have a 100% stun chance with 0.5 sec duration. Right now the increase in 25% daze duration would ensure no one even bothers using this trait.

Chaos traitline:
Much needed improvements. The problem is in the master tier. We now have 3 out of 4 amazing traits in the master tier. However the Adept tier isn’t very useful at all. Two traits in this tier are down state related, two illusion related which are quiet weak traits when compared to adept tier in other lines. It would be great if we can get a master tier trait switched out to this one. Preferably the staff training one.

Torch: This is also another concern that hasn’t been addressed. Torch trait is in domination IX but that trait line is for power usage. It would be great if torch was changed to chaos adept line and we can make proper usage of that trait.

We also have boon duration with chaos traitline while we have condi duration with power traitline. If these were switched around, it would greatly compliment the trait line more.

Inspiration traitline: Still very uninspiring.
The problem with this traitline is that the two shatter related are both in grandmaster and only makes this traitline half useful. If one of the shatter grand master trait was switched out with the mantra master trait, that would allow players to choose this traitline when going in shatter build.

hooma.9642:

JonPeters.5630:

….

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

without any build in mind i see this making problems when elementist engages condition bunkers and has at least some sort of selfheal. means this alone kills all pure conditions bunker builds. what isnt a bad thing imho. at least u need to use carrion amulett or someone to help bring him down to < 90%..

but i dont want to know how that goes for bunker eles. with this u can only engage them via raw dmg.

However our health pool is already so very low that you need to do very little damage to get below the threshold. 2k MAX. Not only that but it is a grandmaster trait in a weird tree.

bluberblasen.9684:

Water V – Cleansing Wave. Moved to Master tier.
Arcane V – Elemental Attunement. Moved to Master tier.
Arcane VI – Renewing Stamina. Moved to Master tier.

plz not!
This are the assurance for most Ele

And Eles can still have them… IF they are willing to pay an opportunity cost commiserate with the proven impact of these traits.

Scepter ele’s will be able to play some forms of condition builds, burst builds with more sustain, and even bunker builds.

We are LOSING sustain with a lot of our water and arcane adept traits getting moved to master tier…what are you smoking? Elemental attunement and renewing stamina both being master is bad…same with aquamancer alacrity and cleansing wave both being moved to master. ALL four of those traits are currently adept traits….they shouldn’t all be moved to master. Ridiculous… there has yet to be a patch without major elementalist nerfs.

Bsgapollo.5364:

• 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.

• Earth VII: I would honestly put this into the adept trait tier. Elementalist has very little ways to deal condition damage, for it to work they have to stack into toughness for it to be effective, meaning they would lack a lot into vitality and other departments. There are a lot of better traits to take into earth and personaly I would never take that trait, not even if it was in the adept trait line.

Pretty much everything this man said. Then again, everyone agrees that eles need a buff or more build diversity. How is destroying the current working builds going to help?!? If the changes are released the way they were published it is a flat out nerf to elementalists, how is that supposed to bring eles back to competitive level?

I would like to add that i don’t like the change to Diamond Skin. Making condition remove less mandatory by making a class immune to conditions is a very, very bad idea. In my opinion having any sort of invincibility against entire builds or playstyles does not add to the gameplay in any way.

Edit: In addition to that, this will force players to invest MORE points into arcana and water to get actually even less than they had before. And the changes to the other traitlines are not going to give elementalists enough damage or other support to compensate for the changes (excluding the dimand skin change which should never, ever released to the public because its either completely OP or completely meaningless, depending on your enemy)

Warrior comment:

I’m surprised to not see any change to Healing Signet. It’s an incredible amount of self-healing at the moment and requires a lot of damage to overcome the self-healing.

The Signet needs some toning down and possibly needs a change to the healing coefficient as well.

Earthshaker: The problem wasn’t the damage. The problem stems from the massive stun, and an AoE one at that. Two warriors dropping Earthshakers == 4 seconds of AoE stun, which is insane. (and I’m speaking from experience on this!).

The change to Symbol of Swiftness concerns me. Does that mean a guardian will have to stop and stand still in the circle for several seconds in order to build up swiftness? That seems counterproductive. The way it’s used now is to cast it ahead of the group, so folks run through it. Will they now be expected to stand there and wait? This would see little use.

I like most of the changes, particularly the removal of the cheesy permastealth build (I main a thief, and I didn’t like feeling pressured into a cheesy spec). I love the changes to elementalist. I might pull the dustcovers off mine, now that we can spec something other than 30 Arcane.

As per thief changes:

I don’t believe the nerf to ini gain on signet use and klepto was called for. A lot of the more experienced thieves use these 2 traits for instant initiative gain for those clutch times when you just need a few more initiative to pull something off. They are both on 20+ sec CDs even when traited for, which means with both traits you can actively get 5 ini every 24s or so. I don’t really see how that’s a problem? 5 ini isn’t even enough to use infiltrator’s arrow once…

I won’t push too hard since you guys are claiming that the new increase ini regen rate would balance that out, but gaining 1 ini from using a signet is pretty horrible. Nothing in a thief’s weapon skills requires less than 3 ini to use besides shadow return and larcenous strike…most require 3-5 initiative. To gain 1 ini makes clutch plays pretty unlikely because from experience, most often than not, I am missing 2-3 initiative before I can do something useful.

Just food for thought…I’ll wait for the patch to judge. The other changes are solid!

Please make the first grenade kit skill for Engineers a proper auto-attack and remove the manual targeting.

Eles are reliant enough on boons that moving arcane V to master actually forces us to dump an additional 10 points in arcane, rather than freeing us up to devote points elsewhere. I mean, I still plan on having 30, just saying that aspect seems backwards.

Also you’re really not leaving a whole lot of options for the adept arcane trait we’re going to be forced to pick after taking the mandatory 20, since you’re also moving up 2 of the other non-grandmaster arcane traits (VI and III) that weren’t complete garbage for a non-staff ele. Staff eles will pick blasting staff still so there’s no change to them, everyone else basically has to pick between their mediocre weapon-specific trait or final shielding.

Also not a big fan of piling every good ele trait into master or grandmaster tier in general. We still have to pick an adept trait. You should move arcane VI OR arcane V, and water I OR water V, so someone who dumps 20 points into the line can still use both instead of needing to pick a bad adept trait because there are no good ones left. Otherwise this feels like you’re still nerfing the only 2-3 viable ele builds to try to force us to use your still-not-as-good alternatives.

tl;dr: I know you’re obsessed with forcing eles into more build diversity, but nerfing arcane and water constantly isn’t going to make us switch to other builds, you need to make the other trait lines not suck. Which involves more than throwing one decent grandmaster trait and a bunch of crap into them. Fire especially needs a complete overhaul. Even a nerfed (again) bunker ele is still going to be vastly superior to everything else.

iriyabran.6218:

So you want to take away some of the need for eles to go into arcane and you actually do exactly the opposite by moving multiple mandatory traits up in tier you force people to invest even more and even more trait points in water and arcane. Also people who go high in arcane go for “evasive arcane” NOT for the attunement cooldown.
You basically doom us to set ourself in stone with 30 water 30 arcane and 10 whatever, the attunement recharge won’t matter and diamond skin genuinely made me laugh. I wish good luck to everyone who decides to test spending 30 trait points and trying to stay over 90% health in PvP often enough for it to be a trait that justifies the investment and sacrifice of everything else.
I am not even joking when I say this I really don’t know how you guys play ele if you play it at all.

Quoted for kitten truth…I hope anet reconsiders some of these changes to arcane and water to avoid “power creep” when the “power” we are getting is not even worth going for. So basically we end up with unneeded nerfs. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Zero Day.2594:

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).

Shhh I’m already running those builds.

While I appreciate the effort here, I think Diamond skin has some potential, and I think that the balance patch will be great for eles who trait into fire and air, the fact remains that I feel that support eles are shoe-horned into the traditional 0/0/10/30/30 cantrips build. This patch buffs the elemental attunement rate which is great! Being attunement locked is never fun! But in no other way touches support staff cantrips. Maybe the devs feel that the cantrips build is a perfect build that doesn’t need to be touched at all. However, it is frustrating to try to play a dedicated elementalist in WvW and really only have one meta build available to you in group settings (this is not addressing roaming eles, which have plenty of awesome builds at their disposal and will have even more after the patch). This could also be reinforcing the ideal that big group-style play is not encouraged in WvW; however, while it remains the norm, so will the cantrips build remain the most effective. Therefore, unfortunately, this patch will do very little for me except on the rare occasion I step into PvE to dungeon run.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Sepreh.5924:

Hey Jon, just wanted to echo everyone who has already said thank you for the preview and for explaining the reasoning behind some of the changes. Is much appreciated by many of us and a great step towards collaboration

No prob, that’s why we wrote those out for you guys.

We’ll try to do more of that going forward!

I hope it’s all expected GvG? =)

Lévis.5489:

Ranger sword 1 still rooting?
Why should i get 300 points in precision and 30% more critical damage if i want to use traps?

^ Agreed with this.

I’m glad to see the damage buffs to longbow though since you sacrifice so much by being long range in GW2 (all the boons your melee friends cast don’t affect you when you’re more than 600 range away). From a PvE standpoint, I’m still not sure if the damage boost is enough.

However, the 1h rooting on the main attack is still the main reason I haven’t touched my ranger in…probably close to over 6 months now? Not sure. It’s been a long time. =/

I still follow up on Ranger news/builds/etc, but I every time I try to play my ranger, it doesn’t last long.

Here’s probably what I think the #1 problem is with ranger: The skill cap for something like a spirit ranger is very low, whereas playing a sword/X ranger in PvE has a very high, unforgiving skill floor because of the root effect on sword. The damage and utility of running a 1h sword build in PvE is also so far ahead of bow builds, this means that many rangers must either submit to the wonky sword mechanics or get trash-talked for using a bow.

Phi Is Sly.1857:

Tyler Chapman.1832:

DiogoSilva.7089:

The change to arcana is lovely, and it’ll open up a lot of new possibilities, but I worry about some issues that might cripple those possibilities. Here’s a few comments:

3.1. Elementalists rely too much on Elemental Attunement or Renewing Stamina to survive. Although it might be worth trying the scepter’s higher endurance trait now that it is at adept, I think the earth traitline should have a… worthy substitute for elemental attunement’s protection. Maybe it could have a stun breaker trait? Rock Solid could get it, but I fear it could make it too strong. Maybe as a grandmaster trait, and moving Written in Stone down a tier.

The changes we’ve done to Ele are actually going to drastically increase the amount of build diversity. The arcane recharge change really does add the flow the Elementalist needed when not spending points in Arcane. This will now allow players to stray away from spending points in the Arcane line. Ele’s will now experience faster attunement swapping as well because they will be down to 1.5s globals when they have zero points spent in Arcane and 1.2s globals with 30 points.

This makes:
13 second recharge on 0 points Arcane
12 second recharge with 10 points Arcane
11 second recharge with 20 points Arcane
10 second recharge with 30 points Arcane

Dagger ele’s will now have new specs through Tempest Defense, Elemental Shielding, and Shared Auras much more appealing, as well as being able to go up the Fire and Earth trees.

Scepter ele’s will be able to play some forms of condition builds, burst builds with more sustain, and even bunker builds.

Staff ele’s will now be able to get blasting staff from tier one and now be capable of going for a trait such as Diamond Skin, or even Fresh air or high up in the Fire line.

Here are some examples of specs I’ve been messing around with:
0/30/10/30/0 (Tempest Defense, Elemental Shielding, Shared Auras with Cantrips and Dagger/Dagger)
0/0/30/10/30 (Diamond Skin bunker build)
0/30/30/0/10 (Tempest Defense, Diamond Skin, Double Arcane with recharge burst spec)
20/20/0/10/20 (Dps staff build based around sustain from Burning Fire)
0/10/0/30/30 (Generic D/D Arcane build)
0/20/0/20/30 (Generic S/D Burst build)
0/30/0/20/20 (Fresh air build)
Many more..

We thank everyone for their feedback. We are keeping a VERY CLOSE eye on this thread and we will constantly be chatting internally until this release drops for potential things to change.

Why would Anyone want to go 0/20/0/20/30 for a S/D Burst build. Don’t just post things with out playing the class please. Your just pen pushing and have no idea how the changes will impact us for the bad. You don’t even go 30 fire at all.

+9000, honestly everyone can jump on a build craft site and see what “could work”.

Do something useful for each profession and actually talk to the players in their respective forums and get honest truthful advice from them. Why do you think there are hardly any ele players anymore. You destroyed our original D/D build and now youre destroying in even more by nerfing arcana AND water line adept and master traits.

You should have 2-4 Devs per profession to be able to sit down, come up with ideas and theories and prospected changes to their profession and only their profession, then post those ideas in their respective profession forums and discuss ideas and critiques with the players of that profession. Doing things like this and having so many good ideas get lost in the clutter of every single profession talk about things they like/hate is pointless.

I would like to add that i don’t like the change to Diamond Skin. Making condition remove less mandatory by making a class immune to conditions is a very, very bad idea. In my opinion having any sort of invincibility against entire builds or playstyles does not add to the gameplay in any way.

@ Columbo

It isn’t as useful as you might think. Having low health and only being able to avoid conditions for a very short while isn’t over the top. How often are you able to stay above 90% health when in combat as an elementalist?

Let’s say you have a whopping 20k health with plenty of points in vitality and using soldier’s. You can take a meager 2k damage before you are affected. Staying above 90% health as an elementalist is ridiculously hard. The trait is nigh worthless for 30 earth imho.

piffdaddy.8014:

iriyabran.6218:

So you want to take away some of the need for eles to go into arcane and you actually do exactly the opposite by moving multiple mandatory traits up in tier you force people to invest even more and even more trait points in water and arcane. Also people who go high in arcane go for “evasive arcane” NOT for the attunement cooldown.
You basically doom us to set ourself in stone with 30 water 30 arcane and 10 whatever, the attunement recharge won’t matter and diamond skin genuinely made me laugh. I wish good luck to everyone who decides to test spending 30 trait points and trying to stay over 90% health in PvP often enough for it to be a trait that justifies the investment and sacrifice of everything else.
I am not even joking when I say this I really don’t know how you guys play ele if you play it at all.

Quoted for kitten truth…I hope anet reconsiders some of these changes to arcane and water to avoid “power creep” when the “power” we are getting is not even worth going for. So basically we end up with unneeded nerfs. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I agree with these posts very strongly. For those of us in the WvW community these changes are mind baffling.