Guild Wars 2

Elric.6971:

JonPeters.5630:

… working hard to make the right decisions ..

.. why even bother posting these notes .. It honestly feels like arenanet will not accept or hear any actual concerns and critiques and only listen to praises.

Elric,
Lay off the man, huh? It’s a job, but one everyone affected can get passionate about. I can tell you for a fact that they have listened and made changes due entirely to player customer requests and complaints. I’m such a nerd my eyes actually got watery when I read Jon’s words here. Be good you two.

Cicatrix.6149:

Why did the Ranger shortbow not get a boost to its damage as well?

I switch between longbow and shortbow for almost all world boss content and I’m already wondering why I even bother with shortbow as it is. I love how fast I can get shots off, and switching between the two on every weapon swap cooldown keeps a steady barrage of fast-paced AoE on mobs (with the use of piercing arrows). However, when glancing at the numbers and attempting …math… it appears as if longbow does the same if not more damage then the shortbow, currently, even at fairly close range. Or am I wrong about this? I’m in zerker gear and neither the shortbow or longbow are individually traited to do anything above and beyond the other.

If, according to these notes, longbow damage is increased even more (which is awesome and needed, thank you!), I just don’t see why anyone would equip a shortbow at all… for any purpose. If there is a choice between bows, how does it make sense to choose the shortbow over the longbow? If you want to equip them both and switch between them, what’s the incentive to switch between a ranged weapon that does more damage (and more/better aoe) to a ranged weapon that does less damage and less aoe?

This confuses me.

Before this change the Shortbow was a better weapon than longbow regardless if you spec’d for condition or power. Even if you consider the benefits of vulnerability from rapid fire, the shortbow outdid the longbow in damage at everything but max range, and even at max range the damage difference wasn’t that great.

Now with these changes, the shortbow is still a stronger power weapon at minimum range, but at the middle range the Longbow can compete more evenly. When factoring in the vulnerability from rapid fire, it does slightly more damage than shortbow (assuming you only flank 25% of the time for bleed). If you spec 25 in the crit line the gap widens slightly so even with more bleed uptime the longbow is a better weapon.

Now the weapons are more even and you can make a decision on which one you want more on the utility each offers and the style of their play. Now all that said, playing a power build still isn’t going to happen with the class because it lacks to major components every other power class has: burst and AE. So while the weapon is a better contender for a power build, it’s still a pitiful choice for the class as a whole.

I really really they’d split pvp, pve, wvw. I don’t know anyone that regularly s/tPVPs. I know about half a dozen that regularly WvW. Everyone else, the vast majoirty, PVE. Whenever I venture over the PVP-land and look at the available rooms most of them are empty. I guess every single random time I look I’m just looking during the non-peak hours.

The game would benefit as a whole from splitting pvp/wvw/pve no matter the resource cost.

I don’t know if this has been mentioned but shouldn’t you be talking out the raw damage off Warrior 100blades? I know from a PvP stand point its alright since no enemy will stand in a full 100blades but in PvE its certainly different and it gives other DPS classes less chance to compete against a warrior.

Do not add a 1/4s cast time to Sword 2 for Thief, just no. Wow please…no, seriously.

Is reducing Signet Use to 1 initiative gain really needed either? Why can’t it just stay 2.

Try to keep Assassins Reward in Master Tier too please. Its not that great to invest so heavily into that line just for that GM trait. Hardly even worth 20 points…

Everything else is fine… I guess. Looks like zero new updates for traps though, sure wish I could use traps and actually maintain a viable build. And I still wish Steal was a stun break.

Hello Jon!

Let me start off by saying thank you for offering this opportunity to directly interact with the community in regards to the upcoming balance patch. While most of my concerns are not with the changes listed in the preview, there are still a number of things that I’ve been wanting to express for quite some time now.

Overall I do like the changes to the Engineers, although an aspect of my build did receive a nerf (in regards to Speedy Kits and Vigor). I am, however, of the opinion that 20 skill points, two major trait slots, and the effort of constantly switching kits is an acceptable cost for on-demand vigor (especially when others can achieve perma-vigor with as little kitten skill points). Something that should be weighed in a class’ ability to do something is the cost required to do it.

The change to Modified Ammo is a minor, but welcomed change to most builds but the benefit it provides to Grenade Kit is enormous.

Grenade Kit’s balance is a complicated issue and perhaps the greatest one Engineers have at the moment. I understand that concessions are made because of the lack of auto-attack and skill involved in its use. However, it is the be-all-end-all weapon for Engineers.

Most Direct Damage: Grenades.
Most Condition Damage: Grenades.
Most Range: Grenades.
Greatest Area of Effect: Grenades (5 targets per grenade).
Best Underwater Weapon: Grenades.
Best Application of Conditions: Grenades.
Best Application of On-Hit / On-Crit Effects: Grenades.
Greatest Efficiency per Skill Points spent: Grenades.

On top of this, Grenades is unrestricted by the user’s line of sight.

No other Engineer weapon option even comes close to the versatility that Grenade Kit provides. This has everything to do with the Grenadier trait, which provides not only 1500 range, but a +50% efficiency bonus on all of its attacks (toolbelt aside).

I do not wish for this to be construed as a rally cry to nerf Grenade Kit, but there was a drastic, hasty balance change to Kits in October 2012 when weapon stats become applied to them that left other kits by the wayside (Flamethrower was the hardest hit).

Grenade Kit was the least effected by this (only receiving a damage decrease to #1) and it has only been improved ever since. The change to Modified Ammo only widens that gap. Even the change to Scope provides the greatest benefit to Grenades as it is the only weapon to have greater than 600 range on all of its attacks (Rifle only has it on #1, Pistol #1-3, Elixir Gun #1 & 2).

While the easiest solution would be to bring Grenade Kit down (which is not my intention), this doesn’t change the fact that other kits and weapons need to be brought up. Flamethrower, Elixir Gun, Tool Kit and Speargun are the ones most in need. With a lesser extent to Rifle and Pistols.

(Included in the following post due to length).

Dekk.3459:

ENGINEER
I know engineer needs some love. Isn’t a 100% condition convert every 15s a bit OP? Wait for only 15 trait points?? Needs longer ICD IMO

THIEF
Please, seriously take another look at thief damage mitigation. Low hp pool, minimal condition removal and buffs. Now the plan is to take vigor and nerf sword positioning and cond removal? I for one am not playing at some LAN party, lag can be an issue. Reconsider these changes or revamp the whole thief mechanic in 2014 cuz the number of thief players is going to drop.

Some change possibilities. Add another buff to traits that give vigor, for example, vigorous recovery vigor X sec, stability X sec; Bountiful Theft vigor X sec, aegis or protection and steal two boons. Add a steal boon or transfer condition to kleptomaniac. Add transfer condition to some other ability, really any condition removal (low hp pool might be fun for a guardian).

Other thoughts:
Deadly Arts
Throw out DA X, move DA XII Residual Venom to X and move SA XII Venomous Aura to DA XII. That or make DA X damage increase for skill 3 of dual wields.
DA VII Improvisation – Transfer condition on steal
Critical Strikes
Opportunist (dec10) with ICD of 4s
Shadow Arts
SA XII Shadow Sieve – attack after stealth transfer two conditions to target icd 10s
Acrobatics
A III Vigorous Recovery – gain vigor 4s and stability 2s
*A IV Change to Swashbuckler – Sword #2 is instant cast, or 25% speed w/ melee
A V Master Trapper – traps are instant and recharge quicker
Swap A VII Fleet of Foot with improved A V Master Trapper
A XI Hard to Catch – Turn to mist/smoke 2s & gain swiftness on disable (sorry but shadowstep skills are buggy with current terrain models and a class that uses positioning to survive… random movement is not conducive)
Trickery
T Adept Kleptomaniac – reduce ini 3 to 2, steal one boon
T VII Bountiful Theft – Grants Protection and Vigor, steal 2 boons
Basilisk Venom: gives target herpes, next 3 attacks (anyones) cannot be dodged, blocked, or evaded (at this point its only used for Rune set actives… Elite not so much)
Increase dps of sword overall by 5%, atleast give thief sword autoattack…
Increase speed of shortbow #5

This is some good stuff. Especially Hard to catch and Improvisation.

Flamethrower Kit : This kit was the hardest hit in the couple months before and after release.

• The clever, useful and visually appealing Backdraft (5m56s) was replaced by Smoke Vent, which feels like an under-performing placeholder skill.

• The knee-jerk change to the Juggernaut trait (which replaced Stability and a move speed reduction for Might stacks) is incongruous to a core design element of frequent kit swapping (or, for that matter, using anything other than Flamethrower all of the time).

• The power scaling on Flame Jet was heavily reduced in the patch of October 2012 which gave weapon stats to kits. Flamethrower with every available trait, damage boost and 25 might stacks trails behind an unmodified Grenades and Bombs. Puzzling with something that has a very long channel, only provides a burn at the last hit of that channel, has a low target cap (3 vs the usual 5), substantially less range and, thus, far greater risk. It is also shut down hard by the Retaliation boon.

• Ironically, Flamethrower is the worst applicator of Burns that an Engineer has. With only having a 1 second burn at the end of Flame Jet and a 1 second burn per second spent in the narrow, un-damaging Napalm wall. Not only does it take no less than 100% Burn Duration for there to be any benefit to Flamethrower’s ability to apply burns, but it cannot even take advantage of the 10% damage to burning enemies that was given to Flame Jet without the use of Incendiary Powder (which will now be harder for FT builds to obtain) or Incendiary Ammo toolbelt and its lengthy cooldown.
  Bomb Kit’s Fire Bomb, Pistol’s Blowtorch and any attack using Incendiary Powder does a better job of applying burns than Flamethrower Kit does by a wide margin. It is even trumped by a Guardian’s un-traited Virtue of Justice passive.

• On top of poor direct / condition damage, short range, a long channel and low number of targets on its #1 (Flame Jet has a cap of 3 vs the usual cap of 5), Flamethrower is the only kit that cannot be used underwater.

• In short, Flamethrower sacrifices more than any other weapon and has little to show for it.

Tool Kit: A great utility kit held back by the slowness of the #1 skill’s animation and light trait support. It shares the issue with Elixir Gun in that no one would ever consider building around it as a main kit.

Elixir Gun: The Skale Venom consumable hinders this kit, as it is a superior method of applying Weakness to its #1 PvE. #2 is a slow projectile that has a tendency to miss, loses effectiveness at range and has unpredictable behavior. This could be a great kit if there was an incentive to build for a support role and better trait support (it’s quite a stretch to take Deadly Mixture for Flamethrower, much less Elixir Gun).

(One more post!)

Speargun: An otherwise decent weapon buried by its #1 skill, which is an extra-ordinarily slow moving, easily avoided projectile (even the motion of an enemy attacking is enough movement to evade it), that deals low damage and has a 1 second cooldown. Once again, even un-traited Grenades has 300 more range, more than double the damage, double the attack speed, faster travel and far more AoE than Speargun.

Rifle: I saw that you mentioned that Firearms was a line that felt as though it was lacking, which is great news to hear acknowledged. In the case of Rifle, there are 5, arguably 6, traits for Rifle.

• Traits such as Hair Trigger and Rifled Barrels are hard pills to swallow when Warriors have Crackshot that is essentially the equivalent of both of these traits in one. Especially when Rifled Barrels provides noticeably less benefit to Rifles due to the wide range variance in skills.

• Rifle Mod is one of those boring traits that offers nothing to gameplay but is too essential to Rifle’s damage to go without.

• The risk to reward ratio on Blunderbuss is disproportionate. In order to get the full damage out of Blunderbuss, one must be within 100 units of the target (at this point the weapon model nearly clips with the enemy) and even then its damage is behind that of a Warrior’s Arcing arrow, which can be performed up to 1000 units away (untraited) and is a blast finisher with the same cooldown.

• The snare wipe on Overcharged Shot is puzzling, as it is essentially trading a 1.5 stun to removing less serious movement penalties. The snare wipe would make more sense on a skill such as Jump Shot.

• Jump Shot shares Blunderbuss’ unfavorable risk/reward ratio. It’s often just too dangerous to use this skill in many situations and the damage is only worthwhile if the takeoff and landing both connect. It is also easy to avoid / interrupt / interfere with movement impairing conditions.

Pistol: As a whole, Pistol isn’t bad. Main hand pistol only has the issue with the random spray on #2, while offhand #5 has the severe range/effectiveness issue that Blunderbuss shares. Its traits are also lacking in harmony in only applying to a small section of its skills.

Finally, as I have gone on for far too long already, one last issue that is fairly unique to Engineer is in regards to the Kit Refinement trait.
Speedy Kits directly interferes with the use of Kit Refinement as the former will cause the latter to trigger at inopportune times while the lengthy global cooldown prevents it from being there in the situations when one would need it.

Furthermore, the global cooldown that replaced the individual cooldowns cripples the usefulness of this trait as it, along with Juggernaut, runs counter to the design idea of an Engineer switching their kits often.

I realize it is a lot, and I am very thankful to finally have a platform of voicing some of these concerns in a way in which they will be heard. Thank you very much for opening the floor to a dialogue with the community.

Some modifications I suggest for the upcoming Thief changes:

Shadow Return on Sword. Renamed to Infiltrator’s return. No cast time should be added, it’s fine the way it is.
Critical Strikes 15 – Opportunist. Increased trigger chance to 50%. Increase cooldown from 1s to 3s.
Critical Strikes VIII – Signet Use. Leave as it currently is, the CDs are long enough already, there’s no need to reduce the initiative gain for them any further.
Acrobatics III – Vigorous Recovery. Reduced Vigor duration to 5s from 8s.
Acrobatics IX – Quick Recovery. DO NOT reduce initiative gain from 2 to 1, it’s already 10s per initiative, this skill would be absolutely useless if reduced.
Trickery VII – Bountiful Theft. Reduced vigor duration from 15s to 10s. Remove a condition.
Head Shot. Increase the daze duration to .5s.
Signet Of Agility. Increase the conditions cured when activated by 1.
Daggerstorm. Make this a stun-breaker.
Shadow Assault. Reduce initiative use from 7 to 6.
Flanking Strike. Reduce initiative use from 3 to 2.
Pistol Whip. Increase stun duration to .75s.
Vital Shot. Add an extra shot per cast.
Body Shot. Add a .2s evade per cast.

Vi Au.8341:

I must disagree with the vigour change for thieves. Thieves are supposed to be the most mobile class in gw2. We should be able to dodge more and evade more than other classes.

I don’t mind mobile and evasive…but thieves get mobility, evasiveness, condition cleaning and insane damage while stealthed. My ranger at best can only prolong my eventual death in WvW 1v1 encounters with thieves. Heck, last week six of us had a hard time dealing with two perm-invis thieves in Bay.

So…hide in shawdows…yes. one-hit, one-kill from shadows? Please no. The class is called Thief….not assassin.

The are some goods and bad, like we are used to, but I would like to make myself clear about a couple of things I saw and wich are totaly wrong.

JonPeters.5630:

• 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..

The current cooldown is 15sec with 0 to arcane and 9sec when you are fully speced, so you should change the base value from 15 to 12 and the remaining to 9. If you change that value to 10sec it could hurt the Elementalist DPS cycle.

JonPeters.5630:

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

It has never healed our turrets for 1% health, it is a tooltip mistake wich you implemented in the latest patch and wich got reported by players on the Engineer subsection. The real value is 10% every 10sec or 1%/sec.

JonPeters.5630:

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

While it can help out the rangers using a Greatsword and Shortbow, I see one big problem -> Asuras Technobable.

Moment of Clarity increase currently the duration from both Stun and Daze effects, if you increase that effect to 100%, it means an Asura Ranger can have a 6sec daze on a 45sec cooldown.

You are basicaly doing what you are trying to avoid with the stun Warrior.

JonPeters.5630:

• Discipline XI – Burst Mastery. Reduced damage increase from 10% to 7%. Removed erroneous adrenaline gain fact.

The adrenaline fact wasn’t wrong, it used to give halve of our adrenaline bar (or 15 stack of adrenaline) when the burst skill was used. You even fused the effects from both Discipline Grandmaster traits together wich were separetly a CD reduction (wich became the 10% damage bonus) and the adrenaline recovery in one of your patch.

The point of this trait was to use your Burst Skill and switch over to your second weapon set to get an extra 5 stacks from Versatile Rage and follow it up with a lvl 2 burst on your opponent. Somehow that value got decreased to 1/3 (or 10 stacks) of its original value when you changed the burst mechanic into cooldown reduction instead of damage bonus.

To stay short,

I don’t like to sound harsh, but you are the Devs and are supposed to know the game better than we do. And still, I see commun mistakes on skill facts and even on the forums from the devs themselve trying to balance their game around those same mistakes while it would be logical to fix the erronated database and balance the game around the correct value.

So, may you please be kind enough to test very hard your game and fix the mistakes written on this post.

Many thanks!

JonPeters.5630:

I added this idea to my list of stuff to discuss Monday as I think it would be a fine buff to this trait.

This… would be very interesting.

For bunker DD eles, Renewing Stamina is a bit optional (although still useful). With this change, a DD ele could dedicate that arcana slot to this. It would create an interesting roaming/ bunker setup which, in fact, was already the niche behind ele bunker eles before the nerfs, especially before the RTL nerfs. Of course, +25% speed is not as “problematic” as RTL – it doesn’t allow eles to reset fights, and requires a valuable slot. But it would bring their old point-to-point mobility playstyle back.

Hope you go through this change.

@Necromancer

JonPeters.5630:

We brought down some of the raw DPS conditions that necromancer enjoys, while also maintaining their pressure and sustain elements.

While I 100% agree that this is the right way to go with the necro, some of the proposed changes are very counterproductive in that context:

Weakening Shroud:

The reason why so many complain about the increased cd already is not because of the lost condi pressure. In fact, it’s not even a trait used exclusively by condition-mancers.
The sustain through death shroud will suffer from this the most.

JonPeters.5630:

…we want the Necromancers to be focused on sustaining themselves through death shroud.

So if I wanted this trait to apply less pressure, but maintain its defensive purposes, then I would keep the same cooldown but reduce the bleeding and weakness duration. For example: 1x bleeding and 4 sec of weakness instead of 6 sec.
In fact, I bet players would rather have a 10 sec cd with no bleeding at all, instead of a regular Enfeeblind Blood every 25 seconds.

If the skill itself stays as it is, you’ll just have the same damage pressure, only less often. That will reduce survivability in Death Shroud heavily, but still allow for the same condition burst rotation if the skill is off cooldown.

JonPeters.5630:

• Death 5 – Reanimator. Decreased cooldown from 30s to 15s.

Now you’re just teasing us… why are you trying to fix this trait??
Any effort put into this is a waste, remove it already.

Some issues that weren’t adressed in the preview:

Dhuumfire

I’ve read a comment by John Sharp saying that there were plans for Dhuum/Terror down the road. Still, I want to be the 1000th person here to say what needs to be said:

Dhuumfire is an embarrassment to the necromancer profession!
This trait should not have existed in the first place, it is responsible for the infamous condition meta and brought the necromancer nothing but nerfs anywhere else but this trait. You always insist on wanting to increase build diversity, but most condition nerfs pushed players to take up Dhuumfire even more.

I don’t know a single person who likes this trait, not even necromancers. In WvW it’s as about as hated as Perplexity rune users or perma-stun warriors. It is a trait that doesn’t require any skill at all because it just auto procs huge damage, and despite some people argueing so: there is absolutely no drawback in defense. None!

If you really want to reduce condition pressure: Dhuumfire needs to go. Not some weird solution where you reduce the effectiveness of both fear and burning… or other conditions, but Dhuumfire itself. This is the culprit right there.

There have been many suggestions, but I’ll just say it again:
Dhuumfire should apply torment instead of burning. Imo 2 stacks if the duration stays the same.
Or: if you absolutely want to keep it in the game, move both Terror and Dhuumfire to grandmaster in Curses, so it becomes impossible to trait for both.

Staff Marks

Tyler Chapman.1832:

We are changing the tooltip to clear up the confusion for this skill (Putrid Mark). It is a 3 condition transfer from self to foes when they trigger it. None of the other issues are bugs.

Hope this clears things up. This skill has undergone major balance renovations.

It will no longer cleanse teammates and it will always give a full cooldown when interrupted because its one of the best skills in the game.

These are one of the biggest changes to a single weapon in the game yet.
You didn’t mention those nerfs in the patch notes or anywhere else in the past 4 months.
We all know that this is one of the weakest excuses for what was clearly an unintentional change originally.

Now, I can accept the fact that you don’t want all contions to hit one single target, I can also somewhat understand that you don’t want to pile a full team cleanse and transfer to the condition pressure of the current meta.
BUT:
What is absolutely mind boggling is that you want to keep the full cooldown on interrupt. This decision makes absolutely no sense at all.
You claim that Putrid Mark was one of the best skills in the game… then you nerf it by taking away the group support completely and reduce the effectiveness of the cleanse (again, without telling anyone about it officially, but players had to find out by themselves..).
Now…. why on earth would you punish every single skill of one weapon because of one that was hugely nerfed in the same patch anyway?!?
EVERY. SINGLE. SKILL of this weapon goes on full cooldown if interrupted. I don’t believe for a second that someone came up with the idea: hey guys! did you see how strong Putrid Marks is? We should nerf it… and then put ALL marks on full cooldown if they get interrupted to add insult to injury for the blatant awesomeness that Putrid Marks once was. :P

Death Shroud HP

The July/23 patch included these changes:
• Damage taken while in death shroud will now overflow to the necromancer’s health pool if the damage taken is greater than the remaining life force.
• Fixed a bug that caused the necromancer to take increased damage from direct attacks while in death shroud.

The last patch that introduced an actual number being displayed on the lf bar confirmed a theory that necromancers had since then:

The necro’s Shroud hp is in fact 120% of their regular hp.
The number dispayed is just 60% but the damage taken in DS is 50%, for any type of damage… conditions, direct of falling damage. It’s all exactly 50%, so the hp value is basically double of what the number says. This became common knowledge on the necro subforum within hours after that patch was released.

Question: What are the plans for this?
I (and every other necro I presume) hope that you’ll adjust the tooltip instead of doubling the damage. This change to Shroud hp (combined with several improvements to life force regeneration) was what made DS actually usable as a sustain type of mechanic instead of jumping in and out to use the DS skills for bursts.
The lf pool as it is feels like what it should have been all along, it makes so much more sense now and for the first time really allowed for sustaining though Shroud.

(I posted this on the SPvP forum but am putting it here as well)

It seems like there are too many changes just because of one build, Hambow. It usually looks something like this – although I focus more on might stacking than the standard version.

Reducing the damage of Earthshaker seems like a crude way to go about it. What makes it have the potential to hit as hard as it does comes from the fact that the stun is applied before the damage. After the stun, the damage gets increased from the trait Merciless Hammer as well as getting the extra crit chance from UF. It also gains a damage increase from Burst Mastery which is why it’s getting nerfed as well.

But what if you just had the damage apply before the stun? Then it would not only have a much lesser chance to crit, it would also not gain the damage increase from MH.You could do the same to Skull Crack as well. Also, why not reduce the bonus damage gained from MH instead of nerfing Burst Mastery? Nerfing Burst Mastery just due to one skill doesn’t seem fair to other burst skills. In addition, rather than moving Unsuspecting Foe why not simply reduce the +crit chance instead? Making it around 25%-30% would make it useful, but not lead to skills like Earthshaker and Skull Crack almost always criting.

I get that you want the damage output to be reduced, but you are hitting it from so many angles it may start to hit just as low as a Guardian with Hammer. What good is a Warrior that has less sustain than a Guardian but has only slightly more CC and the same damage output? With the proposed changes you are nerfing the damage of the Hambow build in four areas: critical hit chance, ES damage, Staggering Blow damage, and Burst Mastery damage. If CC Warrior just becomes a slightly inferior version of Guardian, people probably won’t be as willing to run one. I for one have a lot of fun using Hammer in it’s current form, but I fear hitting it in so many areas will make it not worth taking over other weapons.

Summary of suggestions:
- Reducing the +crit chance from Unsuspecting Foe to 25%-30%
- Reduce the bonus damage from Merciless Hammer rather than nerfing Burst Mastery
- Have the damage from Earthshaker and Skull Crack be applied before the stun so that they crit less often.

These changes do not majorly effect any other weapon besides hammer, and lowers the DPS just enough so that it isn’t as strong as it is now – but still has enough that it is worth bringing.

here is some sugestion
on necromancer:
- could you consider removing the reanimator trait, that trait is very bad for a dueling necro because the downed opponent can easily kill the critter and rally. i stopped using the toughness traitline because of that
- adding passive condition trait. although it is not too necessary added passive condition damage will help necro a lot because there is so many condition removal now and we need more damage to compensate for that

on warrior:
- revenge skill recharge is too short. its almost impossible to kill a warrior on my character now without the warrior using revenge skill. and the most annoying thing is the character didn’t give world exp.

on thief:
- could you please the stealth on thief. permanent invisible thief are the worst. at least give it a 1 or 2 sec delay before the thief could use another stealth skill.
- please remove the trait that remove conditions on stealth, its is really annoying when you cant hit them and even more annoying on my standpoint if they can get away with removing the damage source

well just some suggestion to balance the game from my standpoint :P
hope you consider this

Sreoom.3690:

Vi Au.8341:

I must disagree with the vigour change for thieves. Thieves are supposed to be the most mobile class in gw2. We should be able to dodge more and evade more than other classes.

I don’t mind mobile and evasive…but thieves get mobility, evasiveness, condition cleaning and insane damage while stealthed. My ranger at best can only prolong my eventual death in WvW 1v1 encounters with thieves. Heck, last week six of us had a hard time dealing with two perm-invis thieves in Bay.

So…hide in shawdows…yes. one-hit, one-kill from shadows? Please no. The class is called Thief….not assassin.

Vigor isn’t a stealth thing, its a boon that most thief builds rely on. Nerfing it is just pigeon holding us into using lame stealth spamming builds more, because our ability to dodge in combat is going to shorten with this proposed change. Vigor doesn’t remove conditions, and it doesn’t reduce incoming damage or heal us. Its how thieves are able to live out of stealth, by evading. We have the lowest tier of hp, little boon access, its disgusting.

STOP NERFING THIEVES ALREADY! We aren’t top tier in anything. Not in pve, not wvw, and not spvp. Very few people seem to understand how weak thieves already are, so they rant about them on their blogs and post in these forums hoping that 1 day, it will be easy mode for them removing the purpose of thinking altogether. Outside of stealth, our ability to sustain offers no room for error. We dodge at the wrong time, or try spiking at the wrong time, anyone with proper knowledge can shut a thief down. We have few stun breakers, low condition removal (outside of stealth), and no reliable regen (outside of stealth).

Ele- burst heals, regen, protection, stability, invuln, condi clearing

Necro- 2 health pools, decent condi clearing, protection, insta cast fear(avoid burst)

Guardian- regen, aegis, various heals (on boon application, meditations, symbols, dodge, virtue, some weapon skills), and tons of condi clearing/convert

Warrior -healing signet, shout heals, condi clearing, highest health pool with heavy armor

Mesmer- clones, critical infusion, invulnerability, stealth, condi clearing, sword(#2&3)

Ranger- Trolls potion, regen, decent evasion(endurance/skills), could use some better controlled condi clearing but not too bad.

Engi- various boons, regen, burst heal, perma vigor, condi clearing, invulnerability, some stealth.

Thief- stealth, low condi clearing unless using shadow’s embrace, evasion. Change us, don’t nerf us.

The guardian changes do not affect the over all builds of the guardian other than the Valor V. All of the other guardian changes do not push the dps guard build. Frankly, Zeal the worst trait line to go into, because every other trait line is better. Radiance would be a better option, but the only weapon option is the sword. You will kill yourself against foes that reflect projectiles.

Possibly reworking the Zeal and the Radiance trait line will open the variation of the guards, until then most guards will be AH, or dsp Meditation. Possibly you could open a whole new, type of guardian which I would like to see.

Stillmoon.6894:

here is some sugestion
on necromancer:
- could you consider removing the reanimator trait, that trait is very bad for a dueling necro because the downed opponent can easily kill the critter and rally. i stopped using the toughness traitline because of that
- adding passive condition trait. although it is not too necessary added passive condition damage will help necro a lot because there is so many condition removal now and we need more damage to compensate for that

on warrior:
- revenge skill recharge is too short. its almost impossible to kill a warrior on my character now without the warrior using revenge skill. and the most annoying thing is the character didn’t give world exp.

on thief:
- could you please the stealth on thief. permanent invisible thief are the worst. at least give it a 1 or 2 sec delay before the thief could use another stealth skill.
- please remove the trait that remove conditions on stealth, its is really annoying when you cant hit them and even more annoying on my standpoint if they can get away with removing the damage source

well just some suggestion to balance the game from my standpoint :P
hope you consider this

Vengence can be avoided, by simple finishing them off. You can

A. blind them and they miss that slow hammer.

B. start to finish, wait about a sec, watch them take 8 weeks to pull the hammer out and press dodge. By the time that’s over, you can once again finsh them off, and vengeance won’t come off cd. Warrior downed state is pathetic already, please don’t offer silly requests.

Thief doesn’t have strong condi clearing outside of stealth. Shadow’s embrace is a strong trait, everyone has them and is entitled to hold them. I don’t think you play thief at all to understand what position we are in.

Taken from mesmer post:

Scepter
Scepter is still missing something but we don’t want to overload the autoattack as we think that promotes more mindless play and are trying to move away from builds that focus so much on the “1” skill. I feel like that scepter should be the tricksy defender that can stop enemies from attacking and defend allies, but maybe it’s single target nature is keeping that from working.

Are there changes possible to necro weapons that greatly revolve around just that – spamming ‘1’, whether it’s the dagger, the DS, the axe or the scepter.

In general after palying most professions I feel that necromancer, which is my favourite character, is really left behind in the fun weapon category. They are usually decent, good even, but all are missing some nice skills that would make the gameplay more fun.

Usual necro fights:
Snare skill (Chillblains, Grasping Dead, Dark Pact) → DPS AoE → ‘1’, ‘1’, ‘1’
Repeat.

I probably am a little biased, but that’s how I feel. Could the necro get some interesting chains on their skills to make it more fun than it already is?
I think there is no discussion making things more fun and more active should be the way to go when designing and evolving each profession.

Once again, thank you, Jon, for taking your time at the weekend.

leman.7682:

Taken from mesmer post:

Scepter
Scepter is still missing something but we don’t want to overload the autoattack as we think that promotes more mindless play and are trying to move away from builds that focus so much on the “1” skill. I feel like that scepter should be the tricksy defender that can stop enemies from attacking and defend allies, but maybe it’s single target nature is keeping that from working.

Are there changes possible to necro weapons that greatly revolve around just that – spamming ‘1’, whether it’s the dagger, the DS, the axe or the scepter.

In general after palying most professions I feel that necromancer, which is my favourite character, is really left behind in the fun weapon category. They are usually decent, good even, but all are missing some nice skills that would make the gameplay more fun.

Usual necro fights:
Snare skill (Chillblains, Grasping Dead, Dark Pact) -> DPS AoE -> ‘1’, ‘1’, ‘1’
Repeat.

I probably am a little biased, but that’s how I feel. Could the necro get some interesting chains on their skills to make it more fun than it already is?
I think there is no discussion making things more fun and more active should be the way to go when designing and evolving each profession.

Once again, thank you, Jon, for taking your time at the weekend.

I don’t main necro but I do have one leveled and I see quite the opposite. For axe, the #2 and 3 are really strong, and depending on the build come in handy. Dagger #3 has a bit of a long cd but it does work well with #2 if you want the full effect. Personally I only use dagger for those 2 skills. Scepter however I agree, the aa is much better. The #3 doesn’t really suit the weapon but I guess it’s there just to work if a build doesn’t have many ways of gaining life force, #2 is alright but I feel like it could use more utility like if it hits only 1 target the cripple duration is increased.

Kay.3718:

It’s awesome that you’re responding to my earlier post, and I greatly appreciate your insight and opinion, but you looking at exactly the wrong things. Heck, I even warned you about them! I know you mean well, but I literally facedesked just now. As I said previously:

• Avoid getting pinned on that one example, because it’s just the first example I could think of.
• It isn’t about changing a certain trait that appears too powerful. It is about preserving synergies that aren’t the (immediate) objective of the change.

And you seem to do / assume precisely the opposite. I can only assume (hope?) that you didn’t actually read it properly.

You seemed to think I was arguing that Unsuspecting Foe doesn’t need a Nerf. I wasn’t. It could do with a toning down. I even said so. If you’d taken the time to read my actual post, or perhaps if you re-read it, you can see that the point was not that one specific trait change shouldn’t happen. The point was that:

It would be nice, when Arenanet changes a skill with the objective of bring a certain build A into line with what they feel is balanced, they wouldn’t inadvertently nerf additional builds / synergies X, Y and Z that they never even considered / knew existed, due to those not being part of the flavour of the month / meta.

I know they’re trying hard, and doing a okay job of it. It’s just that some these balances are making it painfully obvious that they don’t know enough about their own game to balance it. And that’s fine, I guess. They’re excused. But it does mean that when they try, there’s a good chance of it being a punch in the guts for the player-base who do actually care enough to think things through.

You said you think the warrior example is a neat little synergy, but you’d never even thought of using it. That speaks volumes to me. It’s not being abused, or even used a lot. Why would it have to disappear? It’s collateral damage, because just like you, Arenanet never thought of it. Yet they’re destroying it. You don’t see anything wrong with a situation where Arenanet just changes skills without knowing the scope of the outcome? Because I do.

That right there is my point. They don’t know enough about their own game to balance it.

I understood your point. I never thought to try your build because my build fit together so nicely for me. I’ve never been a fan of Axe mainhand, so I’ve never built around Evis crits. I’ve always needed to trait for survival, so the Strength/Arms trees are mostly impossible for me to utilize when I generally need 0/0/30/0/20 at a minimum for my playstyle.

My general point was that perhaps they are being cognizant of the synergies, and they decided that some synergies were too “neat”. Maybe they wanted to disrupt your build and force you into 40 points to do what you’re doing instead of 30. Maybe they decided that 20 trait points was a very small amount for a pretty easy permanent fury. Maybe for other synergies that are being disrupted, they’re being disrupted for a reason.

It’s definitely worthwhile to bring the preservation of synergies up as something you’re concerned about, but I don’t think it’s fair to assume they aren’t aware of these synergies when they make these changes. That’s my point. I did a shoddy job of trying to piggyback on the example as an example for my point, but that’s the idea.

And maybe Jon will address this idea in his Warrior response. You never know what might find the spotlight.

•Nature Magic X – Enlargement. This trait now uses Signet of the Wild to trigger. This reduces the cooldown to 60 seconds and allow it to interact with the Signet of the Beastmaster and Signet Mastery traits.

Is this an isolated case or are traits supposed to affect cooldowns of other traits?

If Rangers can reduce their cooldown on Enlargement, then Last Gasp for Necromancer should interact with Spectral Mastery for a shorter cooldown as well. Right now if you take both, your Spectral Armor skill will be cooldown 48s, but your Spectral Armor trait will say 60s.

As thief is what I have most experience with:

• Increased the base rate of initiative gain from .75/second to 1/second.

Honestly, 33% might be a bit too much. You are basically increasing the thieves thieffectiveness by 33% and withdrawing any initiative-related nerfs doing so.
I don’t really see why it’s a bad thing that we need to invest trait points if we want that extra initiative – you can often play without it if you play carefully.
From being sort of a requirement, many initiative management traits now looks quite useless, since you reduced both their effectiveness and their demand.

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

Good change for a start since it makes CC a bit better at countering S/ when timed correctly, and it will certainly raise the S/ skill ceiling since it will require you to predict and react faster to your enemies actions rather than just noticing that you couldn’t spam 3 any more. The problem of teleporting out of line of sight (as in, for example, teleporting from under the Clocktower to the control point and back again) does however remain.

• Pistol Whip. Reduced the after cast on the first half of this skill by .25 seconds.

Good change, but it might not be quite enough to compensate for halving the stun duration with the global stun duration fix.

• Shadow Arts V – Infusion of Shadow – This trait functionality has been changed to “Gain initiative when you enter stealth.” 2 init.

Great change, as it will make D/P stealth spamming less effective (since I have hard to believe that was intended to be possible in the first place) while hardly touching thieves that are actually fighting.

• Acrobatics III – Vigorous Recovery. Reduced Vigor duration to 4s from 8s.
• Trickery VII – Bountiful Theft. Reduced vigor duration from 15s to 8s.

I can see where this is coming from, as you want to reduce the general vigor up time and you want to decrease the evades of S/D, but first of you left a number of Vigor on crit-traits (such as Critical Infusion) unchanged, and both of these seems quite pale in comparison. Secondly, on the thief we do at the same time have access to Feline Grace (15 pt acro), which IMO is our most effective endurance trait, and that was not changed. This change might result in evasive thieves getting concentrated more to S/D with high acrobatics, which was what started this whole evasive thief problem in the first place.
While I’m on it I’d just like to mention that the Bountiful Theft-boon steal was not updated to keep stacks and duration with the Larcenous update. Updating that could compensate for reducing its vigor duration.

• Acrobatics X – Assassins Reward. Increased healing scaling by 35%. Moved to Grandmaster Tier.

Interesting, but I hope you are aware of that this trait is bugged so that Cloak and Dagger does only heal for 5 initiative, despite costing 6 initiative.

• Trickery 5 – Kleptomaniac. Reduce initiative gain from 3 to 2.

I’m not sure about what harm Kleptomaniac ever did. I hope this is not just a part of reducing the need for initiative traits, because this was IMO a very well balanced trait.

And then finally we have that non-thief trait that has been discussed greatly…

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

… really? After all complaining about Automated Response (Immune to conditions while under 25% health), you’re considering making this?
I’ll admit that I’ve been quite annoyed by AR in 1v1, but it does have clear disadvantages, and it required active gameplay if you where to use it, because of something that your Diamond Skin idea misses; the risk.
To gain the immunity to conditions with AR, you needed to go down below 25% health. First of, this didn’t just not work on, but directly exposed you to raw damage – if a power thief found you in this state you where instant bacon. Secondly, because of the way conditions works, a condition user could wait for you to automatically heal up above 25% hp (because of a minor trait called Transmute, which you intend to nerf) and then condition burst you. When you then drop below 0% hp you’re done with.
The difference when it comes to Diamond Skin is that it has zero risk involved, and condition users will never get a chance to every apply their conditions unless they have a power based friend with them. If or when you manage to get rid of that 10% of their hp, the elementalist will activate the fabulous powers they where known for before the warriors got even better at it, which is healing.

I know that you don’t want to balance your game around 1v1, but really, this is too much.

@Jon Peters

When are you going to do something about conditions ?
The way they are designed right now they affect pretty terribly gameplay turning it from action mode to cast and forget mode ,beating the game’s first promotion factor wich was the action based combat system.
Right now condition damage needs only one stat to maximize dps and you also enforce it with bunker stats.Condition duration and precision are all non standing arguments since it only increases the condition dps in a fight by very little while if you go into power builds,stacking only power will give you horrible damage.Besides that conditions are to easily reaplied in comparison with condition removal and promotes easy non action combat.Conditions have only one counter wich is condition removal.

While the power counterpart forces you to stack 3 stats neglecting defence entirely and what is even worse direct damage has a lot of counters.

Range and need of constantly aplying the dps is just the first one.Biggest counter is protection and weakness wich funny enough is a condition hence negating even more the damage incoming to a condition bunker from a power source.

So we have protection,weakness,armor,kiting,dodging,blocking,blinding as a counter to one damage type wich needs to heavily invest in 3 stats to be effective while on the other hand we have only condition removal as a counter to conditions wich need only one stat to be effective

I already suggested that there should be a rework arround conditions and the main one would be drasticly decreasing any base condition durations,remove condition duration from food/runes and sigils and create a new stat combination available for example Condition damage/Precison/Condition duration to achieve the same effect as now and properly mirror the full berserker power builds are forced into to maximize dps.The next step would be to add weakness,armor and protection counterparts for condition damage.

Toroquin.3605:

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

… really? After all complaining about Automated Response (Immune to conditions while under 25% health), you’re considering making this?
I’ll admit that I’ve been quite annoyed by AR in 1v1, but it does have clear disadvantages, and it required active gameplay if you where to use it, because of something that your Diamond Skin idea misses; the risk.
To gain the immunity to conditions with AR, you needed to go down below 25% health. First of, this didn’t just not work on, but directly exposed you to raw damage – if a power thief found you in this state you where instant bacon. Secondly, because of the way conditions works, a condition user could wait for you to automatically heal up above 25% hp (because of a minor trait called Transmute, which you intend to nerf) and then condition burst you. When you then drop below 0% hp you’re done with.
The difference when it comes to Diamond Skin is that it has zero risk involved, and condition users will never get a chance to every apply their conditions unless they have a power based friend with them. If or when you manage to get rid of that 10% of their hp, the elementalist will activate the fabulous powers they where known for before the warriors got even better at it, which is healing.

I know that you don’t want to balance your game around 1v1, but really, this is too much.

So ele speccs into earth and water for defense. What’s left? – Exactly. Nothing. This trait is only usefull for bunkering. Bunkers should be able to tank a single player and if you can’t get an ele below 90% HP with 2 players you’re doing something wrong – meaning that the only scenario where this trait is usefull is tanking a condition class in 1v1 which can be a quite rare scenario. So this trait is by far worse than it sounds. Just think of how squishy eles are with their low base-stats. Even condi-classes won’t have a hard time to do about 1,5k physical damage to get him below 90% … just sending in a pet is all you have to do to outplay this grandmaster-trait.

JonPeters.5630:

Some internal thoughts on the necro

---

—
-

Dhuumfire
We know there are problems here, but again this condition helps those conditionmancers get over the top and is really what brought them into play in a lot of parts of the game. I think the real problems with this trait are:
1) Having to put 30 points into the power line as a condition necro.
2) Requiring crit on a 30 point trait in a line that does nothing to improve crit chance.

We talk about a lot of different versions of this trait including moving to master tier, making it on hit instead of on crit, and reworking the numbers to making it more reliable to use and to counter.

All of this back and forth could upset a lot of balance, but if this moved down to master tier Terror would almost certainly be moving up to grandmaster to accommodate. At least then condition necromancers would be 20/30/x/x/x, which just makes so much more sense. The biggest thing holding that back is the lack of a replacement grandmaster in Spite. We aren’t huge fans of weapon or utility type specific traits at this tier otherwise an improved Axe Training might have a shot. This is the crux of the damage necromancer problem right now, and we will talk about it more next week so any discussion on it here will aid us in those talks.

Is there any consideration going on about removing burning, and making the trait apply torment on crit or hit in it’s place? Work the numbers to come out around the same, and you have 1 less condition that wasn’t needed in PvP on top of torment , and might even be a PVE dps buff on group fights since Necro wouldn’t be competing for burning applications (torment isn’t going to reach cap, so would get the full ticks). This would make moving terror to GM and the new Dhuumfire down to Master tier even easier.

To precise my previous post in this thread:
To provide some love to mesmers in WvW:

-Align Confusing Enchantments & Blinding Befuddlement with Distracting Strikes:
4 stacks of confusion for 8 sec.
-Make mantra channeling a reflect or provide stability.

JonPeters.5630:

Dhuumfire
We know there are problems here, but again this condition helps those conditionmancers get over the top and is really what brought them into play in a lot of parts of the game. I think the real problems with this trait are:
1) Having to put 30 points into the power line as a condition necro.
2) Requiring crit on a 30 point trait in a line that does nothing to improve crit chance.

We talk about a lot of different versions of this trait including moving to master tier, making it on hit instead of on crit, and reworking the numbers to making it more reliable to use and to counter.

All of this back and forth could upset a lot of balance, but if this moved down to master tier Terror would almost certainly be moving up to grandmaster to accommodate. At least then condition necromancers would be 20/30/x/x/x, which just makes so much more sense. The biggest thing holding that back is the lack of a replacement grandmaster in Spite. We aren’t huge fans of weapon or utility type specific traits at this tier otherwise an improved Axe Training might have a shot. This is the crux of the damage necromancer problem right now, and we will talk about it more next week so any discussion on it here will aid us in those talks.

Hello Jon I am little confused by this. If your goal is to remove the drawbacks of every trait then you will kill build diversity and solidify the idea of having one meta for each profession. Players should be forced to weigh drawbacks and rewards for picking certain traits.

That being said, I feel that Dhuumfire is overall too strong. Your post would indicate that this is not how you feel?

mini.6018:

@Jon Peters

When are you going to do something about conditions ?
The way they are designed right now they affect pretty terribly gameplay turning it from action mode to cast and forget mode ,beating the game’s first promotion factor wich was the action based combat system.
Right now condition damage needs only one stat to maximize dps and you also enforce it with bunker stats.Condition duration and precision are all non standing arguments since it only increases the condition dps in a fight by very little while if you go into power builds,stacking only power will give you horrible damage.Besides that conditions are to easily reaplied in comparison with condition removal and promotes easy non action combat.Conditions have only one counter wich is condition removal.

While the power counterpart forces you to stack 3 stats neglecting defence entirely and what is even worse direct damage has a lot of counters.

Range and need of constantly aplying the dps is just the first one.Biggest counter is protection and weakness wich funny enough is a condition hence negating even more the damage incoming to a condition bunker from a power source.

So we have protection,weakness,armor,kiting,dodging,blocking,blinding as a counter to one damage type wich needs to heavily invest in 3 stats to be effective while on the other hand we have only condition removal as a counter to conditions wich need only one stat to be effective

I already suggested that there should be a rework arround conditions and the main one would be drasticly decreasing any base condition durations,remove condition duration from food/runes and sigils and create a new stat combination available for example Condition damage/Precison/Condition duration to achieve the same effect as now and properly mirror the full berserker power builds are forced into to maximize dps.The next step would be to add weakness,armor and protection counterparts for condition damage.

I assume you’re talking about pvp.
Cause in pve, conditions aren’t that much useful as now. They’re constantly overshaded…by the direct damage you’re so much devaluing.
A suggestion like the one you made would make conditions even more useless in pve.
I think as well they need some serious rework…but they must work in all the game modes after that, not just one.

JonPeters.5630:

Terror
I can’t tell you how long we debated moving this trait to grandmaster tier last time around, and this time again. The problem is a huge % of Necromancer builds are hinged on this trait. There is a gaping hole at grandmaster here with Withering Precision (barely worthy of adept tier in our opinion), however we were really hesitant to either move terror and didn’t have a good alternative for redesigning Withering Precision

Turn it into something that adds a functionality to another condition. Like the trait for fury on ele fire fields give the necro another spice for one condition:

• Weakness on crit, while under weakness enemy takes damage upon dodgeroll
• Chill on Crit, chilled enemys take damage per second
• Cripple on Crit, enemy takes damage for each second moving while crippled
  *Torment on Crit, Torment does extra ticks of damage based on the distance between necromancer and enemy (over 600 units way 3 ticks, over 1000 units away 4 ticks)

JonPeters.5630:

Dhuumfire

We aren’t huge fans of weapon or utility type specific traits at this tier otherwise an improved Axe Training might have a shot. This is the crux of the damage necromancer problem right now, and we will talk about it more next week so any discussion on it here will aid us in those talks.

Some ideas for grandmaster traits:

• Enemys take a % of lifeforce generated trough skills as true damage
• Damage and blast finisher upon entering and leaving deathshroud
• Power based damage/sec while in Deathshroud (Locust swarm like)
• Modification/buff to all #1 weapon skills

JonPeters.5630:

Death Magic
On the defensive side, the Blood and Soul Reaping necros are starting to feel pretty good. The Death line on the other hand is too focused on minions. From Reanimator, which we have heard over and over feels bad as a minor trait, to the fact that 1/3 of the remaining traits are minion traits, to finally the fact that both grandmaster traits are minion traits.

For Deathmagic i would love to see

• 5 and 15 being merged, new 15 minor without minion relation

Ideas for Grandmaster traits:

• Gain +x Thougness / Take x% reduced damage while CC’d
• Damage that higher than 10% of your current life is reduced by X %
• When hit and under x% HP you siphon health/ deal damage / retaliate X Damage back to the attacker

Blood magic is still lackluster for self sustain. its good for group support but every other support line is also useful for self sustain. This is because no heal in DS and lacking numbers. Currently 2 heals are outshined because they heal over time, which is wasted while in deathshroud, encouraging us to use consume conditions only.

I would love

• A trait that siphons life based on life force generation.
• A trait that siphons life based on conditions applied onto foe.

Most of Thief changes feel good, especially initiative regen or higher convertion of precision to vitality. What i’m not sure about is slowing down Shadow Return from sword skill 2. Thieves are kinda squishy, being able to fluently shadowstep away is both quite helpful and thief-style. Dont listen to ppl whining about backstab: fighting against clones, illusions, minions, while gettin tons of conditions (mesmer confusion…) isn’t very nice too. Besides, backstab isn’t always deadly, ppl often just block, dissapear, convert dmg or get way too little dmg from it.

Rezzet.3614:

Kensei.1495:

Nix.3152:

heal signet!! zerker stance!! no nefrs?? ………….. but ye nerf engi’s vigor – gg ((

Even though it’s somethingthat bothers me a lot, i think it was necessary. No one should be able to gain a boon like vigor w/o a cooldown.

if you read you’d notice that thief got nothin but nerfs and engi got some Real Good buffs

bunker and support engis gonna party witht he 50% healing on bombs and 5% hp heal every 3s on turrets HALLELUJAH

The vigor nerf will destroy us in team fights. In team fights we don’t have fail safes for getting caught. Once we get caught were done. We also don’t have stability to make up for not having vigor. I use 3 kits and 1 stun break.

ENGINEER.

The vigor nerf will destroy us in team fights. In team fights we don’t have fail safes for getting caught. Once we get caught were done. We also don’t have stability to make up for not having vigor. I use 3 kits and 1 stun break. I think the vigor nerf will leave us close to not viable at mid fights since it will be very hard to evade the incoming cc. I’m talking about real top tier tourney teams. Most the complaints you are getting are from hotjoin players any good player can 1v2/1v3 them so they are going to think we are op and complain.

Warrior nerfs are fine for stunlock wars yeah. but do you think about the support wars as well?

I’m mainly playing WvW in a Guild group of 20-30 people and playing there Banner supportive build, my only dmg is coming from unsuspecting foes.

this trait is not worth a master trait, it only triggers on STUNED foes, not on disabled foes, on a warrior you have only 3 skills which are stunning the enemy.

you think you nerf the stunlock wars but actually you nerfed the support wars even more

Thief notes:

If Arenanet really don’t like that thief do so much evades ( I guess it’s about PVP) because in PVE they shouldn’t care about evades, then also make the changes in PVP ONLY, because if they make thees changes also in PVE, than i don’t know, it just becomes a trash… ;/

JonPeters.5630:

I think right behind those are the interrupt shutdown mesmer and the signet mesmer, so future suggestions towards those are appreciated as well.

Thanks,

Jon

I’ll make the suggestions then make any comments after them.
My suggested Signet changes:

Trait:
-Signet trait Cleansing Inscription: remove 2 conditions instead of just 1.

Skill:
-Signet of Inspiration, Signet Active: Gain all boons for 5 seconds for you and allies.
-Signet of Midnight, Signet Passive: add …and gain 25% run speed.
-Signet of Illusions, Signet Active: add ..and gain two seconds of distortion.

First signet change removes the randomness and makes it a set effect. The boon choices (currently 8 ) could be changed to where it only gives certain boons instead of all if it has balance issues.

Second signet change is more a quality of life change which Mesmers have asked for since Beta (not necessarily on this signet but for one of them). It also makes it just that much more useful for people to want to consider.

Final signet change is because it is often seen where you get downed/interrupted/stunned before you can even use the effects active ability. And this happens in both PvE and PvP. This is more of a shoring up to this skill to help the user at least be able to use the second skill they were trying for. Basically this skill is currently a two hit combo, but the second hit can miss quite often due to many variables. The change makes it to where there is at least a good chance to actually get the second part of the skills use to work by allowing you that little extra time to shatter in one form or another.

Did Anet fired GW staff and hired Wow staff? because Im having a huge deajvu here…

Instead of think hard now we have to cry hard. Good direction ANet…

Hm, I guess they don’t have many Anet staffers playing mesmer.

Please make the very simple change rangers have been asking for forever to make it so that are auto attack chain with mainhand sword doesn’t root us in place.

An elementalist’s point of view:

This is amazing. Moving arcana V and VI both to master tier is harsh but perhaps the only way to make elementalists consider not going 30 arcana for once. I love the idea of vigor becoming a factor as well, instead of being taken for granted. Adds even more depth to buildcraft.

Tempest defense aura sharing with or without elemental shielding is something i’ve been running with even before this patch with another ele, to great success. I fear it might become quite overpowered now the cooldown has been so drastically reduced, but then again, if that makes people appreciate options other than the One Build, i say leave it. I dont see people appreciate venom sharing yet either although with the immobilize buff its a VERY strong option for a teamfight thief.

Love assassin’s reward remake, not really fond of ‘just’ reducing effectiveness of all initiative gain traits, quite bland tbh. Overall maybe a bit harsh. Perhaps make larcenous rip one boon and remove one as a go-between.

CC warriors needed this dmg reduction, thats common sense. I’m sorry warriors but it just didn’t make any sense especially in wvw. Thx anet.

About swapping cantrips grant regen and vigor with cantrip recharge, please dont. Otherwise you cant justify not going into arcana. You need the vigor(and the regen) to kind of make up for loss of arcana V and VI, and not having cleansing wave is not an option without EA.

One more trait for auras would be nice to establish aura sharing, if you have leftover traits to rework. EDIT: like aoe vigor, to further support the elementalist frontliner.

Tried to keep it short.

Lolololol i just finished my bolt on my thief and equiped it….give mte back my 2k g anet

Elementalist Evasive Arcana
The updates look great, however I do not see anything to address the fact that Evasive Arcana has no effect under water what so ever. Please look into this I do not want to waste 10 points into arcane if it will not help under water.

BoB.6082:

ENGINEER.

The vigor nerf will destroy us in team fights. In team fights we don’t have fail safes for getting caught. Once we get caught were done. We also don’t have stability to make up for not having vigor. I use 3 kits and 1 stun break. I think the vigor nerf will leave us close to not viable at mid fights since it will be very hard to evade the incoming cc. I’m talking about real top tier tourney teams. Most the complaints you are getting are from hotjoin players any good player can 1v2/1v3 them so they are going to think we are op and complain.

You think that’s bad, you should look at what thief has in store.

A NET, about thieves, have you tried to test a vigor buff proc as guardian’s one ( on critical hit 5 sec Vigor. 6 sec cd )?

Also we are trying to improve the survivability of thieves in the Acrobatics line through easier access to the Hard to Catch trait and increased effectiveness of the Assassin’s Reward trait. This will reward thieves who are actively engaged in the fight rather than those who are just dodging over and over again.

With this you will reward combat thieves instead dodger thieves, if the real matter is “prevent to dodge that much if u dont fight”.

Also the trait “hard to catch” could be more problematic than helpful, while are you trying to follow your target. I agree with assassin’s reward swap, but:

-you random shadowstep, with no breakstun nor remove imparing movement effects
-you could be full life and close to kill your target, and then be warped somewhere else.

Ofc you can avoid Zerg better, but as passive trait could be both handicap and utility.

I like the most of your modifies btw, but as squishy class, with no invul, heavy armor, protection, stability, etc, dodge is our main skill to survive. Think about it.

ps: what about move thieves dagger burst from 2 to 4? Something like Leap with normal dmg that cripple instead dagger throw ( Dagger/Dagger skill 4 ), and as second skill a strike 1/4 or 1/2 sec cast wich scale dgm on enemy’s healt?

Thanks for reading

Please consider buffing the ranger shortbow, maybe add an immobilize or something.

Elemental Attunement moved to Master tier.

Most eles use this trait. You said you wanted to discourage putting points into arcane, but every ele who only had 10 points will now have to jump up to 20.