Guild Wars 2

Auesis.7301:

JonPeters.5630:

Vigorous Recovery & Bountiful Theft
I’ve seen a lot of talk about this as well, and discussing this already this morning the current vigor is a bit too high, but we may have overdone the reduction. I was thinking about going back to 5s or 6s on Vigorous Recovery, and going back to 10s or 12s on Bountiful Theft.

Could you please elaborate on why Thief, one of the flimsiest, if not the flimsiest class can’t have access to high Vigor uptime, but Vigorous Precision and Critical Infusion can grant basically permanent Vigor for 5 trait points for 2 other classes? Elementalist a little more understandable with 20 points (as of next patch) for Renewing Stamina, but that’s still 20 points opposed to 30 for the 2 Thief traits?

Maybe I can help you with that as I asked the same question some months ago. The answer lies in Feline Grace. If you just compare numbers Feline Grace is like an about 30% increased endurance regeneration trait not unlike Natural Vigor for rangers. But it is applied differently because endurance is granted after it is used.
That means that a ranger with Natural Vigor und the vigor boon still cannot exceed the 100% margin for buffed endurance regeneration but a thief under the same conditions is essentially at 130%.

JonPeters.5630:

Elementalist:

• Arcane VI – Renewing Stamina. Moved to Master tier.

Please swap Air II – Zephyr’s Focus and Arcane VI – Renewing Stamina instead.

Renewing Stamina depends on Crit, and is out of place in the Arcana line, while Zephyr’s Focus belongs to the Arcana line (although it’s nearly useless since only Meteor Shower counts as a channelling spell). Swap it, put Renewing Stamina in Adept tier for Air, and put Zephyr’s Focus in Master tier for Arcana, and maybe buff it a little bit.

Arcana has too many good traits, swap it to other line like Air will help builds diversity.

JonPeters.5630:

Phew,

Ok, I made it through all of my notes on the 8 professions. Today will be a busy day here on the balance team talking through those notes and continuing to comb through this and other threads. I am certain there will be some adjustments that come out of today and as we compile those we will get back to you (in this thread) to update what has come from our discussions.

Thanks so much for all of your time and effort providing us with this feedback.

Jon

Thank you for your effort.

It must be tiring to read and reply to a 27-page thread while having to write huge posts discussing each profession and having to discuss all those changes through the weekend.

Looking forward to reading more stuff about the elementalist, though.

About my previous question, where I asked if traits that affect the cooldown of specific utilities also affect the cooldown of other traits that trigger/ fire off those utility skills, I’ve tried it out with my elementalist, and the Arcane Mastery trait didn’t affect the 90s cooldown of Arcane Shielding trait. At least, it didn’t update the tooltip. However, a dev in the ranger forums (Tyler?) implied that this kind of synergy was possible, at least for the rangers. Any clarification?

Not sure if someone already mentioned it or not but I really think necro’s Dhuumfire is too op (necro is my first and favourite char). I like to have burning on necro though, but it’s too op if you use it together with scepter to spam so many conditions.

I think that 1 possible and good solution would be to assign Dhuumfire to Axe only (as it is located in the Spite trait line together with axe boosting traits) without nerfing or buffing it.

Peras Arche.1239:

I propose to make Warden’s Feedback trait change also appearance of Temporal Curtain, to promote, mesmer’s teammates using it as a barrier (similary to how Masterful Reflection changes appearance of Distoriton shatter, to inform opponent players in pvp that it refect projectiles).

I fully support this. Currently, only the Mesmer knows his skill swill reflect; teammates don’t know unless they’re told. The trait makes a pretty big difference functionally – shouldn’t it make one visually?

Goodbye My Love Goodbye(Necro) …..if these changes will take place with no buffs i think is time to move from A-net games .
I have (necro/thief/war/mesmer) but no class compare with necro as play stile .I played 1700 hours as cond necro pve and spvp and when i see no change to our big problems make me sad .
No cond buff in pve , the 25 bleed cap is killing us, beside no reflect no block or other mitigation then Ds and in spvp u let us " ROOT IN PEACE WHILE FOCUSED " since we can’t disengage and now u cut or dps even more.
Just my opinion u killing this class and u don’t listen what we want. Remove Dhuumfire and give torment instead is that hard to do it?? and don’t touch staff mark, Curses IV – Weakening Shroud and bring us back our old Corrupted Boon .
To all devs wake up and read what ppl want for our class , not what other wanted nerf.

P.S. How much u going to buff the guard ?? give him a bazooka and call it Guardians Wars 2??

Combustive Shot – Increased pulse duration to 3s. Increased burn duration per pulse to 3s. Normalized damage per pulse. Updated pulses per tier to 2, 3,and 4 respectively for tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3.

Current combustive shot Future Combustive shoot
Tier 1 = 3 ticks Tier 1 = 2 ticks
Tier 2 = 4 ticks Tier 2 = 3 ticks
Tier 3 = 5 ticks Tier 3 = 4 ticks

JonPeters.5630:

Longbow
A lot of thought went into the change to combustive shot. This skill was simply too effective at renewing itself. One of the drawbacks of the burst skills needs to be losing your adrenaline, but this skill was easily able to restore all of the adrenaline it lost. Rather than reduce the burn duration we reduced the # of attacks this skill creates because we felt it made it more counterable in PvP and less reliable in PvE as an adrenaline builder.

Yes but what about it’s DAMAGE? Why do we need to suffer adecrease in damage too(power).Isn’t already adecrease in andrenaline gain enough?Are you planning to increase the damage too or we will loose 33% on tier 1 and respectively 20% on tier 3?“normalized damage” on the notes you posted are really vague.You need to update it to match the current damage or this is unnaceptable for power builds.

Zelyhn.8069:

Can you please tell us how Lingering Elements will be fixed on 26/11?
Thanks.

would be nice if a DEV could answer that

Gorni.1764:

Zelyhn.8069:

Can you please tell us how Lingering Elements will be fixed on 26/11?
Thanks.

would be nice if a DEV could answer that

They eventually did:

JonPeters.5630:

Lingering Elements
All passive bonuses for that attunement should linger. This means Flame Barrier, Stone Flesh, Soothing Mist, and Zephyr’s Speed.

Yep. You are reading correctly.
Then cannot even understand that minor adept traits are far from being all attunement passive bonuses.

This trait is going to be so useless, but at least it will be bugfixed, yay!

I am making a warrior, any ideas for color of the eyes ?

Regarding thief changes:

I actually agree with almost every change you want to implement as I can clearly understand your reasons for doing so and believe that the thief community as a whole will be able to adapt. That being said there are some points to consider.

Flanking Strikes, Vigorous Recovery and Bountiful Thef
I agree with you latest post that these changes might be too harsh. Flanking Strikes would need to be buffed if it is moved to Master Tier in order to compete with Bountiful Theft. And on the matter of vigor duration, I also believe that 6s and 10-12s would be better.

Hard to catch
The elephant in the room… I understand that you want to boost thief survivability by moving this down and making it more accessible. I think you won’t accomplish that because Hard to Catch triggers on CC but does nothing to actually get rid of said CC. The added swiftness doesn’t really help if we get stunned for 3s for example. It also involves an unwanted RNG element because of the random teleport. This makes it very awkward to use. Think back to the changes of engineer elixiers, same story.

It was stated that condition removal should be available through the acrobatics line. I wholeheartedly agree and would change Hard to Catch to remove 1-2 condition(s) and set the ICD to 20s. This would then actually be useful as it would remove the impending conditions.

Now the teleport should actually remain. Here’s why: It is an awkward mechanic and disorienting for the thief himself but this lets it also act as a counterweight to the rest of the effect. A kind of penalty if you will that could be turned into an advantage by a skilled player.

As it is now the trait is only mildly interesting and involves too much risk with too little reward for the thief. Another thing worth considering when thinking of the phrase “hard to catch” is to add an evade ability to the skill for 2s after the teleport. This would give the thief some breathing room and improve survivability significantly.

Thank You
Last but not least: Thank you for taking time out of you no doubt very buisy schedules to inform us about all these changes and for letting us actively participate in guiding this update.

A word on traits that require the player to be downed to activate the benefit — I’m wondering how much of the player base actually uses them. No one intends to go down at all because that’s one finisher or a few auto-attacks away from being out of the fight. Unless there was a trait that gave you immunity to finishers or mobility while downed (like the drowning state), I don’t really understand the point of traits that give you an effect on rally, higher health or higher damage when you’re downed. It seems counter-intuitive (I’m lookin’ at you, Retaliatory Demise and Chaotic Revival).

How come the skills don’t just have the PVP and PVE separation like in Guild Wars 1? Because by nerfing skills and classes into the ground in PVP, it affects PVE players. It worked out really well in Guild Wars 1, Dont forget your roots!

is Master’s Bond, which could be really excellent trait, always gonna be a trait that punishes pet swaping yet remain in a trait line that is built around swapping pets rapidly? imho these stacks applying to the ranger and remaining though pet swap would be a HUGE boon to the amount of damage a pet takes/dishes out but as it is this trait is rarely used as it is completely unrealiable with the terrible pet AI as the pet will often run directly into huge aoe/burst attacks and can’t be stowed permanantly.

also i think that Shattered Aegis as it is has great senergy with fiery wrath and is very effective for bursting even with low cond damge. removing its burn is going to kill that senergy. granted there are other classes that provide burning, ele is the only reliable one for the Fiery Wrath trait and Fire Eles are few and far between anyway and not always in a party. if we’re going to shoot for increasing Guardian damage i don’t think that making Fiery Wrath less useful in an attempt to make aegis do any kind of direct damage will achive that. i run a GS with Shattered Aegis and Fiery Wrath and LOVE the damage increase it gives me while still being able to maintain a somewhat defensive build. please reconsider this change to Shattered Aegis for synergy’s sake. the true problem with Shattered Aegis is that Guardians dont really have any viable cover conditions and with aegis on along cooldown generally the burning is easily removed. Perhaps making it something more like Shattered Aegis: When an Aegis ON YOU is removed, your next 3 attack skills apply Burning for 3 secs. this would i think help with the burn removal that is the guardians bane with the Fiery Wrath trait but still balance Shattered Aegis in 1v1s as right now it is more powerful the more lopsided the fight is in your favor (applies to Aegis you give to allies O.o) and that just seems silly thanx for your consideration

I know I’m late to providing feedback, but I wanted to give the Mesmer changes some thoughts.

The changes all look good. Most Mesmers I’ve talked to are happy with the preview’s notes for Mesmer. However, I am not sure condition removal is still viable enough for Mes even with these changes.

I feel the general issue is how much the Mesmer has to give up for condition removal. Be it the Torch trait, or having to bring two condition removal utilities on long CDs, it’s still pretty limiting build-wise. Limiting enough that I’m not sure there’s a real viable build for it involved that isn’t totally specified to one type of encounter, be it PVP or PVE.

If I had a suggestion, it would be moving the traits around in the Inspiration line to make going for Shattered Conditions more interesting. I propose moving Restorative Illusions down to Master Tier, and moving Restorative Mantras up while improving Restorative Mantras.

I would improve Restorative Mantras by changing the heal trigger to activating a charged mantra instead of the current heal on charging usage. I seriously doubt that Restorative Mantras is used often, and if it is, it’s used with any mantra other than Pain because of the CDs on charge. However, the trait would work with all mantras if the heal was triggered by activating a Mantra. This would involve lowering the heal amount of course, but I feel the trait would play better and open up more builds if improved in this way and moved to Grandmaster.

Meanwhile, if you could have Restorative Illusions and Shattered Conditions in the same build, then you can really go with a support/survival shatter build.

Soad.7290:

How come the skills don’t just have the PVP and PVE separation like in Guild Wars 1? Because by nerfing skills and classes into the ground in PVP, it affects PVE players. It worked out really well in Guild Wars 1, Dont forget your roots!

Could some dev please take the time to answer this paticular point please. This has come up numerous times in this thread and for the life of me can’t understand not following this path.

Auesis.7301:

JonPeters.5630:

Vigorous Recovery & Bountiful Theft
I’ve seen a lot of talk about this as well, and discussing this already this morning the current vigor is a bit too high, but we may have overdone the reduction. I was thinking about going back to 5s or 6s on Vigorous Recovery, and going back to 10s or 12s on Bountiful Theft.

Could you please elaborate on why Thief, one of the flimsiest, if not the flimsiest class can’t have access to high Vigor uptime, but Vigorous Precision and Critical Infusion can grant basically permanent Vigor for 5 trait points for 2 other classes? Elementalist a little more understandable with 20 points (as of next patch) for Renewing Stamina, but that’s still 20 points opposed to 30 for the 2 Thief traits?

Critical Infusion? Yes, it grants mes perma-vigor and has to be changed.

Vigorous Precision? No. It’s not down the crit line for guards. Its the same as Renewing Stamina for ele. It is placed in a line that has no increase in critical chance. Which means it requires invested points elsewhere to gain the benefit reliably.

Critical Infusion is also one of the two reasons why every single mesmer drops 20 points down the Dueling line. The other reason is Deceptive Invasion (dodge roll creates a clone) has no ICD.

I’m going to echo what a few others have said, but with thief, I don’t think you’ll accomplish what you set out to do by moving Hard to Catch to master tier.

I’ve played with the talent before and honestly, it’s not worth taking, regardless of where you put it. Since it doesn’t get rid of the CC, it really doesn’t do much to help and can often just move you into other AoE damage.

From my use, I found that this rarely saved me and often became too much of a liability.

I think you may have to consider re-designing this talent to some degree before you see any changes to it make any real difference.

I’ve always thought the only reason eles were good was because they had good mobility, but once they take that away wouldn’t an ele be horrible?

MesmeForever.3612:

A word on traits that require the player to be downed to activate the benefit — I’m wondering how much of the player base actually uses them. No one intends to go down at all because that’s one finisher or a few auto-attacks away from being out of the fight. Unless there was a trait that gave you immunity to finishers or mobility while downed (like the drowning state), I don’t really understand the point of traits that give you an effect on rally, higher health or higher damage when you’re downed. It seems counter-intuitive (I’m lookin’ at you, Retaliatory Demise and Chaotic Revival).

i feel the same way about the falling damage traits. they are really only usefel in WvW and that’s it. i’d like to see them something like Procs when you take 33-50% of maximum HP from a single source. Falling damage is decreased by 50%. this way they would still have the same effect in WvW but would have a little more incentive to take against siege, huge boss attacks, huge 1-shot crits, etc. this would also help them proc when you actually need them and not just when you take 100 falling damge O.o and then go on CD. just my idea though to make them more viable elsewhere in the game

DO NOT CHANGE:
Guardian
Symbol of Swiftness:
This change would kill guardians in WvW even more. I main on guard and one of the most frustrating things is the necessity to lose a utility skill to “Retreat” in order to keep up with everyone else (or you are forced to bring a staff as one of your weapons similar to mesmers with focus). This can somewhat be mitigated by use of staff, but I’m still constantly behind most everyone else. Guardian is one of the only classes that doesn’t have passive swiftness so in order to keep up we are required to either bring a staff, or lose a utility to “Retreat”. This change will only make running a guardian anywhere even more of a headache. Please, Please, Please do not make this change.

selan.8354:

well, anet i think buffing mantras is nothing we need as mantras as they are atm are not very useful. especially in a zerg…

i mean do u think i can charge my mantras(which btw decharge when in water o.0), then run in the middle of a zerg, attack a little bit(hitting barely anything, and then in that massive chaos of aoe and perma cc u go ahead and recharge that mantra……o.0

mantras are barely used as the way they work is not really ideal for a spam and aoe kinda meta or a fast speed combat game anyways.

id rather see a complete rework of mantras and turning them into aoe that dont require a clone/phantasm or for us to have to go close in order for it to hit…

mesmers are a light armor class that lack aoe which is bad and no ai is terrible in wvw.

20 in inspiration + Mantra of Recovery + Mantra of Pain = 2750 aoe healing every 3.5 seconds. Other mantras grant aoe stability and 2 cleanses. Granted, the AoE should be larger to be really effective, but those are good zerg skills.

I’m really getting a bit tired of everyone saying that they are just veil bots. That’s not the problem with the class, that is an issue with your group comp and how your guild runs.

BTW, in order to keep your mantras when entering or exiting water, they just need to be in the same skill slot. Granted, this seems lame as I should be able to have different underwater skills and still have my mantra’s charged when I exit water.

JonPeters.5630:

Thief:
One of the issues we are working on for thieves this patch is the dependence on the traits which boost initiative. We did this by shaving a significant amount of initiative gain from these traits while simultaneously boosting the generic rate of initiative gain by 33%. We have also somewhat reduced the effectiveness of high evasion thieves by reducing vigor up time and adding some cast time to the Shadow Return skill on the sword. This prevents these thieves from evading too much and too easily dealing with being disabled (stun, daze, fear, knockdown, etc.). 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. The change to Infusion of Shadow is meant to stop players from gaining initiative by applying stealth while already in stealth. This should keep thieves from being able to recharge all of their power while idling in a very long stealth. We felt that using a lot of different abilities to maintain stealth is ok, but re-using the same ability over and over for almost permanent stealth was just bad for the game, especially when gaining large amounts of initiative.

1) All of these Thief changes are intended to create build diversity
2) the SINGLE thing about the thief that enables it to be the BEST defensive class in the game is stealth = inability to TARGET thief
3) the ability to attack while stealthed enables thief to systematically win MANY matches 1v1 1v2 1v3 no matter what classes are faced (unless foes are just randomly casting AOE while thief isn’t smart enough to keep his distance waiting for cooldowns)
4) IMO ability to attack from stealth is the single MOST FUN part about playing thief. For example in spvp, many times thief can solo take out all (at least 1/2) base NPC before the rest of the foes team can even react (already engaged in capping/fighting).
5) changing the ability to sustain stealth “evens up” those 1v1 1v2 1v3 types of matches but does NOT appreciably CHANGE builds (wep choices) only some trait distribution
6) it almost seems as if the real intent of these changes is to simply encourage thieves to use other traits (those not typcially used) by reducing the synergy of existing traits with basic Thief playstyle mechanic
7) Alternate approach to Thief build diversity is to cause stealth debuff on any wep attack = no wep attack WHILE stealthed = stealth becomes pure defense and not offense (other than surprise). Thief playstyle would then be to get in – get out without simply downing opponent (since finish can still be accomplished via stealth) or play unstealthed like ALL other classes.

Soad.7290:

How come the skills don’t just have the PVP and PVE separation like in Guild Wars 1? Because by nerfing skills and classes into the ground in PVP, it affects PVE players. It worked out really well in Guild Wars 1, Dont forget your roots!

Yes, please use separate PVP and PVE skills. Its a perfect solution.

Lacrimas.7496:

Soad.7290:

How come the skills don’t just have the PVP and PVE separation like in Guild Wars 1? Because by nerfing skills and classes into the ground in PVP, it affects PVE players. It worked out really well in Guild Wars 1, Dont forget your roots!

Yes, please use separate PVP and PVE skills. Its a perfect solution.

Why not just ask for GW3? These requests for “please separate this from PvP/PvE”. Sheesh. Where do you draw the line? You don’t like something “put it in an area that I don’t really play”. Think of how confusing it would be to new players (which is, I’m sure, what ANet wants) if they come into the game and you have traits and skills all hodge-podge around the board depending on what aspect of the game you’re in. No. You MUST have structure and continuity. There must be some universal truths.

This tread has become super long and I’m getting tired of spending so much time reading it. I have a few more classes I play, but don’t want to be as detailed as before. My caveats: I’ve played over 4000 hours. I mostly WvW, so most of my critique will come from that perspective but have done most PvE contentent. I have over 10K achievement points.

Thief: The initiative changes could be great, as long as the initiative regen would even things out. The thief class had a ton of build diversity already. I was always surprised when I asked fellow thieves what they ran and thing s were totally different that what I ran or the standard thief builds. Unfortunately, nerfing vigor isn’t going to help. The thief has a super low health pool and armor co-efficient that the thief relies on stealth, evades, and dodging for survivability. Considering that they have very few cleanses, and you already nerfed that, I don’t see much diversity because we will still need to run stealth, signet of agility, blinding powder, shadow refuge for cleanse and emergency healing / repositioning. In WvW, signet of malice is a must.

Warrior: I’ve only recently played a warrior, so I don’t have as much insight as others, but this whole talk about nerfing earthshaker seems silly. It doen’t do crazy damage like meter shower, churning earth, life transfer, well of suffering, etc. Also, it has such a long cast time that I’m often inturrupted. If I’m blinded, it doesn’t connect. On average, I miss the attack over half the time. That doesn’t equate to a lot of dps. I do feel that signet of healing is overpowered.

Necro: Another class that I’m not super familiar with. One thing I know is that in WvW, and most situations, direct damage trumps condition damage every time. I created a calculator to see exactly what the difference is. It boils down to this: A condi build will have 3 times the condition damage as a direct damage build. A direct damage build will have twice as much direct damage as a condition damage build. Granted, a condition damage necro does more overall dps, but cleanses ruin this. In WvW and sPvP, cleanses can negate much of a condition necros overall dps. Now, I can say in sPvP, I’ve just gotten owned by necros running a fear well build. Crazy. They down me in a few seconds. Good luck trying to find a target in WvW that has enough conditions on them to utilize epidemic. By the time the skill actually goes off, they may not even have any left on them. I have builds and exotics for both. I’ve read through a lot of the posts here and agree with most of them regarding necros.

Lacrimas.7496:

Soad.7290:

How come the skills don’t just have the PVP and PVE separation like in Guild Wars 1? Because by nerfing skills and classes into the ground in PVP, it affects PVE players. It worked out really well in Guild Wars 1, Dont forget your roots!

Yes, please use separate PVP and PVE skills. Its a perfect solution.

I would very much like to hear Dev input on this. The changes (as I have said before multiple times in this thread alone) are entirely PvP-centric.

The impact on PvE is huge, and thus far has been completely ignored. Shifting the PvP meta necessarily impacts the PvE meta by extension. And very rarely has it been for the better. There may be balance within the changes for PvP, but there’s little to no balance between PvP and PvE.

This needs to be addressed fundamentally. Not casually.

It’s been really awesome reading the responses from devs on this thread. Just listening to some of these posts tells me that the devs are in touch with the meta and gives me confidence that they see the same issues I do (even if we might not agree on the fixes).

I know time spent reading and writing on the forums is time not spent on development, but, personally, I haven’t felt this confident about a patch moving the game in the right direction since I started playing PvP.

I hate to admit it, but I love playing my init focused thief. I never have had to group up, as I can roam and survive most anything I care to. This will not change, as I am antisocial and don’t like playing in competition with others… which brings me to these notes and my major peeve here. In regards to the modifications to the Acrobatics IX change: I’ll only still be carrying this on my build because ALL the other options for Acrobatics 20 are weak, including new and old options… You criticize the “init” builds, while trying to make claims about getting players in the fight… well I’m in the fight, the whole time, but not likely now since you nerfed EVERY init boost I have as an option while claiming a .75 to 1.0 base boost is supposed to make up for it. Running in circles as if I’m caught, I’m dead (the way to look at it, not quite literally) wasn’t enough for you?
– Reading your changes, it seems you want us to run more (Crit Stikes X, Acrobatics III), be caught more (hard to catch relocation), and do less damage (Critical Strikes 15, Acrobatics IX)… great message. You know any other good dual pistol builds, as it seems my thief was too good :/… so, specifically:
– How about instead of being kind and increasing Acrobatics IX to 3 per 10 seconds, you just leave it alone instead of hampering it’s already WEAK plus .2 init per sec… a whole trait just for plus .1 init… makes me wonder, how about you delete it as an option instead of nerfing it beyond “decorative” level in a build? Or changing it’s name, as plus .1 is hardly “Quick” Recovery.
– Or reduce the cooldown spike to 3 secs instead of 5 on Critical Strikes 15? You weakly modify the base init gain compared to the massive hampering you do elsewhere… and the math just doesn’t add up for me. My init gain is no longer based on my contribution to the battle, or my desperate fight for life, but a meager boost to base gain after the compensation it provides for the Acrobatics IX drop? Some encouragement to “keep fighting” you came up with there, how about trying to increase the number of skills we can use by decreasing the number of skills we have next?
– Oh, and I’m heavily vested in the Acrobatics line… and you’re going to hamper me beyond belief. I stay alive by killing, it is the only niche I found to keep my dual pistols alive while in the fight… Unload can only have 1 Opportunist boost now, forget your silly “50% chance”… only 1, ever. 8 shots, 1 chance (5 sec skill)… with a 60%+ crit chance, I could keep myself in the fight and useful with the occasional 2… and the miracle 3 per volley… now it’s “sorry, I have to back off compadres, I shot at it too much. :/”?… get a clue devs, stop with the hate. High init requirements need init, not punishment for needing it.
– As a final note… what’s with the bs about being better… you make a 35% increase to the output of Assassin’s Reward, an already weak skill considering your changes… how is it not to be seen as evidence of how much you’ve hindered the average initiative output per sec of a player? This 35% increase just drips of “oops, we better fix it, as it will be useless if we don’t change it with these modifications to init”…

The combustive shot change for warrior is something I feel is going in the wrong direction. The skill is very strong, but making -all- pulses at 3 seconds makes it incredibly easy to avoid and takes away from one of its more useful features, namely the control aspect of making a part of the battlefield a temporary deadzone where enemies do not want to fight. I would suggest toning down the damage slightly, and keeping the burns at 3 second pulses spaced 3 seconds apart, but making the raw damage pulses weaker ones at one per second. The overall damage could be toned down, but in large group fights the constant damage ticks would work to keep enemy players out of the fire field. Skilled players would learn to use the damage ticks to dodge the burn tick, which would reward situational awareness. The size reduction at lower adrenaline levels has already done a lot to reduce its overeffectiveness.

As a thief main i feel like the changes to sword 2 and permastealth are both necessary for the game’s health. There’s nothing more infuriating than fighting a thief who -never- leaves stealth and only harasses, it’s a cheap playstyle and feels like an exploitation of mechanics. That being said, your stated goal of rewarding thieves who stay engaged in combat seems to be falling short. Assassin’s Reward as a grandmaster trait is a huge investment and not enough to keep me alive by a longshot. I run over 2500 armor on my thief and without black powder shot to make a blind field i get splattered in melee range without a stealth to disengage. With stealth and vigor both being reduced, we need a stronger and more accessible survival mechanic if you want us to stay engaged. Assassin’s Reward is not accessible enough at grandmaster. A small scaling buff to Signet of Malice to make it more appealing would be nice, and a trait similar to the Nightstalker’s Insignia from GW1 would be lovely, something that gives a toughness boost only when attacking in melee range. Between those three things i could almost abandon stealth entirely and be viable in melee without dying when someone sneezes on me.

a lot of thief feedback here but one other thing i’m wondering about stealthing and the “revealed” debuff is is it somehow accidently tied to boon duration or is it just completely bugged b/c often i will try to use a stealth ability several seconds after the ‘revealed’ debuff has vanished and, whoops, i’m still IMMUNE to stealth for some reason and now taking huge damage after i just burned my last defensive mechanism
:( this is very frustrating against pve mobs that like to gang up on thieves b/c of thier low toughness/hp pool and when stealthing is what you depend on for defense the unreliability of the debuff timer is incredibly frustrating when it comes to stealth management. i hope you can look into this or the thief community can provide me some feedback if they encounter the same problem as i haven’t tested it with diff boon durations or -cond durations but it seems like a very chaotic mechanic from my experiences

WhedonGaming.8016:

Necromancer changes have most certainly not addressed the raw dps they do. descrease the damage fear does when feared by at least 50% and dont do PvP ONLY removals… they make no sense as PvP is widely regarded as the least fun thing to do and the lack of armor stats and buildability in PvP is harsh as it is. Just remove the bleed stack from both, its not going to nerf necro to unplayability. the class is way too powerful as it is. 70k hp, massive burst, insanely powerful downed state. i see barely any changes to its dps as you have stated it. most of those things are buffs, actually.

Tell me the class that you play the most. I will give very good reasons why it should be nerfed to the ground.

unleashed.8679:

WhedonGaming.8016:

Necromancer changes have most certainly not addressed the raw dps they do. descrease the damage fear does when feared by at least 50% and dont do PvP ONLY removals… they make no sense as PvP is widely regarded as the least fun thing to do and the lack of armor stats and buildability in PvP is harsh as it is. Just remove the bleed stack from both, its not going to nerf necro to unplayability. the class is way too powerful as it is. 70k hp, massive burst, insanely powerful downed state. i see barely any changes to its dps as you have stated it. most of those things are buffs, actually.

So you want the necro to be unplayable?

• 70k hp: not really a big deal, necros lack of movability so this is to survive within a fight, because you have to stay there until it is over.
• massive burst: Necros don’t burst, with direct damage, so you have to talk about fear and dhuumfire. But terror is balanced, because all those fears can be blocked, missed, dodged, … and with stability the damage of terror is 0! Damage is a bit to high in WvW due to much higher stats there, but every build deals that higher damage, so why only nerf necros?
• insane powerful downstate: are you kidding? what makes necros down so powerful? the fear?

TO WhedonGaming.8016:

I was think about how You get this 70k hp – looks like You tell about pvp mode.
Just log off from pvp mode whwere i make max necro hp.
Now i know how You get this numbers – FROM THE STARS!!

Oh yes , the numbers, here we go:

Necro on pvp can get max of 28312hp (if used FULL vitality gear+ 300 vitality from traints-blood magic)
DS is a 60% of base hp – with is 28312*0.6=16987hp
So the pvp match starts and the necro get his superior hp:
28312+(28312*0.6)*0= 28312HP !!
The numbers dont lie- read.

WhedonGaming.8016:
“70k hp, massive burst, insanely powerful downed state”- i think You forget about insane mobility, extremaly long range and fast teleports with make them invisible, ability to block and evade all atacks, extremaly OP chuck Norris roundhouse kick, and many more
So next time try read the stars more careful, or simple Play the class about which You write, before You make some new post like “I heard that his turtle is too fast”

cheers !

Oulov.7913:

Not sure if someone already mentioned it or not but I really think necro’s Dhuumfire is too op (necro is my first and favourite char). I like to have burning on necro though, but it’s too op if you use it together with scepter to spam so many conditions.

I think that 1 possible and good solution would be to assign Dhuumfire to Axe only (as it is located in the Spite trait line together with axe boosting traits) without nerfing or buffing it.

Just totally remove Dumbfire already. No one wants it, not even necros. None of us ever asked for this. Dumbfire is the bane of necro balancing. We don’t want to see it ever again. Bad idea is bad. We tried it, it didn’t work. Just get rid of it forever.

doomfodder.2906:

JonPeters.5630:

Thief:
One of the issues we are working on for thieves this patch is the dependence on the traits which boost initiative. We did this by shaving a significant amount of initiative gain from these traits while simultaneously boosting the generic rate of initiative gain by 33%. We have also somewhat reduced the effectiveness of high evasion thieves by reducing vigor up time and adding some cast time to the Shadow Return skill on the sword. This prevents these thieves from evading too much and too easily dealing with being disabled (stun, daze, fear, knockdown, etc.). 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. The change to Infusion of Shadow is meant to stop players from gaining initiative by applying stealth while already in stealth. This should keep thieves from being able to recharge all of their power while idling in a very long stealth. We felt that using a lot of different abilities to maintain stealth is ok, but re-using the same ability over and over for almost permanent stealth was just bad for the game, especially when gaining large amounts of initiative.

1) All of these Thief changes are intended to create build diversity … accepted but …
2) ….. BEST defensive class in the game ….. seriously NO
3) the ability to attack while stealthed …. they loosing stealth when attack …. so, NO….
enables thief to systematically win MANY matches …. tpvp…. NO MORE
4) IMO ability to attack from stealth is the single MOST FUN part about playing thief. For example in spvp… seriously …
5) …
6) …
7) …. play unstealthed like ALL other classes …. THAT IS THE POINT !
Anet doesnt Support stealthless gameplay and the patch will shut down thoose who want PLAY STEALTHLESS with s/p or p/p cause the only Thing, realy THE ONLY ONE THING to avoid burst,dmg,cc is to DOGDE

Do you ever played a thief in tpvp vs high ranked Teams…. I think … NOO!
If you only Play WVW then I can understand your Problems with the misstakenly permastealth; want some tipps: if you walk/run straight Forward you can kite some thiefs cause their build is effectly bound to Point fights.

Part 1/2

I’ve written many posts so far relating to each class I play. I’ve played well over 4000 hours in this game. Most of this time has been spent in WvW, but have spent some time in sPvP and completed most PvE content. I have over 10K achievment points. Most of my perspective will be from WvW. PvE is a joke and it doesn’t really matter what your build is.

I really appreciate the devs creating this thread. While I’ve addressed the class issues that the devs are proposing, I reject this exercise as a whole. The whole point of this is to address build diversity and balancing. This can not be accomplished by moving around some traits and tweaking others. The classes need to be looked at from the ground up. It seams like you are going that way with the thief by upping its initiative regeneration. That is the direction you need to go with the other classes.

For example, the elementalist fundamentally lacks survivability due to its very low health pool and armor co-efficient. Due to this, almost every build needs to spec high into water and arcana and run boon duration runes. Untill this is addressed, no one will spec high into more than one line of fire, air, or earth.

The guardian has the same issue as the elementalist.

The warrior is almost the opposite of the other two. I struggle to get my health below 25K. But part of this issue is that there is only one good group build: shout heal / warhorn trait spec with runes of the soldier. Everything else is cool and does good dps, but are selfish and do nothing for the group. There are banners, but they are super annoying as people accidentally pick them up all the time and they are static, whereas fights are mobile. Even one on one, all the enemy has to do is kite the warrior away from the banner. One nice suggestion someone had once is to make the banner part of the warrior, like a Japanese battle standard they wear on their back. They could have only one active at a time.

Bring back confusion and rework clones. I made the suggestion that clones should be invulnerable if one hits an F key. When was the last time anyone has run through a glamour field and had confusion applied to them? No joke, confusion is dead on the mesmer.

Along the lines of confusion, another problem with this threads premise is that there are still bugs that exist in this game that are keeping skills, weapons, and traits from reaching their potential. Instead of fixing the issue where people would take confusion damage from dodging or when their health reaches a certain point and trigger a skill, thereby taking confusion damage, you just flat out nerfed it by 50%. I don’t play ever profession, and I have more experience with some professions more than others. I think these bugs that still exist since launch are well known. Fix these bugs first, then re-look at balancing and build diversity.

RawkFist.1935:

Kain Francois.4328:

Problem with Ranger: While pet damage was somewhat balanced at release, the 50% nerf killed our core mechanic hard.

For guiding a stupid AI which cannot dodge, shouldn’t we be rewarded?

I propose we buff the Pet damage, rather than the Ranger’s.

So that a Ranger can be on one end of the sPVP map and their target be on the other (WAY more than a 1200 range) and have that pet with it’s buffed damage kill you? No thank you.

I’d prefer a revamping of the entire pet system. Active would have the pet being its usual self. However, passive (on a 10-20 second cooldown) would turn them into spirits, untargettable, and unkillable. In return a buff hits us (dependent on pet type), which can be traited to hit allies. F1-F3 turn into various skills which we can use (depending on pet type), that work like Engineer gadgets. In other words, buffs, AoE attacks, etc we can use. Basically we’re nerfing our damage with the pet no longer useable in combat in order to buff 1 or 2 stats (with the two stats getting buffed half what you would get if it was a single one) along with more flexibility in combat.

Example, with a canine on passive, we get a boost to vitality, and the F1 to F3 turn into moves that could give fear, one for AoE condition cure and regen, and the last one being a melee knockdown that’s a guaranteed critical with Torment attached (but in return its base damage would be low).

Part 2/2

Some traits, no matter how much you buff them or move them in the trait trees, will never be attractive. Some people brought up on down traits or falling damage traits. Just get rid of these completely. This is an opportunity to really come up with some good ideas.

Stop making such drastic changes so close to other changes you’ve already made. Not everyone in this game is rich. If someone sees a build they’d like to try or may think is better, they typically need to get a whole new set of armor, weapons, and trinkets. This can take weeks or longer, especially with the inflation in this game.

Make sentinels gear more available. Some builds, like elementalists would need this if you want them to spec into a more offensive build to make up for their low health pool. However, each piece can cost between 75 and 100 gold. Many are not even available on the trading post.

The flip side is you are going to really kitten people off who’ve already invested heavily in their gear. Like myself, I had a full condition set for my mesmer with all ascended trinkets. I never play it. I’m very angry at this and would love a way to get a refund for my laurels. These sort of things are what makes people quit the game and generate the buzz that these balance changes are just a way to generate money by making people buy gems for new gear.

Many of the “balance changes” seems to have been knee jerk reactions to qqers and people who are just bad at playing the game. These are people who seem to want to just stand in front of an enemy, tank the damage, and spam a few skills until the enemy is dead. Confusion is a great example of this, or this issue with earthshaker. A dodgeroll can solve most problems, or a cleanse. But so many people just want to run zerker and spam their rotation without thinking.

Along those lines, keep in mind you should not balance things too much. Not every build should be able to survive and kill every other build. There should always be a time when you run into a fight that should be a stalemate or that build should own you. A zerg build is different from a roaming build. If I’m tanky, I just may not have enough burst to kill another tanky build, but will have enough to survive and kill a glass build. It seems that you are trying to make every build survive and kill every other build. I think you may go insane trying to accomplish this.

It feels that the people responsible for balancing are just tinkering because it’s your job. Maybe you need to talk to the other people you work with and address these other issues that affect classes first. Keep these in mind when you address balancing.

Thief: Critical Strikes 15: Opportunist

After doing some testing I noticed that this change does not take in account the volume of hits. The larges volume of hits is on P/P Unload thief with ricochet.

Granted those ones have 15 initiative, spend 5 initiative per unload, unload has 50% critical strike chance, makes 8 shots in 1.75 seconds, with ricochet – 15 hits over 1.75 seconds. That equals to 7 crits over 1.75 seconds which is 4 crits per second. At 30% opportunist chance, its 75% chance to get 1 initiative/second on the WEAKEST weapon set.
75% for 1 initiative every second vs almost 100% chance of getting 0.2 initiative per second. 0.75-0.2 = 0.55 initiative loss per second. The change to initiative returns only 0.25 of that. So the P/P, weakest thief weapon set gets nerfed by this change by far more than any other thief build out there.

Summary:
Previously: 1.5 initiative/second while unloading with 50% crit chance and ricochet trait into a group. After 4 ricochets you have 5-6 (up to 9 with incredible luck)/15 initiative left

Now: 1.2 initiative/second while unloading with 50% crit chance and ricochet trait into a group. After 4 ricochets you have no more than 3/15 initiative left.

Now please take in account that full berzerker thief will have no less then 77% total crit chance without fury on unload and over 100% with fury and food/spotter. That would increase the initiative per second pre-nerf to 1.7 (on pack) and a whooping 1.55 single (or without ricochet).

Could you please ensure that this change (clearly intended to balance out other rather powerful builds) would not hit the weakest weapon set the most? Even as weak as it (P/P) is now I still grown to love it after Body Shot change. So please, even if we are minority, consider the impact of this on all thieves.

The upcoming changes outlined have good and bad qualities (which i wont address since the community has amply covered the concerns). That being said it should be delayed until the real issue can be addressed. For ideas on said issue of pvp and pve separation could be as follows. As of now when you enter sPVP you get a whole new trait bar, gear, and some items are different such as traveler runes( spvp and pve variants have different stats), that being said why cant that “new” skill bar you get have the word PVP affix in the title, Then you can simple nerf/buff PVP traits/skills without having PVE affected in it, and visa-versa with nerf/buffs to PVE skills/traits. As far as WvW if it too had the PVP affix on skills since you are very much doing Player vs Player, then it too would address the problems that caused these nerfs in the patch in the first place. I am not however saying to rework WvW, what i am saying is, simple add PVP affix to skills/traits in PVP situations and patch those two different entities. The long you wait to separate the two, then the more uproar/heartache/work will occur when the changes finally take place. In Guild Wars 1 it took a little while to separate pvp and pve but when that occurred it brought the game to the next level and it needs to happen here especially if A-net is trying to get into E sports. PVP and PVE are two different beasts, Treat them as such.

HAH! Balance changes to get people to play a variety of styles. So explain how the changes you plan on implementing benefit the D/D Ele….? They don’t one bit! You completely destroy the class and make don’t make them viable any more with the traits and how you are rearranging them! This is an utter joke… D/D, S/D and Staff are all viable at this current moment in time for the Elementalist and therefore no changes need to be made with regards to movement of traits, perhaps only slight re-adjustment of internal recharges or durations etc.

ANET ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING!

I find the initiative changes problematic for the thief, so yes you get 2.5 more initiative within a 10 second period, with the current Quick Recovery trait its 2 and with signet is 3, so mathematically it checks out, however what this doesn’t account for is burst initiative.

The trait and the signet, you get 3 initiative immediately after you spent those then another 3 initiative after those 10 seconds.

The Opportunist trait took a big hit as you may have 50% chance to get 1 initiative however this is put into cool down 5 seconds, compared to the old where it may be 30% but its put into cool down for 1 second, with some attacks you are sometimes capable of getting 2 attacks in that second ( or 3 in 2 seconds) just to gain that initiative back, so you can potentially gain more.

Finally the signet initiative gains being brought down to one, its’ another but I would say it’s a small bite, because its not worth much, losing power for 36 seconds, every other signet for 24seconds including the 1 initiative gain per second means 3 initiative max, is it worth it? I would say no unless that extra will down or kill your target.

So in conclusion, builds that are not stealth stabbing will still need those traits to continue to function.

Now for survivability of a thief, I totally agree you should not be able to mindlessly dodge through everything, however halving the vigor buff time is quite huge on its own, and the attempts to make up for it aren’t significant enough to make up for it, with thieves having so few options to invest in just to survive.

Compared to a DPS Guardian and DPS Elementalist, I find thief lesser than these two, as thieves have little access to self buff defensive skills.

So constant fighting to survive, that’s fine I can live with that, however the assassin’s reward as three problems: it has a very low base heal, it scales terribly with healing power and it would be a grandmaster requirement. It would mean sacrificing 5 more trait points or (10/15 if you even opt for this), before I found it acceptable because you can opt for the Fluid strikes trait (10% damage while endurance not full), now to get it means sacrificing more damage or something useful just for a low heal compared to a guardian passive or warrior heal, which are constant to the thieves skill healing.

What I can think of for a “constant fighting” thief, is giving it someway to stand in a fight without stealth, only thing it has is Flanking Strike from sword and maybe Black Powder from pistol, but they’re both expensive and short lived. Practiced Tolerance +2% is ok, but it’s too little to help, Hard to Catch doesn’t break any CCs, perhaps raising base healing of signet of malice and assassin’s reward will help or even the base hp of the thief or some new skills.

In the end, with initiative gains being theoretically lowered and the naturally low effective hp of a thief, the only place it has in a party is single target DPS, and even then it may become less effective in that field as well.

I dont get what you mean by Raw DPS conditions for Necros. I have tried using scepter many times but is so slow at killing things compared to axe and staff in my opinion. I am sure I am not specing correctly.
Maybe have feast of corruption do a little more damage when specced in to curses or change Lingering Curse to something more useful than “duration”. I would like to see scepter become more viable because I see a lot of axe necros out there.
I like the changes to DS and many other traits.

I feel like the incoming nerf on Thief’s initiative regeneration is going to damage furtherly any possible of the already damaged Pistol/Pistol builds. After this, thieves will abandon P/P completely even in PvE.

JonPeters.5630:

Phew,

Ok, I made it through all of my notes on the 8 professions. Today will be a busy day here on the balance team talking through those notes and continuing to comb through this and other threads. I am certain there will be some adjustments that come out of today and as we compile those we will get back to you (in this thread) to update what has come from our discussions.

Thanks so much for all of your time and effort providing us with this feedback.

Jon

Jon is it better for us to provide profession specific feedback here or on the discussions going on in the professions forum? I really appreciate your dedication to reading all this feedback!

JonPeters.5630:

Some ranger discussion.

Natural Vigor
Starting here because I think it requires the most discussion. This, simply put, was a wildly overpowered trait. I tell people not to compare one profession to another, but Engineer has this trait as a major grandmaster. It was simply too easy to put 5 points in this line and then be able to dodge every 6.67 seconds. As it stands after the change this still allows you to splash 5 points and dodge every 8 seconds. I don’t think this will ruin survivability, and I think by buff other traits further down this line it will encourge rangers who are looking to survive to go further into this trait line.

Spirits Unbound and Nature’s Voice
I think the biggest change of moving spirits unbound is it allows you to take this trait along with Nature’s Voice. Internally we have done some testing where you bring stone spirit, guard, and then still have a open third utility slot to make some truly good support ranger builds. Spirits have always had that feel and I think this brings that to the forefront.

Power Rangers
No pun intended. As many have said these guys are in an interesting position. In some ways they can be very strong, but everytime I play my ranger this way it feel like it comes up a little bit short. I think this is because they are lacking a few things as either additional tools for greatsword or as utilities. Signets are the somewhat obvious utility choice but their effect is too varied to run a strong full signet build here. Conversely all traits associated with signets tend to increase in power the more you bring. What signets need is a good trait that synergizes with bringing a single signet, like Nature’s Voice does for shouts. This would let you bring maybe one or two signets and suppliment them with something else. One idea we talked about for Greatsword would be to take the evade off of the 3rd attack of the auto-chain and put it on swoop. This would give you a second on-demand defensive skill and instead we put something less timing based (for example a whirl finisher) on that third attack to empower it.

Main-hand sword
I just want to clarify for good that main hand sword is currently working as intended. All movement skills cannot be interrupted by dodging and this is currently intentional. It has a very specific play style, and I would like it to remain. I understand that rangers want a one handed melee option that is more mobile, but that will have to wait, as I know there are a mix of players who also like how this weapon plays and I do not want to take away one of the more unique playstyles that we have and replace it with something that is fairly common.

Thanks,

Jon

Link to ranger sub-forum
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/December-10th-Ranger-changes/page/5#post3149107

Thank you for the reply. It certainly sheds some light onto the thoughts behind the changes.
However, for greatsword, instead of removing evasion from AA, i think the ranger playerbase in general, would be more happy if we had a blast finisher added to maul. It has been asked for about 10 million times now, and it is but fair that rangers, aswell as most other professions, have an equal access to spammable blast finishers. Thieves, warriors, guardians, engineers all have blast finishers at hand with short cooldowns. And given the current “wildcard” behavior of whirl finishers, i find these to be, less effective and desirable in terms of group utility than blast finishers.

A suggestion while on the topic of finishers. To promote rangers as a “bow/ranged focused” class, may i suggest that all bow/axe/thrown attacks from rangers have 100% projectile finisher chance?

Another question regarding axe.
The Axe #5 has in many cases been stated as “blocks incoming projectiles but due to a bug it randomly reflects”. Can the development team either decide whether to make it “block” or “reflect” once and for all? It would be nice if it reflected, as that would provide some more group utility, kinda like wall of reflection.

RawkFist.1935:

Lacrimas.7496:

Soad.7290:

How come the skills don’t just have the PVP and PVE separation like in Guild Wars 1? Because by nerfing skills and classes into the ground in PVP, it affects PVE players. It worked out really well in Guild Wars 1, Dont forget your roots!

Yes, please use separate PVP and PVE skills. Its a perfect solution.

Why not just ask for GW3? These requests for “please separate this from PvP/PvE”. Sheesh. Where do you draw the line? You don’t like something “put it in an area that I don’t really play”. Think of how confusing it would be to new players (which is, I’m sure, what ANet wants) if they come into the game and you have traits and skills all hodge-podge around the board depending on what aspect of the game you’re in. No. You MUST have structure and continuity. There must be some universal truths.

Then ANet should never have started separating PvE skills from PvP/WvW to begin with in this game.

I believe all of the classes already have at least one skill or trait that operates differently in some fashion in PvP/WvW than it does in PvE, not to mention that multiple runes function differently as well (not to mention the complete lack of some runes in PvP).

If you really gave a kitten about “structure and continuity”, you would be calling for ANet to undo the separations they’ve already created, not lambasting someone for calling for further separations when those further separations make perfect sense.

Spurnshadow.3678:

Part 2/2

Some traits, no matter how much you buff them or move them in the trait trees, will never be attractive. Some people brought up on down traits or falling damage traits. Just get rid of these completely.

The falling damage traits are designed to be swapped in during WvW. They do their job, and they do their job well.

Just because you don’t WvW doesn’t mean they should be removed.

I thought the falling traits were pretty worthless at first…

…then I started doing jumping puzzles.

In regards to the engineer.
I think the incendary powder move is going to hurt more builds and create less diversity.
not intentionally obviously but some builds need this like a dual pistol/ft builds needing the extra burn damage/ just the condition itself for the bonus.

Perhaps a way to get round this would make the pistol conditions last a bit longer because even with pretty decent condi duration they fall off pretty quickly even with 100% conditon duration (which is hard to get). This could also replace the rng traits in the tree for condition application.

Hi, I will be very happy to speak about the engineer, but first i want to tell you that all the changes that you will make on decemeber will be very good, and especially for thief and warrior.

now let’s talk about engineer, i’m not here for complaining, and want to point out that engineer is my favourite class and i spent with that over 1000 hours of game. i love the basically idea behind this profession, i love the mechanic based on toolbelt and kit, but also i have some problems making different build.
Now, i tried a lot of different build but in conclusion i see that one of the utility skill is essentially stuck, being a kit, whatever you want, ok, but a kit. i say that because base weapon an engineer can use are less powerful than every kit. i tried to change a kit with other utility but the final result is always the same.

Now i want to ask devs something about that: you said that you are ok with a warrior that can do massive damage, so i can think that the imprint of a warrior is based on damage like a guardian is based on healing. what’s the role of engineer? i see that can do a lot of things, and is very flexible, but if i can say that berz war is the best dps, or something like that (thinking at the ele build based on hammer delivering 10k damage on the 3 attack of tha autoattack chain), what can i say about engineer?

being the best doing something can give you a role in a party, like people call for guardian and ele if they look for great defensive capabilities, or war and mesmer for high dps. at the moment i see that (pve speaking) nobody calls out for engineer: not in fractals, or every dungeons or other events. at the beginning engineer used to be an high aoe dps class, but with melee fighters like warriors that can hit 3 or 5 enemy at a time, aoe damage like granades or bombs are less useful.

P.s. speaking about utility skills and traits, i think that elixir with traits support is not compared with other stuff, cause they can give powerful buffs like stability, stealth, invulnerability etc, lcuring one condition, and possibly giving might. The other options are: kits (as i said before to maximize a build one slot is yet taken by one kit, so you can decide to take other 1 or 2 kit) but the traits that support this style of game are not so useful (the best effect for changing kit is placed on med kit, an healing skill). turrets: speaking of pve, they are something that you put down, fire, and than explodes easily if used in dungeon or fractal, and the attack speed it’s slow, near to one of a phantasm of a mesmer, but that can do 10X damage of one turret. Gadgets: the idea it’s very itneresting and funny, but if i want to play using gadgets, i have some extra movements but i can’t remove conditions ( except for the healing skill ) but no buff and no damage bonus.

If you can answer to my question i will be grateful to you, because i really appreciate the explanation of the reason behind your choice, and i’m very interested in the ones made for engineer.

ty