Guild Wars 2

Deccode.3659:

Sorry to ask this, but how about you buff warriors off hand sword skills? I didn’t read all 32 pages to be honest and I’m sorry if this was brought up already, but I really really love having two swords equipped on my warrior and I’m playing him as condition damage with rabid gear and right now I got the feeling that skill 4 is really bad and 5th skill is ok-ish in fact sword off hand skills are in my eyes terrible compared to shield/mace/axe. About the trait’s it’s ok I’m gonna adept to it I guess. So yeah any thoughts about changing some weapon skills like those specially those I meantioned above?

Ranger

Trait: Beastmastery

Some of the traits are completely useless. Not from a subjective point of view, but due to mechanisms working against eachother.

Eg. Intimidation Training:
Activated (F2) abilities for canines and spiders cause cripple.
Wolf with fear (F2) and Drakehound with immobilized (F2) does NOT synergies at all with Intimidation Training. What is the logic behind this?

Master’s Bond:
Almost all traits, skills and weapons encourage you to swap pets on a regular basis. On top of that, pets are highly susceptible to AOE damage (a well-known fact) due to lack of evade mechanisms. Which further forces you to swap pets regularly. Why would anyone invest in Master’s Bond when a swap resets all of the hard-earned stacks?
Imho, you should loose the stacks when pet is defeated or changed ( not to be misinterpreted with swap). Also, there should be separated stacks for the four (2 land, 2 water) chosen pets. Therefore you should be able to keep the stacks on all active pets as a reward for being a good beastmaster keeping your pets alive.

Hey, thanks sooo much for finally the communication we’ve been asking for, that’s a great move !
I was holding judgement, waiting to correctly have in mind everything and think about it but I saw the thread was going to close pretty soon.
So my question is : since there are soooo many posts here and it’s impossible to follow while being casual on the forums, can we post our thoughts in the respective professions threads as well ?
I know it’s possible but I mean : will it be taken into account in the same way as posting here ? Or will it be regarded as useless ?

Me and two friends,after we read this post, have managed to think about some of the weak points of our thiefs. I want to precise that we played this class in PvE, PvP and WvW, for a discrete amount of time.
Those are general suggestions, not focused only on 10th Dec patch.

Cluster bomb: long casting time,like 4-5 sec , choking gas is way faster.
Death blossom: sometimes, casting it makes you evade too far from targhet, so u must adjust your position to attack again.
Infiltrator strike:if you use it while attacking mobs near walls, usually you’ll go in textures.
Shadow arts traits are almost useless underwater.
The possible lack of initiative with this patch will limit evade-with-weapons builds, and encourage the use of infiltrator signet (3 shadowsteps with s/d, steal,infiltrator strike, and signet as well)instead of others usefull skills.
Initiative cost of Unload on p/p and Cloak and Dagger can result too excessive with this patch.
Dodge is funny, but statics thiefs aren’t possible to play for the lack of armor. (Maybe it’s a peculiar trait of the class, but we’ve wrote it anyways)
Oh, I forgot about it; but pistols can’t be used for hitting anything like structures…and really, to cluster bomb them is just meh xD

Sort of sad that
Ranger
Short Bow
Skill 2: Poison Volley
is NOT being improved at all….

Short bow has been constantly being nerfed since day 1…
Why not actually improve this skill to be of some actual use?

A poison aoe similar to how barage is done would be cool (short range aoe) even with maybe 1 stack of torment @ 40% on crit. ?

Thats the one thing that short bow is actually missing from making it a true viable weapon is a decent aoe…..

If you are not going to give us better pets, or our old range, or any of the other fixes we have been asking for, can you at least grant us a basic aoe skill for one of the most nerfed weapons in the game?

Arena Net

Necro: It would be great if you could acknowledge the terrible blood magic changes that were made in the last patch for the Necro. These changes were hyped up and people were expecting something reasonable.

These traits are still really bad – the changes did nothing to address any sustain problems this class has. Read the Necro forums for the calculations…. we are siphoning 30-40 health per hit when fully traited (multiple traits), while warrior healing signet gives 400 base heal ever second (not that i’m calling for a nerf on this, but rather a buff on the Necro siphons – it’s vital that this is addressed before we can say we have any type of sustain or attrition at all).

There have been so many threads on this in the Necro forums it’s just not funny…. don’t know what else to do.

Also, i think the range on Necro axe should be increased and the damage on the #1 skill should receive a slight buff to bring this in line with other weapons.. The damage on the #2 skill is great, but rarely do you get this channel skill off in WvW due to dodge, block, aegis, sand in your eyes.. etc

Flesh Golem – would be nice if this worked underwater and old mate fleshy didn’t drown every time you walk through a puddle.

Signed – a power necro (non condi-bomb)

Ranger: Please re-instate the short bow range for the Ranger class – this nerf was so uncalled for.

Elementalist: Should be able to slot an extra weapon set with out of combat weapon swapping – it’s just a quality of life improvement that would be really cool for this class.

Krag.6210:

Plyte.8130:

I main an engineer, have 1360 hours on him, and these changes are just bad. They nerf nearly every viable engineer build in PvE. No more perma-vigor, no more incinerary powder access for pistol builds. The only build I’m seeing a minor buff to is flamethrower with modified ammunition change.

There are a lot of issues of the engineer I could get into, but I feel these issues will not be solved until theres a reliable source of damage outside of kits. Until then, our builds will always require us to invest heavily into kit-specific traitlines, limiting build diversity.

This, the point investment is too high just to make one specific kit our main damage one. Grenadier for example is a must have if you want to use grenade, A flamethrower or elixir gun build has to invest heavily in Firearms.

We are the elementalists of science, we use every kit/attunement we have at our disposal to keep our damage and support running so why doesn’t our trait line look like that of an elementalist? They can build around Fire/Earth/Water/Air but end up taking a bit of each for all the sweet damage increases and they don’t have to invest heavily into one line to make a specific attunement worth using.

Right now as engineer, I can’t play grenade without grenadier so in the end I’m stuck with grenades and two unbuffed kits that I use only for one of two skills because I can’t invest points in them. I’m not investing much points in damage increases like the Ele but instead in must-have traits for one specific kit.

My suggestion is give the untraited grenade kit 3 grenades and change grenadier to just 25% more range then move it to Master, that way Grenade kit becomes viable in any build and you can actually build for something else without worrying about having no ranged option, then make Flamethrower or Bombs our main damage kits so there’s more risk/reward playing these than grenades.

We can’t be the jack of all trades if your kit defining traits are at the very end of our traitlines.

And rework that kitten kit refinement trait, it’s completely useless as it is now when it should be the Elemental Attunement of the Engineer.

About the nerf on Vigor, I wouldn’t care as long as you also nerf permanent Vigor on the other classes because Vigor on Crit is a lot easier to achieve than Vigor on kit swap (which already requires to invest 20 points), I actually have to swap my kits when I want Vigor unlike the no-brainer constant Vigor on Crit.

ehi i have written something like that, but i think that core of problems is that we a lot of alternatives to do the same things like a jack of all trades. if we have 2 kit for dps 2 for condition etc i would be more easier build an engineer and can have better performance.

- Grenades: the best dps weapon, so the most used, but also not easy to use cause the explosion radius and the launch system. But we have that it’s not full dps, it’s mixed up with condition damage… we can compare the second attack skill to the one of war greatsword for example… also it a range weapon that have to be used near target to hit correctly, and have no skill of movement, insted of warrior GS.

but the problem is not on setting grenades better, also if they are UP with respect dps made by ele, war and almost thief. the problem is that Greandes are the only kit and weapon we can use to do dps…. because bombs do damage only with autottack, give lesser vulnerability and do poor damage on all other skill, but also can’t spred bleeding, and the have to be used near enemy and with right timing. FT have autoattack that does 4k damage in 2,5 seconds, meanwhile a war can hit 4 time with GS hitting for something like 10k. same type of problems with wrench, but it can be balanced by the ability of blocking attack for a few seconds. elixir gun is a debuff weapon in order to give weakness, but compared with war mace is very UP.

But the very big problems, are about Gadgets and Turrets, that are not a viable option and have to be retrained and better support from traits, so an engineer don’t have always to use kit and elixir….. and yes, to do something like that, rifle and pistols have to be changed (i like rifle and it would be a very good weapon if the autoatack used by a Berz can deal about over 4 k, instead of 2k)

other things with respect of dps class…we cant overbuff us with might, so we have to depend on others

i’m right guys?

Jon,

After my post explaining why I think that the elementalist’s grandmaster cleansing water trait is bad when coupled only and just only with the new soothing wave’s functionality (unlike when coupled with only and just only with any other regeneration source), I’ve been thinking of something about it.

Cleansing Water (much like Ride the Lightning) used to be one of my favourite effects in this game. The trait was very elegant and screamed “fun!” However, after the 5 second cooldown was added to this trait in pvp, it started feeling very clumsy instead. In fact, I try my best to prevent using it, because of how unnatural it feels to me. I’m all up for traits that require skill to use or change your playstyle, but the 5 second cleansing water made me to purposely play poorer with my cantrips so that I would force myself to not use the skills within the 5 second range. Or if I used them within that range, then the trait would simply be underwhelming.

I was going to ask for the balance team to reconsider the balance behind this trait (and RTL skill), to see if there is a way to balance those effects without ruining (and to bring back) the fun behind them.

But then a small detail in this upcomming patch got me thinking. The old bunker condition-removal elementalists are going to be further nerfed in this patch for no reason. Let me explain: elementalists won’t be able to combine soothing disruption, cleansing wave and cleansing water in the same traitline, because the two adept traits are now master traits. This means that an elementalist must either choose for soothing disruption + the grandmaster cleansing water, or else they must go for the master cleansing wave and… go for the grandmaster cleansing water which will do exactly the same as the master trait IF elemental attunement is equipped, or else it’ll be weaker than the master trait itself in most situations where there aren’t viable regeneration sources to activate the grandmaster version. Even if combined with the new soothing wave trait, which, as I’ve stated, is as weak combo, due to the combination of the 10 second cooldown and the fact that you can’t trigger it whenever you want it.

This will make the grandmaster cleansing trait weaker or about equal to the master cleansing trait in many situations. So not only is cleansing water already clumsy to use with its 5s cooldown, it’ll become more niche and less neutral/ universal than the master cleansing trait.

So, Anet, and Jon Peters, here’s my proposal:
Revert the nerfs done to Cleansing Water. Remove the 5 second cooldown from the pvp version. You will already indirectly nerf this trait in this patch. So compensate for it. Compensate for it, and make it a fun, elegant trait once again.

Atherakhia.4086:

You guys need to come up with a plan on what you want the Ranger to do. If you want it to have a realistic power options you need to sit down and determin what makes power builds for other classes work and figure what the class is missing.

Right now I’m just not seeing anything to move the Ranger in a direction other than strictly condition bunker with pet support. Nearly every change you made will impact this entirely.

Longbow damage is hardly what is holding back power Rangers. It’s the complete lack of burst, AE, utility, and focus of the class overall. I’m still unable to tell what the Ranger class is even supposed to do in GW2.

Didnt you see the livesteam? Our job is to auto attack with sword (which is working as intended…) to attack two targets at once (apparently we should lock our brown bear on another target to the one we are attacking…) and to hit 2 on wrongbow. Troll. Lol. Lol.

Poor rangers. They are strong in pvp, but doesn’t change the fact that the pets are a broken mechanic that are holding every ranger player back. These “fixes” are all so pvp biased… they are completely ignoring the dire state of conditions in pve (which affects all professions and anyone that wanted to run condition spec…) failing to address the boring facerolling “zerker meta” (I think I have encountered maybe one or two bosses that can’t be beaten by melee stacking and facetanking in zerk gear by 4 warriors and a mes/guard…).

I was always against a split at first.. but the more pvp changes continue to hurt pve, the more I am starting to see the appeal of a total split between pve and pvp. Personally I would like to see totally separate skills, totally separate traits. I know that isn’t going to happen but a girl can dream….

Christmas is going to be a big decider for me (and a lot of people I know). The living SNORE-y (lol) is just zerging meta achievements for back piece of the week, the armor skins are pretty but the gameplay of the last few story instalments have been seriously lacking. 2 weeks is too fast, they are creating a treadmill for themselves and for players, atm it feels like we have to grind to stay still… They have promised a lot of things by the end of the year… new fractals, ascended armor, craftable precursors, wvw overflow map… I just hope that they can pull it all off and give people a range of satisfying end games.

This game has so much potential, but atm I am fatigued by the uninspiring biweekly updated… it’s such a shame, they could do SO MUCH, new weapons, new skills, new utilities could give so much LIFE and vigor to the professions! I want to see a range of builds, a range of playstyles, not just everyone running the saaaaame thing. It’s boring, atm the game is boring. And that is a shame :/

I love this game, I played gw1 for 8 years and I think in almost every way gw2 is a better game, but it’s been a year… and I dont care if people say they are different teams… the living story is taking focus and resources away from changes that people really wanted to see happen. It’s an admirable aim to have a living mmo, and I applaud their vision, just not the execution.

perko.8309:

Necro:
+ thanks for toning down their multi-condition vomiting

They haven’t turned that down at all. After the patch, necros will still be putting out the same number of conditions, just lower intensity on the bleeds. In fact, Jon has been talking about making our Burning even more accessible than it is now.

Hello Jon, I noticed the change to Blunderbuss and had a couple of questions (well, a dozen really but my other posts were huge so I’ll keep this brief).

• Will the damage / range component on Blunderbuss be adjusted or removed? The change to how Rifled Barrels interacts with it won’t impact it much if one has to get within 100 units of an enemy to get full damage anyway. Any chance of the minimum range being changed to 400 or in that neighborhood. Just seems odd to have to get inside of melee range to get full damage out of a ranged attack. In its current state the risk outweighs the payoff.

• Despite listing Rifled Barrels indicating a 200 unit boost to range, it only improves the range of 1 & 2 by 200, while 3-5 are only increased by 100. The way it interacts with Rifles causes Rifled Barrels to be of questionable use as the short range of the 3-5 skills virtually negates the increased range the trait provides.

Thanks again!

I love my Guardian but i am really bored of feeling forced into a Altruistic Healing build. Its nice to see work being done on the Zeal trait line (seriously Zeal has been horrible since launch).

However one thing that i have not seen addressed is Spirit Weapons, they are broken and useless and need a complete rework. This has been talked about for months on the guardian forums yet nothing has been done to fix them.

If you are going to finally fix Zeal can you please finally fix Spirit Weapons?

Lastly, is there a possibility that Guardians can get a ‘Virtue of Speed’ considering the Symbol of Swiftness nerf, we have been one of the worst classes when it comes to this issue and this nerf to Symbol of Swiftness makes things significantly worse.

It’s nice to see this! I love that you are reading us!

Well my opinion here is the following:
Guardians: it’s so nice to see that you’re finally doing something about the Damage side without making it overpowered! I love it…but there is one thing to be fixed for guardiands….

Spirit weapons. They are the coolest thing ever…but they are sooooo broken, they are useless in my opinion. They don’t last long enough not even with a full spirit weapons build. …it feels like you summon them just to put the skill on cooldown and see how they are gone before you realize and then wait a long CD to call them again for a few seconds.

Please do something about spirit weapons…it’s such a really cool idea and good concept but so broken right now…

Hey i have read all of the incoming nerfs and buffs….
I think some people said that “Hard to catch” is somewhat worthless and i ever use it (the main problem is, it just AUTOMATICALLY activate and i found that i usually got Hard to catch when in stealth).
So i don’t know if the developers can do this (ahem,in programming terms)…..
Why don’t you just replace an exclamation (“!”) on all weapon skills while got daze stun blow or whatever (except any skill that can be use instantly) so a thief who trait “Hard to catch” will be able to use it quiet more effectively since all skills will be unable to use by the way.
For example, i got a daze from a mesmer. Normal “Hard to catch” always active at “first” daze. What i want to tell you is that, it should have a chance for player to decide wheather to use “Hard to catch” or not. If he/she wish, just press “!”. If she/he decide to stay,it should just have 0-3 seconds cooldown so if he/she is about to get up and found another daze/fear or whatever , this trait should be more handy(normal “Hard to catch” cooldown still apply). (I usually play “Hard to catch” to run for myself until “Share venoms” is more fun. Hope this help. )
And let me think a little more before type some more.
PS And can i suggest in here? Maybe you should add a special ability to make “Steal” show the opponent’s casting time and shows opponent’s detail like health and skill’s cooldown time so that it will be more useful for thief who plays “passive”. (And i think this should be nice if this active in dungeon too.)
PS 2 I main Mesmer and found that warrior for me is suck so bad and maybe some pro players spread wrong propaganda about how cool and kitten the warrior (in power terms) is.

Scoobaniec.9561:

eleshazar.6902:

nicknamenick.2437:

Scoobaniec.9561:

I actually wonder why warrior keep getting nerfs to damage? Guardians actually outdps us yet they getting another buff while warrior getting his dps cut down.

…

+1 Scoobaniec

Allot of nerfs on warriors best weapons, but zero compensation.

This actually made me bust out laughing…literally. You have obviously never played a guardian before in your life if you think we can ever out dps a warrior. Right now we are known as the tanky small damage class. Warriors have some of the best damage in the game, and also are extremely tanky and have great cc to boot. There is a reason you guys are getting nerfed. You are OP plain and simple. Anyone can play a warrior and kick some tail. Other classes aren’t like that. They actually take skill and thought to deal damage AND survive.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Asking-a-question-that-was-proposed

You obviously don’t know ur own class sir. And yea, u made me laugh.

Read the whole thread, only theorycrafting no proof. And here fails your counterpost, you post a link as proof that doens’t even have proof, but all theorycraft.

It stands: Warrior outdps, guardian. Especially over long times.

Hey and sorry to double post in one day. I just know what to add.
Since Engineer’s turrets are somewhat….not good at all. I think i would like to suggest some to you. (And hope your developer team read this too. wink.)
Why don’t you put a reduce-cooldown-by-unknown-percent in turrets (in a throw able turret trait)? And change the way it drops. In my opinion, turrets in GW2 can be drop from the sky (Similar to SANCTUM 2,come on, Asura can make a waypoint so why turrets can’t do that…right?) BUT can’t be manually exploded (picking them should convert to turret bundles to make them move and replace in a new place)and their hp reduce over time. About the toolbelt skills for turrets, just add something like accelerate the turrets’ attack speed and enable auto targeting mode but will reduce turrets’ hp by half due to heating issue.
This should make turrets more useful. (apologize in advance if your developer team only want to hear the things you’re discussing now.
Also about Ranger, too bad i can’t suggest you (i have lv 2 Ranger. Seriously.) But maybe i want to tell you that it should make F1 become more effective by not having to stop attack and click new target and F1 and then click at the old target and attack. (I was playing something like this , it’s like when meet two targets, i want one and i give my pet ANOTHER one,a bit similar fashion from XCOM the bureau, again, i mean i prefer an extra option to manage pet’s interior AI attack. Just like FFXII’s Gambit. Although it doesn’t have to be something like attack a target who has 10 percent and use F2 or blah blah blah because this will be too complex but appreciate if this is made.)

Necromancer… I think he/she is somewhat suffer a little problematic when attack together with other people. Stack reach to 25 too fast. So i think it’s time to convert ALL necromancer’s skills to be hex like what you guys did in Gw1 (i never play GW1) so that it will be a little more unique and really not just provide same conditions to the other. I say “Blood is power”, "Convert boon (i think you should make like this “all boons and incoming boons will be converted to conditions,increase cooldown if more than 1 boon converted this way.)” etc. (I saw bleeding reach 25 stack levels in less than 3 seconds sometime ago. I just like o.0)
Hope this help.

PS Maybe if possible,you should nerf some of the warrior’s skills back. Like Frenzy. I think taking 25 percent more damage is still too low compare to the damage that warrior will give to the target. I think it should revert back to 50 or 100 percent more damage. (I DO have a warrior, a white black stripes Charr.)
PS 2 Oh and about thief, i have LV 2, usually join PvP. When i heard a lot of people ask you to apply buff to thief, i feel want to play thief in PvE.
PS 3 Speaking about thief, why don’t you make “a seperate stealth” for each one. Like shadow refuge will always have 13 seconds to stealth self while powder (deception) and ANY kind of stealth can’t stack stealth to each other. (like decoy , hide in the shadow and torch stealth from Mesmer. All of these can’t stack if i remember correctly.)

As I posted in another thread, please stop nerfing useful necromancer traits into uselessness, and instead focus on several of the necromancer traits that are seeing no use what so ever. That is one of the biggest problems with our trait tree right now. There are very few good alternatives to something like Withering Precision. We need more alternatives, not less.

The idea to make Terror a grandmaster trait is even more absurd, when you realize that terror is already pretty much useless in most of PVE. Nerfing it, will ensure every PVE necromancer removes it from their build for good, and passes on playing anything focused on the fear mechanic. All of the bosses and champions in the game already render fear useless. You might as well scrap the entire mechanic this way.

Thanks for the replies, John!

Yeah, those threshold changes certainly do help for Blunderbuss. The close-range threshold is still very short, but I’ll take what I can get in regards to that. As an aside, Blunderbusses did produce a lot of smoke.

And when you put it that way about Jump Shot, I understand what you mean. I certainly wouldn’t want the animation time lengthened as it does seem rather long already. Might there be a chance of there being an evade during the leap portion? The engineer still has to worry about getting distance again after the Jump Shot after all.

Also, in regards to Jump Shot, just in case you aren’t aware the Vulnerability portion adds 3 stacks per enemy hit. Meaning that if you hit 3 enemies, each of the 3 gets 9 stacks of vulnerability, 4 = 12 stacks, etc. It’s a pretty cool aspect of the skill as it and makes it more attractive to use, but the tooltip doesn’t reflect the multiplier aspect and thought I should mention it.

Thanks for the prompt response!

Phenn.5167:

Soad.7290:

How come we arn’t getting any answers or feedback on PVE/PVP skill+trait separation?

Several people mentioned it, and You Devs have posted after thier posts while just ignoring it. You could at least give us a general blanket term saying thanks but no thanks so we know where this is heading and not hoping a miracle would happen.

Lastly, why not follow the idea of your first guildwars with a HEAVY pvp centered game and a PVE side that did so well? Instead of just throwing everything into the same pot and calling it done…

Seconded, thirded, etc. I’m fairly surprised the balance effects on PvE have yet to be addressed by any dev.

I wish they would just address this issue and give some kind of statement. How many more times does the question need to be asked?

Are we going to have a PvE/PvP split?

Hey Jon, I was wondering – do you guys at Anet feel that giving things such as turrets, ranger pets and similar things 85% to dodge AoE makes them too overpowered? That is what “that other game” does and currently turrets are absolutely 100% useless in WvW and PvE, due to the fact they just can’t stay up. What are your thoughts on that?

Some issues seemed to be overlooked :

Healing Signet
This skill is clearly over the top right now. Other passive healing options (Elem, Thief) does only heal when attacking.
Why ever putting a full passive healing option on the profession with highest armor & health pool ? Why giving them the option to heal passively while blocking, 000ing, running away ? This leads to more passive play, and actually warrior is already the passive king (full passive heal, auto-stab, auto-0000)

Dhuumfire
I did not see any tweak (understand nerf or deletion) of this trait. Even necromancers recognize that it’s over the top, especially when combined with Terror.

Julie Yann.5379:

…..

The only reason that GS is so powerful …

100b deals the same amount of damage in 4 seconds than autoattacking with a one-handed sword does in 4 seconds. Test it yourself in the Mists. Now add to that the fact that you are rooted with 100b and it has a cooldown and you should ask for a buff of that horrible skill.

Very nice that AN shares their info with the community to prevent issues in the future!!! Well done!

I’m disappointed with the change to the warrior long bow Combustive Shot (CS), but I can understand the reasoning for wanting to rebalance it somewhat. It’s a good skill, but part of the reason it shines is because many of the other warrior ranged attack options have their own sets of problems.

CS is one of the few (only?) AoE DPS skills that the warrior has access to. In WvW, it’s very useful in siege situations, both on offense and defense. One reason for this is because it’s one of the few skills (along with longbow skill #3) that can get around the problematic line-of-sight issues at walls. If I can clearly see my target, why should my ranged attack be blocked by the wall? That really doesn’t make sense. Slightly weakening the CS damage might be ok so long as some of the problems and limitations with other ranged attacks for the warrior are also addressed simultaneously. For example, fixing the various line-of-sight problems that affect longbow attacks #1, #2, #4 and #5 and all the rifle attacks would help. Also, a slight damage buff to one or more of these other ranged attack skills would also be worth considering.

As a very experienced ranger (3.4k matches) I completely disagree with the nerf incoming to dodge endurance.
Arguing that ranger has traits that produce vigor is not a solid statement for this nerf, since chosing those traits will make us lose damage output or defense, and are never good enough as a perma 50% vigor.

Why you nerf us this way? Meanwhile engineers + warriors immunity to conditions (berserker stance, heal sig and many more horribly op core things) while ranger has horrible access to good condi cleanse) + engineer 50% vigor GM trait.

As I said, as a top solo Q leaderboard ranger I completely disaprove this nerf to rangers endurance. Regen and evasion is core for our gameplay, and warriors stacking 20 might with ultra glorious cheese builds are crushing us way easy.

No thanks. That one is unnecessary. Tho the rest of the patch looks very nice to me.

Ranger:
•Wilderness 5 Natural Vigor. Reduced the increased endurance regeneration from 50% to 25%.

U think this trait is too strong and too easy to get. what about this idea instead of nerf it:
Move Companion´s Defense to 5, Peak Strengh to 15 and Natural Vigor to 25?
so i think that could work. this minor trait is still strong but u most invest more Points in wilderness survival then before, so it is more balanced.

JonPeters.5630:

by the way just bumped overcharge shot to 400,600. I might just bumped baseline again as 400 range is kindof worthless.

Jon, I play a rifle engineer and I think the change to blunderbuss is great, as it currently never really gets its full damage out.

I would caution you to be careful about buffing overcharged shot. It’s already very strong and people blow random dodges like crazy when close to a rifle engineer to try to avoid it. If it’s possible, I’d recommend allowing it to fire and remove immobilized even if your target is strafing around you, so a buff to utility instead of just a straight-up buff.

Thanks for your answer John, I will thus proceed to give feedback from time to time in different subsections then

JonPeters.5630:

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

Oh joy. Please, Anet, if you do anything to this trait – make it toggleable! For those of us who trait into death magic for the staff buffs, yet don’t use minions… this trait is horrible. Why do I want a weak, useless minion spawning that leeroys and looks silly? I’m not asking for anything in place of it… just let give us an on/off switch so I can have staff skill cooldown reduction or mark radius without having to deal with these silly things.

I will build a shrine in honour of the dev who does this.

Hurrdurr rangurhur!

Make GS’s Maul skill nro 2 a blast finisher. We currently have 1 blastie that we can control and that is offhand warhorn skill with awfully long cooldown.

If rangers are supposed to be the bow overlords, why do warriors and thieves have better bow related traits? I’d like to see Piercing Arrows happen by default (Maybe merge or replace Alpha Training with this one? Alpha Training as it is is pretty useless), and shortbow added into the Eagle Eye trait.

Great changes. Just not sure of the value of this change: Acrobatics X – Assassins Reward. Increased healing scaling by 35%. Moved to Grandmaster Tier.

I have tried using various thief healing skills, and noticed that Leeching venoms/shadow rejuvination do much more healing per game (and simultaneous damage in the case of venoms). Plus, Acrobatics tree does not provide healing benefits in its line which the trait buff relies on. To invest 30 points into acrobatics and then either take another trait line or get gear purely for healing would sacrafice a lot of what the thief is about: burst damage, quick action. I’m sorry I don’t have a good plan B to offer, but maybe this change could use another look?

I just want to say THANK YOU to Anet.
I don’t agree with all the changes, but I appreciate your transparency.

No matter if this patch becomes a huge success or a failure, I won’t regret.
Please keep doing this for next patch, and please don’t be afraid of big changes and quick iterations!

With love,

JonPeters.5630:

Ok some more incoming updates

THIEF

• No longer swapping Flanking Strikes and Trickster because we felt it was taking away more build diversity than it was creating. We will revisit what to do with Trickster in the future.

NECROMANCER

• Weakening Shroud. This trait now does a smaller version of Enfeebling Blood when entering Death Shroud. Bleeding (1 stack only; 6 seconds [10s with full condition duration spec]). Weakness (2s [3s with full condition duration spec]). No ICD.

Necro one in particular I would love some discussion on I’ll go post in the sub forums for each of these professions to allow some discussion on pros/cons.

Thanks,

Jon

I wish someone would “love” to go into detail about the most neglected, unchanged class in GW2 since release. The Guardian.

Here is my objective comparison between S/D thief before April 30th, 2013 and S/D thief as it currently is:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ahi5x5bvGhKqdHRTMnZ1R201endmank3UnVfZHdkbVE#gid=0
(For clarification: I am still referring to Infiltrator’s Return as Shadow Return in my analysis)

I sincerely hope that this analysis is read by everyone who comes across this post.

Edit: clarification

There were enough reasoned things said about the engineer tweaks.
I’m not entirely happy with the vigor related changes, but the new way how modified ammunition works seems to fix that since it gives more reason for playing kit-builds.

However, there is one thing that annoys me to this day with the engineer.
No Autohit for the grenade-kit on land.
It doesn’t really matter for PvE, since the path-finding of NPC’s is kinda predictable. But when you face situations where you must be aware of the opponents active boons, dodge their attacks and manage to survive, the grenade pack complicates the whole damage-dealing process up to a point where it’s basically useless for the engineer.
Examples for such situations are zerg-fights in wvw, or encounters with multiple players in sPVP. Engineers should be able to fire-and-forget at least skill 1 of this kit so engi-players can focus on more important input, like map-awareness in PVP and the actual movement of the WvW-zerg they’re running with.
It is awesome for water-fights as it is, but the fact that you must place every single shot manually (regardless which settings you use) on land, decreases their usability down to the point of being basically worthless.
I was hoping that the latest introduction of the new aoe-targeting would introduce automatic aoe-placement under the selected targets feet, but since that never happened, and anet tries to increase the variety of engineer-builds that use kits, the introduction of an skill 1 – autohit for grenade-kits seems absolutely necessary for me.

JonPeters.5630:

Ok some more incoming updates

THIEF

• No longer swapping Flanking Strikes and Trickster because we felt it was taking away more build diversity than it was creating. We will revisit what to do with Trickster in the future.

NECROMANCER

• Weakening Shroud. This trait now does a smaller version of Enfeebling Blood when entering Death Shroud. Bleeding (1 stack only; 6 seconds [10s with full condition duration spec]). Weakness (2s [3s with full condition duration spec]). No ICD.

Necro one in particular I would love some discussion on I’ll go post in the sub forums for each of these professions to allow some discussion on pros/cons.

Thanks,

Jon

Jon will you ever address the major problems with condition damage? You keep making changes to condition damage specs but the underlying problems are still present.

Is there any progress being made on condition caps?

Is there any progress being made on the gear scaling discrepancy between condition gear and bezerker gear? (5% vs 17% damage gains on ascended alone)

Is there any progress being made on the DPS discrepancy between condition damage and direct damage (Specifically in PvE where condition damage is vastly inferior)?

Is there any progress being made on the discrimination against condition specs in PvE? (downed PvE enemies dropping conditions, many many bosses cleansing conditions repeatedly, enemies being completely immune to conditions, structures being immune to conditions, etc)

These are are major problems with condition damage that seem to be completely ignored in these balance patches even though they have much much more effect on balance than the changes you are making.

JonPeters.5630:

MESMER

• Confounding Suggestions – We will merge the old functionality with the new functionality. It will now have 50% change to stun on daze and increase daze duration by 25%.

Hey,
I’m terribly sorry but I don’t think it’s a good solution for this trait.
Traits that have a chance to trigger should be in the chaos traitline and not in domination.

The 25% daze duration… you could wonderfully stack it with the mesmer rune (+33% daze duration) to really be the one that controlls/dominates the fight.
Since the mesmer can daze 2s with the pistol it’d change a (2*1.33*1.25) 3.325s daze into a 1s stun… that’s not a good trait. It rather downgrades our gameplay since we have to rely on that trait when using it.

I’d like it to work like this:
You have a 50% chance to CONVERT a daze to stun.

So your stuns wouldn’t be affected.
E.g.:
Daze an enemy with a 2.735s daze: 50% chance to convert the daze to a 2.735s stun

ADD: The trait would cause us to have 50% good dazes and 50% stuns… yey 1s stun vs 3s daze…

JonPeters.5630:

Ok some more incoming updates

THIEF

• No longer swapping Flanking Strikes and Trickster because we felt it was taking away more build diversity than it was creating. We will revisit what to do with Trickster in the future.

NECROMANCER

• Weakening Shroud. This trait now does a smaller version of Enfeebling Blood when entering Death Shroud. Bleeding (1 stack only; 6 seconds [10s with full condition duration spec]). Weakness (2s [3s with full condition duration spec]). No ICD.

Necro one in particular I would love some discussion on I’ll go post in the sub forums for each of these professions to allow some discussion on pros/cons.

Thanks,

Jon

Sounds good, unfortunately I rarely use that trait, but glad to see it’s intention preserved for thief burst. As for necro, I’m still learning it slowly so I’m hoping to love it before and after these updates.

figured this would be an appropriate place to put this

for thief -
any chance u guys can have caltrops work like a combo finisher?
say i deployed them in a fire field- it would also apply burning on top of its bleeding and cripple. or on a water field it would stack regen to allies etc

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Jon will you ever address the major problems with condition damage? You keep making changes to condition damage specs but the underlying problems are still present.

Problems:
Condition damage can be maxed easily while keeping 2 of the 3 defensive stats high.

No other build can spike this hard in one direction while remaining effective. The problem is that there are two different types of DPS. Direct and condi. Spiking direct DPS requires all three stats of your gear. Power, Precision, and Critical Damage. Taking this route leaves you extremely vulnerable. Spiking condi damage, however, requires all of one stat: condition damage. That’s it. That leaves the other two stats open for vitality and toughness; defensive effectiveness.

Condition damage must be inherently weak since it is most effectively used as a defensive build. You can’t have people building spike condis of 1k DPS burn or This leads to problem 2:

Might equally adds condition damage and power.

There is absolutely no reason why your condition damage should benefit from boons. Players are not able to gain boons that hinder conditions, why should they help? Protection doesn’t decrease condi damage, Stability only stops Fear because it is considered both a condi and a cc effect, and before you say it, Regeneration is not a condi-counter boon. Its simply healing. There is currently an imbalance between the two systems.

Ranged and Melee condition application.

You’ve obviously seen it fit to decrease ranged damage in comparison to melee damage since being at a distance is undeniably defensive and puts you at a much lower risk. However, you haven’t seemed to be able to translate that to condition application. In fact, most skills that apply conditions have a good amount of distance on them.

The fact is that conditions are better applied from a distance. You have an increased chance to force attacks to miss at a distance, you are able to stay out of ground-targeted and PBAoE attacks, and you have the ability to control your target (cripple, chill, immobilize, blind, confusion, poison, torment) without the requirement of closing the distance first.

In this light, conditions applied at a distance should have their durations reduced when compared to conditions that require a target to be face-to-face.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Is there any progress being made on condition caps?

By which do you mean? 25 stacks of intensity? No that’s here to stay. Bleeding is even too powerful at 25 stacks from a condi build. You can get 3k DPS out of 25 stacks easy. That’s on top of the damage you’re doing with the skills used to deliver the conditions.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Is there any progress being made on the gear scaling discrepancy between condition gear and bezerker gear? (5% vs 17% damage gains on ascended alone)

You mean the difference between zerker requiring all 3 gear stats and condis requiring only condi damage? As stated above, that’s what’s making condi builds OP right now.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Is there any progress being made on the DPS discrepancy between condition damage and direct damage (Specifically in PvE where condition damage is vastly inferior)?

Condi DPS is not inferior in PvE, stacking multiple condi classes in PvE is what is inferior. There’s a huge difference.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Is there any progress being made on the discrimination against condition specs in PvE? (downed PvE enemies dropping conditions, many many bosses cleansing conditions repeatedly, enemies being completely immune to conditions, structures being immune to conditions, etc)

1. Structures are immune to critical hits as well…which hurts zerks a lot
2. What bosses repeatedly cleanse conditions? … Be specific
3. Enemies don’t get “downed” in PvE, they die
4. Which enemies, specifically, are immune to conditions that are not immune to direct damage as well?

ZudetGambeous.9573:

These are are major problems with condition damage that seem to be completely ignored in these balance patches even though they have much much more effect on balance than the changes you are making.

I have a feeling you’re speaking from a purely PvE standpoint. Most of the players who are calling for “balance” changes, specifically the ones listed and discussed in this thread, are speaking from a sPvP and WvW perspective.

Elementalist

I think you’ve taken the wrong approach in dealing with Elemental Attunement and Cleansing Wave. By making them Master level traits you aren’t broadening the spectrum of builds, you’re killing it. Splashing 10 points in one stream is a good thing. It enables someone to build on 2 grand master roads without getting 10 points of leftover useless crap. Rather than taking universally splash-able abilities out of the Adept level, you should be putting more universally splash-able traits into the other attunements at the Adept level. Moving them to Master immediately hurts builds not focussed on arcane/water.

While on that point, you should also revise the minor adept traits for all 4 attunements to make them splash-worthy… and actually impactful.

I would, rather than moving moving them up to master, move underutilized but universally splash-worthy abilities down the ladder.

First, marry the alacrity abilities to the damage modifiers in the GM minor, freeing up 4 major traits – yay

Second, eliminate the Adept minor traits for Fire, Air, Earth, and Water. Eliminate Elemental Attunement completely. Make the Adept minor traits for Fire, Air, Earth, and Water coincide with their piece of Elemental Attunement.

Third, make Rock Solid an Adept major trait in Earth. Suddenly, 10 points splashed in Earth looks nice.

Fourth, make Evasive Arcana an Adept major trait. Powerful compensation for the loss of Elemental Attunement, but all the supporting traits following it in master tier. Still, many more will stop at 10 now.

For new Arcane Grandmaster, conjure weapons cooldown reduced 70%, only conjure as one in hand, don’t disappear when you weapon swap and instead you just set ’em on the ground.

After all that… I’d take a serious look into the ridiculous cooldown times on our stun breaks. None of them should be over a minute. We shouldn’t have to run 3 cantrips just to stay alive.

In the future the traits still need to be cleaned out, focus needs work, and they definitely DEFINITELY need a spear fighting style made for the water AND land.

Kashrlyyk.5364:

Julie Yann.5379:

…..

The only reason that GS is so powerful …

100b deals the same amount of damage in 4 seconds than autoattacking with a one-handed sword does in 4 seconds. Test it yourself in the Mists. Now add to that the fact that you are rooted with 100b and it has a cooldown and you should ask for a buff of that horrible skill.

Never played GS in the Mists but in PvE with full zerk gear once you factor in vulnerability, might, food buffs you can easily pull a 20-30k 100B. I’ve never seen a 1H sword auto-attack do that kind of damage.

I’m sorry but despite all that you guys, the Devs, do to the Ranger nothing is going to make it great until you unshackle it from the NPC that we are forced to bring with us.

Bring back preparations from GW1 for the Ranger and give us the option to have a pet. If you search the Ranger subform you will find thousands of posts and hundreds of threads about removing pet options. I don’t sound to be mean but I do sound to be honest: If you could program a perfect pet companion you would have already. Anet has been at this for awhile from what I understand. If you haven’t done it 8 years it is highly unlikely you will do it in the next 8. Not to metion the build diversity that giving preparations back would open up is mind boggling.

Hi Jon/Jonathan,

Not sure if you are still reading this, a couple of points on mesmers which may have been overlooked.

1) Winds of Chaos (Staff autoattack)

- Projectile speed is too slow.
- In PvE events, it is difficult to tag mobs with the staff as the projectile takes so long to hit.
- As it’s so slow, you can use stealth, then have the projectile you cast 1s ago hit an opponent, breaking revealed.
- Please increase the projectile speed. The attack rate is fine, the projectile speed needs a buff. The phantasm (3) could also use with a slight buff to attack speed for the same reasons.

2) Arcane Thievery
- The tooltip states this is unblockable, this is incorrect. It can be blocked.
- The skill often fails. I cannot isolate why, even after frequent testing, making it unreliable to use.
- The CD is too long. Mesmers are so limited in condi removal that we can often only take one utility for it without affecting the build too much. This skill only removes three condis, and while the stealing skill is useful, it’s not often both come into play at the same time. Please reduce the CD a little, similar to the Null field change.

3) Malicious Sorcery (Scepter Cooldown trait)
- This is in the incorrect trait line.
- Inspiration is focused on phantasms and healing. The scepter is does not relate to either.
- The scepter is a condition weapon, likewise this trait boosts condition weapon. There is nothing else in this line regarding conditions and it has little synergy with the line in general.
- Please move to illusions tree as a master trait.

Another Ranger thing: why is passive/guard not on a keybind?

That should have been on a keybind since launch. Adding it to F5 would be fantastic and go a long way to making the QoL for Rangers better… but seriously, give the option to drop the pet and gain preparations.