Guild Wars 2

JonPeters.5630:

Warrior:
_The overall goal here is to reduce the damage for the very high control warriors. This means reducing some dependency on going 30 points into discipline for Burst Mastery, making warriors spend 20 points in Arms to get the benefit of Unsuspecting Foe. We also reduced the damage on the hammer’s burst skill to separate the control from the damage. We don’t mind warriors doing massive damage, or doing great area of effect control, but we’re trying to prevent them from easily doing both.

In my opinion it´s really bad idea to reduce the hammer´s burst skill. As an example you could have simply moved “merciless hammer” from Defense to Strength trait line. In that way you will force the warrior to sacrifice Defense in order to gain the extra damage without the need to reduce hammers raw damage.

Also by reducing the damage from “Burst-Mastery” trait you will affect and possibly harm other weaker builds that are dependent from that trait, since all of our damage traits are Grandmaster traits.

We also increased the readability of Skull Crack, which will allow opposing players to more easily react to it.

By increasing the cast to a very slow weapon? In my opinion there is absolutely no need to render “mace” useless. You could have simply reduced it´s stun duration to 2 sec since now you are moving “Unsuspected Foe” to a master trait.

Regards

Seed

Domination XII – Confounding Suggestions. Changed to increase daze duration by 25%.

Why?

Seed.5467:

JonPeters.5630:

Warrior:
_The overall goal here is to reduce the damage for the very high control warriors. This means reducing some dependency on going 30 points into discipline for Burst Mastery, making warriors spend 20 points in Arms to get the benefit of Unsuspecting Foe. We also reduced the damage on the hammer’s burst skill to separate the control from the damage. We don’t mind warriors doing massive damage, or doing great area of effect control, but we’re trying to prevent them from easily doing both.

In my opinion it´s really bad idea to reduce the hammer´s burst skill. As an example you could have simply moved “merciless hammer” from Defense to Strength trait line. In that way you will force the warrior to sacrifice Defense in order to gain the extra damage without the need to reduce hammers raw damage.

Also by reducing the damage from “Burst-Mastery” trait you will affect and possibly harm other weaker builds that are dependent from that trait, since all of our damage traits are Grandmaster traits.

We also increased the readability of Skull Crack, which will allow opposing players to more easily react to it.

By increasing the cast to a very slow weapon? In my opinion there is absolutely no need to render “mace” useless. You could have simply reduced it´s stun duration to 2 sec since now you are moving “Unsuspected Foe” to a master trait.

Regards

Seed

THIS 15 char

Please change that necro fear is not an interrupt. I’d love to be able to use perplexity runes on my necro and be able to use fear to cause confusion on interrupt. Other classes like warrior can use this easily with all their stuns/dazes. Not fair that our interrupt doesn’t count as an interrupt.

Thanks

a t s e.9614:

Guys stop QQing , the hammer is still fairly strong with a DPS build . Stop being a little rabbit and running with soldier gear . Learn to use a burst set for god sake .

He is right you just have to run 0/20/30/0/20 not 10/10/20/0/30 and zerkers will still work with that you don’t NEED soldiers.

1. About all Professions:

1.1 Autoattacks:

Please get rid of damaging condition application through autoattacks.

No burning, bleed or poison on autoattack. Put them on Cooldown based skills.

Autoattack should provide some control like cripple, chill or weakness + vulnerability as a ramp up for your strong cooldown based abilitys.

Bleeds, burning and poison through traits, sigils and runes only trigger from cooldown based skills.

1.2. Area of Effect Abilitys:

Reduce the radius of this abilities on weapon skills. Make it harder to aim with them. Especially on small nodes there is not really a counter. You have to eat them if you want to keep the point contested.

Keep the bigger radius on utility slot skills. They should be stronger than normal weapons skills.

1.3. Immobilize:

Please revert the change to this skill.
It was better when it wasn´t stackable. Immobilize ist too strong in it current state.

1.4 + 5 % /+ 10 % Damage traits:

Please remove them or change them to give stacks of might on you or vulnerability on your opponent. Condition damage based classes would profit from this because might increases the damage dealt through conditions aswell.

For example:

Old: You have a trait that gives you +10% dmg when your target has a damaging condition on them.

New: You gain 5 stacks of might for 1o seconds if you put a damaging condition on your target. 15 seconds cooldown. (You can keep it permanent if you invest in + boon duration)

I hope you understand what i try to achieve: Counterplay … your opponent has options to counter your increased dmg. He can rip off your boons, convert them into conditions or use a defensive cooldown to increase his defense.

1.5 Cooldown reduction:

Merge them and put them into different traitlines for a 20 point investment.

-20% CD on Melee Weapons, – 20% CD on Ranged Weapons (for Thief this would mean a increased initiative regeneration if you are wielding the right weapons)

- 20% CD on Utilitys Skills; -20% CD on Healing Skills, – 20% CD on Elite Skills;

1.6 Critical procs:

Change them to normal hit procs and decrease the proc chance.
Opens up a lot of options for non crit builds.

2. About Thief:

2.1 Iniative

Same initiative regeneration for all builds. Only increased by the cooldown reduction trait.
So it´s easier for the developers to calculate what a thief can do in a given timeframe compared to other classes.

2.2 Evades

Thiefs defense is a tricky part, if you go for stealth based combat your survivability is okay.

If you want to stay visible and contest points etc. you have to abuse evades so you don´t get downed in a second.

One way that could work is:

Change Flanking Strike to give protection on the first strike and steal a boon on the second part. Would fit with the design that conditions are a strong counter against thiefs, we wouldn´t be downed so fast by direct damage and it would lessen the frustration from other players that we can´t get hit 3 out of 5 times.

That´s all for now! Thx for reading!
Best Regards! Shinobi

Thief Changes Feedback:

*Shadow Return – I understand the direction you are heading, but would suggest not implementing this specific nerf as I feel it will frustrate the majority of the sword community. I feel that sword could get away with not having this specific nerf at least until the follow up balance patch following this one, if the need for it still persists. Additionally, Id stress that this nerf requires it be castable while stunned otherwise it will be too severe of an adjustment. Also, losing the ability to cast abilities while shadow returning will be greatly missed and resented for being changed.

*Pistol Whip- While this is definitely a step in the right direction, I feel it needs some additional function to make it more usable, as it is often not reliable damage. Something to consider is maybe adding a vulnerability application or possibly a light bleed, with the majority of said application being done toward the end of the flurry, so as to add incentive for properly landing the end of the pistol whip. It wouldnt have to be much and would synergize better for trait lines then pistol whip currently does.

*Sundering Strikes- Decent change overall, however id suggest possibly making it an 8second vuln as 6 will not really generate more then 3-4 stacks (I know condi duration is being taken into account but still feel it is nessessary) With that, you could also move it to master tier and leave it at ~8 – ~10s duration, as the master tier of deadly arts does not have all that much to chose from generally. However, if some form of vulnerability was added to current weapon sets it would alleviate this problem for the most part.

*Opportunist – While I see the purpose of this change, I feel it is too drastic of a change. With that trait line already lacking in minor trait quality, that is that the 5% crit while above 90% hp is inadequate compared to many other minors, I feel this change is a tad over done. Possibly just reducing the cool down to 3s instead of 5, or even 4, would greatly improve its usability. Though i understand why this change was made, some compensation needs to be done, either to this minor or the adept tier minor, either way.

*Signet Use- While this trait will surely still be usable, I feel that this is more due to the lackluster quality of other master tier traits in the critical strikes line. Overall I feel this will hurt signet builds more then promote diversity in the trait line. With that said, it is certainly more reasonable a change then the Quick Recovery change.

*Critical Haste – I feel this trait still need at least 1 second increase to its haste duration. This has been needed since the initial haste change when all haste durations were increase except this one. 1s of haste per 15s of cooldown is unreasonable for being a master trait.

*Infusion of Shadow- Respectable change, agree fully.

*Vigorous Recovery and Bountiful Theft Vigor reduction – I agree that these need to be reduced by I do not agree with a 50% reduction, 33% or 25% would be more reasonable in my opinion, as there is not much incentive for picking either of these up if you do not have boon duration at 4s and 8s, especially since bountiful doesnt buff you if you do not make contact with an enemy and that Vigorous recovery can limit your heal options. I feel these changes, as they are now, will make these two traits unused for the most part.

*Quick Recovery – With the mentality you all are taking toward initiative changes, I fully understand this change, however it needs some compensation for losing 50% of its effectiveness. Should that be done, this would likely be completely fine.

*Assassin’s Reward – I cant see many people making the devotion to the acrobatics line to pick this up as there are simply better options for healing. That and the acro grandmaster is not as flexible as the other said healing options.

*Kleptomaniac – This change is understandable, however I feel it will hurt the trickery trait line as a whole. This was a large part of the incentive of going trickery tree despite its lackluster trait linked stats, at least for builds that aren’t pure condition damage (IE Sword).

The most important changes to me are the shadow return change, the opportunity change, and the active skills that give initiative (steal with klepto and signets).

Sorry for the length, I appreciate any consideration.

P.S. – Can you all PLEASE change the shot animation for Body Shot. The beautiful effect the old body shot was wonderful and fitting of the Thief profession. These new Bolas we fire are ridiculous, unsuited, and frankly seem like a place holder. Thank you!

For Warrior:

• Damage decrease to hammer is too much all at once. Wouldn’t it be better to have smaller decreases over time to test its balance/effectiveness? It would look bad if you decreased it too much and then had to backtrack and increase it again. Incremental is a better route in my opinion.

• As others have noted, Healing Signet may be too strong as it is. It should be affected more by the Healing stat, not just be uber-strong no matter what. Alternatively, some kind of heal-on-hit might be cool, too, similar to thief signet.

I’ve mained a warrior since beta (nearly 2k hours) and most of that has been hammer. Making hammer #4 mobile made me so happy, I can’t even tell you! I don’t see any problems with the rest of changes to warrior except the two I’ve mentioned.

I note that to date, IF a character elects to MAX a single attribute, that character is unable to effectively utilize more than 1 other of their available attributes. Has any consideration been given to increasing (for L80 characters ONLY) the number of available attribute points (say to 100)?? I agree that making the increase an “easy” effort is counterproductive, but a combination of skill points, “leveling”, and Gold, might make the “option” to increase an expensive (but viable) one.

Hane.8695:

a t s e.9614:

Guys stop QQing , the hammer is still fairly strong with a DPS build . Stop being a little rabbit and running with soldier gear . Learn to use a burst set for god sake .

He is right you just have to run 0/20/30/0/20 not 10/10/20/0/30 and zergers will still work with that you don’t NEED soldiers.

and some of us may not won’t to spec towards that. Keep that in mind..who suffers the most out of it? Not every warrior wants to be burst builds, but also they don’t want to be nerf because of those players who abused it.

biggs.4702:

For Warrior:

• Damage decrease to hammer is too much all at once. Wouldn’t it be better to have smaller decreases over time to test its balance/effectiveness? It would look bad if you decreased it too much and then had to backtrack and increase it again. Incremental is a better route in my opinion.

• As others have noted, Healing Signet may be too strong as it is. It should be affected more by the Healing stat, not just be uber-strong no matter what. Alternatively, some kind of heal-on-hit might be cool, too, similar to thief signet.

I’ve mained a warrior since beta (nearly 2k hours) and most of that has been hammer. Making hammer #4 mobile made me so happy, I can’t even tell you! I don’t see any problems with the rest of changes to warrior except the two I’ve mentioned.

Can’t we just fix the Perplexity Runes instead, and leave Hammer Warrior’s alone? I mean, the new Hammer Warrior build that came out after Perplexity Runes were introduced were the real problem, right? I don’t remember seeing too many people complain that “Warrior is OP!” before Perplexity Runes were introduced…

Here’s my take on the preview for the thief ( since it’s basically the only class I truly use for pvp. )

I will also keep in mind that this is to help build diversity more than it is to nerf/buff things. With that, lets begin.

Increased the base rate of initiative gain from .75/second to 1/second.
This is a good change, it’ll easily help with stopping myself from bringing 2-3 initiative boosting skills and allow myself to maybe pick other traits in comparison.

Shadow Return on Sword. Renamed to Infiltrator’s return. Added a 1/4s cast time.
I don’t understand this change. It’ll be incredibly clunky. I would have personally preferred an initiative increase on the return portion, especially with an increased initiative regeneration rate. This would stop the skill from being spammable, but would still allow for the thief to use it intelligently and have great mobility with a semi-stunbreak.

Pistol Whip. Reduced the after cast on the first half of this skill by .25 seconds.
Much needed an in the right direction, now to test it out when it goes live ( if it does )

Deadly Arts VI – Sundering Strikes. Increased the trigger chance from 50%. Remove ICD. Decrease Vulnerability duration to 6s.
Much needed buff, but I don’t know if it’ll ever see use. I think it could use a bit more spice.

Critical Strikes VI – Practiced Tolerance. Increased conversion from 5% to 7%.
Good buff, but I think these traits shouldn’t even exist and something more creative could replace it.

Critical Strikes 15 – Opportunist. Increased trigger chance to 50%. Increase cooldown from 1s to 5s.
I believe this to be a pretty good buff. Attacking more than once in a second only happens on a select few attacks, so we honestly had VERY minimal chance to see the initiative gain especially on D/D for example even with a high crit rate ( which typically you can only get 50ish% in pvp anyway. )

Now we’re basically given an extra initiative once every 5 seconds, even for non-crit heavy builds it should be easier to get that initiative. BUT, this is a big nerf for PvE, where you basically crit 100% of the time and remove that second layer of condition required to get the initiative.

Critical Strikes VIII – Signet Use. Reduced initiative gain from 2 to 1.
I’m alright with this nerf, it still retains the lower signet cool down and is always a welcomed bonus to using a signet ( which I typically used agility/infiltrator’s, two signets who have really useful active/passive abilities )

Critical Strike X – Critical Haste. Increase trigger chance to 25%.
Although a good buff and 2s of quickness every 30 second sounds pretty good ( In comparison to say, using haste which requires a utility slot, gives 6 seconds with a complete loss of endurance + breaks stun ) It is FAR too random to be used with any type of skill. Too many passive rng abilities will hurt gw2 in the long run. I saw a suggestion where it would activate at 33% health threshold that could be a step in the right direction to having more control over the trait.

Shadow Arts V – Infusion of Shadow – This trait functionality has been changed to “Gain initiative when you enter stealth.” 2 init.
Much needed. You can still stay in stealth for a while, at the cost of munching on your initiative.

Acrobatics III – Vigorous Recovery. Reduced Vigor duration to 4s from 8s.
I’m ok with this. At first, while still a nerf, you get boon duration traiting to get this.
This basically means that, every heal you use, you get a dodge back in 5 seconds instead of 10. While before you would have gotten double, it’s not too much of a big deal, people need to learn to not spam dodges to evade 24/7 and actually intellectually use their dodges. That and we have signet of agility/feline grace anyway.

Acrobatics IV – Assassin’s Retreat. Increased swiftness duration to 20s.
We have a sigil for this that no one uses. I don’t see a reason to make a trait for this expecting thieves to actually take it. It needs a rework in my opinion. To what ? I don’t know yet.

Acrobatics IX – Quick Recovery. Reduced initiative gain from 2 to 1.
This trait needs a secondary use like “signet use”, otherwise it’ll never see the light of day ever again.

I’ve been using a Hammer for over a year, and I think the changes are appropriate. I’ll just be switching from my 0/10/30/10/20 build to 0/20/30/0/20 to keep UF and my additional burst while losing out on Leg Specialist. Or, if I want to keep the more consistent CC, I’ll to do something with 0/0/30/10/20.

I don’t know what % of my damage done to an enemy is Earthshaker at the moment, but if it’s 20% (which is a high-end estimate, all things considered), then a 20% damage reduction on 20% of my damage is actually a 4% overall damage reduction to my potential overall. Adding in Staggering Blow, which would probably be even lower % of overall, we might be looking at 6%. Adding in additional power from toughness (in my zerker gear, 280 instead of 140), considering 150 power on 3000 attack is ~5% potential damage increase, I’m not even sure my overall potential will go down that much.

That’s just some napkin math. Either way, I’m not worried. People just see double digit numbers and decide it’s time to complain before thinking about the changes to see their actual impact.

EDIT – Sorry, I forgot it’s from 5% to 10% of Toughness, not total Defense. Still, it’s probably about an overall 2% damage increase from just having that trait alone.

Acrobatics X – Assassins Reward. Increased healing scaling by 35%. Moved to Grandmaster Tier.
No one uses healing because it’s bad. And to further raise its effectiveness, you would need to trait into shadow arts as well. I believe a flat bonus to the actual healing it does would be far more useful and keep the bad scaling. We’d be like warriors, except we’d need to actually attack to get our healing from signet of malice/this trait.

Acrobatics XI – Hard to catch. Moved to Master Tier.
People traited 30 into acrobatics quite a bit for quick pockets, never for hard to catch.
It’s far too random and puts ourselves in horrible situations. Although, now its easier to get ourselves killed since we don’t have to dedicate that extra 10 trait point for it lmao. It needs a rework, I’d honestly like for this to be a stun break ( 45 second icd ? )

Trickery 5 – Kleptomaniac. Reduce initiative gain from 3 to 2.
I’m ok with this, I always considering minor traits bonuses anyway.

Trickery IV – Flanking Strikes. Move to Master tier.
I see this as being pointless.
I thought people used thrill of the crime and bountiful theft when they specced into trickery anyway ? Make it 10% and it could be justified.

Trickery VII – Bountiful Theft. Reduced vigor duration to from 15s to 8s.
I’m also ok with this. Tones down the perma vigor ( although some classes apparently are still allowed to get near perma vigor, but that’s another issue ). Every steal basically gets you 2 dodges within 10 seconds instead of 20 seconds.

Trickery VIII – Trickster. Move to Adept tier.
Much needed buff, we’ll see how it fares against thrill of the crime/uncatchable.

JonPeters.5630:

Ranger:
For the ranger, we’ve adjusted the placement of some traits so that rangers should have more build combinations. For example, by swapping Nature’s Vengeance and Spirits Unbound so that rangers can have spirits follow you in tier 2, players can now opt out of the higher damage output from spirits and still have options elsewhere. We also brought up some Marksmanship and a Skirmishing trait to make power specs more appealing. We feel like rangers also currently have too much endurance regeneration through traits. Due to this, we’ve made adjustments to Wilderness Survival traits, and we’ve also brought down the passive of Sun Spirit and the active effect for Storm Spirit.

• Long Range Shot. Increased the damage at 500 range by 20%.
• Long Range Shot. Increased the damage at 500-1000 range by 15%.
• Marksmanship V – Predator’s Instinct. Increased the threshold from 25% to 50%. Increased the Cripple Duration from 2s to 10s. Increased the cooldown from 15s to 30s.
• Marksmanship VI – Beastmaster’s Bond. Decreased the cooldown from 90s to 60s.
• Skirmishing XII – Moment of Clarity. Stun Duration increased from 50% to 100%.
• Wilderness 5 Natural Vigor. Reduced the increased endurance regeneration from 50% to 25%.
• Wilderness VIII – Oakheart Salve. Decreased the recharge of this trait from 20s->15s
• Wilderness XII – Bark Skin Increased the damage reduction from 30% to 50%.
• Nature Magic I – Circle of Life. Cleared up the text of this trait to clearly identify that it happens when downed, not defeated.
• Nature Magic V – Strength of Spirit. Increased conversion from 5% to 7%
• Nature Magic IX – Two Handed Training. Added the following functionality to this trait. Greatsword and Spear attacks have a chance to grant Fury on hit. 50% chance. 3s Fury. 10s cooldown.
• Nature Magic X – Enlargement. This trait now uses Signet of the Wild to trigger. This reduces the cooldown to 60 seconds and allow it to interact with the Signet of the Beastmaster and Signet Mastery traits.
• Nature Magic VII – Nature’s Vengeance. Moved to Grandmaster Tier.
• Nature Magic XI – Spirits Unbound. Moved to Master Tier.
• Beastmastery VI – Mighty Swap. The might from this trait is now applied to you and your pet.
• Sun Spirit. Reduced the passive burning from 3s to 2s.
• Storm Spirit. Reduced the damage from the Call Lightning skill by 33%.

Do not like the Natural Vigor change

Simply put: Don’t change the vigor on Ele.

Explanation: Elementalist either takes the most damage in the game period or has access to a reasonable number of dodges.

This ruins two things. Ele might stacking, a large hit to Ele survivability.

If anything, that should have stayed medium tier.

And at the very least, if you’ll move it to grandmaster, move EA to master.

Lastly, the counter: You can’t not change vigor on guardians and mesmers yet nerf Ele vigor.

Alternative solutions to (d/d) elementalist’s defense

I fully agree with the decision to move Renewing Stamina and Elemental Attunement up a tier, due to how strong they are, but based on this thread it’s clear that, regardless of how strong those two traits are, eles (especially d/d) weren’t broken with both of them to begin with.

Anet can probably fix it while still going through the EA and RS changes.

1. Shave Cleansing Fire’s cooldown by 5 or 10 seconds (30 or 35 from 40). Since this cantrip lost its stun break, it hasn’t seen use even when the meta favors it. That says something. Should the new trait’s cooldown be linked to it, put both at 35s then. Fire-specced eles will probably not have easy access to sustained defense, so I don’t think this would be a risky change for the new trait.

2. Shave Armor of Earth’s cooldown for the skill and for the trait by 15s (75s from 90s). Much like Cleansing Fire, this skill isn’t used even when the meta favors it. Same logic as above.

3. Buff Elemental Shielding’s trait to add 5s of protection per aura instead of 3s. Here’s my list of arguments to justify why this change would be fair and not add powercreep:
3.1. This trait mostly affects dagger elementalists, and dagger elementalists are the ones that need extra defense the most.
3.2. Dagger elementalists are barely viable even at elemental attunement at adept tier. This is one of the bigger arguments in favor of this buff. EA adds 5-8 seconds of protection that also affects allies, and it still adds might, regeneration and swiftness on top of it. 5s protection elemental shielding would still be much weaker than EA, which would justify it being an adept, and it would be mostly exclusive to dagger users.
3.3. I’ve defended in this thread that the earth traitline needs an alternative solution to elemental attunement’s protection. The above buffs to armor of earth trait and elemental shielding would make the earth traitline a viable defensive alternative, while still having enough restrictions to not make it as strong as EA at adept tier.
3.4. A five seconds protection for Elemental Shielding, to ever be as strong as EA, would require 30 point investment in water for shared auras, while EA already had the AoE naturally.
3.5. EA is already in the boon traitline. Elemental Shielding requires further boon duration investment to get up to 8s of protection like EA ccan easily acchieve.
3.6. God, EA is just so strong! A buff to Elemental Shielding won’t suddenly make d/d eles broken. It’ll just give them the extra protection they need to survive.

4. You are buffing non-arcana eles, but why nerf arcana eles in the process? It’s not like 30 arcana eles have been dominating any game mode, have they?
4.1. What I mean is, consider making Elemental Attunement the #25 minor grandmaster trait. Yes, this will be a direct buff to all arcana eles, which might be risky.
4.2. Nerf Elemental Attunement’s protection duration to 3s (it’ll still be good enough for anti-bursting, especially with all the extra boon duration) but change fire’s might to stack 3 times instead of 1 (decrease the duration to 8s). This will even out EA’s effects, and further make the earth traitline more appealing for protection.

5. I don’t understand the nerf to water’s traitline. Removing 1 condition on water is strong, but was it EA/RS-strong? Nonetheless, I want to make some comments about this change.
5.1. Cleansing Wave is important for build diversity because of how universal it is. A glass cannon ele with +10% damage on >90% hp could switch to it anytime they would need it without re-traiting. Likewise, a cantrip ele could do the same. It’s a trait that can be used in any build, which is cool.
5.2. By moving up a tier, cantrip eles and glass cannon eles will be stuck to only one water trait at adept tier. Also, the water traitline will offer underwhelming protection to non-cantrip builds at that tier. This is bad for a defensive traitline.
5.3. For all those reasons, I suggest keeping this trait at adept, or revamping soothing wave to a more universal any-build-can-benefit-from-it effect. For example, it could improve the minor #5 trait, or maybe add regeneration on water (a weaker version of EA), or even something fancy like “your healing skills heal other allies for 25% more”. This can be expanded to “and increases healing skills radius by 60”, but I wonder, if this wouldn’t be worthy a master tier as well?

6. It wouldn’t hurt if elementalists could get a non-boon defense, like access to weakness or blind through a trait. Air traitline is a good candidate for a blind, and fire traitline increases condition duration, so it could get something like “Melting Weaponry/ Equipment: your next hit applies weakness (and vulnerability?) on a burning foe”. Of course, this could go to earth as well, for an interesting fire/ earth synergy.

LordCanti.7124:

Do not like the Natural Vigor change

They’re changing all the passive endurance regen increase moves. I’ll take it since it’s across the board, plus they are giving us quite a few needed buffs to compensate.

Regarding elementalists:

These changes would make sure elementalist survivability drops, and certainly won’t be able to bunker properly. Currently the bunker is meh, giving up on either Renewing Stamina or Elemental Attunemnt (you can’t have both, and you certainly want E.A.) will set them back even further than now.

But worse than that, roaming/hybrid builds will face hard times. While they are somewhat mediocre in the current meta, they will lack defense and a lot of it and become even less viable.

I dream of build diversion and like that you are sharing this with us. However, when such a list appears it seems as if you want us to go 25/30/x/x/x, or variations of that. Yes, some changes are neat enough, but the relocating of the survival skills would hamper the class drastically.

I don’t see bunker or hybrid builds working in the future, unless perhaps in PvE. Pure damage, suicide builds only doesn’t sound swell.

Suggested relocations/changes:

• Air V – Soothing Winds. Increased conversion from 5% to 10%.
• Earth XI – Diamond Skin. This trait has been redesigned. Condition duration is lowered by X%. (25%?)
• Water V – Cleansing Wave. Staying at adept tier.
• Water X – Soothing Wave. Moved to adept tier. This trait has been redesigned. Signet of Water passive will remove two conditions instead of one. Signet of Restoration will remove one condition on use.
• Arcane V – Elemental Attunement. Staying at adept tier, because we aren’t sadists.

See that? Much needed condition removal to signet builds. It really needs it. Build diversion please, Jon.

JonPeters.5630:

Thief:

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

Don’t see the reason to nerf is as my thief relies on it for survivability (we have no stability so at least you should be able to get out of the way)

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

5s seems a little to much statistically, so it’s a nerf. Too much for me with the other initiative changes

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

Like it!

• Acrobatics III – Vigorous Recovery. Reduced Vigor duration to 4s from 8s.

Oh god please don’t. The acrobatics line will be less useful for survivability than stealth. WAY too much of a reduction.

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

I see what you want to do but Assassins Reward is a useless trait b/c of random teleports. Rather change the trait altogether.

• Trickery VII – Bountiful Theft. Reduced vigor duration to from 15s to 8s.

Wow, way too much nerf.

The way I see it, these changed even reduce optional builds. Vigor is way too nerfed down and I don’t see why anyone would go for Acrobatics instead of shadow arts. Perma stealth nerf good though! Please don’t touch the other things (I struggle with my thief enough already).

Thanks for sharing!

Malcastus.6240:

• Arcane V – Elemental Attunement. Staying at adept tier, because we aren’t sadists.

lol’ed at this one

you are going to kill thief. Make a nerf to s/d that’s fine but give us something actually viable to play in pvp. The traits you are suggesting we take are trash and arent even worth taking.

tango.8962:

The one thing I would want to see changed for a thief is for them to come out of stealth while spiking. Unless your class has a AOE knock back or move ability in the downed state a thief can spike you from stealth 100% and you can’t do anything about it.

My reasons are that when a thief goes into stealth they should not be able to do any damage. they are going into stealth to gain a situation advantage, then they come out of stealth to do the damage. stealth spiking just feels like cheating and I feel cheated when it happens to me.

Not to mention that spiking is a grand “Here I am! I’m going to end this toon’s life right in front of everyone to see! Look how great I am!” So the instant anyone under stealth hits that “F” key to spike they should become visible. Heck a thief should then have his stealth abilities hindered for a few seconds due to the grandiose act of spiking.

So what are you giving to the thief sword after taking away its viability? How many s/d thieves do you see at the top of pvp? 1 maybe 2??? Adding a cast time to the squishiest class with the only weapon they can go into a group fight in melee with without getting shot in the head? If you are going to make such a groundbreaking nerf to a weapon set you better be giving it something in return.

I’d like to comment on the propose thief changes.

-Initiative gain should NOT require a slow regen. Thieves have 0 cd but our weapon skills cost initiative and are mostly offensive, what we have atm are a few traits that let us directly control that letting us land combos. Thief only has 1 gain from spending intiative, and the plan seems to be move that trait further away. Make more benefits to spending initiative, and maybe add a total cd to staying in stealth if resetting a fight is the issue. Don’t nerf our control over a resource.

-Thieves have very few boons. We have no protection, our regen is mediocre unless in stealth, no stability, no aegis. I see the issue that thieves may spend a lot of time dodging rather than fighting but keep in mind, dodging thief means no direct dmg to the enemy. If they can’t control someone who is dancing that’s a fault in player skill and not how thieves stay afloat. We have the lowest health pool, and by nature are quite squishy, so we rely on dodges. Although I never have, some people may only spend 10 into acrobatics for vigorous renewal, this would just ruin any chance of that staying, an indirect nerf at best.

-From what I see, there are just nerfs to this rather than an improvement to the class. Taking away more control over our builds, and dishing little to no incentives to try new things. Also, I saw no notes in improving venoms which still remain rather weak. I know all classes have some list of skills/traits that are useless but thief really needs more diversity. Just like the change to Larcenous strike, we had a control build. Maybe 2 boon stealing was too much, but it could of just been changed without completely removing the effectiveness of the build. A Couple ideas could be

_remove 1 boon on flanking strike, steal on LS
_Steal 2 boons but lower the duration of the stolen boons.
_steal 1 boon from the front, steal 2 boons from the back
_steal 1 boon and apply it to nearby allies (range 150?)

Instead we are left with 2 initiative to steal 1 boon, atleast change it to 1 initiative. I thought the goal was build diversity.

Mesmer-wise: Do you guys have any plan of redesigning mesmer’s scepter auto attack chain? Ether bolt and Ether blast seems weak especially when you are running with condition gear and spec. Reducing cast time of two may effect clone regeneration, but isn’t it better attach poison one of chain or increasing base damage of ether bolt and ether blast and lower amount of attack damage getting from power stat (currently 0.500 according to wiki)?

As a person who plays all classes and all game modes quite intensively, this patch sort of.. feels weird. (3k+ hrs)

• NECRO wise? I just feel that without touching terror \ dhuumfire, the conditions will still be overwhelmingly powerful. I think a slight tone down to terror scaling would be a good solution.

• WARRIOR nerf? In my honest opinion, playing both as a warrior and against warriors, this is a bit overkill. Moving unsuspecting foe to master trait and just lowering earthshaker damage by 10% I feel would be a good spot to be in, seeing as honestly- earthshaker doesn’t do crazy damage anyway.

• I don’t quite understand the ELEMENTALIST changes to be honest.. if you’re trying to make people NOT depend so much on the Arcana line, why do you move elemental attunement to a master trait? Maybe it’s just me, but I feel that it’s a very good trait that is pretty mandatory (for lack of a better word) in most elementalist builds.
  >>I think instead of lowering the dependability on the Arcana Line this change will essentially deny elementalists of vigor on crit or attunement swap effects. <<

Otokomae.9356:

I don’t remember seeing too many people complain that “Warrior is OP!” before Perplexity Runes were introduced…

Hahahahahahahhahaaahahahahah ((inhale)) hahahhhaaahaahaahahahahah!

First off, this small list of changes is already more balance than the “big October” patch.

My opinion so far…

Elementalist:
The main issue with Arcane is that it provides % boon duration and % cooldown reduction. Two of the best stats you can get on an ele. Move boon duration into water and move vit into arcane. Tempest Defense cooldown reduction over 50% could be problematic as it allows AoE stuns and Merciless Hammer-like damage for 4 seconds.

Guardian:
You’re serious right now? After all the time that’s been spent on traits and useless skills in the guard sub-forum you’re going make near-meaningless changes and nerf the swiftness symbol? You guys hate this class or something? I can think of 3 major things that are balanced and have been called for by many players in-game and on the forums:

• Combine Writ of Exaltation and Writ of Presence
• Increase Resolve’s Passive
• Re-evaluate the Aegis boon

Granted going through and rebalancing Aegis would take longer than a Dec 10th patch would allow, but it should definitely be on the radar. It should have been on the radar since launch, over a year ago.

Mesmer:
If you really don’t want classes with perma-vigor, change Critical Infusion. The only other classes that have a trait like this are the guard and ele; and they’re not placed in a crit heavy line. This class always has vigor up. And the next trait after that is obviously Deceptive Invasion. Perma-vigor and clone on dodge is so OP it isn’t even funny. Mesmer needs an ICD on Deceptive Invasion and Critical Infusion should be 2s of Vigor on a 10s cooldown.

The reason why the mesmer “depends” on Dueling line is because the first 20 points are just too powerful to ignore. Nothing you can do short of making him more OP could ever change that.

Warrior:
Its a start, but I don’t think its enough yet. Dogged march doesn’t need to grant regen and Healing Signet definitely needs to be changed. I think it should be changed all together into a support-heavy passive healing skill. Cleansing Ire needs an ICD on incoming adrenaline when struck. Crack Shot moving into Adept may make a Greatsword/Rifle damage build the new OP war. We’ll see.

Another idea to take the dependence out of elementalist’s elemental attunement, is to further buff their minor adept traits to be comparable.

Make earth #5 add 180 toughness (same as signet of earth) instead of the stated 120, or give a party radius effect like the water trait. Or both.
Make air #5 add 15% speed instead of 10%, but I have my doubts about this one. 25% speed would feel better, but could it be too strong for a 5-points trait? What about a party-radius effect instead?
No ideas about fire #5, but maybe something like “% chance to inflict 1s burning on hit/ 5s cooldown”, kinda like a modified burning precision.
To be honest, even water’s #5 could get a slight buff, even though it’s the best of them all.
And of course, bug fix lingering elements to work with air and earth.

Even so, those are only very tame buffs. Think this way, Anet: what would be better, investing 5 points in each traitline to get each of those small tiny effects, or invest 20 points in arcana for elemental attunement and fury on swap and an adept tier of choice?

EDIT:
Another solution, and a very bold one, is to remove the elemental attunement and lingering elements completely from the game, and have each minor adept trait add EA’s effects, with slight modifications.

Fire’s #5 trait: 3 stacks of might for 12s. 240 radius.
Air’s #5 trait: 6s of swiftness. 240 radius.
Earth’s #5 trait: 3s of protection. 240 radius.
Water’s #5 trait: 6s of Regen. 240 radius.
Lingering Elements: increases the duration of those buffs by 33%.
Elemental Attunement: increases the radius of those buffs to 600. Adept tier, or grandmaster minor, or master minor swapped with lingering.

Inventions XI – Elixir Infused bombs. Increased healing scaling by 50%

This is ok, but it also need an increase of the area (only for the healing effect. Maybe 480), because if you have swiftness you run always out of the healing area.

Mr Sharp:

I have been playing these types of games since DAOC. I am very familiar with the balance game and usually don’t bother to comment, as balancing is part of the game.

However I feel that someone went out and played a necromancer as a solo player or an spvp player and decided to make some changes based on that small group play.

Let me state: I don’t much care one way or another. Nerfs, Buffs happen. But one thing needs to change. Badly. You want us to live through death shroud etc then you need to give us heal during shroud.

Our abilities for the most part give us more damage when we are willing to get in there and fight close in, taking a chance on dying. That’s great. We are made to decide whether our shroud is to be used offensively or defensively, also great, but truthfully no matter what class I am on, my group (most groups) target the squishy necro first. Why? Because his group wont be able to keep him alive long enough for him to get out and back to the backlines.

Give us those few k from siphon. It would be a great change.

In a large scale fight its becoming harder and harder to stack someone and epidemic. There are way to many condition clears. Formula 409 cleanses, Guardian cleanses, Warrior cleanses, etc etc. And I have always felt that those large zerg fights are where we are SUPPOSED to shine. Your changes actually just confirm that.

If you want the class to shine in those areas we need damage uptime, and to get damage uptime we need those siphons.

Thanks for listening.

-Mummies R Us.

Lower cooldown on the shout “Retreat!” to 45 seconds base for the guardian.
If traited with shout 20% lower cooldown we get 20/36 uptime, and if also have 30% boon duration its 26/36, so its not making guardian in any way a chasing melee machine.
at the moment 60 seconds on retreat make it non usable for any purpose, as a shout its way too long of a wait with low effect to be used with pure of voice or soldier runes.

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

I dont understand. It will be scaling with healing power? So this buffs only acrobatics + shadow arts builds and settler’s, cleric’s users? Weird..

Please remove the cast time on thief sword #2. I don’t think you realize what makes this build viable. Hard to catch is not a good trait, making it easier to get isn’t fixing it. Doing things like fixing sundering strikes and other useless traits is what you should focus on, not removing S/X from spvp.

Ranger, suggestions and additional thoughts:

• Beastmaster’s Bond: Always thought this trait belonged with the Beast Mastery Line.
• Eagle Eye: Have it grant +300 range to the shortbow as well.
• Bark Skin: I think 30% dmg reduction below 50% health treshhold is actually more useful. Too strong? Maybe tweak the dmg reduction number then, but I believe that a dmg reduction below 50% health is of greater use than a dmg reduction below 25% health. Especially so, since it’s a grandmaster trait and competes with Empathic Bond.
• Fortifying Bond: This trait shares Vigor with the pet, which is rather pointless since the pet has no means of dodging. However, stability is not shared, which actually would be useful.

I really wish sword #1 wouldn’t root us in place. A change that #1 chain skills and animations are interrupted upon dodge attempt, would be much appreciated.

So you want thieves to be less stealthy and more up in people’s faces? Might as well roll a warrior, because now it sounds like we have to put 20 points on Acrobats as a staple to survive without stealth and initiative upkeep.

However this is speaking without having tested the new rate of initiative gain of one per second. But for now it seems like everything keeps getting nerfed but p/d.

Girion.5483:

I really wish sword #1 wouldn’t root us in place. A change that #1 chain skills and animations are interrupted upon dodge attempt, would be much appreciated.

Only reason I dislike sword. can’t even dodge out of an easy to evade hit. Gotta use other sword’s skills if my zephyr is on cooldown.

YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD BE GREAT ANET? SEPARATING PVP AND PVE SKILLS PLEASE AND THANK YOU.

Regarding Thief

I love this game for its PvP, and I love using my thief for it, despite the annoyance of encountering cc heavy warriors, eles, necros and near enough invulnerable warriors (seen some running orb in spirit watch that me and another thief couldn’t even kill.. he was just running). I don’t run that annoying beyond embarrassing condition and/or evasion spamming build. I play it like I believe it was intended – an assassin class, and to be honest I prefer that style of play. This means sneaking up, taking someone out, or zipping in and out of a zerg to wear a target down, reviving allies, back capping etc.

Nerfing our regain 2 initiative on stealth will really hurt the ability to sneak up and stay in a fight for a time without having to run. If you use initiative to sneak up, you’re lacking initiative to fight for too long, and have to run sooner. I feel this change was actually to stop thieves from being able to play hit and run via stealth to make them fight properly, but for people who play the initial sneak up approach I fear it may have the opposite effect. Nerfing base initiative regain and changing the regain on crit and cd will be ok for PVE since backstabbing doesn’t have you hitting 5 times per second, you won’t notice any difference. For PvP however… any thief that isn’t abusing stealth will have been hitting 5+ times a second. The potential regain has therefore dropped from an average of 1/100*30=0.3 per second to (1/100*50)/5=0.1 per second, and a max of 5 per 5 seconds (unlikely but still) to 1 per 5 seconds. That on top of increasing the natural regain rate from 0.75 to 1 per second will hurt a lot for those who wish to stay in a fight for a length of time.

The evasion build was balanced, sacrificing DPS for survival.. I don’t see any talk about removing a warrior’s ability to block for 5 seconds, or engineers and guards from chaining invulnerability, so why stop thieves from evading for 5 seconds? If you wanted to nerf their mobility with the evades then stick a maximum distance from target cap on S/D 3, and make it only usable when there is a target. Putting a CD on Sword 2 Shadow Return will remove the ability to zip in and out of zergs. A squishy thief won’t survive in there.. and it’s also great for dealing with those engis and rangers that run around like headless chickens.

I agree with the reductions to traited initiative regain through signets, every 10 seconds etc. Because no class should be able to spam the same skill near indefinitely without a CD. However, all builds and play styles for thief in PvP have been significantly hurt except the glass thief that simply hides spamming shortbow, gets some bloodlust stacks then goes off to spam heartseeker. The thieves that spam heartseeker will still be able to spam it and run, causing the class to be hated on. So despite telling us we are an assassin class and giving us all these traits based around stealth, it appears the devs really intend for thieves to have the same stealth capabilities of a mesmer, and to only run around spamming heartseeker and hoping for some nice crits. The only thieves we’ll see in PvP now will be D/P + SB now.

It was nice to see a buff to the heal for initiative use. That had potential in PVE, but for backstabbers Shadows Rejuvination was superior. However moving it up a tier and nerfing overall initiative regen really just balanced that buff out. For that reason I doubt it will see much use.

Regarding Necromancer

I recently made a Necro for PvP and it’s quite fun. I’m running a direct damage power build rather than a condition build and it’s very effective at taking down multiple enemies. However if I wanted more survivability I’d have to sacrifice almost all of that DPS. Life siphoning is obviously – devs even stated – a key part of playing necro. But it’s so weak. The only way to get a decent amount of life siphoning is by running around with an army of minions.. but if I wanted to play PVE, I wouldn’t be in PvP. I’m not alone in this either – a lot of my friends complain about joining a PvP match and there being 5x the number of NPCs as there are players. It is also worse than face rolling. The minions do the bulk of the healing work for you. Life siphoning needs a very big buff, whether great increase to the healing it provides or a smaller increase with the ability to siphon and heal while in death shroud.

Regarding Elementalist

It’s nice to see a lot of the complaints about ele needing to go into Arcana have been heard. With the introduction of Fresh Air however, it was possible to get a good DPS build without needing 30 Arcane, by using Lightning Whip and the Lightning Strike on change inbetween select skills from other attunements. Despite this, a lot of eles – myself included – still went into Arcana… why? Because if you’re meleeing as the lowest health and lowest armour class in the game, you still need a lot of dodges if not healing. So while it was nice to reduce the base attunement cooldowns further improving builds using Fresh Air and not 30 Arcana, you’ve basically made it necessary for us to put 20 in Arcana for such a melee build instead of 10 by moving Renewing Stamina up a tier. A step in the wrong direction.

Some interesting changes to fire and earth. Taking away one 5% increase and making another 5% increase into a 10% increase won’t make going that far into fire more attractive than before. Changing one trait to use cleansing fire at a given point in a fight did make some sense considering it’s Cleansing “FIRE” and all the condition removal was based in the water line. That was a good change. To then give ele some condition immunity in earth was nice too, however I would like to see some more changes to earth. We are lowest health and armour, so why is the 25 trait +10% when endurance IS full. Some other classes have increased damage when it isn’t, which makes much more sense for such a squishy class. And while on the one hand seeing capability to handle conditions in other trait lines is nice.. It was also a bit disappointing not to see anything.. ‘new’, given that ele already has a lot of traits for dealing with conditions.

Ranger:

• Longbow damage is welcome, but traiting to make bows effective is prohibitively expensive; consider merging two of the bow traits, Quick Draw and Piercing Arrows, to be like warrior’s Crack Shot.
• Natural Vigor: vigor got a serious in-combat nerf recently with the change to healing spring, is this reduction still necessary? If 50% is too much for an adept minor, consider moving it to master minor.
• All the Nature Magic changes seem good.

Things that should probably still be addressed:

• Sword 1 root – I understand it’s a leap, and game mechanics prevent you from dodging out mid-leap, but the movement lock lasts much longer than the actual leap animation. It should be possible to dodge or move slightly between each of the attacks.
• Traps being in skirmishing. Much has been said on this.

Wish list:

• An option for rangers to revive their downed pets, like Comfort Animal, automatically swapping the downed pet’s F2 for this. Chained 60s periods without any use of our profession mechanic is punishing. No other profession can have theirs taken away.
• Pets that don’t root when attacking. In PvE this is fine the way it is, but players move too much, which is why pets with leaps, tracking attacks, and cleaves are far more useful in PvP/WvW.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Seriously, it’d be nice to actually have a reason to use my Necromancer in a dungeon for once. You could flat increase the effect of condition damage in PvE by 50% and it still wouldn’t compare to most power-based builds.

Here here! I’m sorry to say, but as a PvE player, and a Necro main, this is so far a bit of a disappointing set of updates. It’s pretty clear these are primarily PvP balance changes, and is not really bringing the effectiveness or build diversity PvE players are looking for from most of the “non-meta” classes.

JonPeters.5630:

Our goal for many of the classes was to increase build diversity while still maintaining class roles and identities.

I was under the impression – from vids/advertising/etc. during development – that any class was meant to be able to perform any role, be it DPS, support, or control? Because where some classes can provide all three, and can provide them each pretty effectively, other classes are sorely lacking in every role.

Quash the DPS > everything in PvE, make control/support/condition builds more viable and I have a feeling you’ll make many people a whole lot happier

noooooooo….
bye bye perma vigor and boons on attunement swap elementalist. ok, +25% movement speed, but where’ll be my vigor
good thing i play as a dd thief, pretty nice changes for that

Seems like a huge nerf to hammer warriors. Very out of character to nerf so many intersecting skills at the same time.

I know you are trying to tone down the tanky / damage / control builds. But AFAIK, Hammer is the only weapon that is actually useful in PvP/WvW. For many months, Warriors were kings in PvE and laughing stocks in PvP/WvW. Nerfing the hammer (moving unsuspecting foe, so no more crits, decreasing damage so base attacks hit for less, etc.) without buffing some other weapon (no, moving the useless rifle skill doesn’t count.) Is only going to remove Warriors from the PvP/WvW meta, again.

Most warriors use Hammer for combat and sword/wh for mobility. They isn’t even a weapon set to be worth it as an alternative. I imagine warriors won’t be very useful in WvW / PvP anymore.

Edit: Another reason ascended gear is terrible. Before you could roll with the punches, get new gear and try again. Now it’s just a gut punch up against a huge grind.

There is so much criticism for every class… In my eyes this is a bad sign. This shows that you are actually doing things that are not needed or doing it the wrong way…

I think this is most likely because you are not in the game often enough and there aren’t enough people in Anet HeadQuarters to think about making the right changes….

You might have made the game, but really it is the people that play a lot that will know what changes would be best for balance.

Balance shouldn’t be fixed like this, at the moment balance is awfull… It needs a much deeper approach then “we think these will be good changes, give us feedback”.

You should let people with much more experience in the game then yourself speak in an organized way. Out of all those ideas, combined with yours, you can make a “preview to balance patch” and THEN ask feedback.

This way of working would be much more effective at addressing the issues the right way….

If you keep addressing the balance issues like you are doing now, it will take ages…
Please keep in mind this IS a step in the right direction, but as i stated, it could be done in a much more effective way.

Elementalist.

Fire III
It´s a good move to put some condi cleanse etc. into the traits, that´s absolutely needed for anyone to put points into this tree. However 3 every 40 seconds without you being able to affect when it pops….just not enough i´m afraid.

Fire VII
Conjures will still be just a gimmick even if you took charges away alltoghether. This won´t make anyone invest into fire outside gimmicky pve situations, nor does this make conjures any more valid option for pvp/wvw.

Rest
Small boosts to dps from fire line, kinda nice but it´s not what´s holding people from putting points into fire. Lack of survivability and utility are what´s holding people from investing into fire.

Air V
It´s not the amount you gain that´s a problem with this trait, it´s that it´s completely counterproductive to go into air for support traits. Nothing else in this tree lends itself to support purposes, and the trait has to compete with really powerful offensive traits.

Air XI
Maybe this is now competition to fresh air, i seriously doubt it, but might be it´s somewhat more useful.

Earth 5
The whole trait is borderline non-existant because of the simple fact that lingering elements does not work. Any buffs to this are pointless untill that´s fixed.

Earth VII
Kinda nice change to support condi builds. But then again, the real problem with condi ele is that the ele skill set just doesn´t make for a great condi builds. In order to gain different conditions to get damage and cover your important condis you need to swap, and to keep stacking those condis at acceptable rate you need to stay in one attunement.
The fact that this is a master trait also means that it´s borderline useless to hybrids, who need to spend traits to get power traits (air and/or fire trees master traits), condi traits (earth master, grandmaster traits), survivability traits water and arcana master and grandmaster) because they´re ele, so to make it work you´d need 120 points pretty much.
Imho this need to be adept trait to get people to use it.

Earth XI
Now this is a GM trait that has potential to be seriously overpowered. However i also foresee this could be really really buggy. How does the effect occur? Is it just -100% condi duration, circumventable by +condiduration etc?

Water I
Wait wut? Why is this being moved to master tier? I just can´t figure out a reason to move this. It impoves 1/4 of our skill set, barely improves utility of any solo build and has to compete against really powerful traits even in adept tier, i can almost certainly say that nobody will ever pick this over other master traits. Not only that, but this will severly nerf all support builds, as condi cleanse and less cd on support skills can´t be achieved anymore.

Water V
This is powerful trait true, i can see some justifications to move it there.
However, if the goal is to make people not have to invest into water and arcane, this will accomplish the compelte opposite. In order to have any survivability ele that´s not a complete burst build, needs to invest to either water15+cleansing wave, or EA. Glassier balanced builds, might get away with just the cleansing wave, which still would require 20 in water now, so in essence you made it mandatory 20 in water rather than mandatory 10 in water.
Also, the little extra condi cleanse in fire line hardly requires any compensation, let alone such a major nerf as this. I can see poentail problems with new earth GM trait, but then again, is it really worth it to introduce a new trait, and gut all other builds to keep it in check….

Water VIII
This was never a choice for combat build, it still isn´t. This only padds the changelog.

Water X
This is just a bad trait, defensive part of it is really bad compared to soothing disruption, and offensive part just isn´t enough compensation. Longer chill duration and/or more stacks of vulnerability is what´s needed to make this viable. Drop to adpet tier atleast makes it “only” compete against likes of vital striking, piercing shards and soothing disruption…

Arcana III
Cooldown reduction, good. Move to master tier…nobody will use this over elemental attunement. Elemental attunement gives 2-3 stacks of might constantly up, this trait gives you period of crits, where you may or may not have skills up to use it, may or may not be even able to use any skills and may or may not be about to be bursted down and thus need to focus on defense. Even for just offense elemental atutnement is almost always better, never to mention the defensive power elemental attunement has.

Arcana IV
Slighlty better trait with, lower cd, but the hp treshold needs to be bit higher, since witht he amount of busrt there is in this game it often just doesn´t procc at all.

Arcana V
This truly is a powerful trait, and propably deserves to be a master trait.
But the goal apparently was to make people less reliant on arcana, well this pretty much makes people to still go atleast 20 into arcana. I see nothing in the other trait lines that would mandate this to avoid powercreep either…just no reason to move it now all of a sudden.

Arcana VI
…This truly and utterly baffles me. Is this somehow meant to re-nerf the already extinct bunker eles? Reduce the allready abysmal defense of burst eles? Other vigor traits (well apart from soothing disruption which will now see even more use i think) weren´t used because they are bad, not because this was op. Also, even if elemental attunement wasn´t enough to force people to put 20 into arcana, this for sure will be.

Arcana weapon traits
Dagger trait is useless, and will always be as long as it doesn´t stack with other speed buffs.
Scepter trait is just bad, and i doubt it will replace renewing stamina either, people will propably start using final shielding or such for their scpeter builds.
Staff is mostly unaffected, they were propably going to go 20 into arcana anyway, and they will still do that, so only thing changes is the order which the traits dispaly for them.

Attunement cd rework
Atleast there´s freedom not to have to specc into arcana for cd…well there kinda still is, 13 is quite a lot, and atleast 10 in arcana is needed to get the previous effect of 20 arcana which is when rotations start to be fluid enough. Important traits moved to master tier means that 20 in arcana despite not being necessary for cooldowns alone, is still pretty much a must, and 30 has really potent trait to justify it over almost any other 10 point investment.
So in the end despite this rework, mandatory points in arcana are still there, even more so than before some might argue.

I can see what you´re going for, but i´m afraid you´re doing too radical things to offset the slightly increased power in fire/earth trees.
Bit more utility and damage in fire/earth will make people consider using them…and then you make changes that force people to trait heavily into water/arcana to get the crucial traits from there, which again make people actualy not trait into fire/earth.

Also, many of the changes seem to be based on purely, “people use these, we´ll move them to same tier so they´ll have to choose either or” which in the end leads to people having to specc even further into those trees, but still have less power than previosuly.

Final words
I´m afraid this patch won´t change the fact that water and arcana are a must have for ele, people will have to specc even further into these just to get the important traits, and apart from the new earth GM i see no incentive not to specc just like before.
There will simply be too many reasons to go atleast 20 into both water and arcana (if all the new master traits go through).
There needs to be good options for adept traits in those trees to make people not specc heavily into them (for example: arcana V and VI can not both be master traits, there needs to be a reason to stay at 10), while simultaneously providing good alternatives in other trees.
You will have to figure out what people need from water and arcana (oh, wait, we´ve known this since launch, it´s healing, condi cleanse, boons and utility), you´ll need to add limited forms of those into unused tress, in such a way that they don´t compete for the main reason you´d want to go into that tree (damage traits in fire can´t compete with survivability traits, otherwise it would be better to get survivbility in it´s better form from elsewhere)

ELEMENTALIST

1) why not combine elemental attunement and lingerig elements? this would be the new arcana 15.

2) move Conjurer to Arcana to fill the hole left by elemental attunement, because there is only ONE trait for conjures, and it doesn’t make sense in fire line, as there are 5 conjures spread over all 4 elements. (and no Arcane Conjure)

3) i don’t really understand having defensive traits in the fire line, especially fire 5. i’d much rather fire 5 be changed to give power per level while attuned to fire, or +300 range while attuned to fire. leaving defensive selectable traits is fine, allowing for choices of course.

4) the elemental 15 traits basically turn attunement swap buttons into spells. and then there are master traits that add extra effects to the attunement swaps. i’d much rather see those 15s rolled into a single arcana master trait, because in my opinion, that would be much more useful than evasive arcana. combining all the 15s and all 4 of the master traits that buff the F1-F4 keys could be a grandmaster trait. and would really then feel like a grandmaster of attunement swapping.

5) after freeing up the 15s, the 25s would be moved into the 15 slots, because frankly, the 25s are copies of other classes ADEPT traits. (+10% damage while endurance is full, +10% damage while target has x condition) and then new elemental 25s would be made. that would be useful no matter what attunement you’re in. for example, all projectiles pierce targets.

6) i don’t understand the grandmaster arcana traits at all. evasive arcana is a copy of a master trait for every other class. and in my opinion, is not worthy of grandmaster status. the other one only affects 5 utility skills, which means a grandmaster trait is wasted on at most, 3 skills on a skill bar, more likely 2 or 1. i’ll never trait 30 arcana as long as we have such weak grandmaster traits.

Disapointing to see Anet asking feedback and doing the exact opposite of the community feedback, they are just spitting in our face.

How the hell do you think gardian community asked for more DPS (everyone asks supports and heal buff) ?

How the hell can’t you read the reports everywhere about healing power stuff being useless and people willing to use it for something really useful ?

What’s the point asking user feedback if you don’t read it ?

Every minor 15 trait for elementalist triggers upon attunement change. Maybe it’s time to make elemental attunement similar, moving it to 15 arcana.

It’s not like lingering elements trait works correctly.

Redscope.6215:

• Re-evaluate the Aegis boon

This

We are saying them this since release, i wonder how they can think aegis is fine, especially with the amont of multiple hit skills.