Guild Wars 2

JonPeters.5630:

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

I really can’t help but comment on this. When your game puts so much focus on dodge rolling as a method to mitigate attacks, isn’kitten bad idea to add so many skills which lock players into these fixed animations which cannot be broken by anything short of weapon swapping?

I understand that dodge rolling in the middle of a leap doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I don’t see why it would be impossible to dodge roll out of a kick or a dash.

If you pay attention to the comments you will find a great risk in thieves changes:
Destroy the p/p build viability
This is due to several facts:
- There are many general traits that work with any weapon combination, but to be somehow competitive with two pistols you have to get pistol specific traits (this circumstance does not happen with other weapons). I f you get them obviously you can not select others, making p/p highly specific and dependant of several skills and traits. Something wrong would undermine the p/p builds much more than expected.

- If you hace to select several pistol especific skills to remain competitive you are stuck with that weapon set and secondary weaponsets do not work properly. Be careful with this.

- two pistols rely much more in vigour than other weapon sets, survivability is dependant 50% in stealth and 50% in vigour, much more than other weapon sets who have more stealth and teleport perks. Nerfing vigour is killing the weapon set, add somekind of survival to the skills options or we are doomed.

- upload is heavily dependant on initiative bursts, a greater initiative rithm does not help as much as specific initiative gaining skills as stated. being the only damage skill it does not worth so much due to long execution times and initiative cost.

- all other damage skills are very, very specific in use and too costly (number 2 is worth since inmobility) in initiative.

- Moving assasin reward to grandmastery kills many p/p builds based in the combination with ricochet and shadow rejuvenation. It makes impossible to survive together with the vigour nerf.

Summarizing: vigour nerf, initiative rethink and traits move will make p/p unplayable.

I suppose that you have to do this changes due to particular permastealth builds. In this case you should boost p/p skills and traits highly in order to increase survivability and damage outcome.

My recommendations would be to add survival aspects to number 4 and 5 p/p skills.
Maintain assasin reward in mastery with the buff but make one of the grandmastery skills as viable as hidden assasin or shadow rejuvenation, a strong buff is needed in the acrobacy line, as well as in trickery in the grandmastery final step.

Please, take in account that not many p/p run in guildwars2 and many thieves have stated exactly the same, these changes kill p/p builds both in pve or pvp.

Best,

Haltair, one of the Twelve Shadows

JonPeters.5630:

Here are my comments on what we have seen discussed so far with the warrior changes.

-snip-

Link to warrior sub-forum
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/December-10th-Warrior-Changes/first#post3149139

Any comment on the greatsword warrior? Or why it is literally the only spec I see any warrior running around in, for PVE? Any plans to bring other specs or weapons up to match the effectiveness of greatsword?

cesmode.4257:

JonPeters.5630:

Here are my comments on what we have seen discussed so far with the warrior changes.

-snip-

Link to warrior sub-forum
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/December-10th-Warrior-Changes/first#post3149139

Any comment on the greatsword warrior? Or why it is literally the only spec I see any warrior running around in, for PVE? Any plans to bring other specs or weapons up to match the effectiveness of greatsword?

The only reason that GS is so powerful in PvE is because of the mentally challenged AI. Mobs will just stand in a 100B without dodging, blocking, or even just walking away. If they fixed the AI then the GS damage would be on par with the rest of the weapons.

As for the Hammer nerf to ES and SB, I am still concerned that it would make the hammer very weak. Especially for those builds that don’t use UF or BM. Basically, it would limit our options when build trying to create a viable Hammer builds cause now we will be forced to go get 1 or the other in order to keep enough pressure on the enemy.

JonPeters.5630:

Here is a summary of what I have seen discussed on the thief changes and some more clarity into what our initial thoughts were and where we stand currently.

Thank you for the update Jon. Can you also share with us the team’s thoughts on the changes to Quick Recovery, Hard to Catch, and Assassin’s Reward?

Quick Recovery
I personally believe that with the proposed change Quick Recovery would become too weak for a master tier trait. At a gain of .1 initiative per second it would be on par with Infiltrator’s Signet, if the signet only had the passive ability. Are there any plans to add a secondary effect to the trait to compensate for the decreased initiative gain?

Hard to Catch
I appreciate you want more thieves to use this but I don’t think simply moving the trait to master tier will accomplish that. There are many troublesome elements with this trait that prevent people from adopting it. The chief of which is that, while it does move you out of harms way when disabled it never actually does anything about the disable. If you are stunned for 3 seconds, yes you will be moved but you’ll still have to use a stunbreaker to escape. The swiftness given by the trait is also lackluster as you will lose some of it during the duration you are stunned anyway.

There is also the problem of agency. That is to say the player does not have full control of when this trait triggers, which can put the thief into worse situations. For instance, if you were stomping an enemy warrior the warrior’s hammer knockdown would not only knock you down but it would also teleport you away from him, which is an undesirable outcome. Are there any plans for resolving the issues the trait already has before moving it to Master Tier?

Assassin’s Reward
I like this trait a lot because it promotes active use of initiative, so it is a good thing that it is getting some recognition. However, I think the move to Grandmaster Tier opens up more opportunities than a simple raising of the healing scaling for the trait. Not many thieves spec into Healing Power so I feel the buff will largely go unnoticed if that is the only change. Are any other changes being considered to bring the trait up to Grandmaster standards?

One of the things that thieves lack are support builds, so I was going to suggest making a portion of this skill’s healing also heal nearby allies. This would give thieves another option for support, similar to Venomshare which is also a Grandmaster Tier trait. Otherwise, lowering the boost to healing scaling but increasing the scaling with initiative use would be better received. Increasing the initiative scaling by 10% and the healing by 25% would probably result in a better boost overall.

Thanks again for taking your time to answer our questions and read our feedback.

*Earth XI – Diamond Skin. This trait has been redesigned. Conditions cannot be applied to you when your health is above the threshold. 90%.
-Are you sure about this 1,i hope it has some ICD of 90sec or so…

*Explosives VI – Exploit Weakness. Increased the health threshold from 25% to 50%
to much for automated trait….
*Inventions XI – Elixir Infused bombs. Increased healing scaling by 50%.
Now everyone will QQ about engi being unkillable beast:(
*Alchemy 15 – Transmute. Increased % chance from 8% to 100%. This effect can now only trigger once every 15 seconds.
*Tools XI – Armor Mods. Changed this to now trigger on struck instead of on critical hit incoming. Reduced the cooldown from 25 seconds to 15 seconds.
-This is just to much i had impression while rading this that these are buffs for several professions not just 1.

*Domination XII – Confounding Suggestions. Changed to increase daze duration by 25%.
-This is 2 much,mesmer is my main but this is overdoing it,ppl will complain and ina month you will need to nerf it again.

“Before this change mesmers needed to place 25 points into Illusions for many of their builds. Now they can place only 15 points in there to get the Illusion cooldown which will give them back 10 more trait points to open up some new builds.”
*Illusionist’s Celerity – Moved to Master tier.
-I LOVE YOU FOR THIS

*Spite X – Chill of Death. Increased trigger threshold from 25% to 50%.
-another no skill trait given boost,to much

*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.
-This is to much even with higher cd

*Skirmishing XII – Moment of Clarity. Stun Duration increased from 50% to 100%.
-Why did u bother to “fix” sigil of para i wonder?

*Wilderness XII – Bark Skin Increased the damage reduction from 30% to 50%.
Hard to kill now even harder with just auto attacks , ranger is new OP

*"boosting the generic rate of initiative gain by 33%"
-Insane!!!!!!!!
-instead working for ini regen they have it auto regen

*Acrobatics XI – Hard to catch. Moved to Master Tier.
-Instead of having to spamm evade ,now thiefs have it on auto:(

*Warrior:
-all that wr ever needed is higher cd on burst skills nothing more.
Only good change is that now , new ppl will stick to rifle for about 10 spvp matches instead of 5….

Rest of changes i like but i sure hope you test this with before you apply it,seams like whole new game .

PTS: the key to implement a lot of stuff in short time.

JonPeters.5630:

Some ranger discussion.

Main-hand sword
I just want to clarify for good that main hand sword is currently working as intended. All movement skills cannot be interrupted by dodging and this is currently intentional.

The problem isn’t that dodge can’t interrupt a movement skill. I have no problem with that.

The problem is you’re unable to dodge after certain movement skills (in particular, a leap). Immediately after a leap, you can move, you can fire another skill, but you can’t dodge. In fact if you do a leap-move-dodge, it works. But a leap-dodge won’t work.

I’ve posted a detailed bug report on this:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Cannot-dodge-after-a-leap-skill/first#post3140248

deda.8302:

*Explosives VI – Exploit Weakness. Increased the health threshold from 25% to 50%
to much for automated trait….

…that nobody uses. It cripples an enemy for 5s at 25% hp (or 50%, after the change).
If we talk about trash mobs, at that treshhold they’re already dead anyway.
If we talk about stronger enemies, 5s of cripple won’t be useful anyway.
And if there is someone in melee, it does basically nothing worthwhile.

deda.8302:

*Inventions XI – Elixir Infused bombs. Increased healing scaling by 50%.
Now everyone will QQ about engi being unkillable beast:(

As now it is 0.1*healing power. It will become either 0.15 or 0.2, depending on how they mean it.
And we’re still talking about a grandmaster trait that applies on a single utility slot. (whereas any other class has traits applying to whole categories at grandmaster levels).
I could say it is even too weak.

deda.8302:

*Alchemy 15 – Transmute. Increased % chance from 8% to 100%. This effect can now only trigger once every 15 seconds.

Beware the wording of the trait – it converts incoming conditions, not the ones already applied. Basically, whereas before it gave a little defense shaving randomly some incoming condition here and there, now it will convert just one of them every 15s.
If anything, this is a huge nerf on a trait that wasn’t that great even before. And on the only sort of passive condition removal engineers had got.

deda.8302:

*Tools XI – Armor Mods. Changed this to now trigger on struck instead of on critical hit incoming. Reduced the cooldown from 25 seconds to 15 seconds.
-This is just to much i had impression while rading this that these are buffs for several professions not just 1.

Again, grandmaster trait that nobody ever used. On a line that doesn’t even directly contribute to defense. You’ll have to forfeit either toughness or vitality to get this one. Seems like a fair compensation, and i think many people will still ignore this trait anyway (we’ve got to spend too many points in other trees if we want to trait out some kits).

Arkantos.7460:

doomfodder.2906:

JonPeters.5630:

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

7) …. play unstealthed like ALL other classes …. THAT IS THE POINT !
Anet doesnt Support stealthless gameplay and the patch will shut down thoose who want PLAY STEALTHLESS with s/p or p/p cause the only Thing, realy THE ONLY ONE THING to avoid burst,dmg,cc is to DOGDE

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

answer: nope I don’t play tpvp cause solo queue is a joke, & you gotta KNOW somebody to get into tpvp. I’m just a spvp dolyak & I play ALL OTHER VENUES in the game on all 8 toons.

In legacy, my thief can easily solo both soldiers & a caster in less than 2 min, then solo other caster & lord in around 3 min (both those numbers are kinda slow because I’m NOT a good thief)

In skyhammer, my thief can take out skyhammer operator even before he “leaves” cannon or ALWAYS just moments after .

In wvw, I’ve escorted a dolyak with 2 other players only to have a single thief take out the dolyak & down the other two players along the route.

U can’t kill what you can’t target. It’s really as simple as that. Can’t target makes thief/stealth the best defense in the game.

“some tipps: if you walk/run straight Forward you can kite some thiefs " running from a thief is NOT the answer… turning your back for an extended period (like more than a few seconds) to a foe when in range is like saying kill me now. The best option is to NOT engage.

in spvp my best hope is to stalemate a permastealth thief when I play as thief, eng, war, mes. I lose every time with rngr, ele, nec, guard. In wvw, I don’t even waste my time since there are better ways to score points for the server.

playing any class facing a pve thief is trivial (becuase they don’t run permastealth builds). Imagine if you had to face 4-5 vet level permastealth thief(s) in PvE in order to complete some objective in an area, how long would it take you and your party to kill them when they’re not targetable & can down you from stealth?

Regardless of how many opinions you take into account, a lot of things can only be properly evaluated and tweaked with a test at a realistic scale, so…

Why not make a separate “test realm” (or three, to test WvWvW), that players can clone their characters into, where you can evaluate the effect of large patches for a couple of weeks before applying them to the permanent realms?

I can understand not wanting to release new events early, because it would “spoil the surprise”, but this really is the kind of thing where you can save yourselves a lot of work (and players a lot of frustration) by conducting a medium-scale test before a full release.

BladeBraverBureba.1052:

Spurnshadow.3678:

Part 2/2

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

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

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

nobody ever said anything about removing them. if you look at my post IN CONTEXT that he is referring to you’ll see that my proposal in NO WAY does away with the falling traits and, in fact, improves on them very much and makes them more viable for builds than just a “jump off cliffs” on-the-fly kind of trait AND makest them viable in other aspects of the game as well as honing the mechanics of them to be more consistant/useful

*edit: sorry i didn’t notice that SpurnShadow had said to remove these traits completely. that is, i agree, a terrible idea as they do have their uses. if you read my post which brought the subject up in the first place i’m sure you’ll agree that my proposal would make them much more effectve and less situational/game mode biased

Not quite sure where to put this so please pardon me if you see it as its own topic as well as on this thread.

Much easier to be patient for a change if you know one is coming. Can we get someone to comment for the community on:

1) Are pets performing as you intended in terms of:
a. Damage?
b. Utility?
c. Ability to Survive?

2) Are their difficulties (technical or testing) that limit what can be done to improve Pet AI (not hitting moving targets, F2 not firing)? If so, how tough are these challenges (roughly)? Or is it really working as intended?

3) Do you have a broad theme for pet changes (as Jon highlights this is a ranger’s defining mechanic)? Any rough (we won’t hold you to it. . .or I won’t) timeline on starting to look at functionality and change?

Any word on doing anything with more Elementalist minor traits, specifically in Arcane? Does Lingering Elements even do anything right now?

deda.8302:

*Inventions XI – Elixir Infused bombs. Increased healing scaling by 50%.
Now everyone will QQ about engi being unkillable beast:(

As now it is 0.1*healing power. It will become either 0.15 or 0.2, depending on how they mean it.
And we’re still talking about a grandmaster trait that applies on a single utility slot. (whereas any other class has traits applying to whole categories at grandmaster levels).
I could say it is even too weak.

Dint play my engi for a month or so but if i remember correctlz with healing kits elixir gun i and healing bombs i could have round 600 heal/sec and its an aoe heal…
Im writing this from my head and memory so i might be exsagerating ,bomb heal was in range of 250-300 or so add to that automated response ,energized armor,protection injection and you are looking at imposible to kill engi.

Even with out this buffs wr-guard and engi on one could hold whole teams for 2-3 min,now with imprioved heal and aaegis every 15sec that is 3 man holding point for 5 min.

If trasnmute cures inc.immobilize or fear that is huge improvement for a minor auto trait.

P.S.
I do not hate engi class,it did need some improvement but not as much

I certainly haven’t read 28 pages…However 1 thing i think lacking from the red post i’ve seen.

Separate the sPvP / WvW /PvE balance changes. Currently i’ve seen atleast 4 “Balance Devs” and 2 of them are PvP related frankly… this is unnerving as it sets the wrong tone. You said you could balance these modes independent of each other please do so.

I don’t expect anyone to care, just expressing my views. This is the first and last GW game I will ever buy. My idea of a fun time is not getting nerfed, and crap always changing around on my toons every time a dumb patch comes. This is becoming comical and pretty tedious. It shows me Anet are just idiots who really don’t know what they are doing since they are still tweaking players this much after the game has been out for over a year. People in these forums have much better views on character skills/traits than Anet does. I really hope GW does not make it that much longer as a game. I really like it but can not put up with these lousy patches anymore. I will patiently wait for Elder Scrolls Online and gladly pay a fee for a good no bull shi 1t game. In the meantime, I will very happily play BF4. Anet just will never get it, I just got two ascended weapons that took me forever to farm guess what they were, a Dagger and Pistol. And now my thief is nerfed yet again. I understand many of the nerfs before this but now thieves aren’t even that good anymore and yet another huge blow to majority of thieves. Mesmers are already so OP yet they get buffed more and definitely for the better. Necros are super deadly now, and they get buffed … Warriors get buffed numerous times and now they are getting nerfed… like really Anet wtf you doing over there ? Are you just picking crap out of a hat ?

Profession Synergy

I know it would take alot of work, but i would like to see the individual professions to be able to contribute something special to the group.
Something that would make it more usefull to have different professions in your group.

In the past the mesmer was a good example.
In PvE you picked a mesmer instead of a 5th Warrior because of the aoe quickness buff.

Also combos allready help a bit. Like elementalist fire fields for might stacking.
Other things worth mentioning are traits like imrovisation that increases the damage with elementalis weapons and other bundles by 10%.

But i think it would be great to see each profession be superior to others with specific support.

For example Warriors could buff aoe might while thieves buff aoe fury, guardiands aoe protection, mesmer aoe quickness and so on.

At the moment a warrior only party can buff everything better then anyone else and has no need to play with another profession.

It wold take alot of work and alot of balance changes but would encourage to play mixed parties instead of something like the 4 warriors + 1 mesmer.

Xovian.8572:

JonPeters.5630:

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

Thanks,

Jon

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wanted to agree with most of what is in this post. Mainly that signets need something to make their active effects more attractive and add a speed buff to a passive signet. Might as well go with signet of midnight, its effects are extremely weak both active and passive so swiftness would hardly look too strong.

Signet of inspirations is one of our best support methods though, so I am not so sure we should be centering on helping ourselves over handing the love out especially since the focus lately has been on support skills.

Signet of Illusions, adding Distortion….kinda torn about this. F4 gives us 3 seconds already, plus sword 2….I can kinda see it but I almost wish we had a mantra that could do that intelligently as an on-demand cast which would be more effective(instant defense when you need it) and be powerful enough to justify running a mantra to begin with. Since mantra’s make you a sitting duck while charging its always balanced(thats why I always say, mantra’s must be overpowered to compensate the long cast times).

JonPeters.5630:

Ok all it’s been a long 3 days of reading. We talked for a few hours today about this stuff and I won’t summarize it until tomorrow morning but at least wanted kill a few minutes on the bus here to keep you up to date. We felt like this was a good useful exercise and will continue to do it for future patches if we can. Thanks to everyone who contributed and continues to positively contribute to the discussion. Due to the time it takes to finish up, fully test and push these changes forward I am going to lock this thread at the end of the week. Keeping it open past then is disingenuous as far as what we would reasonably be able to accomplish.

Thanks all and I’ll be back with some concrete stuff tomorrow,

Jon

Thanks Jon, it’s definitely appreciated that you are all listening to the feedback and keeping us in the loop as to your thought process! Hope this will continue for future releases.

only one thing to say im glad you all are making everyone use that thing call a brain
and also grt. job balancing lets get are kill on now whoa!

This is a question for Chris about ranger.

I know you addressed that this function is working as intended, and what i have to say is, i never really thought this was broken, per say. However, as a ranger who has over 3,000 hours of experience, i would say this needs some tweaking. Sword is a great mobility tool, and a great evading tool, keep it as such. Give it an evade at a % chance and call it a day? If you mean for it to be an “All in weapon” make people actually fear it and not just stand letting you hit them as you make yourself wide open for a huge counter attack.

In summary, the ranger sword 1 has core flaws in its design, but can be addressed quite easily if you give a ranger who is using his sword #1 a defense as he uses it.

P.S. moving the evade on GS1 last attack to swoop is a good move…but this means i will literally never press 1 on GS ever again. It does not do enough damage to justify me auto attacking with it. Please do not nerf this weapon….this weapon needs the same damage boost your giving LB (10%) and in my opinion the evade needs to stay on the 3d swing of GS1 or be replaced with something as valuable. (REFLECT!) I really would like to keep swinging my Sunrise on my ranger

Thank you.

Solandri.9640:

JonPeters.5630:

Some ranger discussion.

Main-hand sword
I just want to clarify for good that main hand sword is currently working as intended. All movement skills cannot be interrupted by dodging and this is currently intentional.

The problem isn’t that dodge can’t interrupt a movement skill. I have no problem with that.

The problem is you’re unable to dodge after certain movement skills (in particular, a leap). Immediately after a leap, you can move, you can fire another skill, but you can’t dodge. In fact if you do a leap-move-dodge, it works. But a leap-dodge won’t work.

I’ve posted a detailed bug report on this:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Cannot-dodge-after-a-leap-skill/first#post3140248

this.
I guess almost any ranger is fine with non-interruptible movements skills, but please don’t let our dodge be ignored by the AA

deda.8302:

deda.8302:

*Inventions XI – Elixir Infused bombs. Increased healing scaling by 50%.
Now everyone will QQ about engi being unkillable beast:(

As now it is 0.1*healing power. It will become either 0.15 or 0.2, depending on how they mean it.
And we’re still talking about a grandmaster trait that applies on a single utility slot. (whereas any other class has traits applying to whole categories at grandmaster levels).
I could say it is even too weak.

Dint play my engi for a month or so but if i remember correctlz with healing kits elixir gun i and healing bombs i could have round 600 heal/sec and its an aoe heal…
Im writing this from my head and memory so i might be exsagerating ,bomb heal was in range of 250-300 or so add to that automated response ,energized armor,protection injection and you are looking at imposible to kill engi.

Even with out this buffs wr-guard and engi on one could hold whole teams for 2-3 min,now with imprioved heal and aaegis every 15sec that is 3 man holding point for 5 min.

If trasnmute cures inc.immobilize or fear that is huge improvement for a minor auto trait.

P.S.
I do not hate engi class,it did need some improvement but not as much

Mh, first, you’re talking strictly from a pvp perspective. A build like the one you described can’t do much other than healing himself and staying on a point – the offense is rather low, since he’ll probably be using a cleric equip and almost all the trait points are on defensive stats. Basically, it works just there because of how pvp is designed.
(even then, with such a low vitality, automated response could be countered easily by a well-timed condition burst near the treshhold, or simply burst damage)
But even then, regarding the “aegis” part, it isn’t actually a problem – you can’t have the healing traits and that one together. There aren’t enough points to get all of them, thus you can take 2 of them at most.
And the problem with transmute is that the engineer has no control upon it anyway. But whereas before it could trigger multiple times in a small timeframe when against condition spamming, now it works much less times. Thus even the probability of stopping some really harmful condition, rather than the spare bleed, is lower.
Especially in group content – be it dungeons, or WvsW.

Julie Yann.5379:

cesmode.4257:

JonPeters.5630:

Here are my comments on what we have seen discussed so far with the warrior changes.

-snip-

Link to warrior sub-forum
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/December-10th-Warrior-Changes/first#post3149139

Any comment on the greatsword warrior? Or why it is literally the only spec I see any warrior running around in, for PVE? Any plans to bring other specs or weapons up to match the effectiveness of greatsword?

The only reason that GS is so powerful in PvE is because of the mentally challenged AI. Mobs will just stand in a 100B without dodging, blocking, or even just walking away. If they fixed the AI then the GS damage would be on par with the rest of the weapons.

As for the Hammer nerf to ES and SB, I am still concerned that it would make the hammer very weak. Especially for those builds that don’t use UF or BM. Basically, it would limit our options when build trying to create a viable Hammer builds cause now we will be forced to go get 1 or the other in order to keep enough pressure on the enemy.

I too am very concerned about the proposed changes to Warrior Hammer. Right now I find its damage to be fine where it is. Why? Because its a melee weapon. Very often on my warrior with hammer I have to spend half the time trying to just get in range to my target, and all the while dealing with more and more conditions being spammed on me, most noticeably chill, immobilize, and cripple. (cough Necromancers and Mesmers) Now I realize someone is going to say something about the dodged march trait for warrior, but that doesn’t exactly help much when I am still getting all 3 movement slowing/stopping conditions spammed on me continuously.

The funny thing is that I do not run using Unsuspecting foe OR Burst Mastery, I have zero trait points into discipline. I have not found the Discipline trait line to be worth it when that means I will have to take 30 points out of other traits. If you really are looking at lowering the damage output of 2 of the core skills of the Hammer, then PLEASE at least first fix Earthshaker so it can hit targets on different elevations. Far too often if I use Earthshaker on someone who is on a slope above or below me, it completely misses, and is incredibly frustrating. Add in the fact that its animation is so plainly obvious that everyone knows it right away and can easily dodge it, and it becomes very difficult to hit with Earthshaker successfully in the first place. So PLEASE fix this skill first if you are going to lower its damage.

Windy.3158:

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

ANET ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING!

You don’t see the red tag posts? They are listening. The issue is a lot of these changes aren’t small, so its no wonder it’s upset a large sum. I’m not too happy with the thief changes, but then again they aren’t finalized yet so I’m not losing faith yet.

I’d like a revamp of the ranger pet system. That’s about it for myself.

Just to be sure this get read I must say once more that the Thief’s Opportunist trait nerf should be looked at, because if this happens the sword/pistol and pistol/pistol sets will suffer. Pistol whip and unload which will basically render both weapon sets completely useless.

Edit: also I forgot to mention, have you even looked at the Improvisation trait yet? It’s randomness is too much and its second part is just useless.

Rafahil.2857:

Just to be sure this get read I must say once more that the Thief’s Opportunist trait nerf should be looked at, because if this happens the sword/pistol and pistol/pistol sets will suffer. Pistol whip and unload which will basically render both weapon sets completely useless.

Edit: also I forgot to mention, have you even looked at the Improvisation trait yet? It’s randomness is too much and its second part is just useless.

Feels like that trait was “stolen” from an engineer HAHAAHHA

But really, that trait is aweful.

NinjaEd.3946:

Rafahil.2857:

Just to be sure this get read I must say once more that the Thief’s Opportunist trait nerf should be looked at, because if this happens the sword/pistol and pistol/pistol sets will suffer. Pistol whip and unload which will basically render both weapon sets completely useless.

Edit: also I forgot to mention, have you even looked at the Improvisation trait yet? It’s randomness is too much and its second part is just useless.

Feels like that trait was “stolen” from an engineer HAHAAHHA

But really, that trait is aweful.

Awful doesn’t begin to describe it. It’s a Necro-level of borked. It hasn’t worked since early Beta…

For Rangers

One of the major issues with Longbow is it requiring 50 trait points to grab its traits:
30 in Marksmanship for Piercing Arrows and Eagle Eye
20 in Skirmishing for Quick Draw

The Shortbow has the same problem:
20 in Marksmanship for Piercing Arrows
20 in Skirmishing for Quick Draw

Both Quick Draw and Piercing Arrows only affect the Longbow and the Shortbow. So both the Longbow and the Shortbow need to spend at least 40 trait points to get their relevant traits.

The solution is quite obvious if you see it:

Longbow Mastery (replaces Piercing Arrows – 20 point into Marksmanship)
Longbow arrows pierce and Longbow skills have 20% less cooldown

Shortbow Mastery (replaces Quick Draw – 20 points into Skirmishing)
Shortbow arrows pierce and Shortbow skills have 20% less cooldown

With this both the Shortbow and the Longbow only need 20 points to get piercing arrows and less cooldown on their skills instead of 40. Talk about improving build diversity!

With this change, If you still want to use both Longbow AND Shortbow together and want both to pierce AND have 20% less cooldown, then it’ll cost you 40 points. Which is exactly the same amount as before the change.

Currently the game basically tells you to go dual bow with how the Piercing Arrows and Quick Draw are set up.

Ranger 1h sword won’t be fixed? omg it’s just annoying autoattack, not unique game style! dodge should override EVERY autoattack, ANet, try fighting lupicus or other bosses with sword…

Could we get the Guardian healing signet recharge equal to the recharge of the Warrior healing signet?

Are we going to get any response on bleed cap soon?

JonPeters.5630:

Ok all it’s been a long 3 days of reading. We talked for a few hours today about this stuff and I won’t summarize it until tomorrow morning but at least wanted kill a few minutes on the bus here to keep you up to date. We felt like this was a good useful exercise and will continue to do it for future patches if we can. Thanks to everyone who contributed and continues to positively contribute to the discussion. Due to the time it takes to finish up, fully test and push these changes forward I am going to lock this thread at the end of the week. Keeping it open past then is disingenuous as far as what we would reasonably be able to accomplish.

Thanks all and I’ll be back with some concrete stuff tomorrow,

Jon

It’s great to hear feedback on both sides this early in a patch’s development. I’m sure there’s a lot to filter and plenty to take into consideration – hopefully it’s not too overwhelming on your team’s end.

I’ve gone ahead and posted my suggestions on some of your dubbed ‘lackluster’ traits for the engineer in the subforum that was created in regards to this patch. I don’t want to fill this up with another copy of it all, so here’s the link. Enjoy.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/engineer/December-10th-Balance-update/page/5#post3152830

I look forward to seeing balance previews in the future. It’s an enjoyable (but oftentimes messy and stressful) process in game development and refinement I wish I could have had more experience in.

Hi Jon, I have a question…

Do u all really love your baby Necromancer compare to the others…..

I just feel there’s something lack in this Necromancer, you all want the player to play any build they want, but then u guys are pushing them into the other way round… somehow…

please clarify me if i’m wrong… but still… they are still really not excel in anything… except aoe condition apply… =\

BladeBraverBureba.1052:

Spurnshadow.3678:

Part 2/2

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

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

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

If you read my posts, you will see that I have over 4000 hours in this game. Probably 90% of that is in WvW. I play 6 different classes. I’ve never used those traits. They are pointless and actually detrimental. How? If you fall and proc chaos storm, death from above, static field, or anything that can aggro monsters, then it puts you, your party, and anyone else that may be attacked into combat and slow down the group and spread them out. That is not desirable. The only trait worth anything is death from above, and that is only swapped into and out of for a warrior to jump onto enemies at a gate to knock them off rams. I never die from falling because I know where to run off cliffs. If I’m in a fight, I never run away. I fight until I die.

Elementalist player here (1500+hours), my only concern is about both Water spells : Aquamancer’s Alacrity. Moved to Master tier.
Cleansing Wave. Moved to Master tier.

as in my current build i pick both, but this won’t be possible anymore if they are in master tier.
In my opinion it is a straight nerf to water as the only good trait remaining in adept is III Soothing disruption, which is not bad but not good if you are looking to support others, i thought anet wanted to let Elementalist play more as support with one of their their last update but maybe i was wrong.

Dang Guardian mobility isn’t getting buffed yet?
Why does warrior (the most mobile class in the game) have an Adept Trait that makes them run 25% faster while Guardians are still slow as kitten? I think you guys should give Guardians something like that trait, hell make it 20% and possibly put it in a master tree and i’ll still trait for it.

Engineer:

Incendary powder is gonna hurt! I don’t thnk that’s a good move, cause that trait is one to use in any build, now you’re expecting ppl to spend 20 points for that trait, that extra 10 points will ruin some builds IMO

The other changes are just fantastic! I would only suggest you improve f/t. What I’d suggest (and with this, the incendiary powder change wouldnt hurt that much) is to make skil 1 inflict burning with every attack, not just at the end of it, considering it’s not a great dps (you have to force its dps effectiveness with a weird combo of gear/build and sacrifice some other important things. Not worth it.) and even if you use lots of cond dmg, burning will only dmg foes once due its short duration with f/t. I’d do that or I’d include that feature in the “juggernaut” trait.

If that f/t thing is not a good idea or would be considered OP let me now why, I might be asking for too much and I don’t even notice.

Sorry, I just wanted to add that one way to get around that “incendiary powder” issue a little bit would be making it a 15 point explosives trait. I don’t think someone would realy miss “reserve mines”
Or a 5 point explosive trait to make eng. super powerful XD

Get to with skillpoint to buy obsidian shard

Ty

Jon, I really appreciate that you take your time to explain your point of view to us. I am certain that Collaborative Development will work if we can get more open discussions like this.

Now I will talk about your post.

Mark of Blood – And by extension, the staff as a weapon.

It might surprise you, but the staff is the only viable weapon a necro have in WvW. We use it not because the staff is overpowered. We use it because a necro in WvW only have staff to get AoE damage.

Dagger is totally useless in a zerg fight. It is single target so it doesn’t have cleave. And between all the snares and a necro’s lack of stability, it is literally impossible to be close enough to a foe for long enough to kill that foe.

Axe is totally useless in a zerg fight. Its damage is way too low and once again it is single target.

Scepter is another single target weapon. Its skill 2 ’s 10s recharge is way too long for its low damage to be viable.

So necros are stuck with staff. It should be obvious that a nerf to Mark of Blood, the main damage source of the staff, by 33% will be devastating to a necro’s effectiveness in WvW.

I have never heard of anyone complaining about the damage of Mark of Blood in WvW. Between the bleed cap and the abundance of condition removals in WvW, Mark of Blood rarely deals its full damage. Even at full damage it does not hurt that much when compared to other classes.

I understand that you guys balance this whole game around spvp. But let’s be honest, almost no one plays spvp. There are a lot more necros playing WvW and pve dungeons.

Weakening Shroud – you guys are nerfing the weakness. Necro lose survivability here, the very thing that you guys said you want to promote.

Dhuumfire – It seems to me that you guys are balancing the whole necro profession around Dhuumfire, not the other way around. You guys are assuming that every single necromancer uses Dhuumfire, which is obviously far from the case. I personally do not use Dhuumfire.

Balancing the whole necro profession around one trait/skill is a flawed logic.

Reanimator – This trait doesn’t need fixing. It cannot be fixed. This trait needs removing and replacing it with something cool.

Death Shroud – Jon if you guys are going to keep the Death Shroud as it is (damage spills over to hp), can you please at least remove that 0.5s-1s cooldown on the skill bar when coming out of DS? We need to be able to use our skills right away if we are going to survive. I lost count how many times my LS ran out, so I was forced out of DS, and I died before I can even use my healing skill because I was stuck on that cooldown on my skill bar.

Jon, I also have a question that I asked many times but never got an answer. Since you are actively reading this thread, I would really appreciate it if you would answer this for me:

Have the development team considered reintroducing the idea of life sacrificing back to the necromancer? These skills costs can range from 5% life to 33% life usage. And once these are implemented it will be much easier to balance the necromancer. Any sort of overpowered skills can be justified by the high risks that they involves, so there is less need to nerf skills and traits. You can also buff necromancer healing abilities and life siphoning to match the necromancer’s health sacrifice usage.

JonPeters.5630:

Starfall.6813:

JonPeters.5630:

Symbol of Swiftness
To clarify the new Symbol of Swiftness will give you 4 seconds of Swiftness every single pulse regardless of if you have swiftness or not. This is a improvement in many situations and a slight loss in the situation where you were using the Symbol as just a one time buff. I think this makes it feel more like a Symbol, which is good. We are still discussing the idea of it being 5 seconds, but there is some danger of that going pretty high with boon duration.

Jon,

I like a lot of where you’re going with the Guardian here, but I am a little concerned about the Symbol of Swiftness change. Not as a matter of balance but just as a quality of life issue. 4 seconds of swiftness on a 15 second cooldown is pretty much useless as a means of traveling for a solo Guardian, and the symbol is one of the better ways for Guardians to get around. Having to stop and stand in the symbol to get the full ticks of swiftness while traveling long distance is just going to be counter productive and annoying. And I don’t like the idea that this skill is being balanced around the zerg rather than solo players who probably are only running one source of swiftness to begin with.

Math wise you can now sit in the symbol for 3 seconds with boon duration and end up with 9 seconds of swiftness which is more than you would have had before. I do still think it may need to be 5 seconds to account for the fact that you only get it every second so by the time you get the second one you have lost 1s of the first one.

Jon

Thanks so much for your openness and discussion Jon. I’m a big fan of the game and Anet and it makes me feel respected that you are taking time to listen to the community feedback so thansk for that.

Three things about the change to symbol of swiftness:
-i may have misunderstood the maths here. 9 seconds of swiftness = 3 seconds actual benefit over walking and it takes 3 pulses to apply. In practice this means you get 0-1 seconds of actual benefit as you can run through on the first pulse and you genrally have to stop for the 2nd and 3rd pulse. That doesn’t make sense. It also detracts from the “mobility” design principle as stopping to gain a movement buff doesn’t flow well with the rest of the gameplay.

-Guardian is one of the few classes with no speed trait or passive speed buffs and only a few blink skills (that can be used out of combat and they are on long timers). The only weapon skill with swiftness is the symbol. This means most guards in WvW and open world PvE – where swiftness is needed most – run a staff off hand for the symbol plus a shout with swiftness. By nerfing the symbol it may unintentionally push guards to use more than one shout which then pushes towards a small number of shout/boon duration builds. The intention of this patch is to increase build diversity, not decrease it.
-I believe the current state as you describe it is bugged. I find that when I have no swiftness I get the full 8-9 seconds on the first tick OR I get a paultry 1 second and there doesn’t seem to be a pattern to it. I want to ensure this decision is not based on faulty assumptions about how the skill currently works.

Wait the DPS on conditions is about the only thing that let the necromancer kill at all. We ARE conditions. Take that away and you still have a nerfed condition cap, and broken weak minions. The necro becomes completely worthless. Look guys I know you want to balance PVP but us PVE guys need some love to. In the end the game is about turning full bars health into empty ones, and we can’t do that if you are so afraid of a strong necromancer. Plane old DPS is fine for warriors and Eles but that isn’t what Necros do. We are SUPPOSED to come at you sideways, to take unconventional approaches to turning a health bar to zero. We are supposed to be able to kill as fast as any Ele, just differently. If you turn us into full support you will see people leave the class en masse simply because they cannot kill effectively with it. If you simply must then fix the minions AI, give them some AOE damage reduction, at least give us a good minion master option. We don’t do enough raw DPS with staff,scepter,axe to make a zerker build as decent as the Ele/War and it isn’t what we should be about any way. You put them in the game. You made them what they are. Let them be that, or remove them.

Aza.2105:

JonPeters.5630:

Guardian:
Tanky and supportive guardians are in a strong position in many gametypes. We do feel that damage guardians are not as powerful as they could be. While we don’t want guardians to be as strong offensively as some of the other classes (given their powerful defensive abilities) we opened up more offensive guardian builds.

• Zeal V – Shattered Aegis. Damage instead of Burning.
• Zeal VII – Zealous Blade. This trait now scales with Healing power (2%.)
• Zeal XII – Kindled Zeal. Increased conversion from 10% to 13%.
• Radiance V – Searing Flames. Reduced cooldown from 20s to 10s.
• Radiance X – Powerful blades. Increased damage from 5% to 10%.
• Valor V – Retributive Armor. Increased conversion rate from 5% to 7%.
• Honor VI – Pure of Heart. Increased scaling with Healing power from 25% to 40%.
• Virtues VIII – Supreme Justice. Number of attacks going from 4 to 3.
• Symbol of Swiftness: This skill now applies 4 seconds of swiftness per pulse, rather than 8 seconds if you have no swiftness and 1 second if you have swiftness.

Mr. Peters,

Very positive changes. Though if you want my opinion, regardless of the kindled zeal change it still won’t be used. Its not that condition damage isn’t good rather guardian only has access to one condition: Burning. So investing in condition damage feels like a waste of investment.

Some possible changes would be: Power is converted to Vitality, Power is converted to healing power, Power is converted to toughness.

Searing Flames = Good change
Powerful Blades = Good change
Zealous’s Blade = Good change

The rest of the changes don’t seem like it will change guardian too much to be noticeable. I don’t want to go off subject to much, but it would of been great if spirit weapons were made viable. The traits are split through out 3 different trait lines, the spirit weapons themselves are lackluster aside from shield.

I always felt if they were made viable then guardian would have more damage options while wielding the hammer and sword. Even before the change that made them no longer invulnerable they sucked, after the change they were even worse.

Looking at the awesome art of guardian wielding spirit weapons makes me sad, because the class never really uses them due to how they are implemented.

^This! This so much!

And if I may add, Guardians aren’t really that tanky in this game. They can be just as tanky as a Warrior which are the only two Heavy armor wearers. There’s nothing special about Guardians defense. You should seriously consider increasing Guardians base HP a bit because right now, you’re pretty much forced to stack up on Vitality in order to have decent survivability as a Guardian.

I would very much like to see a real tanky Guardian with Spirit Weapons. They’re so much fun to use but I don’t want to sacrifice my armor and HP for them.

Really appreciate the changes, Jon. My only suggestion is to stick to your guns and let these play out in game for a while. It’s the only sure way to determine the effect.

For the sake of WvsW I’d love to see the 1200 ranged ClusterBomb revived in all thieves hands…

While the elementalist changes in this patch all look great, I am much more concerned about the change to earth staff in the last patch.
The removal of a field that can apply cripple has severely kitten the spec, and in its place we have a 3 second wall with practically no utility in PvE.
The primary source of damage for a condition ele is eruption, and without the ability to slow mobs, it becomes much more difficult to manage.
So where this patch would have made earth-staff even more fun to run, the lack of a reliable cripple is going to leave the spec….crippled.