Guild Wars 2

Soul Beast
Please make Worldly Impact a Blast finisher.

Allow us to use pet combo fields (Smokescale, Fire Wyvern, etc.) after entering Beast Form. Currently, pet combo fields disappear when the pet is melded with or swapped. Which means you cannot Smoke Field → Worldly Impact.

Dagger #3 should be an evade.

This was the only elite spec I played with much. Otherwise I’d make more suggestions.

Gaile Gray.6029:

We’d like to know your thoughts about the recent PvP and WvW preview weekend that presented the new Path of Fire elite specializations.

Please share your input about the August 18-20 Preview Weekend, preferably in 100 words or fewer

Thanks!

Go to class forums please. Already feedbacks there and I don’t think they are going repeat what already said to here. Plus that this thread going to be cluttered up.

Soulbeast:

• Dagger has the workings of a good melee condi spec but competes with the Shortbow for the same role. MH Dagger also lacks an evade which every other ranger melee weapon has for good reason. Even Shortbow has a built in evade. In PvP/WvW, off-hand dagger feels mandatory as a result. I suggest adding an evade to the leap and perhaps upping the condis stacked and/or add some more damage to dagger. Feels kinda lacking.

• Utility skills (Stances) feel lackluster. Dolyak Stance didn’t work over the demo weekend and the other stances didn’t feel powerful enough to compete with the core utility skills.

• Beastmode aura is awesome. Please don’t change this concept. I like looking like a super saiyan. Maybe clean it up a bit to appease the haters, but it’s a cool idea.

In-depth: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/My-First-Impressions-on-the-Soulbeast

Weaver:
- Unravel Hexes: make this remove all conditions, or we will never have a viable PvP/WvW power sword build.
- Sword gap closers are too short range, make them 600 please.
- Sword damage needs a huge buff on Fire 2 and all Air skills; also, auto attacks are too slow.
- Barrier values need some tweaking: reduce base value and decrease scaling maybe.
- Stone Resonance should be our major defensive stance but its values are way too low; consider increasing the duration or reduce the cooldown.

Weaver:

• Sword felt great, it’s very well done. It’s a fantastic addition to the ele and it’s obvious it was given some serious thought and care.

• Dagger Dual Attacks were awesome, I really appreciate that it feels like the daggers mobility was considered and even gained extra ways of moving around with them for weaver.

• Scepter weaver feels like the entire spec was made for a Fresh Air build. The synergy is perfect. Unfortunately it feels like you’d be a fool to run anything else in PvP/WvW. Not too flexible.

• Staff weaver with the exception of Pile Driver and Lahar, feels very weak. Most of the staff’s dual attacks will require predictive casting and what you get for landing them isn’t worth the risk you put yourself in to figure everything out. These skills will need to do a lot more to be worth the skill they replace in most instances.

In-depth: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/My-Thoughts-on-the-Weaver

I don’t do PvP or WvW much (like 1% of my game time) so I tested most of the stuff on NPCs in the lobby or in WvW. However:

RENEGADE

F3-F4 skills seem kinda useless to me.

• F2 IS neat I guess
• F3 does too little for too much energy, used hardly ever and when I did it was mostly hoping I was just imagining this.
• F4 is what I never used. The alacricity from this skill is almost zero so not worth it for the energy cost which I pretty much always need more for the Kalla utilities.

Shortbow

I really like this weapon as an added weapon choice Was looking forward to a condi ranged weapon
HOWEVER:

• Shattershot – The bleeding could use some buffing I think.
• Bloodbane Path – Feels epic but could use the same as skill 1. Maybe tone down the direct damage of both and buff the bleed? I mean we already have the hammer for long range power damage.
• Sevenshot – If it IS meant to work so bad while not in favorable terrain then it is pretty much useless. Needless to say it felt lacking in dmg anyway. I felt like it was usefull only as an opening shot when I could make sure that all the arrows hit and that’s it. Maybe changing it for a mobility skill wouldn’t be in vain.
• Spiritcrush – Takes too long to activate. Also with the “mist portals” mechanic I think that it shouldn’t matter where we wanna shoot the arrows, including behinds us.
• Scorchrazor – Did what it was supposed to do I guess. But a knockback effect would by nicer, as far as I’m concerned. To have at least one skill to keep the enemies at bay.

Slot skills:

• Breakrazor’s Bastion – The initial healing is too small as long as those other 2K take 10 seconds to hit. Maybe if you change it to 3,5K initial healing and 500 every second for the next 4 or 5 seconds could help? Moving the stun break somewhere else would be nice as well. Otherwise BB is too weak. Usually when I used it it took either too long for the healing to land or it got killed or CCd without healing those additional 2K at all.
• Razorclaw’s Rage – The energy cost is quite high which I wouldn’t mind much if there was no cooldown on this skill. I understand that it would be weird spawning more ghosts of the same charr so how about changing it so that one ghost can’t be up more than once at one time and getting rid of the CDs? Those charr can be killed or stuned/feared quite easily so it would be good having them available as soon as we have energy for them which would keep the Renegade more about energy management instead of CD management which, I belive, is what the Revenant is about.
• Darkrazor’s Daring – Same as with RR.
• Icerazor’s Ire – Here I can’t really understand why ICErazor got cripple instead of CHILL. It would fit the animation, the name and even synergize better with the Corruption trait. Otherwise same issues as with Darkrazor and Razorclaw.
• Soulcleave’s Summit – First I thought that I would be using this skill all the time to make up for the lack of defence and sustain I had on Herald with the varband member’s protection application and the healing from Soulcleave but then I found out that the healing from this skill was so weak that I stopped using it at all and sticked only to the Razorclaw + Icerazor combo when switching to Kalla. With the high energy costs of the utilities and the high energy upkeep of Soulcleave it was always EITHER OR and Soulcleave just didn’t seem effective enough to be used over those two.

Speaking about the Kalla utilities as a whole, I’d suggest either making them invulnerable to dmg and CC OR allowing us to use them more frequently since they can die easily which neglects us their purpose. The first would be good for PvP I guess, the second definitely for PvE since it is good to have something to take the aggro from you when you have not much dmg mitigation or mobility options.

Moving on to the rest (which will be quite shorter since you could say that I main Revenant xD)

HOLOMANCER
It would be nice to be able to use any weapon with the new heat mechanic instead of limiting us only to the sword.
Otherwise good work with the theme!

WEAVER
Buffing sword’s power dmg would be definitely great

That’s it from me. Other players made similar suggestions or even better so please, make sure you look at them and think about them

Thank you for your awesome job and for caring guys!

Soulbeast was fun to play, but purely because of the bugs/skills that will get nerfed later.

-Soulbeast doesn’t feel like an elite spec, it’s just a base ranger with few more buttons.
-Soulbeast traits weren’t really interesting and doesn’t justify dropping other traitlines
-Several skills and traits do not work while in beastmode or conflict with each other, make it clear which ones are supposed to work and which ones are not
-Stances are boring and ineffective, including the elite
-Beastmode skills have short range, low damage, long cast times and it’s impossible to hit moving targets
-Beastmode cooldown needs to go, it doesn’t feel fluid and you just end up camping the beastmode
-What’s with the green fartcloud?
-Dagger is clunky and slow
-Beastmode allowed me to run with squishy pets that I wouldn’t normally run with in WvW which was a nice surprise
-New pets seemed good, the felines needs more oomph

Weaver is unplayable.
There are too many delays before being able to access skills 4 and 5 (like burning retreat or static field).

The rotations are clunky to say the least.

Sword doesn’t have enough mobility, cc, range and damage.

The design is so uselessly complicated. Why am I unable to reach my blasts in time? Why do I have 2 fields and no blasts available, or 2 blast, a leap and no field to cast?

I think the elite skills should let you mix elements and by default they shouldn’t be mixed.

The number 3 skills need serious buffs.

Unravel is just bad design: A skill to make the elite spec playable for a few seconds? Ridiculous.

As always the art team did a fine job with the particules, but the Sword animations couldn’t be more ordinary.

I hope it gets improved.

Renegade:

+1 to the idea of removing energy cost from weapon skills…is an already “limited” class , and energy starved badly.

the shortbow skills are “ok” the #3 miss half the arrows.

Soulbeast:

dagger animations need to change they are generic and boring , it needs more cool effects (looks like weaver wasted all the animation team resources) , AA needs to be faster and hit harder the dmg is meh , OH dagger needs some love…now that we are at it.

the mechanic is cool , but being unable to change pet , the CD to enter SB mode , having to watch weapon swap cd , pet swap cd , and SB cd ….ugh

there are tons of pet skills like 90% of the F1 skills that arent worth casting (does less dmg than AA)

traits : some traits in Beastmaster should work on the Ranger when SB mode , boons need to be shared when leaving SB mode.

The elite one wolf pack , needs a cool animation ,everytime it double hits make a wolf spirit bite the enemy or something impressive is an elite with a huge CD. A tell when ranger pops the elite for pvp players.

Weaver : have been explained before and i agree the idea is cool , but i will say it again , instead of modify #3 why not add F5 for dual element spell? losing #3 and the attunement CDs is a pain , Elementalist is all about atunnements changin when needed , and losing a skill for 9s (change attunement and change to that attunement again ) is a big no-no.

Firebrand brings interesting gameplay as a support, but :
- The spec doesn’t have enough survival &/or mobility for a melee support. In comparison, DH needs less survival & mobility but have more of both.
- Cones on mantras & tomes make the spec very hard to play and even inefficient on boss with large hit box or in pvp.
- At GW2 release, Guardian was advertised as the support class, for monk, parangon and ritualist fans. I’m note sure Firebrand bring enough support compared to the Druid. Seems ranger will continue to be THE support class.

Spellbreaker feels great, i just want the elite to have a shorter cast time.

Weaver was fun, sword needs buff in burst damage, leap distance and autoattack speed.
Staff dual skills are good and complement the weapon well.
Dagger dual skills are bad :
- we need to have defensive options on par with shocking aura and burst damage on par with burning speed.
- Plasma burst needs to be a high damage skill
- Grinding stones needs to be a defensive skill
- ashen blast and mud slide are plain useless and need a complete redesign
Scepter dual skills are clunky and bad :
- no skill should root you in place
- glacial drift is absolutely useless, redesign it into a defensive skill on par with water trident
- stone tide is just bad
- make earthen synergy able to hit moving targets

Make twist of fate evade longer, make unravel hexes actually clear condi, increase barrier application without healing power and make barier last longer in combat.

Weaver is an amazing and fun elite spec, currently it’s just slightly undertuned and has terribly bad synergy with scepter and dagger mh.

Honestly, I don’t think people quite understand Firebrand and what trade-offs should exist for it to be so powerful, it exists because of all the Boon Corrupt/Strips/Steal and so much more. It requires paying attention to what you’re doing and where you should stand. Sure the Cone on Mantras feels completely unplayable to some people but there’s reasons for these designs. We don’t understand what PoF Endgame content will be designed around these new ES’s.

My advice is for how over visualized the PoF ES’s are compared to Core Professions and HoT ES’s. I don’t want the new Visuals on the PoF ES’s to be nerfed and then devalue the wonderful work everyone has done for them to be so beautiful!
I’d advise ArenaNet to update Core Profession skill icons and animation visuals to do with elemental/magical/melee affects and etc, not adding new animation stances or attacks. I’m willing to put this unpopular opinion out there because it’s painfully obvious how old core Guardian looks using old symbols next to the new symbols Firebrand brought, or, pretty much every single Firebrand Skill completely outdates Guardian visuals. And any new ES will outright outdate the core profession if ArenaNet always has 2 years worth of work on them. This can also be a place for ArenaNet to work on new ways for Legendary Weapons too affect skill visuals.

To me, this is what needs attention because it’s worth working on something players play 100% of the time. I expect people to be talking about it eventually…

Have a sunny day.

Weaver
From a more casual player: I found this specialization very confusing to play, with the split attunements I find it hard to track which skills I will get after switching. I would suggest to make Unravel a permanent and passive toggle to allow players to stay in single-attunements while still having access to some of the new features of the specialization.

On Scepter/Dagger I dislike the movement (burst forward or backward) under some of the dual skills. I would prefer them to be attack/defense skills only and leave the character movement to the movement keys.

As with the mounts, the animations are gorgeous.

I only got to try Mirage and Holosmith, and for Mirage I feel there’s no cohesive design. The utility skills have no connecting elements which would mark them as a type of skill (not even in their visuals), and overall the spec seemed clunky, with still featuring Phantasms and Shatter skills yet requiring me to use a GM trait and clones to actually deal damage to someone.

Holosmith:

• No reason to use sword, forge mode does the same but better.
• Forge mode skill 4 (pistol attack) should only work when you face your target.

FIREBRAND

First off, I absolutely love the concept. To whoever did the animations: I would gladly buy you a drink. I’ve always loved burn Guardian in particular, and this spec takes that idea into overdrive. It was, by far, my favorite in terms of concept and feel.

Axe:
- The animations are beautiful, and I really want to like axe. But it feels like the design of this weapon conflicts with other design aspects of the Firebrand.
- The range and lack of gap closing makes this feel very awkward in actual use. Increasing the range of the weapon would go a long way to improving the feel.
- The axe 3 pull mechanic frequently glitches with terrain and is an unreliable gap closer.
- The axe 2 symbol has a very long cast time and does not apply a boon once placed. I think the intention is to lay down the symbol first and then use axe 3 to pull enemies into its effect. But since the pull is very unreliable, it feels incredibly frustrating and punishing when axe 3 fails.

Mantras:
- Overall, I think the charge system works quite well.
- Mantra of Flame has a very limited zone of effect. Widening the cone and/or increasing the range to 600 would vastly improve the usability of this skill.
- Related to the axe feedback, the idea of supportive mantras having a forward-facing cone requires that the player either (1) stop their rotation, re-orient to face allies, cast supportive mantras, then re-orient a second time to resume DPSing the baddy, or (2) stand behind allies at midrange and use a scepter or staff so allies can be buffed in a less disruptive way. Option 1 feels very clunky, and option 2 eliminates the axe as a feasible weapon, given its current form. I think there are better solutions.

Tomes:
- I love these. Tome of justice burns all mine enemies with righteous and purifying flame, which is what I’ve always loved most about Guardians. It feels very satisfying to use. Some have complained about the page mechanic, but I like it.
- The cast time to enter tomes does impact the flow of combat to some degree, although I don’t feel as strongly about this as my PvP and WvW brethren, who fear tome interrupts more than I do (as a PvE-oriented player).
- Minor point: I’m going to disagree with others who yearn for the enormous floating book animation to return. I’m not a huge fan and think the art direction is perfectly fine as-is.

Overall:
- I feel that axe skills and mantras have pretty conflicting playstyles at the moment. Both need some tweaking to improve the flow and design of the spec, IMO.
- For axe, a more streamlined way of laying down a symbol and a more reliable way of getting enemies into it is needed.
a) Axe 2 could be modeled after sword 2, which would solve many of the class’ mobility problems. Make it an instant cast teleport that drops a symbol at the enemy’s location.
b) Axe 3 is an unreliable skill to pull enemies into our symbol and AA range. If axe 2 is a teleport that brings us to the enemy and drops a symbol, axe 3 could be modeled after Chapter 3 in Tome of Justice, a heated vortex that collapses nearby enemies into our symbol and AA range. This would be especially useful if you want to keep axe 1 range relatively short.
- While increasing axe AA to midrange would allow us to stand behind enemies and use cone-based mantras to support allies more easily, I get the impression that Anet is wanting the axe to be a short-range weapon. If so, a small increase of axe 1 range (~200?) would be a nice QoL tweak. Mantra of Flame can remain a relatively narrow cone, but a 500-600 range would be needed for skill viability. If we’re not able to position ourselves behind allies and attack from midrange, however, supportive mantras should be changed to a 360 degree AoE cast.
- To distinguish sword and axe (since they would share a skill), keep axe as the more condition-focused weapon and and tweak sword to be more power-focused.

Holosmith

I found Holosmith to be increadibly fun. A mobile high damage e-spec. Just what I wanted.
However, some skills reduced this feeling of nimbleness. Specifically Sword #3. While others lacked meaningfullness like Sword #2 or Hard light Arena not giving allies boons.

Over all the creat damage made up for the icnreadible lack of survivability.
And all in all a muuuuuch more fun e-spec than Scrapper. imho

Soulbeast F1 and F2 animations are depressing; they say ‘bite’ or ‘chomp’ and we punch the enemy. Re-use old animations like the Necrotic Bite effect to fix this; you did it for the Jellyfish moves using the Man-o-War animation and it’s great.

Many Beastmode F1 and F2 abilities need a significant upgrade to be worth using. An ability like the Feline’s ‘Bite’ is worthless; it does auto attack level damage with a 1/2 second cast time, why not just auto attack? These skills need either a hefty damage boost OR a utility boost. For example, the aforementioned ‘Bite’ F1 could be an instant cast skill with 600 range (using the animation mentioned above) that can be combo’d with other abilities since it no longer has a cast time. Added utility and great for bursts.

On the Holo:
- LOVE the visuals and the playstyle
- feels balanced in pvp and wvw. The animations are pretty loud and slow enough to avoid.
- mabe reduce the visual noise on the forge 5 around the engineer himself. Not the wave, but the ‘aura’ the holo gets. It can make it hard to see compact meele animations in there (e.g. warrior axe, shield. )

- If holo needs a nerf, pls reduce the survivability (not dmg or range).
e.g. less barrier, a higher self dmg on overheating, a lower healing on heat loss, or a larger gap between leaving the forge and starting to cool down – if that doesn’t force power builds into the burning dodge traid)
The scrapper is already a decent meele dmg dealer (‘outsustaining’).
The holo needs to be able to spike high dmg – if it hits – to offer a solid advantage for the loss of the support and survivability.

PVP/WvW weekend was great. Access for everyone. Simple as making a new character to play it. Do this again for the next expansion.

SOULBEAST
Main hand dagger could use some different animations added. It is visually lame. Specifically dagger skill #2 which looks like another auto attack. From a visually standpoint I could not even tell I was using this skill in the midst of combat.

The flow of combat for dagger was not fluid. Having a 4 chain skill 1 attack is difficult to finish in a pvp/wvw setting, but we have quickness built into the weapon to compensate. The problem arises when using other skills (specifically dagger skill #2) that breaks your 4 chain attack constantly. It feels off to break your long chain attack and miss that big hit at the end of the chain. Perhaps spread the damage across the first 3 chain attacks, and add some utility to the 4th chain attack. Such as endurance gain or life steal.

Traits- Soulbeast traits are lackluster. I was hoping from something more interesting from the minor traits than a simple straight damage increase.

Other traits did not even function properly while in beast mode. Such as empathic bond. Beast skill traits should also function at the start of the beast skill, such as taunt.

Overall the new spec could use some refinement.

PvP only as I can’t figure out the impact of 1 class in a 50 man zerg in 3 days:

Weaver:
-Felt really complex and needs some weeks to know which attunments chains makes most sense in different situations.

Firebrand:
-Animations are awesome
-Got many bugs with core traits
-Tomes could get 0-0.25s activation time as you can’t react to any spontaneous change in the battle.
-Cones need to target enemies a bit higher or lower standing than you
-At least the elite mantra needs to be player based aoe

Scourge:
-Was really really fun to play
-Changing survivability for support and attack feels rewarding
-If not traited correctly it takes ages to get life force
-Some skills are way to strong

Yolosmith:
-I think anet knows it dealt too much damage
-The most interesting class of all to me

Spellbreaker:
-Felt rewarding if you don’t play too casual
-Looks like a great class to learn how to play spvp as you need to take a look what the enemy does and not just looking at your own rotation and hoping for the best

Yes balance can be better and it will be better after some time but I need to say I really enjoyed all new mechanics and it’s really amazing how the developers create a second time 9 specialisations that work almost like complete new classes.

Scourge:

• Generally awesome and feels fresh.
• Serpent Siphon felt too weak.
• I felt like I am lacking a melee condition weapon.

Soulbeast

• Can I get a beast skill that gives AoE stability? Please
• Fun!

Spellbreaker

• Great sound effects
• Full Counter felt really rewarding to use
• Hated and loved the elite skill – dunno what to think about it

Firebrand

• Cone shaped mantras felt unpractical to use
• Non-quickness builds felt too slow.
• Virtue cooldowns felt too long.

Generally

• New specializations felt more complex than the old ones
• New specializations didn’t for the most part feel more powerful that the old ones

Renegade:

Revenant getting a bow had me excited. Finding out it deals Condi damage was icing on the cake.
Testing out the Renegade this weekend made me doubt whether I should buy PoF or not.

-Energy cost is way too high. Either drastically lower the cost or remove energy for shortbow. Feels very restrictive!

-Revenant is sluggish. Whenever I join any group I spend most of the time catching up to them instead of playing the game really. Can we get movement speed in the traits please!!

I ended up buying PoF because I believe Anet will do what is needed to make this a good Expansion.

Holosmith: 1st class/spec/profession where I don’t care about dmg/heal numbers, but enjoying playstyle. Sure, sword 2 and few TB skills need some tweaks. For now I can say GJ with Holosmith

On Mirage:

1. Ambush skills should be available from stealth, not just cloak.

2. Mirage mirrors need a lot of work. They don’t last nearly long enough. 15-20 seconds would be better. Also it is frustrating to walk back to a mirror to pick it up, and equally frustrating for random mirrors to spawn on top of you and force you into an ambush animation.

I suggest a new F5 shatter specifically for mirrors (not clones or phantasms) which shatters mirrors to give the same effects on demand. Mirrors would no longer trigger just by walking into them.

3. There NEEDS to be better synergy with shatters and phantasms. I suggest changing Self Deception to: Create a clone for every phantasm you shatter. That would be a start. There needs to be other trait options to make shatters worth using. Mirage relies far too much on purely clone ambushes. Consider giving phantasms ambushes as well.

4. There needs to be more survivability for clones specifically. Possibly a trait giving double mirage cloak to clones (not self).

5. The staff ambush skill needs to be improved. The animation is slow, the projectile is slow, the projectile has very poor tracking. It is completely unreliable in pvp. People can avoid it by just strafing.

6. Infinite Horizon should be baseline. Ambushes are the only real new mechanic of the class and we shouldn’t have to choose a trait just for our main mechanic to work.

7. Some or all Deceptions should offer stealth. Sand Through Glass is useless, but with stealth it would be great. It also doesn’t make sense that thief deceptions are entirely about stealth, but mesmer deceptions work more like thief Tricks…

8. Remove the RNG from Shards of glass. RNG on top of a 20 second cooldown is too much.

Overall Mirage lacks focus. It has no synergy with basic mesmer mechanics (shatters, phantasms). The utilities are objectively worse than core mesmer skills across the board. Mirage offers little or no team support, making it a selfish DPS spec, yet it’s DPS suffers greatly because clones die easily and their ambush skills are clunky and unreliable. Mirrors are completely underwhelming and difficult to use. A significant rework may be necessary.

Soulbeast seems really good and I liked that I could share stability with a stance…

Until I realized that the skill is bugged and does nothing : D

Got me hyped that maybe I could play Ranger in wvw melee train? Maybe if the ranger got a second way of sharing AoE stability to allies it could work.

Condi dmg seems a bit too much in wvw seeing 7k burning ticks consistently is going to be a real problem.

Weaver the only elite spec i played seemed ok but it was less of a dps class and more of a tankly class (d/d set up most of the time). Sword is in a weird places it dose not seem to do enofe dmg but it was doing ok support. The cast times need to be lower and the 1 hit chain effect just simply not fit on atument swap class unless you can hold the chains over different atuments. The lack of a condi clear aimed utility on weaver only pulled away from the class to.

Need more time to look at what the staff can do and i am not going to touch scepter its just not my wepon of chose on ele over all.

Too many elite specialisations are too powerful (just another power creep).
More diversity is needed (power, condition, support, bunker): Core build good for two options, 1st elite good for one option, 2nd elite good for another option.

About my favourite Soulbeast:
Permanent Beastmode is good. Perfect for WvW (pet dies here instantly). But the Blue Jellyfish really needs to be supportive instead of deadly. Jellyfish is the underwater support pet (the only underwater Water Field).

About Deadeye:
Remove the un-revealing. Pretty stupid to introduce an option to counter stealth Mesmers and Thiefs just to introduce an anti-counter option again.

For some reason I can’t use the img codes to post an image, and the text is far too long. Did an attachment instead.

Original Reddit post here

Essentially a compilation of a lot of feedback from different sources on Mirage.

Scourge Impressions

The concept is nicely done, you really feel like a battlefield “operator” creating zones to support or punish with shades.

The defensive side of the spec is too strictly tied to healingpower. On offensive builds the defense is basicly not existant.

You cant survive long under hard pressure, even when built for pure tank/support, so you can’t reliably support your allies.

Shade placement and the overall barrier sharing is too sluggish for the fast game pace. You cant quickly help allies at range like a druid or ele can.

Damage when specced for condi is bursty and high. No longer lasting application. It still has a lot of counterplay and investment for that damage.

Punishment skills are boring. I would trade the boon corrupts for more interesting things like more condi application, better defense, interaction with shades.

Traits are okay. Sand Savant feels like its there to make the minors work, its rather underwhelming.

Very good and meta changing in WvW zerging. Lifeforce gain is a huge problem given that you are so reliant on the shade skills. It also feels like we really lack another weapon option for condi, either dagger or staff would come to my mind.

Scourge summary

Very well done from the concept and visuals, the gameplay gets crippled through lifeforce gain, lacking weapon choices and the sluggish barrier application for allies. The old problem of surviving focus fire strikes scourge even harder than reaper or core necro.

Scourge suggestions:

Shade skills need to provide access to some form of defensive mechanics like blinds/weakness/protection/stability (only for the Scourge.) Maybe tied to sequence skills.

Sand Savant GM should share the minor effects with allies.

Torch 4 Add sequence skill to call the flame back, for the same effect + selfharm condis for F2 or transfer.

Torch 5 unblockable and less clumsy.

Heal Skill: Optional shadowstep to targeted shade before giving the barrier.

Portal: Instant cast

Dessicate: Add debuff with +% condi damage or duration

Snakes: Add a leash mechanic for better condi damage.

Trail: Let us draw an area on the ground to get a big damage / barrier effect if we finish it.

Renegade: Like all things Revenant – this class suffers from having energy costs on its weapon skills. I won’t be playing this class, let alone spec, if the energy problem isn’t addressed. Also – whats with there being no traits to address energy concerns AT ALL?

Firebrand: Mantra’s are pretty good. I think the Tomes should have a consistent cooldown between the 3, and instead of charges they should use a set duration like Conjured Weapons.

Spellbreaker: Double-Dagger doesn’t feel very anti-spell. The daze is on too high of a cooldown, the gap closer is way too tiny of a range, and burst skills feel completely underwhelming.

Holosmith: Why is the 1-hand sword the only weapon that interacts with the Heat mechanic? All of the Weaver weapons interact with the dual-attune, so should all the Holosmith weapons.

Deadeye: I love the weapon kit, but most of the utility skills are pretty useless.

Soulbeast: Probably the most bland implementation of “merge with pet” in the industry. Most of the pet skills are trash or clutter up the rotation, and the buff for sucking up the pet is almost un-noticeable. The elite stance is basically the only good one too.

Weaver: All of the sword skills feel very underwhelming. Their damage is too low, and their cooldowns are too high. I feel very immobile considering I just sacrificed all that range. Dual skills feel completely undertuned. There’s so much going on with the dual-attune + weapon choice that it feels less like a skill choice and more like a “just hit whatever isn’t on cooldown” situation.

Mirage: Ambush skills are just as terrible feeling as the dual skills on weaver. They are wimpy AF. Also the window to use them is extremely tiny. The elite is the only thing to like about Mirage. This class needs a do-over. Also, un-nerf Alacrity please!

Scourge: Whoever designed this spec should design all the others from here on out. This ones just amazingly well-implemented with all sorts of synergy and fun mechanics. Bravo.

Gaile Gray.6029:

We’d like to know your thoughts about the recent PvP and WvW preview weekend that presented the new Path of Fire elite specializations.

Please share your input about the August 18-20 Preview Weekend, preferably in 100 words or fewer

Thanks!

Hey, I hope you pass this along. please see my post that I posted here, Constructive Feedback on PoF Elite Specs (search this). Hope you guys give it a read, thanks!

<<If you want to stick to the “100 words” version, just read the bolded text. The rest is for explanation.>>

First, the feel of the specs was fantastic overall, so much effort was put into them and it showed. Kudos!

I’ll limit constructive feedback to Firebrand and Deadeye, the two specs I played. I will only discuss mechanics that are “broken”, i.e., I won’t discuss tuning of damage or overall philosophy, which are open to debate. The focus here is on PvP exclusively.

Firebrand:
1. Tomes should be instant cast like Ele attunements. Right now it is not possible to use them reactively in a fight. At most, you can set one tome in advance of a fight, then stick to weapon swapping, unless you withdraw to “reset”.
2. Mantras have very short range cone skills and should be reworked. I feel a basic tradeoff between range/directionality was not appreciated here. You either have cones with longer range (600 or even 900), or AoE skills with short range (300), depending on the intended style of skill. Mantras are both, and are not very usable, either support or offensive. For example, blinds were very hard to apply to enemies and I would frequently see that my foe was not blinded, even though we were fighting in melee range.
3. Mantra casting is too slow. This forces you to not rely too heavily on mantras otherwise you will be spending a lot of time disengaging from a fight just to charge up your mantras.
3. Axe attack skills are too slow (and lazily designed as they are essentially mace animations). It seems obvious that axe 2 was a reworked mace 2, including the identical animation. Mace makes sense for it to be slow as it is a support weapon. Axe should be a fast weapon especially given the Firebrand theme. I feel a fraction of a second can be shaved off each AA swing. The best way to do this would be to remove the delay the blue energy axe animation appears after the physical swing of the player’s axe.
In general, the Firebrand lacks sustain in a fight not because of lack of defenses but simply because the choice of slow cast times for Mantras and Tomes (I’m not even talking about Tome cooldowns here) REQUIRING you to disengage from a fight which, since you lack effective disengage abilities, means in practice that you are at this point dead. For a spec that is supposed to be about offensive support, this is a bad design.

Deadeye
1. Marks should be instant cast like steal, there shouldn’t be a delay.
2. (Minor point) The Malice stacks UI should be reworked to be slightly more visible. I couldn’t see them at all at first and had to ask in map chat.
3. Basic movement skills like WASD and dodge should break you out of kneel. This is very important. The spec feels very clunky because of this. Not “clunky” in the sense of “oh my thief is slow”, which is not what this feels (and anyway this spec is not meant to be a quick and agile playstyle), but clunky in the sense that in the heat of battle, you EXPECT to be able to dodge to avoid something coming, but with the current mechanic you can’t just dodge. You have to do the extra keypress of release from kneel, then dodge. This is a fundamentally bad design. You must never allow a player’s expected movement action to fail or be stuck. An analogy: long casting skills can be broken out of by movement and dodging. If the Deadeye kneel mechanic was applied as a general principle in the game, then anyone casting anything would be forced to go through the animation before they could cancel. This would severely hamper the feel of fluid combat in the game.

As for its effectiveness in sPvP we shall see; Sindrener has very good points about Deadeye not being able to supplant Daredevil in the role of +1/decap in sPvP and doesn’t bring anything else to the table. As Sindrener (and others) have also pointed out, players learn quickly how to deal with a deadeye, and if you try any sneak & ambush shenanigans you get focussed down hard. I feel the overall design of the Deadeye is brilliant (and I was over the moon when I learned that thieves would finally get my most wished weapon set – rifle). But in practice, it is still a question of whether it will actually work (in sPvP).

Spellbreaker: Spellbreaker’s Conviction: Bursts should gain some sort of additional benefit as compensation for being limited to Level 1 Bursts. Perhaps, all Bursts remove two boons.
Traits
Dispelling Force: Should also grant stability.
Magebane Tether: Tethered foes should also take increased critical damage.

Daggers: Buff the damage of Dagger skills 1, 4, 5 and F1 by 20%.
2: Change cast time to 1/2 sec and have it also immobilize the target for 1 sec.
Burst: Change cast time to 1/2 sec and have it apply cripple and weakness to enemies.

Utilities
Natural Healing: Change cast time to 1 sec.
Featherfoot Grace: Change cooldown to 25 sec.
Sight Beyond Sight: Should grant blindness immunity.
Imminent Threat: Change cast time to 1 sec and cooldown to 20 sec.
Break Enchantments: Increase damage by 100%.

Revenant USED TO BE overpowered in the right hands, when sword3 did 7 hits at 20% more damage, Shield5 used to heal 4000 HP, Vengeful Hammers was 300 range and so on. That’s why we overlooked the crap like “condi weakness”. But since the “right hands” seemed to become more and more frequent, they nerfed it for 2 years, mainly because of pvp. Now if you’re good you’re decent, but not OP.

Still it won’t have place in the condi meta that is going to be in PoF. Scourge and Spellbreaker will just remove Resistance and give us 5-6 conditions we can’t hope to cleanse. Maybe Renegade will find a place in buffing the condi dps of the others in PvE and in trying to survive thanks to external condi cleanse. In pvp and wvw it won’t be viable. Maybe not even the Herald will be.

And of course avoid water my child, since you’ll just have Shiro and Mallyx for some reason (with Mallyx having the same number of ground targeted skills as Jalis and Glint, meh)

Soulbeast

• Dagger skill animations/casttimes are too long, making the weapon feel too sluggish and not fluid, especially compared to dagger on thief and spellbreaker.
• Dagger damage seems incredibly low, both for power and condi, considering the fact it puts you in melee range and the weapon doesn’t have an evade on any of its skills.
• Traits seems lackluster, especially the Grandmasters and even more so when compared to other e-specs. They should tie into Beastmode and each encourage a different type of playstyle. See Scourge and Holosmith’s Grandmaster traits as examples of how it was done right.

I dislike the concept of Soulbeast, it only appeals to all those who hate ranger pets, which I don’t believe is as many as those who always want the pet to be a part of any elite specialization.

I wish the middle ground for this issue would’ve been giving a strong longbow to an other profession, so people who dislike pets but still want to feel like a ranger can choose that instead.

I do not entirely hate the concept of Soulbeast though, as I always believe it should be encouraged to try out crazy ideas that flip professions around, I just want to tell, some people still like pets.

I honestly only tried Deadeye and Renegade in spvp, wvw, and killing centaurs in Alpine.

Deadeye was nice… I think having a different color/image shade for when you are kneeling/unkneeling would be beneficial. In the heat of battle, I couldn’t tell which stance I was in.

Renegade… sigh Revenants are a mess in core, let alone this energy hog and lackluster dps/support. I sat most of the time autoattacking and using maybe 2 skills and then autoattacking. Damage was low, no condi cleanse, stunbreak only on heal without the legend trait, and the heal didn’t do much at all. And underwater combat is locked again!!! You give “Champion Ritualist” title to revenants, but I feel this is a disgrace to GW1 Ritualist mains. (I want my ashes, weapon spells, and spirits!)

Honestly, at this point, any acknowledgement on the Revenant forums to know you HEAR our concerns would be better than being silent. You don’t even have to tell us your plan, just the fact you hear us in the Revenant community would mean a lot at this point… cuz it seems like you honestly dont care… like it was a HoT Design Team mess of a class that you don’t want to clean up.

Scourge: Overall okay. The Torch skills are nice(some effects for legendary would have been nice but it’s necro he does not get stuff I know /s ), One thing I would like is a small change to “Sand Swell” if it had the stun-break mechanic it would see much more use, It would feel more like one of the other stun-break the necro has (well of power aside).

The lifeforce gain with scepter is a bit weak but that’s nothing Scourge specific.

Renegade seems weak compared to the usual condition damage a revenant can deal, but it has nice supportive capabilities. There’s just one thing that needs to be changed to make it compete with druid for the raid healer role:

The spirit that makes your allies apply bleed each second for 10 seconds acts like venoms, meaning the renegade gets the damage numbers from those bleeds and not the people that apply them with the buff.

If it was changed to be like druids sun spirit, it would make a nice elite spec for healer revenant.

Think about it, you got alacrity and heals, condi cleanse, etc. from ventari, and heal + extra bleeds + life siphon from renegade for your team, definitely a competitor for a spot as raid healer/support.

Scourge seemed to binary and it doesn’t fill a role that necromancer didn’t already fill.

It has great condi-bomb and boonhate capabilities, but we already had that in condi reaper, and more importantly scourge is even more dependent on having a support than reaper is, so scourge is getting pigeonholed into the necro+tempest duo meta even harder than reaper was.

Scourge support doesn’t work in PvP for the same reason blood magic support never worked in PvP, because nobody want a support that dies more than the people he is supposedly supporting.

To make scourge support work in PvP, you literally have to bring another support to keep the scourge alive.

Shorter feedback on Scourge, as I played a bit less of it.

Torch

• Harrowing Wave could use something extra to spice it up. Possibly some Life Force generation. Maybe generating Life Force when it hits CC’d/Feared enemy? You can still Fear PvE Bosses.

Punishments

• The skills themselves are mostly fine and number tweaks have already been suggested. My main complaint here however, is the Elite. It’s stunning visually, but mechanically…it’s not really that unique or interesting. Recently (well, this year) we got a rework for Plague. Plague and Ghastly Breach are two Elites on one class that feel incredibly similar on the gameplay level and I’m not sure if I’m a fan of that. Reworking Plaguelands again to have some better identity would be welcome. I’d suggest something like this.

• Sand Swell – I think changing it from 900 range to 1200 wouldn’t hurt much.

• Heal – Could heal a bit more. 1k-2k.

Traits

• Those are fine, really. It’s just that I’m still missing some cool trait or skill that would make use of Scourge-Sand Shade positioning. Something like sending a wave from Shade towards the Player that burns enemies and Regenerates allies. Replacing Sadistic Searing maybe?

Shade Mechanics

• First of, Path of Corruption needs a nerf specific for the Scourge because it’s frankly ridiculous with Nefarious Favor. 6-10s ICD per target.

• Desert Shroud bug, triggering Shade attacks on every pulse, is probably known already, but I still do mention it.

• Barriers are a reactive/protactive mechanic and skills that grant it (Desert Shroud and Sand Cascade) have to be instant, as they are. However, Garish Pillar and Nefarious Favor don’t have to be instant and probably shouldn’t be. A short cast time for those would be handy for balance I feel, like 1/4s for both.

• Add animations that will warn players of incoming Shade abilities. Visual ones. Currently counterplay almost doesn’t exist, aside from…not being near Scourge and Shades. That might be tricky in a conquest mode.

Review of staff weaver in wvw.

Generally speaking, the skills are really nice on the staff. The utility skills are even better. The elite is wonderful. But the staff spec is ultimately unplayable.

Survivability – The problem here is that weaver makes fire 4 and earth 3 useless as they are behind a 3 second attunement cool down. What is the point of an evade skill or reflect if they take 3s to cast.

Utility – the staff utility skills are mostly in slots 4 and 5. This is what makes staff useful in wvw. Static, frozen, line, big water… All skills that need instant casts otherwise you miss the window of opportunity. Again, stuck behind a 3 second attunement cool down.

Suggested solution – swap earth 3 with earth 5. Then more fundamentally, attunement swapping should give you skills 4 and 5 first rather than 1 to 3. This might not work on the other ele weapon sets but it would certainly work on staff.

Holosmith felt too “self-contained” to me. Almost all of the traits dealt solely and directly with the new mechanics/utilities; you are clearly expected to equip a sword and exceeds and use nothing else, making the base specs feel tacked on and build variety stifled. The mechanic overlaps ALL other engi weapons, as well as kits, and heat makes exceeds a clearly better choice. Would prefer traits and mechanics that allow for cooperation with base specs, rather than just making them a source of passive buffs.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Last Warrior Lord.7248:

Gaile Gray.6029:

We’d like to know your thoughts about the recent PvP and WvW preview weekend that presented the new Path of Fire elite specializations.

Please share your input about the August 18-20 Preview Weekend, preferably in 100 words or fewer

Thanks!

Go to class forums please. Already feedbacks there and I don’t think they are going repeat what already said to here. Plus that this thread going to be cluttered up.

We know there is individual feedback in the profession forums, and I’m sure the devs will read it. This thread is very useful, though, because it’s asking for clear and concise feedback, and that is very helpful to us, in addition to the more detailed input that players wish to share.

Fire Brand

Mantras: Final charge was too weak to be worth using on most of the mantras. The frontal cone application does not work as support. Cone is too small.

Tomes: They fail to provide instant healing and damage mitigation. The idea of melee caster is incredibly bad. This is a bit personal, but I greatly dislike anything that changes my cast bar. It does not fit with guardian play style, and the removal of weapons can put you at a serious disadvantageous in sPvP. As someone who uses mace/shield in some builds, the healing and damage reduction offered by the tomes is substantially weaker than maintaining mace/shield, in addition to losing on the instant healing and damage mitigation.

Axe: Please reduce symbol cast from 1.25 to 0.75 secs and remove the daze.

Renegade

Delete :/

Okay more serious.

SB: Damage is low. Application of skills 3 and 4 is clunky.

F1-F3 functions: Cost way too much and do way too little.

Utilities: Wells that can be destroyed and do not do much damage or support. The AOE daze… Why just why… You have to stop with these AOE CCs.

Heal: Weak, requires you to stay in position. Why is the CC break on it?

Other: Renegade only supports condi. You get 300 ferocity, but that aint much and surely not enough to be used of Herald.

Utilities cost is way too high.

No mobility on either utilities or weapon.

I have to say, powercreep is still there but it’s not as bad as HoT. I really like Spellbreaker and Firebrand. Nothing seems to scream OP, except Holosmith and Scourge. They are the problem.

Holosmith does absurd damage in Photon Forge. The low cooldowns and mobility on the holo sword shouldn’t put out that kind of damage, imo. I can do 3k on auto-attacks alone. On top of that, Holo can put out condis and boons like nothing. It’s ridiculous.

Scourge just puts out ridiculous amounts of torment and burning, the two most potent conditions in the game. Shades have basically NO cast times. How are you supposed to play against that?

Holosmith and Scourge specs just scream ‘MOAR DAMAGE’ without much more thought. It’s blatant powercreep.

New elite mesmer spec is condi only, why??

This annoys me no end. Any mesmer condi spec is so boring to play, yet the only viable builds are condi for PvP. The elite spec sucks because of this. Why should I buy PoF? Mounts, who cares. My main character get nothing but a stupid axe and more condi which I don’t play.

Renegade bow felt unimpactful. Damage severely lacking. Either needs more condi damage tacked on or base damage numbers need improvement.

Utility skills were buggy and lacked impact. It was difficult to test elite skill because insufficient energy to use in practically. Energy costs across the board are entirely too high. The energy cost issue is also a problem with Core Revenant though, so this might just be another symptom of the greater class issues.

Heal skill for Renegade was useless and had little-to-no effect.

“Heroic Command” was nice as a might stack before engage, but as its only functionality feels very “Tacked-on” and more like an afterthought. The same holds true for “Citadel Bombardment” and “Orders from Above”. Regrettably, this did nothing to fix the mobility problems Revenant suffers. Adding stationary summons actually took away the little mobility a Revenant actually has. Additionally, adding more energy costs to these skills further prohibited use of the Utility skills.

“Heroic Command” might be more impactful if added the ability to teleport or cause utility skills to move towards the player. This could mirror Ritualists in GW1 a little more and would allow for pre-casting in engagements.

“Citadel Bombardment” could pick up limited CC options to address the lack of Shortbow CC.

“Orders From Above” Providing Alacrity is nice, but a spammable swiftness might be nicer. Perhaps using the ammo mechanic like a mantra where the 3rd use gives Alacrity while the other uses grant swiftness might address these issues.

To clarify I only tried the new elite specializations for 10 min because I didn’t want to spoil myself to much and I only wanted to know how I felt about the specializations.

Let’s start with the heavy elite specializations;

Spellbreaker

• Uhmmm yeah, I don’t like the daggers, they are so weak. I like the skills but due to the fact they feel so weak I didn’t like using them. I’d rather use any other weapon that the Spellbreaker can use then these weak daggers.
• I like the utility skills especially the elite one. “Imminent threat” is the only skill that gave me a “meh” feeling.
• I’m not sure how I feel about losing boons when using my heal skill. Would be great if that would make the enemy lose boons as well.
• I play in open world and WvW. I don’t see any reason to play this specialization in open world nor WvW because of how weak the daggers are and another reason in open world because as far as I know enemies don’t use boons so what can I actually strip from them…..

Firebrand

• The axe is ok. I don’t feel disappointed nor excited about it.
• I love the mantra’s. I do agree with people that cone should have more range but personally I don’t really care because I’m a selfish player (XD) so as long as I can buff myself I’m happy.
• Woohooo tomes are back. A shame they have such a huge cooldown though.
• If this proofs to be a better condi specialization then Guardian and Dragonhunter I’ll definitely be using this specialization.

Renegade

• I love the skills on the shortbow.
• I love the summons but they cost way to much energy.
• Uhmm the healing can get interrupted, not really happy about that.
• Renegade skill don’t work underwater which means I’m half a Revenant underwater. It baffles me that after nearly 2 years you still haven’t added Ventari, Glint nor Jalis and now Kalla joins that club. It also baffles me that no matter how many topics there have been asking when you’ll implement these missing legends that all of them have been ignored leaving us speculating as to why they aren’t available. If it’s because of ground targeted skills then for example with Kalla you could just let us simply summon without having to target. Please finish this class. It’s ridiculous that it’s still unfinished after nearly 2 years.
• I will be using this specialization (even though it’s unfinished >_>) as long as you add build swap cuz I have no intention of giving up my Herald. Swapping weapons, armors, trinkets and traits every time is annoying.

Now let’s go to the medium elite specializations;

Deadeye

• Out of the 9 specialization weapons (well actually 6 but you know what I mean) introduced in this new xpac this weapon, the rifle, is my favourite. It’s as if I have a “Trapper Ranger” in my rifle but then better. I want stealth without using specific runes (Runes of the Trapper) and utility skills (traps), well this rifle has it. I want to quickly create a gap between me and the enemy without having to swap weapons, well this rifle has it. I really wish ranger had gotten this weapon……oh well.
• I’ve got nothing particular to say about the utility skills. I’m satisfied with them.
• I like that you can gain more health and remove conditions with your heal skill depending on how much malice you have.
• I will definitely be using this specialization just for pure fun. I never liked Thief nor Daredevil so I’m very happy to be using this specialization.

Holosmith

• I like the sword. I wish we could dual wield seeing as how we can’t swap weapons and because of the lack of weapons this class has but at least I have the option to use a shield.
• I love every single utility skill, especially the elite. OMG the elite is amazing. I love the tool belt skills as well
• The heal skill is ok. I’m not sure what to think of its tool belt skill though. I’d rather not set myself on fire.
• Thank you for giving this a transform ability (Photon forge mode). I love transforming (except for the celestial avatar >_>). And skills and heat mechanic are amazing. Thank you so much for this.
• Without a doubt my favourite PoF elite specialization. This was so much fun to play with. Scrapper was my favourite HoT elite specialization and now the engineer scores again. If I’m not mistaken Irenio developed both of these specializations. You did a really good job with the Scrapper but the Holosmith beats the Scrapper easily in every way for me. Thank you for making this elite specialization.

Soulbeast

• Daggers feel “meh”.
• Utility skills feel “meh”.
• Heal skill feels “meh”.
• Beastmode and Beastmode skills feel “meh”.
• I love all new 5 pets.
• As you’ve highly likely guessed this specialization feels “meh” in others words plain. There is nothing that makes me excited about this specialization. It felt like I was playing Ranger with some extra skills added to it. I’m disappointed that the Beast mode was made so you shouldn’t stay in it even though you can permanently stay in it of you want to. If I’m not mistaken your pets deals 30% of your damage so when you fuse with them dependent on your choice of pet you lose 20-30% of that damage…. but I will still be playing as a Soulbeast because even though it’s plain and doesn’t add much in WvW when you’re in a zerg fight your pet is useless because it dies so fast so fusing with it helps. “Well why not play Druid instead” you may ask. Well I’ll make this clear, yeah Druid is better but I love using a longbow and I didn’t like using the staff and longbow together and recharging “Celestial Avatar” relies too much on the staff so Soulbeast is a better option for me.