Guild Wars 2

I like the size of it and that it captures so many aspects of the game, world bosses, squads, new QoL options, balances, wvw fixes, gliding etc

My main concern was how small balance was compared to the early previews. For example ele sceptre was mentioned as a key change, yet remained almost untouched – basically the early communication of intent did not always match what had actually changed.

Overall it felt positive though

Wheres the rest of the balance patch? Lol it’s almost exactly as the “preview” we saw.

The removal of the celestial amulet and other defensive ones was big, and it should help diversity to an extent.

That said, a lot of the balance tweaks did not seem to stem from PvP/WvW needs but instead raiding. Even in the stream, PvE functionality was mentioned a lot more than it should have been.

Most core issues facing sPvP and WvW were ignored entirely, adding more gimmicks to classes/builds where they did not need them and what was frankly a very underwhelming set of changes to sets which were stated as going to be getting substantial changes. The size and extent of the balance patch I feel like could have been pushed out in under a month; many aspects of the classes need substantial work from a design perspective rather than what we’re seeing as largely numbers changes and small tweaks, and many elite specializations are still way too strong, especially compared to their core specializations.

Two thumbs down on the profession changes.

Traits across all professions are “messy”, too compacted and placement does not make sense at times.

Movement skill disparities need to be squashed. All professions should have access to similar amounts of movement skills. This should be equal across professions. (I would love to see a gw2 version of “power pools” to remove profession movement disparities, and other gaps too)

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Power_Pools

Many weapon skills need upgrades and reworks.

Health across professions need a reevaluation considering the amount of damage players are being hit with. This is particularly important in wvw and HoT.

Still zero revamp of stealth (to tackle perma stealth) and improving other “things” to increases combat survivability (yes I have a thief).

(I’ll reread the thief suggestion I made long ago, but I’d like to see mid combat stealth layering removed and the Thief become a “heartier” (better HP and condition resistance and removal) combatant. Having played Thief for a while now, I would like to see stealth and blindness removed from weapon skills and limited to utilities. Also, something like this… “Change all mid combat stealth powers, and things that affect stealth, to something like a visible “mist” type form or visible “shadow shroud” of sorts that reduces damage from all sources when struck. These forms or shrouds would still allow the thief to perform normally and traits can be tailored to provide bonuses and enhance these states.:”)

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Thief-improvement-suggestions

The condition system is still over the top and way way way overdone.

(would like to see something like this implemented here…

“Status Effect & Knockback Suppression

Every time a character recovers from a Hold, Immobilize, Disorient, Sleep, or Fear status, that character becomes immune to all five of those effects from other players for 15 seconds. Every time a character suffers a Knockdown, Knockback, or Knockup effect, that character becomes immune to all three of those effects from other players for 10 seconds. These two timers are independent. It should be noted that Confuse effects, while technically mezzes, are on a separate 15-second timer than the other mezzes listed above.")

Too many “gimmicks” for each class shoved into them in an effort to produce “roles”.

Removing of amulets in spvp was the most awful thing you could do. That’s a generic and cheap way of “balancing”.

The game direction is shifting to harder content and “roles” are on the radar, but profession development is still stuck in “turtle pace mode” for a lack of better words.

“Real” and core fundamental profession revamps need to happen. Not more number changes and seemingly random changes “of the month”.

Professions need a 2.0 revamp so roles are more defined, and things make more sense, and certain profession gaps like health and movement/travel abilities… are closed.

2.0 “Profession” and “roles” inspiration… These are the framework ideas on how to develop professions. Following these “profession” and “powers” and “role” and combat mechanic frameworks will have positive ripple effects game wide.

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Archetypes

Druid needs a rework (among other core ranger things like complete sword rework, shortbow bleeding restrictions removed, main hand axe speed needs to be increases and off hand axe 5 needs mobility, dagger is just a complete waste, greatsword damage is awful).

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Healing-design-real-talk-updated/first

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Druid-CA-Overhaul-Needed/first#post5920020

Your players healing other players mechanics and abilities need a MAJOR overhaul period. Playing healer should be fun. It should be smooth. Healing should be able to counter the major incoming damage that players are faced with in certain areas of the game.

Tanking should not be based generically by toughness.

Alrighty, I’ll stay civil and concise, got I Demerit apparently today.

Overall, decent amount of content for PvE, my main mode of choice so good there. Love gliding, brand new way to experience core tyria.

Main classes I can talk about is probably revenant and necro. Only thing I have to say about necro is THANK YOU FOR ALL THE ATTENTION. But we really don’t need that much boon corrupt, it’s great, it’s awesome, but if I had know how much you planned to give us I wouldn’t have been fine with saying boon corrupt on scepter is ok. So maybe scale it back juuuuust a hair. Teeny tiny bit.

Revenant. Umm, ok yeah the sword AA giving us high dps was just bad, but precision strike is buggy as can be with the projectiles flying every which way, and unrelenting assault…no qualms about that. Just you say the rev sword is helping to single out targets but precision strike and unrelenting assault go against this concept so much. Please reevaluate.

Revenant trait wise, please move the ICD on unwavering Avoidance to Enhanced Bulwark. That’s the trait that is causing the most problems I feel. Other than that, just bug fixes really and a look at the shield.

Oh Jalis and ventari could use a little love, please consider making his heal/tablet movement skill have no energy cost to use, or instant cast with energy cost. And Jalis could REALLy use a stunbreaker and more access to retaliation.

I don’t do PvP or WvW yet so I can’t give feedback about that.

- The Revenant change was good, I have a Revenant and I don’t feel (as others say) that you “destroyed” Revenant. My only complain would be the bugs on Unrelenting Assault, as MANY times doesn’t do the 5 jumps, usually when the terrain level changes or there’s a wall nearby.

- The Shatterer upgrade is great! Makes the fight much more entertaining. The break bar on the Shatterer tho is a bit too hard to break. I’ve never seen it drop under 60%, but that could be because a lot of players might still be getting used to what a break bar/defiance bar is.

- Being able to change Fractal Scale inside the Observatory is AWESOME. No more LoadingScreen Wars.

- Squad UI overhaul was great! Is much better to organize large groups for major events and the markers for Raids are really helpful.

- GLIDING. ON. TYRIA! Such a great feature! Not only GW2 already had some really astounding environments, but Gliding made it even more enjoyable! As well as map completion a bit easier and faster.

- What happened with the Scribe cost reduction you talked about on Guild Chat?

Overall, I believe it was a great update. There are a few things to fix and some other things to add, of course, but a great update. We need Raid LFG category!

Positives
Gliding in central Tyria is the best thing ever!!!
Most of the general changes are all awesome improvements.
Gliding.

Negatives
The skill balancing.
Scepter Ele really needs more love than it got.
Diamond Skin is awful.
Ele balancing in general is pretty horrendous.

Positive Summary
I think the general quality of life improvements, and particularly gliding in central Tyria are amazing. I think it’s really impressive for a quarterly update

Critical Summary
I guess my main qualm is that if skill balancing is only going to happen on this quarterly basis, then I expect these changes to be more…. substantial? Looking at what has currently changed…. it looks like no thought went into it.

Even then, most of the changes are garbage ‘band aid’ fixes, that don’t really target the core of a specific issue, e.g. Shatterstone??? I don’t expect complete reworks all at once, but it just seems to be an extremely lazy attempt at saying ‘hey, we balanced!’.

GW1 skill updates were always really exciting. I am almost never excited about GW2, as clearly, the most exciting changes we can hope for are either nerfs, or really bizarre buffs that noone asked for.

At least the next time I hear “quality of life changes”, I can expect a 1 second cd reduction on Shatterstone.

Hey! This patch was really great for the game, aside from hitting the Mesmer and Chronomancer a little hard. I’m not the biggest PvP head but the PvE side of the game certainly feels the impact of the direct and indirect Chrono nerfs. I’m loving the Thief buffs as a Thief main!

On the World Bosses side of things… the new Shatterer is great! However, I have a HUGE problem with the breakbar. I have no idea how much it scales per player but I can assure you that in its current state it is insanely difficult to break. In a level 40-50 zone thats ridiculous. I know it was supposed to be harder but breaking the Shatterer’s breakbar should not require nearly as much effort as it does right now.
I have completed the 10/10 Shatterer kill achievement and have not seen a single breakbar break so far (lowest I’ve seen is 30%).
Honestly I think Shatterer’s breakbar should either be reduced by a very large amount or, if it scales, be capped at a reasonable enough value for ~30-40 players to be able to break it, regardless of how many players actually show up.

Aside from that small aspect that grinds my gears pretty hard during the actual encounter, Shatterer was done very well. He is truly entertaining to fight now.

Overall great patch! I love the new commander markers. Haven’t tried WvW yet but I’m planning on hopping on it as soon as I get my Branded Backpiece.

Honestly? The profession balance was horrible from a PvP and WvW perspective. Simply removing quickness Rez and stomping along with the amulets would have been enough to nerf the bunker meta.
Instead, whoever came up with the balancing does that, then nerfs classes into the ground, complete ignore other, and super buff others instead of making small changes.

The change to alacrity alone could have been fixed by simply nerfing outgoing alacrity to 33% and leave the mesmers at 66%. That plus the quickness nerf fixes most issues with bunker Mesmer.
Druid wasn’t even touched, nor was the sustain of scrapper.

Ideally, instead of looking into fixing bag compacting and trivial QoL fixes there would be people reading and commenting on the sub forums so that they know what is working and isn’t. A dedicated balance team would go a long ways to this end

First my main dislike :
Buffing thief auto attack has gotta be one of the dumbest changes I’ve seen made to the game in 3 years, and I main a thief. We didn’t need more damage on our autos and lets face it, you are going to nerf it again soon anyway because it’s clearly OP and faceroll 1111111 spam, You really need to get someone on the dev team that has a clue about thieves and a clue about balance.

The things I liked from the patch were gliding in central tyria, the option to view ground objects, badges cost removed from the notorary vendor.

Lastly I’m a bit disappointed in the lack of any real content, dragon bash is same ol same ol, done it every year, its getting real old. So yeah don’t go patting yourselves on the back for this patch, there is a handful of good QoL things added but that’s about it, tbh I expected more after waiting another 3 months+ since HoT.

Staff elementalists have been dealt another slap once again in favour of PvP/wvw changes to ele defence. I’d like to know the synergy between harder mobs in HOT, melee tempest skills and lowered ele defence without any visible damage boost

I wish we should get some more new content, not retweak of existing systems, systems that wasnt done properly when implemented and then relaunched as content or ‘depth’ as anet call it. This is quite frustrating to see, and it feels like anet is selling small things as big things, and in the end we are forced to play the same content over and over. Just like fractals, pvp conquest.

During the balance preview stream it was said to be a sneak peak, and then it turned out to actually be the balance patch, more or less. WvW changes are basically reverted changes from the past, resources are being wrongly used, it seemes like anet has a totally different vision of how WvW should be and how they think what the players wants, which is then the opposite. And now theres supposedly a big WvW patch comming at the end of this year, and the history lesson tells me that much of these resources couldve been avoided if voices were heard earlier on. And now we have to wait another year. And another year from now till raids are fully out for our legendary armor. Meanwhile we are often left in the dark. If gw2 wasnt so pretty with great combat then it wouldnt be so easy to get away with this.

Overall
The patch is good / went in the right direction.

Lunar Festival
I really appreciate, that you now only need 20 interrupts. (The achievement from last year was one of the biggest criticism I had.)
I heard people still had the “world is full”-problem when attempting to join the dragonball arena. This problem first occurred with the wintersday instances and sady it is not fixed yet.

Shatterer Rework
I heard a lot of good things about the fight but sadly it was not what I expected. I expected a Tequatly-like fight from the difficulty. Something that will not die on the first try but is still manageable with pugs.

General PvP Balance
Removing the tanky pvp amulets was a great choice. It will definitely increase the action in every match. I also really appreciate the addition of Tybalt, he is one of my favorite gw2 heros.

Balance (PvP perspective)
This is the part where you really screwed up and therefore, I want to describe some problems more in detail.

• General:
  The power-creep is still in place. The elite specs still outperform every other trait line. E.g. why was ‘rapid regeneration’ from the scrapper not shaved down?

• Chronomancer
  Chronomancer could only be played as Bunker. Every other spec was outperformed by other professions – e.g. there was no reason to pick a power shatter mesmer for your team. Now you butchered alacrity (which was a good choice to resolve other problems) but at the same time, you did not adjust the rest of the mesmer/chronomancer.
  Why did you seriously expect? The power shatter mesmer could not stand his ground with the pre patch alacrity, so what should he do now? Why was there not a single buff to compensate him?

• Ranger
  Bristleback Damage is still too high.
  Longbowranger is still not playable after the removal of the +dmg modifier in the Marksmanship traitline.

• Necromancer:
  The buff went completely in the wrong direction. He was already in a good spot but now he is just broken. He still has some design flaws that should be adressed immediately. The necromancer hard-counters every other condition spec with his condition transfer making every other condition build unviable. The necromancer should be able to get healed in death shroud (ofc it should be balanced around that fact).

i like:

the gliding
the balance (as much as i’ve played w/ it, which is lil but feels better)

don’t forget about small guilds and solo/duo players tho w/ all these “big changes”

Can we please get an option to turn off those PvP icons in PvE and WvW? I know you want them for advertisement purposes, but I find them annoying in areas they have no purpose. Also they are a constant reminder that I am no longer your target audience seeing as I cannot show my WvW ranks in PvE. Why should I be forced to see these even after your post leagues patch?

I have already turned off names to the detriment of not seeing my fellow guildies names, but I can still see the icons when I hover over a player.

Edit: I will comment on the other areas of the patch when I am doing more than just my daily.

Let’s start out with all the good stuff that affected me the most or came into play in my time inside GW2:

- Gliding in Tyria is wonderful and I’ve been enjoying my time in ‘old’ core Tyria maps with new way now due to this change!

-Being able to change the scale inside fractal instance is great and makes doing daily fractals so much easier and faster without the constant re-exitting and entering

-Shatterer’s revamp was a welcome change, he now requires even some moving about and actually thinking of what’s happening instead of the old right foot-afk-hitting

Then the bad stuff:

-Some bad bugs slipped in like LFG bugging up on if someone leaves your party in fractals, so you have to break up the party and restart completely outside in Lion’s Arch if you want to actually post up a LFG message

-Profession balances felt a bit lackluster on some parts especially considered how much talk was about a lot of QoL changes coming in and those did come in, but not really to the ones that was spoken the most about (Ele Scepter, c’mon now… really?)

-The Lunar New Year doesn’t bring in anything to fully attract everyone into doing it like wintersday did, Dragon Ball is too unbalanced and at times buggy+unfair for it to be fun and enjoyable for everyone.

For me the two things that were great were the Shatterer redo and Gliding. Shatter felt fun and not a chore. The difficulty level was fine given his actual level and where he is in the world. Overall that was a success.

The gliding in Tyria is Great, however there are significant issues that show you core Tyria was never mean’t to have this. I literally lost count of times where I hit inexplicable invisible walls, despite being in a perfect harmless place with no reason to exploit. It was particularly noticeable in the Shiverpeaks maps. Is this soemthing that could be updated through the coming weeks? It felt incredibly immersion breakign and bizarre to have to take odd detours through what look like perfectly clear flying areas. It took the shine off what is otherwise the best part of the update.

As for skill balance, I felt it was very underwhelming. It really felt like you were just shuffling the food around the plate. Ranger sword has still not been fixed despite it being consistently complained about. We do NOT want to be rooted while autoattacking. Please get rid of this. I still don’t understand why Soldiers was removed as an amulet either being as it was a core set of stats since the game launched.

regarding fractals, changing inside is good HOWEVER, there were occassions were pugs chanegd to fractal number on the fly to trick people into doing a fractal they wanted. This kittened people off a lot. Allow the changes to be made by votes or something.

But as the first update of the year it was pretty good. I personally did not think the balance chanegs where anywhere near what we were led to expect. If I could give one piece of advice to your otherwise amazingly talented team, please stop hyping things up too much; especially regarding balanncing changes. It really only leads to disappointment

My feedback about warrior balance.

• Please, send some one to actually read the warrior forums. There’s A LOT of feedback there that gets constantly ignored.
• The problem can be solved really easily by just swaping some traits around. Adding damage will no solve anything.
• The rifle change was a step in the right direction (Still a gimmicky and clunky weapon), although the berserker stance change was a massive leap back.

Love the QoL changes added as already mentioned.

Class Balance, the rev perspective.
I dont feel the class have been destroyed, but precision strike really needs to be improved. The projectiles are horribly unreliable and really ruins our compensation for loosing AA damage.
And as already stated, unrelenting assault is badly plagued by terrain bugs, just like vengeful hammers or coalesence of ruin.

-PLEASE- improve the underpowered revenant legends! I love vengeful hammers on jalis, but hammers disappearing on terrain seriously kills its use. And the taunt, road and rite is a joke. They badly need to be improved and actually be made useful.

The good things.

I love how you responded to many QOL propositions. It’s really heartwarming to see that you listen to even the smallest pieces of feedback. It really makes the game feel better.

Shatterer rework is amazing, the fight is very fun, although too short in my opinion. It’s so fun that I very often look for more maps just to play it a little more.
What makes this fight so great is in my opinion

a) Mobs that actually drop loot, and there’s swarms of them! A lot of them die quickly which makes me feel quite good about myself for no particular reason, lol (candy crush reward tier I guess, not cool, not cool… but effective… sadly… QUITE LIKE BAGS AND REMOVING KEY BULKS TO MAKE US CLICK MORE, RIGHT? I KNOW WHAT WHERE YOU’RE GOING WITH THIS AND I DONT LIKE IT… Okay, I do… but only subconciously, not fair).

b) No DPS sponges (outside of the boss himself). They always take away a lot of fun.

c) clear AoE indicators! Shatterer moves are really neat, you can easily say what is going to happen next and you know when to dodge if you pay attention. And you have to keep moving!

d) Gliding. Gliding…. Gliding. Yeah. Gliding.

Now the bad things.

No real content additions.

A LOT of people don’t feel like grinding all chak weapons etc or going for the legendaries because they simply don’t like them or they don’t enjoy the meta events from HoT so after finishing the story, exploring the map and getting the achievements a lot of people have nothing to do… that includes me.

Honestly, I expected Living Story Season 3 to go live this January/Ferbruary, but it looks like it’s delayed to Q2? Same goes for new fractals. I can’t wait for the new raid, and the last tweet of one of raid devs made me really excited, but I can’t help to think that for a ‘big Q1 update’, it lacks content. Shatterer and gliding in Tyria are the two things that will keep players intrested for some time, but it’s not enough to most of people I know and me.

Hello.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Dragon-event-full-bugged
Says it all.
plus: the livings torry seasn 2 bossfight server disconnects arent fixed and the HoT storry boss fight server disconnect at solo mordremoth is not fixed to. What shall i say?
Its junk.

/edit: the sevrersided disconnect is existing at basicaly any boss fight at storryline or living storry season 2.

From a PvP standpoint:

deleting amulets was good.
The balance patch leads to the question if the balance team play this game or not. (e.g. look at the Mesmer forum, look at the PvP forum). A lot of people moving to BnS after this. Maybe some questions should be asked..

-Scepter changes for both ele and mes did not quite go far enough, in my small opinion. Autoattacks, especially, need to be looked at. They are painfully slow and their damage doesn’t really make up for it.
—Eles’ aa on fire scepter is 1.15s which is kind of crazy for a non-channeled aa. I expected the burn or base damage to decrease while the aa speed increased.
—Mesmers’ aa on scepter takes almost a full 4 seconds to complete at max range and the ‘reduced cooldown on scepter’ trait doesn’t really help with that. I can’t say exactly how long it takes for the first strike to hit; it’s supposed to be 1/2s, but it’s slower than greatsword and sword’s aas, meaning I almost never lead with the scepter aa or use it unless everything else is on cd. And perhaps there’s a balance issue with this, but I wish the confusion that got removed from the aa (and Phantasmal Mage, tangentially) years ago was the clone-replacement instead of giving scepter more torment.

-We have a lot of new audio cues sneaking in-game lately (lifting environmental weapons or rubble, for example). It would be nice to have character audio for the newer boons/condis (torment, alacrity, slowness, etc). These cues are a big aid to me; perhaps there could be a sensitivity level in audio settings if the team is worried about annoying players. With no more very visible auras and all these extra little boons and condis floating around with no audio cues, I’m more than ever looking at enemies’/my stat bar instead of the fight.

-Fractal level selection in mistlock observatory is great! All the Fractal changes recently have been in the right direction; I think now we just need more fresh paths to see. However, why can we no longer buy heavily discounted fractal keys in groups of 5? (I’m at work rn; maybe it was patched since I last played? Hopefully)

-Gliding in Tyria is fantastic, especially in the hyena-infested crevasse of the iron farm area in Brisbane. It is making re-exploring more fun and less tedious. It also excites me because… I don’t know, I feel like city-zones are open now for vertical development like HoT maps. I’ve wanted rooftop paths that don’t require breaking out for a long time, and I feel one step closer to that

-The art team gets a thumbs up, of course. DR looks beautiful (again) for the Lunar Festival, and it was fun to use the glider to get the fireworks in DR.

eta:
-Those sprites of the red envelopes on the daily reward panel are adorable and immediately communicate game mechanics. Perfect. I hope we see more of that in the future.

-The brew group is the perfect blend of lore and long-term reward that I like. Well done; I love having a story-reason to return to old locations.

-Ranger shouts and axe changes/buffs were well done, as were Thief sword+staff and Warrior axe changes. They were great steps in addressing why those weapons/skills didn’t get used as much.

-REALLY going to miss using Ride the Lightning in mid-jump :\ It was just so fun.

Concerns:

Are these the only balance updates we will get till the end of the next pvp season??
Where’s the rest of the scepter buffs for elementalists, is this it?

New shatterer is great, this scale of rework should be done for other major bosses too, make the fights more fun.

Lunar new year doesn’t have a shoulder skin associated with the event, why? Disappointed

Gliding everywhere is awesome too, can’t live without gliding anymore.

Great work with the check-box to see all items, one of the best QOL changes, a little bit late though for my mouse key

Final thoughts, you seriously need to look after fractals cause right now that content is being a bit annoying (especially 50+), maybe remove or rework some instabilities and more daily rewards would be great for higher scales.
Also add a LFR (Looking For Raid) cause it’s being a mess at LFG if you look at Living Story tab.

Ty and keep up the good work.

First things first. Thank you to anet for a big patch, more content is always good and this is a step in the right direction. Weither it be small patches every month, or large patches every 3 months, it’s just nice to have things to talk about and rekindle interest.

I preface that I am a pve player, and I only focus on fractals and raids, would dungeon too if they were relevant content.

The flying in core Tyria is cool, and I do not like or spend much time in the HOT maps so this has brought flying to my everyday gameplay. Good change overall.

The fractal big fixes and ability to change level inside is much appreciated, but it must be said that this should of been done right off the bat. We spent 3 months logging out and back in to change levels and countless messed up parties due to the world full map. I must say that these types of fixes should be done asap via hother fixes and minor patches, and should not be delayed to the quarterly patch.

No new fractals or raid bosses, is unfortunate but I think it would be reasonable to wait one more quarterly patcheck for some new content in those areas before I get upset.

As for balance changes, we’ll it should be said that the balance in Gw2 pve is absolute awful, and has been forever. This patch actually didn’t make it worse, and I am not personally upset as I want to play my thief lol; I think I speak for the entire community wen I say. PLEASE BALANCE THE GAME TYPES SEPARATELY.

Thank you and have a nice day.

Shatterer fight was awesome.
Quality of Life updates were nice.
Gliding has been wonderful.
I’ve not yet played enough to experience the changes to class balance to a point where I can comment.

That’s the short version.

Big pluses…. the check box to see items you can interact with in the world without holding control. My pinky thanks you.

Gliding in core Tyria, outstanding. Adding the jump pads in certain places like Rally way point to get to the temple fight…I didn’t expect that. Well done.

The Shatterer fight is pretty much where I expected it to be. Good job there.

I love new markers for the squad UI. It means when we have something like the quaggan guild challenge or the skritt, when be break into subgroups we can use the markers as auxillary tags on people running different subgroups so we don’t have to break the squad to make more squads, only to reform after.

I haven’t had a chance to test all the balance changes, but I think the chronomancer was hit too hard. It was OP before but too much depends on alacrity for a change to alacrity to be good without being touched by other skills that depend on it. Chronomancer definitely needed a nerf, but I don’t think the way it was nerfed is overall good for the profession.

Ranger shortbow is still a huge disappointment. I know you want it fixed too Gaile, the dreamer needs it! I don’t suppose you’ve remembered to try out the t-shirt idea…

But Ranger shortbow needs a revamp.
____

Thief buffs are a little much, seems to be pushing for them to join in on raids, but only spamming auto attack isn’t the way to get that.

Thief Sword AA speed changes are negligible. Sword is STILL not comparable to staff and dagger.

Acrobat is still very subpar.

AA damage buffs will not fix problems with thief

I agree with what seems to be the consensus.

Shatterer Re-work was very well done. Gliding is excellent. Lunar festival, hey, it’s a fun-if-limited event.

The balance patch is uninspiring at best. If balance patches are really supposed to only come 3 or 4 times a year, this patch was, frankly, not big enough. It was also, in my opinion, insufficient in actually balancing. In short, not enough was done, and what was done, was done with an axe instead of a scalpel.

Frankly, though, I don’t think the balance patches need to be bigger, I think they need to be considerably more frequent than every 3-4 months.

Mostly happy with changes to balance – at least the ones I’m familiar with.

Alacrity change should have come with some tweaks to trait duration – chronomancer only pays off if you invest heavily into it. WvW condi mesmer might be getting confusion a bit too fast off Mistrust. But it’s a tradeoff between the always useful clone spam trait and the sometimes useful and more decisive punishment of stacking.

Not convinced about Ranger shout changes, particularly losing the last option to move a pet independently. If F3 and pet combat mode had some more options that could make up for it. Defensive trait buffs are nice to have though.

As a thief player, I am happy we got buffs, but not at the expense of skills. From what I have seen thiefs just have to auto attack. Deal tons of damage. No point in using any skills. Id rather you tone back the auto damage a little and spread it out on skills. For example

D/D – Give back a stack or two of bleed back to death blossom. Increase heartseeker break points a little bit. Hell give us more condition applications on our weapons.

Also stop trying to make acrobatics happen. It is not going to happen. Just give us preparedness baseline. You listed one of your concerns as our initiative being low since we have to use our skills both offensively and defensively. Guess what fixes that. Preparedness baseline.

Some buddies and I were doing jump puzzles in Tyria and I was frustrated because my glider kept popping out if I held the spacebar for too long and it made me miss some tight jumps. I would appreciate if the glider was changed to double-tapping the glide key and not just holding it down, since some jumps the game requires you to make are sensitive to how long you hold down the spacebar.

I liked how the update attempted to address every part of the game, and understand that prepping core Tyria for gliding must’ve taken up a huge chunk of dev time. I also liked how the people responsible for rangers kept their promise from September to rework shouts. It’s really great that they followed up on their word. They promised a shouts rework and delivered. They didn’t promised shortbow or sword rework so I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything else.

That said, I was hoping there would be some sort of discussion with the playerbase regarding PvP balance like Colin promised us.

“shortly the balance team will start discussing with you the next big balance update for early 2016 with everyone to gather feedback”

Now, I wasn’t aware of any discussion that went on. I didn’t see it on the forums, on reddit, or on twitch. The only discussion I sort of saw was Grouch asking for amulet and sigil ideas. I did see players discussing among themselves what classes needed balance and how, but nothing from the balance team itself.

For now it’s probably too early to say anything definitive about the balance and meta, but I do know that if there was any discussion with the balance team involved, I wasn’t aware of it.

Gliding + launch pads= awesome

Shatterer update is fun- bugs in things counting for achievements-Eg. Kill Branded.

QoL Ctrl- great change

Game client crashing when trying to dl patch. Can play if I log in quickly enough and ignore it patching, then have issues in-game when trying to go to a different map saying it hasn’t been updated. Tried to patch fully while logged out, client just keeps crashing.

Lunar New Year- boring and disappointing.

I like the ability to glide in Tyria. Opens up the map more for exploration.

What I don’t like is being kicked from servers every few minutes with the code=7:11:3:191:101 error when there’s nothing wrong with my connection -.- I’ve had it over forty times today, and it’s cost me multiple events and game progress when I’ve been kicked from the server. Cant even do my story missions.

My thoughts on the Rev changes

1. The sword nerf was needed but the 20% on Brutal Blade seems like a little much. Could have been 10-15%
2. Precision Strike is really nice now. The DPS is enough to add it to rotation! Def most effective against single target (try it if you haven’t)
3. Coalescence of Ruin is broke really really badly. See https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/42yt29/coalescience_of_ruin_how_does_the_nerf_actually/

Bugs: .
1. If you lay down hammer 2 or even auto attack it wont always hit all the targets if they are on a slanted surface (such as a hill). The attack goes in a straight line (through the hill) and doesn’t follow the terrain up
2. Unrelenting Assault is really buggy. If your toon is by a wall, box or hill the skill wont complete (or only hit once).
3. Hammer 3 is bugged where it wont hit targets even if you get a green ground target. It happens mostly against targets at max range or across a gap. Toon will complete the jump but do no damage

-Cow Bell

TL;DR of below
Balance update was poorly executed. Please listen to your players suggestions. Create a credo or some guidance principles to guide the balance team on the next patch.

Balancing professions
To be blunt, the patch lacks direction.

The balance patch’s scope was too narrow and neglected many failures regarding intraprofessional balance (some traits are stronger than others, some utility skills are useless), and interprofessional balance (some professions are stronger than others). The balance patch wasn’t even a balance patch. If anything, it was a severe meta-shift and left profession balance as lop-sided as it was before.

It changed things that never needed changes, while simultaneously missing out important issues that needed fixes. Beyond that, the fixes were all sloppily thrown together and lazily thought out (Sorry, but I can’t sugarcoat that). Cooldown reductions, damage increases, etc is not a way to fix something when there are clear mechanical flaws within the profession, skill, or trait.

It’s as if the developers don’t even play the game to understand each profession correctly- and I wouldn’t be surprised if this wasn’t the case. Karl looked tired in that balance preview video. Please allow your developers adequate time to learn each profession before making volatile changes that disrupt the balance of the game further.

Take balance seriously. It’s hurting your business and your entrance to E-Sports.

“…The second huge reason that sports become popular is that they’re CONSISTENT. Soccer is always soccer and basketball is always basketball. Soccer the sequel, or basketball 2 don’t exist. Professionals and fan never fear that the game is going to change in any significant way so pros can focus on becoming masters at their craft instead of re-learning a similar but distinct game every 3 months and fans are given time to become truly familiar with the game. That’s how lifelong fans are born. The kind of fans that drive a sport to real success. …. Consistency is important because people can’t become masters at something if the rules keep changing, and mastery leads to the level of depth and amazing play that is necessary to draw in big crowds and more of the mainstream. Without it, players and audiences will have to keep starting over- and that takes all the momentum out of guild wars 2’s sales again and again.”

It’s understandable that GW2 changes, sure. It’s to adapt to new content such as new specializations to keep it fresh, but the changes need to be for the right reasons. But making unreasonable changes every 3 months ruins the balance for the wrong reasons, and forces players to relearn a new profession or build. Do balance right the first time, and do it seriously.

Warriors
Since I am a warrior main, I can speak what my thought are about the warrior balance patch. I don’t play much of the other professions, but deal with them plenty in wvw, pvp, and pve.

Link to discussion: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/Commentary-on-warrior-s-patch

On that note, here’s a legitimate balance plan. Gaile, I know you said the staff is “not able to support individual petitions and requests for communication”, but Jesus Christ at least take a look at it. Being closed minded harms every business, and it prevents the company from gaining new perspectives.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SHhAr84r7L7sKK4B_hfHxBWp5cgt3fsLAh0EvlDUKnQ/edit#gid=852159247

edit/ another helpful link for you guys
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/What-ANET-needs-when-designing-balance

I’m throwing in my two cents on mesmer changes…

• The scepter “rework” was not good enough. It’s a nice start, but the weapon is still slow and clunky.
• Well of Precognition…. I’m pretty sure everyone is aware… The aegis is worthless.
• The alacrity nerf needs to be re-evaluated. I have no idea what is the best solution, but cutting the effect in half without touching any of our base cooldowns is not working. You destroyed every chronomancer build for every game mode just to address a single build in a single game mode.
• Mesmer personal DPS is still atrocious in pve.

I’m in a sort of disbelief that you guys have managed to get gliding to work in Central Tyria, with how big the world is. Bravo.

Honestly, I’m a bit disappointed by the guardian buffs/nerfs. Guardians don’t really excel in anything that’s great, and the meta classes can do roles better than the guardian (support, tank, dps, etc). Regarding this, guardians aren’t very optimal for raids. They’re not in a terrible position, but they’re so mediocre that they tend to get overlooked now.

Chronomancer – I still believe every skill was balanced around Alacrity being 66%, not 33%. I would rework the 50% more alacrity on Chronomancer to “Alacrity has double effectiveness on the Chronomancer” so the group support exists while not being overtuned. Also well of Precog… if Aegis was the way people wanted it to go, I would of preferred “Block all attacks while standing in the well” because at least there are classes whose attacks can be unblockable; Aegis is terrible because of the fact it is not only extremely weak against attacks that hit multiple times (Reaper 3 effectively ignores Aegis) but also the inability to properly block whatever attack you want, because a tiny little mob or a stray fireball can strip the aegis before the big attack like Jade Winds hits.

Elementalist – I’ve asked this and I’ll ask it again. Please rework their trait system. Currently they have the least synergistic traits even inside their own traitline. For example, exclude Tempest and Arcane for a second and no other trait line helps procs Blinding Ashes (only Fire trait line can burn) or Lightning Rod (Tempest Defence the only trait that can cc) or Fresh Air (Air only one out of main 4 giving fury or precision) or Stone Heart/Diamond Skin, it’s literally all standalone traits and each one that’s considered “Strong” has been nerfed because it’s always been standalone. Blinding Ashes had its cd raised to 8 seconds and Burning Precision did NOT have its cooldown reduced to 4 seconds to match this new ICD. Design wise, it was made both 5 seconds so proccing one would always proc the other. Just like the Alacrity change, these are the laziest changes that nerf the overpowered ability without buffing the abilities that were meant to go alongside with it. Then, let’s bring Tempest back into the picture. The traits literally clash alongside each other, every single one, and I mean every single one. Latent Stamina is a endurance support trait while Unstable Conduit is the stable aura support trait while Gale Song is a stunbreak supporty trait. None of them by themselves increase dps, they simply give you supporty aspects… except a support build (usually Auramancer) would want more auras. Latent Stamina is simply too weak to cut it especially when its main role as a support is being fought over by auras, the main support aspect of Tempest. Then, the might and weakness on shout is literally not enough. Ignoring the might, the weakness duration is far too low for the requirement of spamming shouts left and right, and could of honestly been done better by simply adding a shout cdr here. Then, the newer trait Invigorating torrents literally fights with Tempestuous Aria because you want more auras and boons as a support class, and both traits results in shouts = more boons… which is questionable, except you also get auras outside of shouts (Unstable Conduit remember?) meaning you’d want IT over TA at any time. And then stab on overload is yet another thing you’d want to finish overloads to support better. Have I made my point yet? Then your elites… boon duration and more auras with Warhorn? Or healing auras? Two extremely supporty things which I still don’t get why warhorn cdr was removed? And then Lucent Singularity… just does not feel like a Grandmaster. I’m sure it has its uses as it is, but I would of prefered of readding the overload CDR trait on top of the current Lucent Singularity so it becomes the DPS trait. And don’t even get me started on how terrible Scepter dps still is. Elementalist needs synergistic traits. Look at Necro, where they can take Speed of Shadows + Any Trigger-On-Death Shroud. Or how they have corrupting Signets and then a Signet in two other trait lines to work with it.

And talking about Necro… too much boon corruption. It should be a nerf to boon application, not a buff to boon corruption. If Herald or Ele is the problem, nerf how much protection they can get. Herald? Increase upkeeps. Ele? Decrease protection duration. Literally with boon corruption on RS2 and 4 signets, you can trigger a 10 boon corruption even without scepter. Corrupt Boon is way too powerful when Scepter auto attack got a boon corruption on top of it.

Thief, the dps is nice, but the point was they wanted GROUP SUPPORT and survivability that doesn’t rely on stealth. They are the only 11k hp class without protection. Think about that.

“Enemies are now able to be struck by this ability only once every 0.5 seconds.” seems pretty broken, please fix.

Otherwise, this type of change actively discourages you from playing together with other players, which is the exact opposite of what you claim GW2 is about.

I don’t dislike anything in the patch, but it just seems like a collection of things that should have been implemented with absolutely no fanfare. “Gliding in central tyria”, which is a phrase so overused it’s starting to make me feel physical pain, was nice, but something that absolutely didn’t deserve the attention it got. “Big” patches like this used to introduce entirely new systems and change the game fundamentally in some way or another. This “quarterly balance patch” is nothing more than a bunch of QoL updates repackaged and marketed as content. And it’s all pretty good, but boy is it a lot less interesting than when southsun, or the molten facility, or the wardrobe, or collections were implemented.

Not that we shouldn’t get this sort of thing. It’s nice, obviously. But it adds practically nothing new to do. Hopefully you guys are working on… something interesting (new elite specs or legendaries—even a preview of upcoming ones—would make me fall into a happiness coma), because if this grab bag style update is all we start getting until the next expansion… I’m going to spend a lot more time sitting in divinity’s reach looking at my bank and trying to think of something to do besides log off.

For the love of god, a living world update. Repackaged SAB. New collections. A reason to play WvW. Something. Being drip-fed “content” isn’t a good feeling, especially when a presumably sizeable amount of the dev team is working on content that a small minority of the playerbase is going to actually bother with.

I want to enjoy playing this game so much more than I do.

where those revenant weapons at famalam

Thief changes – I primarily come at this from a PvE perspective, but I have played thief as my main for over three years. It was nice to see thief get some attention, but now we are in a situation dangerously close to Revenant before this patch where pressing 1 and only 1 is top DPS or awfully close to it. The attention to auto attack is very helpful, but ultimately the lack of attention to Heartseeker, Cloak and Dagger, and Backstab on the D/D weapon set is disappointing. Daggers cleave less targets and have less range than staff, and they remain an inferior damage option. Thief also continues to be a second tier DPS class when compared with elementalist despite bringing less utility and AoE capability.

Ultimately having balance patches quarterly is a positive, but the transparency seen with class changes in the developer lead specialization threads prior to the release of HoT was amazing. The community was told in detail what would occur and why. A return to this would be a great help to those of us that are very interested and invested in class changes and balance going forward.

Great thread! Overall some neat stuff, though content-wise it’s mostly not for me. That’s ok. Since it’s been said before, I’m going to keep it short and concise and limited to my main concern:

Ele balance. So bad. Just look at it. Please fix.

I see a lot of negative posts on the forums, but I think overall things went good. The patch added some things, fixed some things, and balanced some things. I give it a solid B+ so far.

The only big concern I have is with sPvP, specifically balance issues with Warrior. I honestly feel warrior is in a very tough spot in sPvP, especially if you don’t have HoT for the elite spec. Please look at addressing warrior balance as the weeks and months go by

Well let’s go down the list:

- gliding → awesome.
- Shatterer → haven’t actually tried him yet but general census is that it’s well made and fun
- Lunar Festival → I’m burned out after Wintersday, so having a lighter event is fine I feel.

Now to the meat of it all: the quarterly balance patches.

Honestly, if this is the quality of balance patches we can expect on a quartely basis, good luck. I’m just going to requote myself from a different thread and most of the other posters have already gone into details or mentioned some of the things wrong.

Cyninja.2954:

Personally, I don’t mind them spending time fleshing out the esports side of the game. In general it is always good to have new players moving towards the game.

That being said let’s clear some things up:

WvW is NOT esports.
Spvp is partly esports, but certainly not with this terrible design of a league system.
Pve is no esports (this one is kind of obvious to most, but spvp and wvw get mixed up a lot).

Now where do things go wrong?

Once the entire game gets balanced around 1 of these aspects. We’ve seen this in the past with pve and arenanet balancing the game around this game mode. The spvp crowd, no matter how big or small, was up in arms, rightfully so, and we are now almost 3.5 years into a game where 3 years of this time was spent on mostly only pve.

The last few months post HoT (and slightly before) have been heavily focused balance wise towards the spvp segment while the trying to grow the pve game (content and mechanics wise). We’ve gotten:

- raids
- fractal redesigns
- harder open world maps
- new skins and pve movement skills
- masteries

It does not take a genious to notice that balancing and focusing on spvp instead of pve, while expanding the core game might be a bad idea. Get the new stuff fixed first, then move on to other projects. Cue the people who say: but there are multiple developer teams working on different parts of the game. True, but what they’ve done so far is mediocre at best, and terrible at worst.

At least they’ve started trying to improve their communication on the official forums. Baby steps I guess.

People might notice that I have completely omited WvW from my argumentation. Well for me to talk about WvW, there would have to be WvW to talk about. The neglect that game content has seen (yay new maps, which were more a design orgy than actually play tested) is very sad.

Here would be my 3 main advices:

- The marketing department is NEVER right. Marketing is a tool to be used which when used properly will greatly enhance the strengths of your product. Once you let them run the show though, you lose.

- have 1 person half the numbers the balance team throws out there. Literally do the same things as before, then at the very end, have 1 person go through ALL the numeric changes (no matter if good or bad) and cut them in half. This excessive over the top balancing back and forth (while done in most MMOs) is really hurting a game with 3 game modes.

- other games have had to deal with similar problems (matchmaking and Elo, pvp rankings, pve rewards, wvw, etc.). Stop trying to reinvent the wheel (new league system for example). Go and take a look how others have solved the problem, then addapt that approach to GW2.

Oh and if possible, tell the design team to finally decide on what they want revenant to be. The class is half done and requires some serious fixes (and I mean fixes and not bandaid workarounds) to many of its core aspects (underwater combat, legend viability, auto attack or skill based design, racial skills). To which we can now add futher bugs and desastrous flaws (see sword 2 going for junk targets or straight up missing, see CoE immunity on other players).

My main gripe isn’t with the quality per se, but the fact that this will stay this way for an entire quarter. If you decide on big balance patches without balancing inbetween, make sure they are worth their salt.

Gliding in central tyria is AMAZING!

Increased raid shards reward is nice, now I can cap weekly shards even faster.

Change well of precognition again please. And maybe lower some mesmer’s skill CD to accomodate alacrity nerf.

The only way to play Ele in PvP is defensively, stop destroying their defensive build.

The buff to necro is totally unneeded.

Nice buff on thief.

Make condi ranger a bigger thing (for PvE/raid)