Guild Wars 2

I’m not really a WvW’er or PvP’er so I’ll avoid that, and balance patches have never had much effect on me since I don’t play meta builds, more often than not.

So I’ll focus my feedback on the three major things of this update I do know: The Shatterer, Central Tyria Gliding, and Lunar New Year.

I’d comment on the scribe stuff but I haven’t really looked at it all. I’m just glad it got cheaper.

The Shatterer
The Shatterer is by far an improvement, however I feel that the stance to keep the world boss ‘on par to level’ was a mistake. The dragons are “the big threat” to the world. The three dragons we can fight – Tequatl, Claw of Jormag, and Shatterer – should be among the toughest Central Tyria world bosses (and only other world bosses that should be on par, IMO, in Central Tyria is the Gates of Arah and maybe Orrian Temples – and Triple Trouble but only because it would be silly to nerf that).

The Shatterer, as well as the Vinewrath and Octovines, feel like great placements for “the easiest standard world bosses” and should be where all Central Tyria world bosses not mentioned above or in starter zones should fall at.

So while it is far better than before, I think it should be tougher. That said, I still love it.

I’d rate it an 9/10 – I loved it, I find little to no flaws with it, but I can’t agree with the intended direction of it.

Central Tyria Gliding
Honestly, I love this. I haven’t really tried it out that much but what I have tried out I love.

However, I feel that this should just be “the first step” and not “as far as we’ll take it”. Try to picture it with me:

• A series of updrafts in Orr that takes us to the airships high above so we can fight those dragons in the sky.
• Floating rocks like Morgan’s Spiral or Geomm’s Lab, high in the skies above the lands, that require gliding to not only get to, but traverse.
• A series of steep slopes in the peaks of the Shiverpeaks that can only be reached, one to another, by gliding across wide gaps, ultimately leading to a majesty view of the surrounding area, and some other ‘neat surprises’ for players to find.

In short: adding gliding to Central Tyria opens up a lot of opportunities to add content to the old maps, giving veteran players more reason to re-explore them, and giving new players a glimpse of what they can look forward to in returning to their roots. And I REALLY hope that you guys decide to take advantage of this in the long run, even if now.

As it stands, the maps aren’t really made for gliding, so there’s not much to do with it but prevent dying from fall damage or going a little faster from high point a to high point b, but with some ‘minor’ adjustments here and there, this can change.

And I do not think that people would be opposed to seeing some bouncing mushrooms expand eastward. If you need an explanation – pollen sticking to the Pact/adventurers as they return home and spreading.

I’d rate it as 10/10 – but if you guys fail to capitalize on the potential it has, I’m knocking you down to a 6/10.

Lunar New Year
Pretty much the same old. I was kind of hoping for a fix to some of the old bugs (volunteering not giving auto-win) and oddities (win 5 dragon arena matches for daily… but participate in 2 for daily – feels it should be switched), but wasn’t expecting much. I’m glad that there’s no achievement with an absurdly high goal for maxing out AP this time. Closest is the healing, but that’s rather easy if you do the dailies.

Revenant updates were absolutely disappointing. There was maybe 1 or 2 changes thay were not in the preview.

Rev needs Jalis and Ventari fixed. Rev needs the bugs fixed. Seriously disappointed about this update.

I mean the rest of it is pretty neat, gliding, shatterer, etc is cool.

Just waiting on raids, more legendaries and WvW being fixed

Gaile Gray.6029:

Every week I prepare a forum report for management. For while many of us read the forums every day, a once-a-week report is helpful to the various teams as a sort of overview of what’s happened recently and as they consider what might be a focus in the future.

I’d like to ask for some help with this week’s report, because the January 26th build was huge, and it had a lot of components that touched on nearly every part of the game. Because it did, feedback could appear in any of our sub-forums instead of in an overview thread.

So could you share (or re-share) your top reactions to the build in this thread? If you’re posted elsewhere and simply want to repost in this thread, that’s fine. But if you’ve posted a long set of comments and could give the Cliff Notes here — maybe a one-liner for each of your top several thoughts? — that would be marvelous!

I’m asking for your appraisal of the quarterly build: likes, dislikes, etc. I’d like to not veer off into debates about what wasn’t included, or suggestions about what should be coming, but a snapshot, or “This was the dinner, what’s your restaurant review of the meal?”

Thanks so much to those of you who choose to post!

I love the general quality of life and content updates. Shatterer finally seems like a fun fight, the Lunar Festival is present without being as invasive as the other two festivals this XPac so far, and gliding is probably the best thing you’ve given us since the XPac itself.

I like some of the balance changes you made. Alacrity’s nerf was necessary, I’m glad micro-managing the UI is out, and that thieves aren’t terrible anymore.

I absolutely hate just about everything you did with the mesmer and chronomancer. There were so many short-sighted changes made here, all in the name of not just nerfing bunker specs, but absolutely ERADICATING them, and you took several other mesmer specs out in the process, giving us nothing to work with in return.

Malicious Sorcery still has the same problem it did when you first introduced it, in that it doesn’t affect impact the scepter’s projectile speed, meaning the move actually screws up the rotation unless you’re standing next to the mob.

And the pathetic scepter buff – seriously, what is this? you promise a significant change to scepter indicating skills, traits and general mechanics updates, and you make two minor tweaks that would only apply to a PvE mesmer if they did nothing related to chronomancer skills?

I don’t even know what the point of the restorative mantra buff was, except to trick the unaware by putting in a patch note with a big number – seriously, how is this supposed to put a dent in the hole you carved out with perma-quickness? Oh, is this supposed to bring our healing up to any other class with viable group support healing? Newsflash: IT’S STILL NOT EVEN CLOSE.

In one fell swoop, you’ve managed to shoehorn mesmers into shatter specs in PvP, and well-spam builds in PvE. What is this even, ANet? How is it that after 3 years, you still don’t get that mesmers have a serious sustained damage issue, and will continue to as long as you continue gimping our overall output in favor of clunky illusion pets that we have to frequently remove and resummon? And with your continued reinforcement of a straight damage meta in every aspect of your PvE design, that the only thing currently keeping us in that meta is two duration stacking damage buffs? Can you just fix that? Please? Without deleting us from the game in the process, if possible? I know that’s your balance team’s favorite thing to do, but if possible keep them out of the conversation for this one. The rest of the community will appreciate it, I promise.

That’s all I’ve got

Rata Sum has all this awesome terrain you guys designed, but we can’t explore most of it because of the silly “kill zone” gimmick It’s funny at first, but for people who love exploring maps this ends up being a downer. Please reconsider Also gliding in Tyria has been one of the best updates in a long time <3

I also want to add that not seeing any buffs to Ventari or Jalis was another big disappointment.

I think more time and effort should be given to ability balance. The game has many broken, unplayable, or poorly tuned weapons, abilities, and traits, across ALL classes.

I dislike how tuning passes are usually just number tweaks. Many things need to be redone completely. Adjusting numbers just leads to power creep and doesn’t correct core issues.

Some examples of things that I consider broken / incomplete / in need of further evaluation:

• Guardian Spirit Weapons
• Warrior Physical Skills
• Revenant Ventari Stance
• Revenant Jalis Stance
• Revenant Underwater Mechanics
• Thief Pistol
• Ele Scepter
• Mesmer Scepter
• Ranger Shortbow
• Ranger Sword
• Literally useless traits like Thick Skin
• Traits that cancel each other out, such as Dual Wield (15% atk spd) + Berserking (15% atk spd). Why does this exist?

To name a small few. There are so many more things that need attention, but I can’t list it all here in great detail.

I also feel like base health totals should be increased on Guardian, Thief, and Ele. Power creep has made that mechanic outdated. Things like this should be looked at during balance passes.

TLDR: The game feels unfinished to me. I feel like FAR more time should be allocated to ability balance. This should be one of the main priorities.

Elementalist

- Why did you nerf Water Scepter #2? You increased its cooldown, meaning it can’t be spammed as much. Considering it doesn’t do much damage in the first place, this hurts a lot.

- What about the Scepter autoattack buff?

Ranger

- Sword autoattack still makes it difficult to dodge.

- Why does the grandmaster trait Honed Axes give us a Ferocity buff for main-hand axe? Axe is a condition-based weapon. I do not see any viable uses of this trait, and don’t quite understand the logic behind increasing the ferocity. Is there some secret axe build we are unaware about?

- Shortbow is still in dire need of adjustments. Is it a Power or Condition weapon?

- Druid: Why is Natural Convergence (Celestial #5) so weak in PvE, compared to the PvP version? Is this intended, or a bug?

TL;DR: A balance patch is never going to exist for GW2 so long as we have 3 distinct game modes that require balancing. PvE, PvP, and WvW cannot be balanced the same. It’s just a fact. I might even go so far as to say that Raids qualify as their own distinct mode in need of a distinct balance, but I haven’t been able to do any raiding (due to the players I would have done this with leaving the game) so I only have the second hand accounts of other players to go off of. Separate the balance for each of the game’s modes and let’s stop trying to pretend that we’re ever going to reach a balance that simultaneously satisfies all of the modes that are in play currently.

Scrapper has ridiculous survivability for the amount of damage they put out and are going to be mandatory for all PvP teams unless a change is made.

Please look at some of their defensive abilities. Thanks.

Going to go over a few classes and then all of it as a whole.

Thief: I am really glad that thief now has some viability in pve, and a clear role. Unfortunately it came in one of the most underwhelming ways: auto attack damage. That said we still have an overabundance of bad or underwhelming traits that will never see use.

Ranger: I wanted to give a shout out about shouts. They were done really well and have usable cds. Now when I pick up other classes and I see impactful skills on 60-90+ sec cooldowns I feel a bit sad. Also I thought somewhere I remember hearing mentions of shortbow changes, kinda sad that there was nothing changed.

Warrior got some love rifle wise and I really like it, but the class still struggles to be useful in a pvp or wvw sense. It does not have stick to potential, we either topple, or get kited still.

PvP has never been so interesting; I’ve seen all kinds of builds being tested. I am a bit worried about how necro and the new wanders amulet will play out in the future, but the pace and flow of the game is just right.

WvW I like a lot of the changes, especially the upgrades via dolyak our server was starved of upgrades and supply at one point. People actually had to break off from the bloob and protect objectives. The only problem I have with this, is there is almost nothing to do that is rewarding while protecting objectives.

All and all it was a good patch at shaking things up. Hope to see some things fine tuned and maybe some other changes soon that will help certain problematic builds/roles.

Feedback: The balance is kitten. I grade papers for a living. This felt like the beginnings of a paper that might have been good, but it wasn’t fleshed out enough. Consequences weren’t thought out. Nerfing alacrity means you have to rebalance other things to accompany that. Reducing the cooldown of corrupt boon means we should maybe consider reducing the duration of the poison applied with it. Etc

the changes on guardian is the most awful one.

i cant see what the devs intend on this class at all.

please give us something that makes this class unique, all this class can do can be done better with other class.

and the changes made on the guardian make the build scattered around.

“Scepter buff isn’t enough to make it better than mace in 90% of the builds. Shield trait buff makes you go to valor which is only good with medi and lets be serious 240 toughness for you or 150 toughness for your party? I’d take the party buff because shield skills don’t warrant the extra CD reduction.”

“Signet cd reduction is w/e. I get bane signet can do work on break bars but honestly is it worth the loss of power? No it isn’t. No one uses signet of judgement and if they do they sure as hell dont activate it. "

The WvW update seems pretty solid so far in terms of the PPK and rally changes. 5 to 1 makes fights much more fair and not linger on for 15 minutes. However, I have yet to test the adjustments to the banners however I haven’t seen many people running them either. The Oasis event changing from 20 to 12 orbs is a huge help however its still hard to gauge its power or significance without other guilds constantly fighting on the map. Two WvW guilds I’ve talked to so far find the markers more annoying than anything. The colors don’t contrast enough for people to see and the fact you can mark an enemy driver and leave it there forever is just encouraging tag sniping. What we need is markers for squads only that allow us to see our own drivers easier instead of having to target them plus the commander tag. Its easy to lose for a lot of people.

Gliding in old Tyria is awesome!

Alacrity nerf is a bit weird and you guys should talk to Lord Helseth about it. His post on reddit/Twitter was a home run hit.

Hammer 2 on Revenants shouldn’t be a .5 second on every player because that nulls a skill completely from the game all because someone else cast it at the same time. I feel like a better change could have been made to affect the weapon itself and not a group of players.

Thieves need a lot of work. I would suggest talking and reading more in the Thief sub-forum so it doesn’t end up like the Ranger after launch where it goes into a terrible state for a year or so.

The Shatterer is much better. The rewards and effort for the fight are pretty on par with what they should be. Only issue right now that I see is the lag. In addition to the change, I feel like the guild decoration is way too small and doesn’t really mean much. It almost feels unnecessary to have at all.

In PvP I noticed some of the opposing team’s names would turn yellow. Definitely a bug that could effect targeting.

Keep, PVE/PVP balancing separate. The heavy nerfs to the revenant profession just because of pvp was highly uncalled for, the class has TONS of bugs that needed to be fixed before the nerfs. Have actual people test these class changes before they go live.

Oh and in case you forgot: WHY ARE STAFF ELES STILL SHOOTING TENNIS BALLS INSTEAD OF FIREBALLS?!

Undo those horrible visual nerfs now and get your boss size scaling on effects to work correctly.

Overall changes are good except balance changes:

Shouts are now a utility worth slotting
But in particular Revenants sustain was overnerfed only shiro/glint has a chance on surviving now. Ventari needs now massive improvements to self-sustain and summoning/moving tablet has to be instant cast.
My suggestion for ventari

Varezenem.2813:

While not amazing (and heavily outclassed by tempests) Ventari was viable pre patch.
Nerfs to overall revenant sustain and defenses and the removal of runes of durability combined with overall higher pressure made it unviable.
These changes are aimed at keeping the playstyle while increasing the reliability and returning the sustain to more manageable levels.

• Project Tranquility
  Make it instant cast and reduce the energy cost to 5

• Ventari’s will
  Make it instant cast and increase the modifier to 0.5 (from 0.4).

• Natural Harmony
  Give it a 1 sec cast time, decrease cooldown to 1 sec, remove the delay and increase the modifier to 1 (from .6)

• Purifying Essence
  Decrease energy cost to 25

• Hardened Foundations
  Change it to Healing Power -> Vitality

PvE/PvP/WvW balancing needs to be ENTIRELY separate.

That said, new diamond skin is terrible considering it has to compete with the “you can’t be crit while in earth attunement” and what it used to be.

Having it have the condition of being hit in addition to the removal of celestial amulet and energy sigil’s nerf makes it so that the trait effectively counters itself as when you get hit you will get a condition but then you have to get hit again and likely will be below the health threshhold due to lower overall healing and having the lowest base armor and hp in the game.

Also the version that requires you to be struck does nothing for giving eles build diversity if they want any condi cleanse. The old version which simply removed condi if you were above 75% every second was much better because it allowed Eles to get some condi removal if they didn’t spec water or extra condi removal if they needed it (all gamemodes, particularly important in WvW)

Fix Revenant Sword #2 Precision Strike to primarily attack your target. Right now even with the target in front of me the projectiles half the time just go nowhere near the target.

Fix Revenant Sword #3 Unrelenting Assault – Maybe make it so you’ll do 5 attacks to your target. Right now it’s kind of useless since half the time it bugs out due to out of range, target standing next to a targetable object or sometimes it would just not do 5 strikes at all.

Thx.

PvE feedback: excellent. Gliding around everywhere is fun, and the new Shatterer fight is more interesting than it was before. Great patch.

PvP feedback: You can’t fix balance issues by tweaking DPS numbers alone. If you read the profession subforums (hard to believe), it really doesn’t show. Warrior and Thief forums have identified two or three core issues each with the professions that could have solved a large number of balance problems (especially lack of build diversity), without any damage buffs at all. These issues have been discussed over and over again. Instead, you focus on tweaking damage/healing numbers. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

WvW feedback: a step in the right direction, but until the population issues are solved, WvW is still a dead game mode for everybody except T1 server players.

Balance changes were not enough considering how few we’ll get them per year. However, I think the amulet changes were smart, though, and so were revenant’s.

My biggest problem with Anet’s balancing team/ method, is that it seems to lack personality. It’s very generic, with some numbers toned down or up and hope to see if it works (or not). Mechanical issues, clumsy interactions, poorly-placed traits and mechanically ineffective skills are a large problem of GW2’s balancing, but anet’s balance patches seem purely mathematical.

To be honest, I think developers showed a lot of personality during the time of elite spec reveals. There was a lot of attention to detail and interesting creative changes to non-functional skills and traits. In contrast, anet’s typical balancing patches seems to lack that individual touch and personality. Some balancing done was needed and right to the point, but most changes are usually vague, scattered, shy and many times irrelevant because they do not seem to fix any core issue. It’s as if the balancing team is out of touch with each profession’s playerbase’s desires, suggestions and playing experience. That’s wht I mean by “lack of personality”. Most balancing notes were unfocused and generic.

Also: balance patches shouldn’t be nerfing grounds only. They should also be a hyping tool. For every nerf done to a spec, there should be an attempt to bring new specs to meta. This wasn’t done to all professions, it wasn’t done enough to each profession, and when it was done, most of the times, it was unimpressive and random.

My suggestion is that the balancing team would probably benefit from following a similar method as the team for elite specs did: put each dev behind 2-3 professions and have them heavily analyze and focus each profession’s issues and playerbase complaints. This would allow a more focused approach to balance, I think. Currently, it feels as if anet’s balancing team focus too much on what seems right and what seems wrong from a macro scope, while failing to deliver from a micro scope.

From a pvp perspective
elementalist are in a very poor state right now. Their entire play is arounds boons and active defenses, and right now a fear or two followed by the condi loading and boon convertions is enough to A) get you off the fight for a few seconds until you can heal back up (and hope they dont come after you) , or b) simply die. Well played thieves just demolish us (nothing new) as well in a few seconds. With the amount of boon stripping and conversion ele can’t defend itself. I realize diamond skin needed taken down a bit but to make it a on hit skill on a profession that has the lowest health and armor to begin with is just too much. People were ok with what was said in the preview but the on hit part took us by surprise and hasn’t been taken well. With the removal of Cele and the skill changes ele needs some help

Very lazy pve balance with it now being a detriment to playing with others if you’re a burnzerker or revenant attacking in the same 1/2 second.

Removed many bulk buying options like for fractal keys and lucky envelopes. Why do I have to click thing so many times?

Kind of crushed chronos, they should have the full effects of alacrity since their cd’s were based around it.

Only fixed the literally impossible adventure. You still have pve progression locked behind stupid mini games that we were told were optional and are only available for minutes every few hours. That’s some horrible design and add in the fact that many are still way too tightly timed and rely on rng and you have kittened off players.

I was excited when it was announced you were looking to fix some of the more useless skills. I mainly play engineer and med kit is absolute trash. I’d love the devs run a report to see how many players currently have that equipped at any given moment. Our trait lines are still terrible and need to be rearranged.

I don’t know who thought the thief update was ready to go but maybe spamming literally 1 and not using the classes skills or unique mechanics and doing way more damage then my 52 button rotation isn’t the best idea.

Many HOT annoyances are still around, i’d like a dev response if the LFG meta is what they wanted. I have to play with LFG constantly open hoping to get into a good map that isn’t full.

I don’t wvw much but i’ve read some numbers on the upgrade changes and it seems pretty bad.

Overall outside of flying in the core game which is nice but nothing special since there aren’t enough mushrooms/jumps/updrafts to really take advantage of it the patch left me greatly unimpressed and I feel like the development resources aren’t being allocated to fix the game to make it good again.

how about fixing the absolute train wreck that is hearts and minds? it’s a buggy mess; there’s no motes to reset achievements, there’s no anvil in the instance, so if you’re doing migraine and don’t have repair canisters, you’re pretty much boned. so many things can bug out, like canach not losing his damage reduction after being hit by his shield during the last phase, mordy spawning rifts off the platform, rifts not removing the invuln buff, the updrafts during the gliding section just straight up don’t work very often, you name it. In fact, i just recently discovered that during the mordy fight, the clones don’t have their conditions purged after hitting 10% and the rift opens. This results in the rift not actually switching them to your team, meaning mordy takes 0 damage and is immune to condis.

It’s been like this since HoT launched, and AFAIK, there hasn’t been one SINGLE POST from anet, talking about the plethora of issues this instance alone has.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Impossible-to-finish-Hearts-and-Minds

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Disable-Hearts-and-Minds-until-it-works

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3umpa7/migraine_achievement_bugsproblems_that_are_very/?

To chime in on this.

Core gliding is great, I had problems trying to glide in core Tyria anyway after getting out of HoT maps it’s just nice to be able to do.

Shatterer changes, I can only hope you guys plan to change alot of the meta bosses so they at least don’t just involve standing in a blind spot and auto attacking. I like that there’s more to do now and the fight feels more realistic at least.

Profession balances. Good and bad, I like some of the skill changes but honestly I made the mistake of letting my hopes get raised when I heard ele scepter was getting improved, 2 skill changes hardly worth mentioning, and the auto attacks weren’t touched which seem to be the worst part of the weapon. Also no ranger sword auto change though I’ve stopped thinking that’ll come, just sucks because it’s one of only 2 weapons that let you use off-hands and it’s auto attack is a liability.

Thank you for balance updates, there are people who won’t like WHAT they are, but I think most people will appreciate THAT they are updates.

Gives people new puzzles to solve when you update balance.

I’ll start by saying the patch was very positive . Then I will put on a huge sad face at the fact that Dragon Ball falls short again for me this year. If you volunteer to move to the other team to balance, you should get the win (like in normal pvp). I was in a map that was winning 460 to 320 when everyone in the other team left and I was auto-balanced last second and so, lost. This is upsetting, because I put in the time and effort to contribute to a winning team. When there is nothing to be gained at all from losing, and people can leave with no consequence, you encourage people to drop out of games early if they aren’t winning and go find another map. I wish volunteering to auto balance would give you the win. Or at the very least, penalize people from leaving early (5 mins of not being able to join another game, maybe?)

Well, I started to read the thread, but I ran out of time. I hope I’m not overlapping others too much.

Gaile I love where you’re going with this.

As for me, I posted a suggestion earlier. Here it is below.

Guild Hall PvE Dummies
It would be nice if the golems that are in Heart of the Mist could be placed or unlocked in the guild halls. It would be another upgrade to work towards (sink) and it I’m sure the PvE community would be quite attracted to this upgrade.
No sense in making everybody go to PvP to experiment with their builds anymore when we have Guild Halls. The stats aren’t the same in PvP vs. PvE, and it’s truly an inconvenience.

I would also like to add that I strongly dislike having PvP rank symbols next to my name outside of Heart of the Mist. It has actually led to people treating me as if I’m a novice because I do not participate in PvP. Quite annoying!

[Ele main]

The Good
- The removal of celestial amulet
- The nerfs to chronobunker and revenant
- The removal of quickness ress
- The changes to Diamond skin ( far more useful now respect to before )
- The nerf to sneak gyro
- The buff to lightning orb and gale/fire shield
- Gliding in Tyria
- Downed in wvw cannot be ressed while the fight still rage on
- The removal of auto-improvement to towers
- The nerfs to wvw banners
- The new stronghold hero is actually useful
- The nerf to energy sigil
- The fix to overload earth protection bug

The Bad
-The lies about buffs to ele scepter, the weapon is extremely bad…so bad that not even in pve is used anymore; anyway what annoys people the most are the lies that you devs keep spouting at every turn before every balance patch…this is the 5th that you promised buffs to scepter
- PK in WvW counts toward score, a bad mechanic overall, it only intensify the toxic behaviour across the map

1. Perception that there is no internal testing and/or QA. Patch is released then shortly thereafter several more patches follow. Maybe it is time to add a test realm, introduce proposed code, allow players to copy over a character, and test for 2 to 5 days.

2. Balance – still does not seem ideal but this is probably a tough nut to crack and you can’t please everyone. Would have liked to see some more Guardian and Druid work. Druid more so around CF but I am biased and can admit it.

3. WvW – what will it take to get some much needed attention to this format of play. New maps are nice but there are population / 24×7 coverage issues. No rewards for solo or small groups. And lets face it, orbs are nice but have been off for ever. Middle of the pack servers can’t field groups on all maps.

4. Big data. Set someone on the side to pull up all accounts, time played, and see if they have received a legendary drop or via mystic forge. Point is RNG seems rather harsh and I know this has been dicussed before. Look at the time played for each account, character, and see. I think you might be surprised. yeah, you added crafting, searching, finding a way to one. But overall I think it is still a odd system along with magic find.

Overall I think you guys are great and have a good support staff. The times I’ve used it via email I get a quick response and usually a fix. I think you do well, and mean well. But WvW and sPvP, two formats that I play, are plagued by issues that hurt the feel in the long run.

That and forcing PvE (hero points, map complete, and tokens to buy things) are not idea. You may like them but you do offer 3 ways to play and if I mostly do WvW, well, you have forced me to PvE which I don’t care fore.

Best of luck to you and your team. I feel I have had a return on my investment.

To reiterate what I posted before. This patch shows us yet again how little attention goes toward profession and combat development.

Our characters… those professions we name… and play for thousands of hours… and pour lots of $ into, and the combat experiences in all game modes, are the #1 most important aspects of this game.

GW2 is an amazing AAA game in many ways. It also has some amazing combat elements, like freedom of movement and a real “smoothness” to gameplay, but has CCC professions.

I was hoping that this year would be the year y’all start scrapping “things” and rebuilding professions, but this first patch shows that it’s just the same old status quo spread sheet number crunching with regard to professions and combat.

I’m not being rude, just being direct with this so I hope y’all can accept it… Profession development “departments”/projects/“to do” and wish lists are underfunded, and the patch notes clearly show how out of touch and disconnected things are. I know y’all play, but please take your eyes off spread sheets and take the red pill to pull yourselves out of the numbers matrix ok?

Y’all want roles? Fix professions.

Y’all want spvp and esports to be good? Fix professions.

Y’all want to push the envelope with harder and more challenging content? Fix professions.

Y’all want to have the most kick kitten wvw experience for players? Fix professions.

Y’all want players making more and more characters and dropping thousands of $ to outfit these characters? Fix professions.

Want long term retention and high monthly concurrent numbers? Fix professions.

Want more referrals and great exposure in the gaming world for being known to have the best professions and best combat experience? Fix professions.

Professions 2.0. It’s time. Players deserve that investment, and that will all translate to more money in the coffers… Take the team and make it happen. Fix professions.

What comes to mind in short:

Ele
Balance changes understandable, but Scepter damage is still a joke, especially AA
Ele traits are designed to work with celestial amulet best (rework please or bring back celestial and make it not work on other classes that much)
Needs: More Autoattack Damage on Scepter, Rebalance on traits to synergize NOT only well with all stats in PvP and bad with single stats (zerk is too squishy in contrast to any other class, clerics (the only tanky amulet left) doesn’t scale well)

Mesmer:
Changes make sense for PVE
in PvP Chronomancer lost it’s place. Mesmer as a whole is now on pair with warrior.
Needs: Condi burst in PvP, Alacrity rework (66% was fine… seriously) – eitherway at least a buff so mesmer get’s 50% alacrity only for himself, or add same damage traitlines that make sense into the chronomancer spec.

Warrior:
Where are the much needed buffs for PvP and even PvE whise?
Rev, Thief and even Guards can laugh at a Warriors Damage. The only use is phalanx.

Guard:
Feels great, but I’d like to see changes to give him a useful heal spec like druid/ele.
It’s been to to-go cleric spec choice in the past, but you missed on working on it in the expansion so far. And even shout condi cleanse cannot keep up at all anymore very much.

Thief:
Lazy rebalance, too much dodge/evade and burst for PvP.
Should be more about engaging -> killing the opponent or not, and disengaging if failing. Exploiting more vs less opponent situations for fast stomps. But not being a evade miracle that dies after one second if this traits are gone (although wait… it actually makes sense for thieves… but it’s honestly pure boring power creep no need for skill gameplay)
Regarding PvE, it’s a shame that Engis need to have a exact rotation to be at the same spot as Thieves are with spamming one button (or none with Autoattack enabled).
I don’t say nerf… but then buff Ingi condition damage a tiny bit since it’s a hard rotation.

Really really really bad:
Loss of Soldier/Settler, Celestial and by now way too many runes in PvP instead of making a good balance.
Instead of considering perhaps to split PvP and PvE Skills by Base Damage, CD, Duration, Scaling.

More choices, more diversity means far more rich and interesting gameplay
Cutting down on on anything just streamlines things into a huge pile of the same… just with a different name.

Gliding in core Tyria is great. It’s just, now more so than ever, these fantastical back pieces/gliders make Guild Wars feel like something it ought not to be. I look at my character, my friends characters and ask: “So are we part bird, half angel now?” I just wish there was something , a slight piece of lore, anything that helped make this stuff fit better with the world we already know.

JUMP PADS: I would love to be able to glide whenever I want mid-jump again. I feel like it would add a lot of excitement and novelty to Tequatl fights, and make the Shatterer fight more maneuverable; as it is, I can never tell when I’m actually “allowed” to start gliding and end up mashing the space bar to glide, which is ineffective and intuitive. Compared to the freedom of gliding, linear jump pads are really, really boring!

So far, Anet’s work on elite specs was the highlight of GW2’s entire profession balance/ design process over the game since launch. With each developer working on 2-3 specs and giving their full attention to its deeper problems and interacting with the playerbase about it, they were able to hit the right spots quite more often and underline (and, whenever possible, fix) the core issues identified for each prof.

In contrast, January’s balancing patch was a downgrade and a back-to-the-past situation. Generic, vague, underwhelming, scattered, unfocused.

Pre-HoT Anet showed many signs of evolution and improvement on their profession design and balance process. They were pretty much at the level of Riot/ League of Legends. January’s patch was a downgrade. It seems like the much superior development approach that Anet adopted for elite specs was scrapped, and we’re back to old-Anet, old-balancing-style, old-disappointment.

I’ll post again my suggestion to Anet’s balancing team: reestructure your team and development method so that it takes into account the method that you used during the development of elite specs. Have each dev specialize on 2-3 classes and have them talk with the playerbase in the profession boards.

Remember what you did with Guardian’s shield? Skills were retooled, new technology was used, and the whole thing feels much nicer to play with now. This is what you, Anet, need to do with every other existing weapon set and trait set. Not just number tweaks on cooldowns, timers or damage values. Do you know why Ele’s Scepter is still broken? Because it has no tools to aid Dragon Tooth, because the auto-attacks are generally bad, because water #2 has no purpose and because offensive eles have no meaningful active defenses that are not reliant on defensive stats to work. And what have you done? A smaller activation time here, a 10% buff there… Do you know what this feels like? Shooting in the dark and hoping that it’ll hit the right spot.

What has happened to Anet’s pre-Hot moment of brilliance? Was it temporary?

I liked all the pve stuff.
But in the balance’s:
1: Why removing soldier’s
2: Celestial amulet just killed several key builds like ele
3: Mesmer’s Puff
4: Buffing up character’s that already were really good like Necro boon corruption why?? it was already good why mess it up more STAP IT.

That was my review.
I liked the incentive but well you guys gotta work more.

I don’t have anything terribly insightful to add just now, as I am groggy with the lateness of the hour, other than the obvious gliding is FUN comment.

I did note, though, that despite the warnings that we would no longer be able to deploy our gliders when topping out a bouncing mushroom arc, I have seen no change in this. I hold the space bar, the wings come out, I turn in midair to glide as per usual. For instance, in the frantic pod run after a Mouth Kill, I head to the Northern place with a million pods in it, where we updraft then mushroom up to the green bamboo area. The mushroom drops me on a lower ledge that I then have to jump up off of, but if I deploy the glider at the top I can get those few extra feet to save the time of the jump. It worked just fine this evening.

Brew of the Month … I did that in WoW’s first year of it. I find myself hoping there will be a twist, or a really nifty reward (in WoW I think we got a pink drake flying mount? it’s been a while). You have a few days left in this month to figure out and announce an upgrade to the reward before you incur the wrath of people who didn’t sign up and therefore will finish later than those who started in January … me, I’ve signed up.

And thank you for not tying the Dragonball achieves to a meta reward. Generally I would like a meta reward but in this particular case I’m happy that I feel no pressure to get the achieves. I’ll work on them, and they’re all doable if I play .. 100 games? I figured based on my rate so far of healing gained per game. But if I miss getting them done, I’m not miffed because I didn’t miss out on “the big thing.”

Blackarps.1974:

The Shatterer is much better. The rewards and effort for the fight are pretty on par with what they should be. Only issue right now that I see is the lag. In addition to the change, I feel like the guild decoration is way too small and doesn’t really mean much. It almost feels unnecessary to have at all.

There is supposed to be some scribing thing to make the statues bigger and bigger. Unfortunately scribing is still in need of its own balance patch.

I main a thief though I play all the professions with different degrees of familiarity with each.

Overall I am positive over the changes. The AA buff to the thief not overpowering and not unwarranted in my opinion as one compares AA class to class and the damage inflicted. Work yet remains to be done and specifically on the less used weaponsets themselves (d/d p/p in particular)

Contrary to claims made by many it seems there is some listening going on on ANETS part as both Torment and Confusion cleanses were added to the condition cleanses in the Acro line. This was something the players did request as was lowering the threshold of GI to 75 percent. There certainly will be ongoing debate as to how these cleanses are triggered.

I will not speak to the other professions as I have not the time to play with them a lot since the changes. I can only go by what I get being on the recieiving end and overall I think balance in a better place.

I do think however that when it comes to balance changes for each and every class it rather hard to get informed opinions two days into a change as it takes some time for players to rework builds so as to see what the changes can accomplish in game terms. If one reads through each and every post that addressed balance on any given class the opinions range from “the class is destroyed” to “Not enough downtweaks were made” from “We did not receive enough buffs to they got too many buffs” I do not envy the task of wading through them.

I also think there might be just too much AOE high ranged damaged skills in the game overall.

That all said this speaks to the issues of more regular smaller updates needed when it becomes apparent any given change might have been too unbalancing one way or another rather then wait for the quarterly. I also was expecting more in the way of balance changes then what we did receive but that might well be more of case of my talking myself into it rather then perceptions given by Anet.

I like the adding of gliding to Tyria. This one of my favorite adds.

Squad changes were nice and very welcome.

I fully support the bulk of the WvW balance changes as this remains my favored gamemode and in particular to banners and the new downed/rally mechanics. We have a long ways to go there yet but it understood a major rework in progress.

I am still loving the game.

I feel like this was the laziest balance patch for Thieves yet. We’ve been in such a slump because of our lack or utility and the only thing we get that has any impact is our auto attacks buffed? When it was teased that that was one of the changes I wasn’t too upset until the release came out and that was pretty much it for relevant changes.

The one good thing for Thieves, though, is the buff to Basilisk Venom which was a much needed change due to the amount of blocking and Aegis currently in the game.

I can’t give much more insight on the balance changes as I only play Thief and it’s kinda ruining my enjoyment of the game with the lack of support we receive.

First, the positive feedback: I love the gliding in core Tyria. Best thing ever. Want this in wvw someday please! Also, in wvw, the rally/double down changes may have bothered some but I do believe it was a good step and has made fights more fair. I like this change and hope it stays.

My biggest negative feedback is the Well of precognition change. Changing this to aegis made this well one of the most useless wells ever. It was a great well in WvW, allowing for a much more aggressive gameplay as a personal well (which is how I used it). Now, it mainly is a high recharge waste of space. I dont even use it for zerg alacrity purposes anymore. Please consider changing this back.

Hirasaki.6208:

Fix Revenant Sword #3 Unrelenting Assault – Maybe make it so you’ll do 5 attacks to your target. Right now it’s kind of useless since half the time it bugs out due to out of range, target standing next to a targetable object or sometimes it would just not do 5 strikes at all.

Thx.

Also “no line of sight” for things you are standing next to although that mainly seems to be an issue with too small hitboxes on some things since it also affects skills like Flame Burst.

main reactions (pvp wise):

oh look elemantalist is quite useless now..(so i will just quit pvp until next patch or so). i wish they would really make Air trait viable and make Ele an offensive class rather then a healer/bunker.

oh look my Thief still gets 1 shotted by Revenants hammer 2 skill. alrighty..

oh look Guardian still spams trap/stealth->trap/stealth and 1 shots thieves. alrighty then..

quitting pvp. the life of ele and ex-thief

Gliding: Awesome
Lunar New Year: Fun. Keep the festivals coming.
Major Balance Update: Terrible*

• The biggest issue is one of communication. During the betas, there used to be a sea of red in the forums during HOT beta with DEV engagement with class issues, and that is completely and utterly gone.

Let’s take Revenant for instance. This balance patch was a sea of nerfs and nothing else. There were no bug fixes for skills/traits that have issues. Ventari and Jalis are considered to be poor legends, but there were no updates to them. Heck, three of our legends, including the Elite, don’t work under water!

There’s the presumption that, since this is the “big” balance update, that if there were no updates that then everything that remains untouched is fine. And the playerbase doesn’t think it’s fine and are trying desperately to reach out to the developers, and there has been no engagement whatsoever.

GENERAL

Positives

• Squad changes are overall great. Lieutenants are useful for large maps and the tags are helpful for coordination. Having location and object markers share tags is a positive.
• Brew of the Month Club is an amazing (if simple) addition to the game, I have no complaints.
• I now care about vigor.

Negatives

• Squad changes don’t address major quality of life downgrades compared to the old system. Commanders can not enter LFG mode, forcing the use of the mentor tag for such action. How to join a squad and use squad chat still aren’t transparent, and building squads for open world content proves difficult.
• Gliding in Core Tyria seems unfinished. Beyond the new Shatterer fight, it seems trivial in the greater picture. Is this really an improvement, or is it just something that the team thinks is cool?
• Too many holiday events are focused in Divinity’s Reach, no other capital cities have as much exposure. Why should we visit e.g. Hoelbrak?

PROFESSIONS

• Elementalist: Almost all elites suck. I’m forced to play as a Tempest because “Rebound!” is mediocre/average. I shouldn’t have to choose between an elite spec or racial elites for most scenarios. Glyph is basically just a bonus health pool that isn’t always effective, and FGS is temporary mobility.
• Engineer: To play the engineer “well”/“effectively” I must place the health of my fingers/wrists at risk due to how much kit juggling is required. I do not enjoy having sore hands and these changes do not do much to improve this.
• Guardian: All positive buffs, but don’t really address core problems with certain weapons/lack of build variety.
• Mesmer: Overall positive changes for overall game balance. Chronomancer might rely too heavily on alacrity.
• Necromancer: Reaper is an already strong elite spec. These changes diversify and improve the core necromancer, but at the risk of over-tuning the reaper.
• Ranger: Polish and buffs, but the same pet system makes customization difficult.
• Thief: Running out of initiative is now much harder than the sneeze it was previously.
• Warrior: Rifle buffs are good, but losing piercing on auto-attack reduces the weapon’s overall usefulness outside of 1v1 or 1v2 situations. Previously, skillful play would allow for a more rewarding experience; this is diminished.

GUILDS

• Guild halls: some upgrades are unrealistic objectives for smaller guilds.
• Guild halls: lack of ambiance/lack of variety causes stagnation in interest.
• Guild halls: too many “required” upgrades before selective upgrades become available. Punishing for smaller guilds.
• As someone with grandfathered upgrade statue decorations, this is a poor way to handle these. Lack of creative selection when only one of each exists.
• No way to disable command tag and simultaneously lead a squad. This causes unnecessary map pollution and draws unwary players into guild activities they may not have real interest in (e.g. seeking events and finding a guild rush in progress).

I love the update! The Shatterer is a lot of fun, and gliding in Central Tyria has saved me from many deaths. I really appreciate the Ranger updates too, especially that one skill that allows my pet to resurrect allies. Great job, everybody!

My feedback:

Positive:

• Gliding in Central Tyria is great!
• New Shatterer is fun.

Negative:

• Didn’t include Living World or other similar new content.

I don’t think the new targeting system should work in WvW, at least not as it currently is. A mark that is squadwide and persists through stealth diminishes the contribution of players who are good at tag sniping (of which identifying drivers is one part) and makes it auto pilot for a lot of players.

Also I don’t have to use my lookback key to see an enemy; they’re on my freaking mini-map!

I don’t mind that for friendly tags since that makes great plays happen, but enemies should still get the element of surprise.

Fighting in general was a lot of one pushing. Fights resolve way too quickly, but you can’t win them in siege. Even if you win a fight in a place like smc, you’re in infinite siege, so you can’t res someone after you’ve won the fight. Basically; even if you win, you lose.

General impression for me is :

Gliding in Central Tyria is awesome.

Shatterer is good. Better than before for sure, not as hard as Teq but not snoozefest either. Pacing is decent.

Balance patch though… seems like there’s a bit overnerfing in places. Alacrity nerf is a bit over the top, IMO. moving it to 50% rather than 33% might work better. Remember that alacrity is the cornerstone of Chronomancer, if you still want to go with 33%, at least buff all the alacrity-modifying traits in the Chrono lines so they have a significant effect.

Well of precog nerf makes it somewhat useless.

Revenant sword 2 tracks a lot of random stuff, not just enemies, might want to fix that.

Gonna run down a few things so you know how I consume this game.

Love gliding in Tyria. Love the objects being shown without holding down control. Love, love the new squad markers. This feels like something that should have been included since the squad’s introduction. And finally! We can change fractal levels in the lobby. Again, something that feels like it should have been introduced with the single fractal change.

Haven’t tried Shatterer yet, but I hear good things. I only dip my toe into WvW on occasion, so I can’t tell what’s been changed or if it’s good. I don’t PvP, so profession balance is not something I keep a close tab on. Chrono still seems ok for open world PvP but I did notice the nerf. Scribing costs – meh, I don’t scribe because of the massive sink it was at launch and now I just don’t have any interest. Brew of the month is something to do but not something I’m excited about. Backpack reward is unappealing and actually I’m hoping that there is a hidden reward somewhere along the line that makes me not regret spending the 10 gold.

The Lunar New Year was underwhelming last year, is underwhelming this year. It was a filler event last year because of the content drought and this year it really shows it. Backpack is creepy, which is disappointing because … monkey! Dragonball is fun sometimes, but miserable when you’re getting steamrolled and no incentive to stick around which makes it more miserable for your teammates. I still play it, but only for the 2 participation daily, I don’t stress about wins because 5 for a daily? Not worth it to me. Disappointed pvp activities are still so – not broken, but not implemented well.

Things I’m not happy about is the fact that you can’t buy 5 encryption keys at once anymore in the fractal lobby. We absolutely don’t need more clicking in this game, so I don’t understand why this was taken out at all. I mean at all.

Overall this was a huge patch, I know, but for me it comes down to a handful of really nice QoL changes (2 surprises, 2 I feel should have been in earlier) and a lot of stuff that doesn’t effect me, or leaves me feeling slightly disappointed.