For me it’s the most impactfull (negative) balance patch in a while. The team clearly can split skills (see frost bow of ele) in pvp and pve.
With that in mind they nerf Signet of inspiration to the ground, say they buff mesmer dps in comparison, but only give him 6% sword damage extra? is that a joke. Blurred frenzy double damage is cute, but not enough by long shot. Mesmer is almost useless but a pure buff bot now. Revenent even lost any reason for existance in raids.
Ele 33% attunement skills cooldown reduction nerfed to 20% (aka all fire skills are reduce X % trait), nerfed ele (imo) to the ground. 33% (and you coudlnt have all, it was a choice), was a huge favor to nr 3+4+5 skills. It made attunement dancing fun, and also feel ele matter more with overal weak utility/elite skills (after frostbow nerf). Then you hammer it down. But that wasn’t enough, nope. The only ranged viable, to spam, dps serving skills, did get a cooldown increase: lava font. making fire attunement even more boring then it already was: spam mostly fireball, and go out. That’s a double nerf to lava font cd. Why not start with one at a time to see if it’s correct? And not the fun part, they give a few underused skills their (sort off) 33% cooldown back… Basically Anet admits they made a mistake, but hides it by the fact they gave cd reduction to skills not used in current meta. With the crazy bad auto attacks (apart from lightning whip) on ele, + all the cooldown ramifications, ele is still a no go zone for me. Not fun to play, yet one of my most played professions in gw2.
Then there’s engineer. Auto attacks still feel low, forcing you to use grenade ALL the time in pve, how fun is that? ‘For simplicity sake’ (or something alone those lines’, we remove daze from all gyro’s… What a joke… Guardian traps still Daze, every little one of them. Doing those two at same time conlcudes Anet knows nothing about unbiased, correctly spread balance.
Then there’s the druid nerfs. AF feels very clunky and barely worth it to use in non healing build now. Just the magic aura from raid bosses will almost do more damage, then a few quick heals can do in AF, wich makes it feel pointless. And that’s the keyword that makes me mad in this patch: Pointless. Every profession now has in a certain way a pointless feel to it except for Guardian and warrior, wich are my least favoured playstyles.
Mesmer: Just a boonbot (in past you were an incredible boon bot, making you forget it’s other weakness like dps).
Elementalist: To long cooldowns on most skills for such ‘attunement dancing’ profession.
Necromancer: Lost a huge chunk of dps (condi), loosing spot most likely in raids, and maybe fractals. Not only that, a lot of the weaknesses remain on necro (not all that good dodging, healing support etc). The power changes (boost to axe/Gs) are good though. A small part of patch being good, but overshadowed by destruction of the meta build (condi).
Thief: Venom changed for the 100th time. While i like venoms, and they needed improvements, and i like them being party buffs by default (and hated the connected nerf) and now like that cd’s reduced to counter that nerf a bit), thief needs so much more then just changes around this… Breakbar skills where are they? Thief should have some very strong ones (like head shot was when it works with defiance). Only elite venom works for this. Thief also (sooner or later) needs it dodges nerfed, and burst (especially the non stealth ones) improved. Dancing dagger may finally be usefull again… i never got the nerf to that skill. It costs initiative, can be reflected, and only cripples added to it’s damage… least it can do is good damage.
Druid: AF made (mostly) useless apart from grace of land affection, and healing based builds. Feeling as druid was already weak in wvw, and the professions leading wvw barely got nerf (DH , warrior!) this is not good. I agree it needed nerf in pvp. But … Keep it to pvp then for god Sake!… is that so hard. Shortbow finally boosted (wich is good), but I get no ‘wow’ out of this, especially as condi build on druid need both expertise and condition damage to be decent, and with those two, you cannot combine healing into the build wich makes Celestial avatar mostly useless. Basically patch made druid ‘ok you still meta, but just by an inch and much more shoehorned, we do not allow anything else but the shoehorned builds’… right… Good Anet? I don’t think so. Thought was good, execution very bad.
Continued in part 2
