Guild Wars 2

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1so82e7?new_post=true

“I’ve played around a little with mesmer post patch. People spam whisper me in game for my thoughts so here they are:

These are some of the laziest nerfs I’ve seen since the time when arenanet nerfed quickness by half. How is this a hard concept to grasp? If you completely halve the effectiveness of a certain thing you need to look at the skills tied to this and balance them around the current value.

Well of alacrity was a high cd utility slot skill for the extremely powerful alacrity tradeoff. It was 100% worth the util slot and could be argued to be too strong.

The entire chrono line was balanced around alacrity and was only a problem in pve and in tanky mesmer builds. Alacrity by itself was never overpowered, the wells gaining alacrity to the point they did were.

So what about shatter gives alacrity? What about the trait that makes alacrity last 50% longer? What about all wells that ends well?

You balance the entire chrono line with multiple traits ALL around your new little mechanic and then you kittenING halve it.

The obvious result? Every single skill tied to alacrity, from the well to the traits boosting your duration on alacrity all take a ridicilous hit in effectiveness.

To the dev who proposed and went through with this change: Would you design flow of time (3/4th of a sec alacrity on shatter) with the current state of alacrity? Would you design improved alacrity around this? When you first designed alacrity in the first place you balanced all these cds around the previous state of alacrity.

You would never, ever have nerfed Improved alacrity to 25% but that’s more or less what you did now.

The whole kittening point of chronomancer line is that you don’t get buffed stat wise but that it’s all in utility. Not a single trait boosts your damage, toughness or anything. The only stat modifier is the movement speed(utility) and the 30% crit on slow (trash).

I could type about this forever but here is the golden notes you only need to care about:

ESL added a rule that class stacking is not allowed anymore. I suppose this means that PU chrono could MAYBE see play. This build is literally inferior in every single aspect to DH/rev/thief and would never be picked if the latter two werent allowed to be stacked. The only reason I’d ever play this is because portal+moa can still be abused on it. Stealth, portal, moa. If moa misses you disengage and try again.

The shatter mesmer with duel is completely dead, don’t even bother trying to play it. The CDR hit on alacrity is so big that you actually gain more CDR playing illusion shatter mesmer over chrono which obviously isnt viable due to the powercreep of the game. I’d put that build on the same level as warrior.

Condition mesmer is shockingly not a thing despite the 5% scepter aa buff. Huh.

For those of you that don’t know about the quickness nerf mentioned above, a very long time ago quickness used to have double it’s current effectiveness. Warriors played a build completley built around this using the frenzy utility which made them take double damage but gave them quickness for a few seconds (Can you imagine that the game has powercreeped so hard that quickness for 6ish s while you take DOUBLE DAMAGE as punishment used to be a high tier utility?) and thieves used quickness in exchange for losing their endurance.

Anet nerfed the quickness without even touching those skills, wars still took double damage but now they had half the quickness effectiveness.

I guess it’s worse in this case since they butchered an entire traitline but yeh."