Guild Wars 2

TorsoReaper.8530:

Devilman.1532:

TorsoReaper.8530:

I’m getting a feeling that the Elementalist nerf will never be addressed in this thread

I’m getting the feeling its the elephant in the room that is going to be summarily ignored.

Ignoring is what you do when you have a ton of data, logic, and facts to defend your actions. Obviously.

No. If you have a ton of data, logic, and facts, you present it succinctly to shut down the initial complaints and THEN you ignore further complaints or drama about it.

Ventari Rev seems like it could benefit from having a linking/leashing component to target ally, that would spawn the effect of the skills at two locations(The revenant and target ally). Has this idea ever come up in testing ?

Hello and thank you for taking the time to read these messages and respond to the community.

My question is what is Arenanet’s perspective on the skill Epidemic in its current state? I am a passionate WvW player, and Epidemic has been a hotbed issue in our communities for the greater half of the past year. Unlike nearly every other skill in the game, a player is punished if an ally fails to evade or invuln- not the player him/herself! There is no reasonably visible tell for a player to dodge this skill before it hits, and the frustration is compounded by the fact that Epidemic can also be cast on non-player objects and NPCs such as keep lords and siege equipment. Entire metas and gameplay styles have evolved around this single skill and I am concerned that the absence of any changes or reworks of this skill will further push the dwindling WvW player base to its breaking point.

Thank you for reading.

Is there any plan on doing more aggressive pve and pvp splits(wvw counts as pvp too btw)?

The change to sword mesmer 2 sword by 100% extra damage on pve was huge on the kit and made power mesmers more desirable. If said changes could be applied more often on very unperformed builds like necro power and engie power in pve, we could have a viability of them in raids or fractals. Lets say with a single simple change of 100% damage buff to GS necro 1 and 2 could easily become a class worth bringing in many content.

I generally wonder. When balancing, do you devs compare performance of different professions/builds to each other to determine what mechanics or abilites buff/nerf/add/remove to the underperforming build, or do you follow a vision of that build/profession in your mind?
For example, I’ll use fresh air elementalist, as I know it best. It’s pretty clear that fresh air ele will never be meta, due to the fact that other builds simply outperform it mechanically wise: ele has no stealth, no boon removal, not enough CC to chaincc a target – this automatically makes thief by far the better ganker.
So my question, would you then buff ele with all these things to make it have access to stealth, boon removal, …. or would you follow that vision and only tweak numbers?

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

cranos.5913:

Since alacrity is now no longer mesmer exclusive, are there any plans on making quickness more widely available too? I realise other classes currently already have the boon, but it’s nowhere near the 100% uptime chronos can dish out.

We’ll place quickness where it is appropriate, but don’t have that as a specifically targeted plan.

Chronomancer is the time-themed elite specialization and their being able to grant quickness and alacrity better than anyone else is spot on…

(Until we add the Quickenator Elite Specialization)

That’s disappointing to hear, but thanks for the honest answer.

There 2 main issues I would like to bring attention to.

1) There exist skills that are strongly underwhelming, someone examples are:

“Longbow 4 on warrior – Smoldering Arrow ":https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Smoldering_Arrow
Deals very little damage with weak CC, and a very small radius, thus overall you are better off not using it.

Sword Brust – Flurry
It deals less damage and takes up more time casting it then using 2 Sword Autos

Scepter 3 – Chains of Light
barely any damage with weak cc, on a very high Cooldown

those are some examples of pathetic skills that should be changed/buffed

2) Banners, Don’t you feel that they should be better Environmental weapons? I think you guys did a great job on the banners of WvW(Turtle, Centaur, Dragon) I think making them better environmental weapons will add a much needed complexity to the warrior class.

Another question, do you guys think that warrior needs more complexity? atleast to the standard of the other classes?

Just to an idea to add complexity, add/change rampage to a base transformation(like druid has celestial) and each specialization (like Berserker Traitline’s beserk(F2 skill) ) will alter the base “rampage” or transformation skill. Well, this leads to warrior becoming more like Marital Arts Class.

Explain further, The base Transformation is simply the warrior dropping his weapons and fighting barehanded, and each specialization will change the style or skills in the Barehanded Transformation.

Another idea would be a 3rd weapon-set for warriors? What do you think?

I will repost what have posted on a thread in Guardian forum

I’ll be talking from PvE stand-point; here I go…
Changes are extremely underwhelming. Patch notes claim to be targeting under-used things, though Valor trait line is untouched, we still don’t have a Spirit Weapon or Signet rework, Mace and Hammer skills are still needlessly sluggish, and there are MANY things that still could use small touches (not going to list them, you all know what they are).

I’m looking how feedback is being recieved and being put into good use when addressing the issues with other professions; and Guardian is still problematic.
We are not asking things to become overpowered, we are not asking those things to become meta for Guardian, we are just asking for build diversity and viability. But every patch, we go back to same boring stuff while other professions are getting shiny new toys. Those toys may not be super-special-awesome, but at least people dont look at half of their utilities and traits and say “wtf, why would I even use this?”.

Additional comments I would like to make;

These are pretty much what majority of people (well, at least people who are vocal) think after every patch that has been disappointing for Guardian.

This patch, GS changes were good, I love the fact that you are still trying to bring base Guardian tools to be on the same line as Dragonhunter, but there are still very big missing parts, and every time a balance patch misses the opportunity to address these things that have been discussed everywhere, people losing their hope more and more. At least give us some feedback.

Thank you.

I’m 100% cerain that broad access to quickness and portal are soon forthcoming… oh and moa for everyone.

I love the changes to phantasms but it’s really hard to see them at the moment, past the glare of my specialization no longer being a specialization.

Oh Snapalope.1378:

Druid spirits are still 5 targets. Considering warrior banners are 10 targets now, is this an oversight that will be addressed very soon?

seconding this.

ranger spirits are pretty similar in function to banners, and are arguably more interactive, given their active components. is there any particular reason they’re not getting similar treatment?

Is the way Thief’s new Vault works completely intentional? I noticed that now it gradually moves to the spot where it’s meant to land, which leads to some clunky camera movement, whereas before it would sort of quickly jump to the place it’s going to land and then do a vertical slam.

There are also bugs related to the placement of the final Vault slam when with quickness.

Some concrete questions that are based on general balance topics, not specificly the current patch now:

• I’m pretty sure, you made with HoT many concepts for the first Elite Specializations, so also for the Thief.
  Would it be possible for you to merge Thief with Daredevil and replace Daredevil with one of your other E-Spec Concepts that you made for HoT?
  Daredevil simply offers nothing, thats worth it to let it be an Elite Specialization, its basically just Thief 2.0 with better Acrobatics.
  Also any plans to give Thieves as Core Weapon the Offhand Sword?
  Wouldn’t be worth it to make for that an extra E-Spec, when Core Thief can wield already Swords and should be able to wield it also in both hands.

• Are there any plans on improving the Thief’s Group Support Abilities in the future, like for example giving them Trap Control Abilities as a counter vs. Dragonhunters, Condi Trapper Rangers and Thieves with Ghost Trapper Build to allow the class, that should be god against traps to actually see them and remove them as part of Group Support?

• Are there any plans on improving the Thief’s Group Support by strengthening their Boon Stealing Abilities to make them a significantly stronger counter against boon spamming enemy builds?

• Are their any plans for upcoming Balance Patches to take a look after all these years onto Gameplay Mechanics like reworking and reducing the amount of Boons and Conditions to approach from a different way for once balancing the game, than doing always only Skill and Trait Changes??

• Would be something like a Rework of the Health System for this Game something, what you would ever consider to do, if it would help this game to balance its classes in a better 9 more individual ways, than pidgeonholing them just into 3 Class Types?

• Can we expect anywhen in the future a Rebalance for Upgrades with the goal to reduce them also as well, so that their sheer amount becomes overviewable again, while also improvign their impactfulness for defining the builds of your character?

• Would you ever consider removing Gear Stats from the Game, if this could help you significantly in balancing Classes quicker and easier?
  If you say no, please name a few reasons, why you would like to keep Gear Stats, other than obsolete economy reasons for recipes, materials ect., which can always be replaced with something new. Game Balance > Game Economy

Ithilwen.1529:

I’m 100% cerain that broad access to quickness and portal are soon forthcoming… oh and moa for everyone.

But that was answered for you, the Quickenator!

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

We’ll place quickness where it is appropriate, but don’t have that as a specifically targeted plan.

Chronomancer is the time-themed elite specialization and their being able to grant quickness and alacrity better than anyone else is spot on…

(Until we add the Quickenator Elite Specialization)

Why are you embracing the power creep? Don’t you realize your game feels incredibly spammy already? Why are you lowering CDs when you should be doing the exact opposite? You should have brought down all the elite specs to the level of core ones, there’s very little decision making or strategy anymore. Key skills and attacks don’t feel like they have any weight behind them, you use them on CD more often than not, and most importantly, dodge. Your dodge botton no longer feels like a strategic or even risky choice anymore, it’s always there to use it whenever needed; even top tier players often use it to gain a veeery slight movent speed increase, becouse it’s THAT spammable or because professions are now filled with a trillion passive and active defenses that it doesn’t matter that much anymore!
Why do most of the skills have a million side effects? Just two very small random examples: Head Butt-> Low CD, short charge, CC break, incredible damage, full adrenaline bar. Bandit’s Defense-> Low CD, Stun breaker, movable-all-directional-Block, strong CC. And I could go on forever, absolutely ridiculous. Do you remember how incredibly good and hard hitting once was the Warrior hammer? You are giving flat damage increases of up to +28% on some skills nowadays for kitten sakes!
Most classes don’t have any meaningful resource management to take care of, they’re locked behind CDs, and those classes that have one, ironically, feel even more spammy… I wont continue from here, you get the point.
Please! If you keep up with this trend it’s going to blow up in your faces sooner or later.

With that said… If, sadly, you’re going to go on with this…
…Guardian greatsword is still trash tier. But you’re looking into it, that’s GOOD!
Consider removing the speed penalty on Whirling Wrath, Increase Binding Blade leash range to 900, add 1.5s of immobilize on Symbol of Wrath upon cast and you’re good to go. The weapon either needs to have INCREDIBLY offensive potential or just add some defensive utility to some of the skills (proyectile hate on WW maybe?), currently, sword+any offhand significantly outperforms it at both cathegories.
You were trying to improve unused utility skills, yet not a single meaningful change to a Signet or Spirit weapon. BAD!

You significantly buffed condi mesmers and condi thieves in WvW as collateral damage. BAD! Just remove(replace, duh!) Dire gear and equivalent sets already!

Adrenal Health: The amount healed by this trait has been reduced by 10% in PvP only.
^That’s like less than 100hps, like, nothing, at all. This was done to skew player perception. Power Berzerkers are still going to be incredibly broken in WvW and top tier in sPvP with top notch sustain, condi and direct damage defense and ridiculous damage (like most elite specs that have it all).

Stop overbuffing Maul!

Not much else to say, CDs reductions and (significant) flat damage increases to, ya know, embrace the power creep this expansion created, that sadly took most of the fun away from the game.

Terminsel.5728:

TorsoReaper.8530:

Devilman.1532:

TorsoReaper.8530:

I’m getting a feeling that the Elementalist nerf will never be addressed in this thread

I’m getting the feeling its the elephant in the room that is going to be summarily ignored.

Ignoring is what you do when you have a ton of data, logic, and facts to defend your actions. Obviously.

No. If you have a ton of data, logic, and facts, you present it succinctly to shut down the initial complaints and THEN you ignore further complaints or drama about it.

I think he was being sarcastic m8

Any addresses on Shadowsteps being converted to User only portals due to valid path bugs? Shadowtrap is useless if it detects a pebble & sometimes at certain locations you cannot steal a target if right adjacent to you.

can we also make scorpion wire piece up to 5 targets & pull BEFORE basilisk venom / immobilize triggers ?

why cannot Leap of Faith, Jump Shot, Rocket Charge, Swoop, Vault(bounding Dodger), Swap, Tidal Wave, Feigned Surge, & Dart utilize Dazing Strike and daze however many enemies the listed skills hits? as of now dazing strike only works on 1 RANDOM enemy even if the skill itself hits 3/5 foes.

can we make the change to dazing strike combo finisher to daze however foes it hits if the skill itself hits said 3-5 foes and meets the dazing strike finisher thus dazing those foes hit? would make things more interesting

Sigh…..

Simply no comments on bringing build diversity to eles.

Another patch comes and goes and underused traits, skills, poor elite skills continue unaddressed and ignored.

Having the opportunity to chat with the devs and actually pass along this grief is meaningless if it is just ignored.

I just give up on it.

Well… elementalists got an answer at least, time to talk about necromancers already please!

Robert Gee.9246:

tldr; We added the recharge to stealth attacks to insure that there would be appropriate cost to failing to hit with a stealth attack. We’re pretty happy with this change and aren’t planning to revert it.

Lol. I can’t believe thief players are still kitten and confused about why stealth attacks needed a CD. And its still pretty kitten forgiving too.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

We would really like to do some in-depth passes on underused utility types across most professions. We did not have time to do that for this update, sadly.

Kits on Engineer are an outlier; as utilities they provide an insane amount of versatility. Inherently it is difficult to bring a single skill up to the level of five skills. This is a difficult conundrum and one we discuss regularly. That said, we do have a few ideas for creating gameplay with other utility revisits in the future.

In particular I’d like to review and revisit Elementalist Conjures, Guardian Spirit Weapons, Engineer Gadgets and potentially Mesmer Mantras.

This is really interesting to me, and I understand if you can’t answer it. But when you say you don’t have time to do balance changes such as reworking entire under-used or clunky skill types, what exactly does this mean? How long does it take to re-design a skill versus tweak a few numbers? How much time are you guys given per balance patch? IE will you start working right away on what should go into the next balance patch, or do you wait until 2-3 weeks before you decide to have one and then start working on it?

On a somewhat related note, why don’t we see smaller but substantially faster balance patches? If we got balance patches every month or faster, then it would be fine if you didn’t fully test something and it turned out to be overperforming, because it would be balance again relatively quickly. But with the current iteration, I feel that you guys spend too long testing it internally, because if it is overpowered it will stay that way for 3+ months at a minimum. A faster balance schedule would eliminate this problem. And even if you did screw up and nerf something way too far you could always just undo it in a hotfix.

Azel.4786:

Sigh…..

Simply no comments on bringing build diversity to eles.

Another patch comes and goes and underused traits, skills, poor elite skills continue unaddressed and ignored.

Having the opportunity to chat with the devs and actually pass along this grief is meaningless if it is just ignored.

I just give up on it.

Did you really read all of their responses? Irenio said he wants to review Conjures already.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

In particular I’d like to review and revisit Elementalist Conjures, Guardian Spirit Weapons, Engineer Gadgets and potentially Mesmer Mantras.

Are you happy with the damage output on Rev in pve content? You’ve made some changes to improve condi Rev / Malyx. Are there any considerations for changing how Torrment works in PvE again as it feels lack luster.

You guys mentioned in this thread

“From a group content perspective, alacrity is so strong that if no other profession gains access to it then Chronomancers would push others out of groups because it feels necessary. As is, they are likely to remain the best ways to grant alacrity to others.”

Whilst alacrity is powerful, quickness is significantly more powerful. Chronomancer can bring 100% quickness to 5 people. Literally no other class can even maintain 100% quickness on themselves. Engi gets close.

If the aim of distributing alacrity elsewhere is to reduce the dependency of chrono and increase the viability of revenant, a much better option would be to give revenant access to party wide quickness. Possibly via a pve/pvp split. Until any other class has the ability to generate upwards of 75% quickness uptime for 5 chronos will remain meta.

I’m not happy with the changes ANet made to Elementarists. I get that you want to balance their damage output in raids, fractals and PVP, but open world gameplay just became significantly more frustrating. Especially in the end game zones where it’s not a rarity for a group of enemies attacking you at once. Now with the most effective skills in these situations receiving a significant nerf, it’s becoming even harder to survive and thus even more frustrating to play, since you’ll basically have to drag someone along with you because you are as squishy as a sponge.

Open World was already a pain by default for most ele, but now it’s just straight out frustrating.

I’d really like to know why Dragonhunter Spear of Justice was nerfed to 3/4ths cast time. It just feels really clunky now and out of line with the general speed of other attacks such as scepter auto.

The focus for the thief in PvP for this update clearly was to give it some more condition removal for the price of endurance. Which I find an interesting change and am curious to see how it will work out.
But along that train of thought I was just wondering about the skill “Shadowstep”.
The secondary skill after you activate it (“Shadow Return”) let’s you remove conditions aswell.
The problem though, is that you will teleport back to your original position where you used it, which usually was to get you out of harms way in the first place.
So if you really have to use “shadow return” for condi cleanse it tends to kill you anyway.
Now with all that said, I was wondering if you ever considered to move 1 of the condition cleanses from “shadow return” to “shadowstep”?
(To give you a small cleanse if activating return is to dangerous in the given situation. But if you can use return you get the full benefit of it)
Or did you decide against it on purpose? If so, what were the reasons behind it?

Did you ever consider giving the Revenant a unique damage buff for Ventari? Perhaps convert Grace of the Land into a trait that gives a new boon that offers % damage? Make the boon rarer than Resistance and give it to Druid (by Grace of the Land trait) or Ventari revenant?

Also, when will the Revenant see any condition use in PvE? Allowing Torment to deal full damage on targets already alleviates many issues.

Non of changes will change anything in matter of pvp ele so it’s for sure that if you want play ranked and survive in higher rantings – healbot ekhem tempest d/f mender build is obligatory to play (again!) for 5th season in row. Obligatory not because it’s ,,the meta build". Because it’s only build that let’s you stay alive against class/build x( x – put here just antyhing) Ele will be FORCED to play this build if they want to matter in seasons 6th so questions are:

1. Are there any plans for new amulets that ele could use before new season?

2. Are there any plans of balance changes before new season that could improve ele build diversity.

3. Are there any plans to improve tempest elite specialization to be useful on dps spec or be just be usable on amulet that don’t have both toughness and healing power?

Step.1285:

Is the way Thief’s new Vault works completely intentional? I noticed that now it gradually moves to the spot where it’s meant to land, which leads to some clunky camera movement, whereas before it would sort of quickly jump to the place it’s going to land and then do a vertical slam.

There are also bugs related to the placement of the final Vault slam when with quickness.

I have to second this. Vault feels slower, floatly, and clunky. With quickness it looks broken with the attack of a full ranged vault being 2/3s the distance and in midair while you sort of glide down to your full distance to finish the animation.

Something seems extremely off.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Draco Magnus.2473:

I totally understand the Meteorshower nerv.

But why the Air-Overload?
D/W ele was at one level with thief and condi ranger. (and maybe engi if he is really good)
Now there are better classes in the only thing eles can do in raids.

Ok, you can heal. But then we would need an uniqe group buff or something like this. Otherwise Druids are better.

Make Eles great again!

Overall Ele’s are and have been a bit out of bounds power wise, We’ve been trying to bring them in line. The profession has a huge variance in skill level and applications and they bring a lot to the table in any situation which makes them really hard to make changes to. Overload created an insane amount of damage and a 7% reduction isn’t going to stop that from being played but bring it more in line. As for Meteor Shower when it came to big targets the number of times this would hit was insane so this change helps normalize it so other profession with skills that don’t scale as insanely against large monsters can better compete.

So why no balance to their HP in exchange for the nerf. An ascended zerk ele has around 11k baseline HP. The tradeoff has always been dps vs health.

Would you consider doing Youtube interview video’s on each class after a rebalance patch? It would give us perspective into your way of thinking and it would be very interesting to see how you achieve your goals. The things I look forward to the most are the “explanations” given for each profession, but it’s so short each time and doesn’t really say much.

I dont get the Elementalist nerfs. You seem to be targeting high level PvE (raids) which is justifiable since Ele deserved some nerfs to get in line with the other classes. The damage nerf to overlapping AoE from Meteor Shower, I understand it , but combining it with a quite big 7% Overload Air dps nerf means that Ele now deals worse dps than classes that have a much easier time dealing those numbers. As far as healing goes as long as we don’t bring buffs as good as druids it is very hard to compete.

So with these changes where do you see Ele in the raid meta? In general, why don’t you take smaller steps and see how the community reacts to those instead?

Ithir Darkleaf.7923:

Azel.4786:

Sigh…..

Simply no comments on bringing build diversity to eles.

Another patch comes and goes and underused traits, skills, poor elite skills continue unaddressed and ignored.

Having the opportunity to chat with the devs and actually pass along this grief is meaningless if it is just ignored.

I just give up on it.

Did you really read all of their responses? Irenio said he wants to review Conjures already.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

In particular I’d like to review and revisit Elementalist Conjures, Guardian Spirit Weapons, Engineer Gadgets and potentially Mesmer Mantras.

Ok, good that is something. But it is the same as what we have been hearing since forever without any effort to show for it. The rework for conjures has been talked about since years ago, what is the progress on that? Were are they going and what have they tried?

And what about arcane skills? Elite Skills? What about the fact that almost every trait option for ele is a mindless option because you only have 1 that is actually viable or, at most, 2?

HoT has been out for a year and a half and since before then we have talked about underused stuff for eles and nothing. HoT came out and ele has been stuck with one build option (healbot tank) in PvP since day 1 – when we going to change that?

I am not happy that Chronomancer was butchered lorewise, so can we get new elite specializations now? Not only we do not feel as time manipulators anymore (We did at launch) as we feel like simple plain mesmers instead. Most things about it are useless, slow is useless, wells in pvp are useless and now alacrity has been given away to Revenants? How is it related to Revenants at all? It’s hard to take this game seriously anymore. You said it was supposed to be unique to us. Liars.

What are your plans moving forward for Revenant?

I feel like the alacrity change in this patch is irrelevant to Revenant in a raid setting. The DPS loss from taking that traitline and Ventari in general just isn’t worth the small amount of Alacrity you get. I feel like the real change for Revenant in this patch is the buff to Vengeful hammers and banners going from 5 targets to 10, this will allow groups to sub out a PS warrior for a Revenant in some cases.

I feel like the real issues facing Revenant right now is a lack of options and not having a clear identity. For the lack of options we don’t have many possible weapon setups (staff, hammer, sword/sword, sword/axe, mace/sword, mace/axe, sword/shield, mace/shield) and of all of those only 3 of them aren’t terrible in PvE (Sword/Sword, Sword/Axe, Staff). For the lack of a clear identity right now Revenant feels like a jack of all trades, but master of none. Revenant can do a little bit of everything, we’ve got healing, some damage, some condi damage, and some buffs. But at the same time, Revenant doesn’t feel exceptional at any of those roles.

Do you plan to look at any of the very weak and rarely used weapons like shield/mace/hammer or legends such as Mallyx/Shiro?

Also, what do you think about healing builds in general, and how they compete with druids?

As it is right now, no matter what, if you want to bring any sort of healing class whether it be a healing ele or a ventari revenant, you have to stop and ask “can this compete with a Druid?” And then when the answer is no (because it always is) you drop it and pick up a Druid instead.

How can you make room for healing builds in a high level party composition when none of them can compete with a Druid? Changing the heals and grace to impact 10 targets instead of 5 is nice. But I feel all that would lead to is people either still taking 2 druids and getting more healing from it, or taking just one and then using that spot for an additional general DPS. The problem with builds like healing ele or ventari revenant is just that they require sacrificing everything in order to heal, and don’t provide much else. Alacrity is a step in the right direction, but it’s just not enough.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Draco Magnus.2473:

I totally understand the Meteorshower nerv.

But why the Air-Overload?
D/W ele was at one level with thief and condi ranger. (and maybe engi if he is really good)
Now there are better classes in the only thing eles can do in raids.

Ok, you can heal. But then we would need an uniqe group buff or something like this. Otherwise Druids are better.

Make Eles great again!

Overall Ele’s are and have been a bit out of bounds power wise, We’ve been trying to bring them in line. The profession has a huge variance in skill level and applications and they bring a lot to the table in any situation which makes them really hard to make changes to. Overload created an insane amount of damage and a 7% reduction isn’t going to stop that from being played but bring it more in line. As for Meteor Shower when it came to big targets the number of times this would hit was insane so this change helps normalize it so other profession with skills that don’t scale as insanely against large monsters can better compete.

Im not sure this is true, sure when you are doing rotations on a boss in a raid, but that’s only a small part of the game. in spvp pretty much only 1 build that is competitive, a build that can neither bunker or burst people down – auromancer and a second specific build that is focused on the fresh air skill that is all about constantly pushing you back into 1 attunement (not good gameplay) There is no build for sceptre/focus/warhorn and now staff that is viable against equally skilled players. Then there is the lack of toughness and healing. it goes on.

I see that the intent with makeing TW affect 10 targets is to make a chrono apply perma quickness on a 10 man group, but due to the previouse balance patch where the stack cap for quickness was reduced to 5, most of the stacks of quickness applied will be overwriten as chronomance applies burst of lots of quickness. The alternative is to stagger cooldowns, but that would just feel weird when abilities in CS would do almost nothing in terms of quickness uptime, not to mention the effect after CS ends.

Thus I want to ask why you did not realise this was a problem, and if you did and believe it was not a problem, can you try to convience me why?

As far as I can tell, rev getting alacrity, GotL applying to 10 people and mesemer on paper being able to give quickness to 10 people would allow for more diversity, but this attempt is ultimatly futile, as we will just run 2 chronomancers IF we cannot get perma quickness with 1 chrono, and thus the rev change is not relevant, and furthermore we will still take 2 druids for spotter and spirit, as a condi ranger cannot realisticly drop anything for either.

As a summary, I get what is trying to be accomplished, but the quickness cap is going to stop it all from succeding, and I want a dev comment on why this was not changed as well.

Are you guys happy with the current state of elite vs core specializations? I ask this because since the launch of HoT, not a single core-only build has been meta in PvP. This seems to be at direct odds with what we had heard prior to the launch of HoT about elite specializations providing alternative playstyles that are not direct upgrades. Are there any plans on bringing elite specializations in line with cores, and can we expect the next expansions’ elite specializations to launch as strong as the current ones did?

Also, are any changes being considered to the size or frequency of balance passes in the future? I know many PvP players have expressed dissatisfaction about the rate of balance for this game in the past.

Khenzy.9348:

Don’t you realize your game feels incredibly spammy already? Why are you lowering CDs when you should be doing the exact opposite?

I disagree. I am glad we are finally getting cd reductions. Long cooldowns are NOT fun!

So the TLDR is that you will just let Revenant die?

The thing is that even the competitive build (Glint/Shiro) is just subpar. You need to seriously give something back to them, sword last overnerf made no sense, so if you won’t give help to its pitiful damage you really need to revert/buff back Shiro and Glint (Energy costs being stupid high right now, unnecessary long cooldowns, less endurance on Shiro nerf, Enchanted Daggers nerf, Boon duration nerf on Glint, Infused light nerfs) including shield which is a suicide choice over axe or even off hand sword.

I thought that Shiro was supposed to be a power Legend, an assassin, but you keep breaking and making it worse.

Why do I make mention of Glint and Shiro? Cause Jallis, Mallyx and Ventari don’t even come close to the weakest builds among all the professions.
So if not even Glint/Shiro is a “decent” choice what does that tell you about Jallis, Mallyx and Ventari?

You seriously expect this Ventari band aid to even work? AGAIN just sit there only using Auto Attack because everything is plagued with high energy costs and on top of that, cooldowns.

Well GJ then, AFK for another half a year until you stop being stubborn.

this skin Balance is really really bad.

Anet buff those Useless used skill and ppl still wont used now.

Anet dodge WvW.

Why no nerf Epidemic at WvW ??????

For the next balance patch, Run a poll on what kind of fixes certain classes need. cause some of these nerfs don’t make any sense.

Mea.5491:

Khenzy.9348:

Don’t you realize your game feels incredibly spammy already? Why are you lowering CDs when you should be doing the exact opposite?

I disagree. I am glad we are finally getting cd reductions. Long cooldowns are NOT fun!

Here’s hoping that carries over to every single Elite skill that takes longer than 150 seconds to recharge eventually in future balance patches.

Ben Phongluangtham.1065:

Structured PvP and PvE game modes have different balance needs. There are a lot of changes that we make initially to fulfill the needs of the sPvP that could, after additional evaluation make it to other game modes.

WvW has different balance needs as well, you can’t keep lumping it in with PvE. You are absolutely destroying the one unique thing this game offers.

This probably isn’t an important issue but while weilding the Bifrost the Winds of Chaos projectile doesn’t get the rainbow effect when using Phantasmal Warlock.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Kerivek.5740:

My main concern is the fact that Spirit Weapons went completely untouched. One of my favorite things about Guardian when I began playing back in beta was my Spirit Weapon build. Spirit Weapons seem to be relegated to the realm of “just for fun” rather than having any remotely competitive applications. I would really love to see Spirit Weapons and other neglected skills get some love rather than just tweaking what is already being used ad nauseum.

TexZero.7910:

<snip> when are elixir’s, gadgets, and gyro’s going to be viable choices over kits ?

We would really like to do some in-depth passes on underused utility types across most professions. We did not have time to do that for this update, sadly.

Kits on Engineer are an outlier; as utilities they provide an insane amount of versatility. Inherently it is difficult to bring a single skill up to the level of five skills. This is a difficult conundrum and one we discuss regularly. That said, we do have a few ideas for creating gameplay with other utility revisits in the future.

In particular I’d like to review and revisit Elementalist Conjures, Guardian Spirit Weapons, Engineer Gadgets and potentially Mesmer Mantras.

Please add Guardian Signets to that list. At the very least change Signet of Resolve from 35s to 30s.

Is there a chance you might consider reworking https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Strength_in_Numbers?

150 toughness has very limited utility, especially in pve.

Thank you so much for the ranger pet changes! They have been needed since the game came out (the ability to hit a moving target in PvP) and I’m overwhelmed by the idea that multiple pets could become more competitive now.

Are we going to see more specific changes to pets, like buffs to underused F2 skills like the fire wyvern?

I’ve noticed a lot lately that condi ranger is so much stronger than power ranger despite both investing fully in their respective form of DPS (I’m talking a full DPS build not power ranger + druid heals). Might we see some power ranger buffs (sword and maybe gratsword?) to bring them up closer to compete with other solely focused DPS builds or do you consider it fine that there is a large disparity in DPS builds of different types? Elementalist was top tier DPS in PvE for a long time with a ranged weapon (staff), could we maybe see longbow become more competitive in an organised PvE environment for DPS?

How much of current balance decisions are taking into account the eventual introduction of the second elite specs? Are we seeing changes and shifts in the way core specialisations are balanced that might not make complete sense until we see what the new elite specs will bring?

Thanks again for all the improvements that have been made to core ranger since just before HoT launched. The profession is moving in a very positive direction (Call of the Wild on pet swap, condi is really strong, numerous great pet buffs, sword root removed etc).

I still think the real answer is a public test server where some of these ideas can be tried out but in the end, I’m sure no matter what the PTS shows, Anet will just push through the changes regardless.