Guild Wars 2

ty for forwarding this! when can we expect more specifyed data on the chanes?

MadVisions.4529:

ty for forwarding this! when can we expect more specifyed data on the chanes?

Make sure to tune in for the January 15 episode of Guild Chat over on the official Guild Wars 2 Twitch channel for more in-depth discussion on the upcoming balance changes.

So many good looking changes, wow, I am pumped! Everything sounds great!

Some of the great looking changes I saw included:
Revenant sword auto attack damage reduction
Slow and quickness no longer affect stomps (YESSSSSS)
Thief acrobatics rework (as a thief main, HYPE)
Offensive elementalist improvements
Diamond skin changes!!!

ahahahaah Ranger/Druid

10/10

RIP Diamond Skin

Hope u speed up Reaper GS cast times or it will still be a useless Weapon, u gave us kittene in HoT after months of hope.

I’m a bit skeptic about Warrior changes

Elementalist Sceptre (and focus) will be receiving quality of life improvements. This is great, but for the sceptre, it lacks DAMAGING AUTOATTACKS. Having mostly single target tickle beams is what kills this weapon.

“Warrior
We’ve taken a look at the warrior’s baseline abilities, adjusting cooldowns, damage, and in some cases even functionality. Our goal for this iteration is to give you a bit more to play with in a single weapon set so that the cooldowns feel more active and fun to play around with. Rifle has also seen a bit of a rework, gaining a more defensive nature while retaining its overall purpose of kill-shotting every enemy of Tyria. We’ll also be taking another pass at improving the berserker elite specialization, focusing on increasing its usability in various game modes and promoting more active skill use in trait design. Lastly, we’ll improve the warrior’s ability to sustain themselves in combat.”

Please make Fast Hands baseline and do something about Adrenaline loss. Sustain changes will be very welcome.

Thanks
Retired warrior.

The warrior updates need to bring utility.

For example, Axe 2 (cyclone axe) should be a small reflect. Such as engineer air burst on flamethrower.

In relation to Warrior: the part about giving Warriors more to play with “in a single weapon set,” strongly suggests to me that baseline Fast Hands didn’t make it. I really hope they prove me wrong on Friday.

Remember the sky isn’t falling and the meta needed shaking up to begin with as optimal comps and play were solved pretty early (who didn’t foresee chrono being meta?)

I foresee chrono still being meta since its biggest strengths don’t rely on damage modifiers (portals, buffs, resets, and CC) but also necro and thief next season. Reaper seems strong as it is but with the leeching bolt and grandmaster trait buffs could stay in a fight basically forever as shrouds effectively give it much more HP.

I think some abilities need to take the new stats like expertise into account and reduce baseline condition durations while maybe buffing the stat itself so you need to take expertise to make your chill count (already the case with burning).

I didn’t see anything about a Deathly Chill nerf. Please reduce the damage coefficient of chill damage! This is coming from a necro main.

Also, I hope ranger shortbow is one of the “less used weapons” that is getting some buffs.

warrior should not get fast hands baseline. weaponswap cooldown is not a class specific thing so it makes little sense to give a class a shorter baseline weaponswap cooldown.

i also don’t see anything about expansion pet nerfs / vanilla pet buffs which are needed.

thief auto attack buff? it’s not like thieves have bad auto attacks to begin with. personally i don’t think this is the right way to buff thieves.. because stronger autos won’t help them survive, nor will it change anything about their role in pvp.

Here’s to hoping they only mentioned 0.5% of the nerfs they’re intending to implement.

vana.5467:

Here’s to hoping they only mentioned 0.5% of the nerfs they’re intending to implement.

I agree. Classes should have their skill floors raised across the board except for thief, which already has a high floor. This way people’s classes won’t carry them and punish mistakes more. Survivability and CC also need toning down across the board.

While I’m intrigued about thief getting some damage output improvements to its weapon skills, I am annoyed that you would, instead of simply considering making some things baseline and adding new traits in place of those made baseline, decide to focus on improving acrobatics. Acrobatics! The trait line you nerfed to oblivion because of Daredevil coming in, and which is now no longer used! It’ll need some really strong - and I mean extremely strong - improvements to its offensive capability to even be considered against trickery, deadly arts, and daredevil. In fact, so strong that you might even call it a near complete rework.

I’d trade an acrobatics rework for preparedness and kleptomaniac baseline, driven fortitude changed to give stability instead of heal so we can STAND in team fights more reliably, and two new minor traits to replace the ones made baseline.

Warrior is too far gone.. I got stuck in Amber with my warrior, I switched to rev and now I’m about to get my second account to legendary lol. This patch should of come months ago when teams still played the game. Cele ele was the problem a few months ago and as we speak there are many classes in this overpowered super sustain role. If the balance, I mean marketing team doesn’t want each game to timer then there has to be a serious rework and I have lost faith in the devs ability to do this.

And for one thing please please please tell me more than just rifle is being buffed, I know you devs ignore the warrior forums but there are much better wars of fixing warriors than some of the ideas that were listed.

This blog post is the best news I have had in ages – it even gives me hope for warrior rifle, which was a welcome surprise.

Great to see the concerns about quickness, slow, and their affect on reviving and stomping being addressed, and alacrity being looked at. I’d have preferred revenant’s defensive skills being toned down instead of their damage, though.

Jekkt.6045:

warrior should not get fast hands baseline. weaponswap cooldown is not a class specific thing so it makes little sense to give a class a shorter baseline weaponswap cooldown.

I respectfully disagree since the whole concept of Warrior is to be a master of weapons. So fast hands as baseline is not a completely alien concept for warriors to have.

Anyway this whole thing has been discussed before and i dont want to bring it up again. I will wait till Friday to see what they have in store.

Spartacus.3192:

“Warrior
We’ve taken a look at the warrior’s baseline abilities, adjusting cooldowns, damage, and in some cases even functionality. Our goal for this iteration is to give you a bit more to play with in a single weapon set so that the cooldowns feel more active and fun to play around with. Rifle has also seen a bit of a rework, gaining a more defensive nature while retaining its overall purpose of kill-shotting every enemy of Tyria. We’ll also be taking another pass at improving the berserker elite specialization, focusing on increasing its usability in various game modes and promoting more active skill use in trait design. Lastly, we’ll improve the warrior’s ability to sustain themselves in combat.”

Please make Fast Hands baseline and do something about Adrenaline loss. Sustain changes will be very welcome.

Thanks
Retired warrior.

I will confirm that baseline fast hands WILL NEVER HAPPEN this is quoted from a developer who was collecting warrior feedback in teamspeak.

Why was nothing mentioned about passives?? Like Rev 4 second taunt? What about reducing some healing power for tempests and druids?

Also gj on normalizing rezes!

Do anet know warrior damage is overally sucks except gs/axe-shield set and berserker’s sword-torch/mace-shield set? they need to buff every weapons dps except them.

For example, currently engi hammer skills from 1to5 has approximately 2.3 times higher dmg than warrior hammer skills from same 1to5 at same ammy. Hope you buff warrior dps based upon this theory, or similar theory.

And war need sustain, especially resistence due to too many random blind stuffs and this resistence could be triggered easily by using a skill of stance/shout/rage and all others plus more shout heal or generic heal skills, since celestial druid can heal support more than cleric or settler shout warrior, which makes nonsense becuz cele heal support >>> settler/cleric heal support.

I have to see the actual patch notes before I can judge.

To those of you patting them on the back for make a generalized statement of a “we’re going to look at these classes”, with very few specific changes listed, shame on you! Wait until we get a legitimate list of changes to trust a single word that’s been posted!

Until then, criticize and make suggestions in the hope that they are listening.

For Thief:
“Our design for this profession tends to lean toward damage, mobility, and evasiveness”

Why move away from stealth completely? I mean other classes can arguable stealth better than us while also revealing us. Stealth was one of the reasons I love the thief class (& rouge archetype). If you’re gonna insist on keeping us perma-revealed then pretty much the whole class needs to be reworked.

Additional Notes: Also as other thief players are saying, thief needs more than just damage increase (although acro rework could be interesting), please consider increasing our sustain or making certain traits baseline.

Josh Davis.6015:

FYI: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/profession-balance-goals-for-the-winter-2016-update/

Did you get a chance to check out the Thief forums? Most of us believe in something different than damage boosts (unless you let us gain access to all boons and conditions…rip burning/retaliation/protection). I thought knocking hp to the 15k base (medium, not low) would raise the Barrier to Entry for new players, while Preparedness baseline (even if the trait in place says “currently being created”) would help Build Diversity. Not that I don’t want Thief buffs, I’m just hoping…you know :c

Ele will need more defense built into weapon like Rev/Scrapper/Mesmer/Guardian.

Glass Staff ele needs a lot of love to be viable in PvP. Why is that a glass Rev/Scrapper can 1v1 a Tempest on a point for 5m, but a glass staff Ele will die instantly to anything that touches it?

Also, Scepter auto attack needs a big buff for the tickling beam.

Oh I can’t wait for Scepter buffs. Return of the Burn Ele confirmed?

Some changes seem good ( Ele, guardian and scrappers the most )

Josh, any chance to see engineer slicking shoes reworked?
Or at least the part “unblockable” removed.

edit: and about quickness + Stomp/rezz ?

no word about cele amulet ? mkay i guess its balanced when all other amulets combined are used less..

What are you all getting hyped for, slow down

These are just a bunch of empty PR promises – the same ones they made pre-HoT. Until they actually show us traits, skills, and numbers, these write-ups really don’t tell us kitten.

Good PR, bad transparency. Now would have been the time to talk to the community about proposed balance changes so that we can do this together properly. But I get it, Anet knows what’s best. Sure.

You’ll excuse my negativity, but given their track record of class balance and me getting swindled for $50 makes me a little salty.

Not sure if I’d like buffs to teef. Over the 225 games ( not a lot, I know, but I did try it out somewhat ) I’ve had on it, I felt that d/p was a really strong weapon set. Yes, playing teef is extremely difficult in this current meta, but it’s not a bad class.

I think the problem lies with the meta. I’d prefer nerfs to every class / elite spec ( even daredevil ) than a buff to teef just to keep them up to date with the powercreep. I wouldn’t want teef AA to be the new rev sword 1 with shiro quickness on. That would make teef op ( hard to imagine, right? ) .

Maybe a nerf on conditions, invulnerability, or healing. Make it punishing to simply click an invul skill and expect to survive eg : make any and all skills granting invul channeled and thus interruptable. Increase CD of invuln skills when interrupted. Significant periods of invulnerability must come with a huge kitten cooldown. Shorter periods of invulnerability should be removable / counterable. Say a skill on 12s cd that allows a block on next incoming attack > it can be burnt away with a random AA before landing your burst.

Or simply make skills like endure pain / signet of stone removable with boon corruption / stripping. Maybe diminishing returns on CC and heals so you can’t get dazed for days by 2 druids? eg : Grant resistance to a CC after being affected by it beyond x times. Of course, this would have to come with a limit to boon corruptions and stripping.

Many skills in that one pvp game I feel was balanced has its pros and cons. Prepopping an invul / CC immunity skill before the fight begins would lead to you getting kited for the entire duration of the skill. You had to use it at just the right moment after baiting all the possible counters against your skills. It was never just a press-to-win button like it can be in GW2.

What I want to see is more skill-based combat. Things that are hard to pull off in the heat of combat, rotations that must be thought through and through and adjusted for every single encounter. I want GW2 pvp to be so hard that if you win, you’d know you deserved it. I want GW2 pvp to be like dark souls on a guitar hero controller.

You casuls can get back to pve ; u ;

I think what would help PvP a lot is revising condition damage and stacking, as well reducing the radius AoE condition fields. Way too much mindless spamming of passive condition fields at the moment. Introduce some skill back into the game like actually having to strategically place fields rather than covering whole or large portions of a point. Also bring condition cleansing back in line with conditions for classes that have too little.

RockSteady.7123:

What are you all getting hyped for, slow down

These are just a bunch of empty PR promises – the same ones they made pre-HoT. Until they actually show us traits, skills, and numbers, these write-ups really don’t tell us kitten.

Good PR, bad transparency. Now would have been the time to talk to the community about proposed balance changes so that we can do this together properly. But I get it, Anet knows what’s best. Sure.

You’ll excuse me negativity, but given their track record of class balance and me getting swindled for $50 makes me a little salty.

Agreed. The one word that characterizes this blog post the most: vague. It’s hard to forget the debacles that lead to the June 23 patch and then the HoT beta weekends.

Acro rework \o/

Sekai.2987:

no word about cele amulet ? mkay i guess its balanced when all other amulets combined are used less..

wat?

3 out of 9 classes use cele as their strongest amulet atm (ele, mes, druid)

Thuggernaut.1250:

RockSteady.7123:

What are you all getting hyped for, slow down

These are just a bunch of empty PR promises – the same ones they made pre-HoT. Until they actually show us traits, skills, and numbers, these write-ups really don’t tell us kitten.

Good PR, bad transparency. Now would have been the time to talk to the community about proposed balance changes so that we can do this together properly. But I get it, Anet knows what’s best. Sure.

You’ll excuse me negativity, but given their track record of class balance and me getting swindled for $50 makes me a little salty.

Agreed. The one word that characterizes this blog post the most: vague. It’s hard to forget the debacles that lead to the June 23 patch and then the HoT beta weekends.

But the June 23rd patch was awesome. After the June 23rd patch, and after the DD cele ele fire nerfs, the game was very balanced. It wasn’t until HoT that things got messy again. If they repeat their balance performance from the June 23rd patch, we’re in business.

Dont like what i read about the revenant.

If you go power based, sword damage is the only reedeaming quality.

The class over all is very glassy and its sustain is clunky at best.

Every skill is telegraphed and has very long delays from the click to the effect because of casting times and animations.

Dealing with conditions is night impossible because while the concept of the class is to be focused through its legendary, the legendaries themselves do not bring comprehensive tools to the battle and you always end up lacking.

Dragon has no condition removal and situational healing.
Assassin has the most reliable healing but no way to fight conditions.
Dwarf has marginal healing, no condi removal, no movility.
Demon has some condi inmunity, movility and marginal healing.
Centaur has healing and condi removal, its incredibly awkward to use and should have the tablet flat out removed and you be the center of the skills.

To put it bluntly, damage in general is the only that makes the revenant worth it.

Also and again to put it bluntly, you simply can not balance every 3 months. That requires you to have a stable balanced game and only needing a few tweaks here and there.
This is something that regrettably does not match the state of the game nor you have demonstrated the capability of achieving balance through minor tweaks yet.
You should aim to monthly changes and weekly tweaks until you get things sorted out, then you can can plan on a more relaxed schedule.

I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited for this kind of communication.

Here goes:

- Elementalist: Glad to see diamond skin receiving attention. I think the main thing that needs attention is damage reduction stacking. Currently, damage reduction stacks additively, and elementalist is the most obvious abuser of that fact. With high uptime of protection (-40), frost aura (-10) and geomancer’s defense (-10), direct damage reduction is quite simply too high. Especially coupled with ele’s god-tier sustain. To clarify, additive stacking means the reductions add up (40+10+10) for a total of a whopping -60%, or 100% when a revenant uses or procs jalis elite.. With multiplicative stacking, these 3 sources would only add up to little over 50%, while also eliminating the silly 100% damage reduction thingy. It’s only logical that incoming damage modifiers work the same way outgoing damage modifiers do. Buffs to air grandmasters sound good, although 2 out of 3 are already excellent traits. I would suspect they intend to move bolt to the heart, so it can once again be taken in conjunction with fresh air. That would be a glorious change indeed. Let’s hope these QoL focus changes adress the pitiful fire attunement! Meanwhile scepter could use at least one decent autoattack.

- Engineer: Personally I think scrapper, herald and chronomancer (and to a lesser extent dragonhunter) all suffer from a similar problem. They have too much active defense on a too low cooldown. Between sneak gyro(!), hammer block and evade frames from rocket charge + whatever they get from utilities, surviving in marauder gear is so easy there’s really no reason to run any other amulet. Couple that with stability uptime, which prevents lockdown, and it’s all a bit overwhelming. A nerf to any of these, specifically to cooldown would go a long way I think. The damage is high, but that’s always been part of the engineer identity imo. It’s just that their traditional weakness to lockdown is now completely missing. Same thing as ele, when you have a class with high sustain, you have to be wary of giving it too much defense in any other shape, because that quickly compounds the problem.

- Guardian changes sound alright, though I’d argue for re-evaluating the stability on longbow knockback. I’ll be questioning many of the new stability sources in this write-up. Especially the uptime of this incredible boon. Perhaps spear of justice could do with a projectile velocity decrease. Pulls are incredibly strong, and it’d make sense to make it dodge-able with good reflexes, seeing as it’s already unblockable.

- Mesmer sounds good too, especially the notes on alacrity. Shield block nerfs+ well of precog changes were excellent changes. I’m not a big fan of the cooldown of continuum split being so much lower than that of time-warp and moa, making the latter rather irrelevant. Upping one or reducing the other could bring some variation to how continuum split is used, as it’s currently just copying elites 90% of the time.

- Necromancer: Those notes don’t really mean much as far as I can see. I’ve really no idea what to make of it. Once again, I’ll point out the abundance of stability on reaper, though it’s not as out of place as others. Slowing down the pulses of RS 3 a little would be nice, even if you leave the amount of stacks untouched. That’d give some room to boon-rip or stability shred plays.

- Ranger: The HoT pets are out of line imo. Especially the bristleback. There’s almost 0 variation in what pets are picked nowadays. Even the wolf, which reigned supreme before HoT can’t measure up.

- Revenant: The sheer uptime of evasion/blocks/… is too high. Glint heal, shield block x 2, unrelenting assault, riposting shadows, dodges, hammer 3,… It gets to the point where you can almost rotate through your defenses with little downtime. Other than that, I love the sound of those design decisions, further specialising legends leaving clearly defined weaknesses to compensate. Once more I’d like to point out the stab on dodge trait being super powerful. A duration cut perhaps?

- Thief: In my experience, thief autoattacks were never weak, which is why this note surprises me. Most of all I’d like to stress that thief is a very sensitive class to balance. Nerfing its main opposition in the same patch as giving it substantial buffs can and will likely lead to trouble. As Sindrener said, it’s more the other classes being out of line, than thief being lacking in any aspect. This might sound like a ‘chicken-or-the-egg’ argument, but it’s not. This same logic does not apply so extremely to other professions. Acro changes are very welcome

- Warrior: I’m not very comfortable giving much feedback on this one. Burnzerker needs looking at, but besides that, I think taking a look at how specifically the mobility changes hit warrior harder than any other profession by far. Their mobility got absolutely gutted in that patch. I’d agree it was out of line before, but I’d say they were hit too hard. Giving them back some of that good stuff will alleviate their worries much more than other changes of similar scope, since it allows them to pick and control their engagements more aptly.

Josh Davis.6015:

Aside from skill adjustments, another way we can adjust balance in PvP is by looking at the runes/sigils/amulets that are available for use through the customization panel.

I would be interested in hearing thoughts (with the high-level goals from the blog in-mind) on adding/removing various sigils/amulets/runes. In general, our goal for PvP is to be faster-paced with a higher-level of lethality than what we’re seeing in S1.

I know we’ve had this conversation a few times before, but it’s always important to have this discussion with the correct context in mind.

The first thought that comes to mind is regarding the amulets…For example, the viper amulet fills the same role as the rampager/sinister amulets (and to some extent, the berserker amulet), but offers superior DPS at no cost (i.e., the defenses are the same). Bringing these types of amulets in line and making them fill different roles is probably a step in the right direction. Wanderers makes sense: it’s a lower defense but higher damage version of rabid, but viper is just a better rampager/sinister amulet. New amulets would be great too (power toughness ferocity comes to mind).

The rune is a longer subject, as the more added, the merrier…Slight buffs to some of the older and unused runes (some of which have insanely long ICD’s that could be reduced, e.g, rune of svanir) would be great too. Some runes could have really cool synergy with certain builds but their CD’s are so long, they’ll never have be integrated into a build. For example, look at superior rune of resistance; this rune could be really great and promote new types of signet builds, but the 30 s ICD makes it useless. Nerfs to some overused/overpowered (e.g., durability) would also be welcome. Runes that offer 15% runspeed along with power/condi stats would be cool too, so that builds that don’t have access to 25% runspeed aren’t funneled into traveler runes (note that the elite specs for druid and chrono offer runspeed traits…leaving the base specs literally in the dust). Nerfs to might-stacking runes (strength, hoelbrek) should also be considered—there has been a long trend of might-stacking cele builds dominating the PvP scene, and this could be a way to help fix it. A poison version of rune of balthazar could be a cool addition (think of the tormenting rune).

Apolo.5942:

Dont like what i read about the revenant.

If you go power based, sword damage is the only reedeaming quality.

The class over all is very glassy and its sustain is clunky at best.

Every skill is telegraphed and has very long delays from the click to the effect because of casting times and animations.

To put it bluntly, damage in general is the only that makes the revenant worth it.

I can’t help but laugh at this. If you think Revenant is bad, wait until you try Warrior.

Apolo.5942:

Dont like what i read about the revenant.

If you go power based, sword damage is the only reedeaming quality.

The class over all is very glassy and its sustain is clunky at best.

Every skill is telegraphed and has very long delays from the click to the effect because of casting times and animations.

To put it bluntly, damage in general is the only that makes the revenant worth it.

Wow, bad Rev detected. My glass Rev can solo toe to toe with a bunker due to all the low cooldown block/evades/blind/heal/CC built into the weapon.

Originally this post was going to be about how Karl isn’t properly addressing some of the issues; how the balance team appears to be completely lost on what to improve while I describe some key examples.

But that would be a complete waste of time, so here is facepalm response.

Apolo.5942:

Don’t like what i read about the revenant.

If you go power based, sword damage is the only reedeaming quality.

The class over all is very glassy and its sustain is clunky at best.

Every skill is telegraphed and has very long delays from the click to the effect because of casting times and animations.

To put it bluntly, damage in general is the only that makes the revenant worth it.

I play power rev with mainhand sword + offhand sword (sometimes shield) with staff as a secondary weapon with eagle runes and it isn’t just about autoattacking but making smart use of your cooldowns and energy. I only use sword 3 in special circumstances (opponent under 50% health or avoid trap damage if no dodge is up) which is likely the intent since healing up can be trivial. What balances revenant’s good damage is energy management and not so good self heals. Glint heal is only good if someone’s committed to an attack (rapid fire or unload for example.)

The change may be good overall if tankiness and survivability gets toned down across the board making for more active play.

Josh Davis.6015:

Aside from skill adjustments, another way we can adjust balance in PvP is by looking at the runes/sigils/amulets that are available for use through the customization panel.

I would be interested in hearing thoughts (with the high-level goals from the blog in-mind) on adding/removing various sigils/amulets/runes. In general, our goal for PvP is to be faster-paced with a higher-level of lethality than what we’re seeing in S1.

I know we’ve had this conversation a few times before, but it’s always important to have this discussion with the correct context in mind.

If the goal for elementalists is to make them play more offensively, i’d suggest doing something about the celestial amulet. While having the option to have a little bit from each stat is interesting, it looks like this is the only amulet that is viable to elementalists for getting max efficiency. They have many defensive abilities which benefit from the defensive part of the celestial amulet and at the same time they get some nice bonuses to their offensive abilities through condi dmg, power precision and ferocity. It’s hard for me to ask for its removal, so maybe change it a little to make it into a more defensive amulet, by lowering the offensive stats and upgrading the defensive ones?