Guild Wars 2

Balance Predictions and How you would you like to see the Meta change? or think it will change to?
Discuss

Class balance is very good actually at the moment, I’m only expecting minor tweaks here and there.

Only exception is DH/Guardian, which isn’t in a bad place either but it could use some more competitiveness. I’m also expecting some targeting improvements for revenants.

Ranked matchmaking on the other hand still needs a lot of work. The current matchmaking is the best one yet, but it’s not enough. It should distribute classes more evenly, and not drop 2 thieves in the same team as it does now. Or make 1 team include 4 necromancers.

I’d expect shaves to scrapper damage or sustain, shaves to tempest heals, perma evade staffdevil will probably be destroyed (justified or not) and absolutely no changes to guardian because it’s in a good spot (aka, anet has no idea how to balance it’s elite and has no intention of making a non hot build viable).

I want staff ele to be meta /jk

- some random buffs
- some uncalled nerfs
- random abandoned utility skill category gets insane buffs and is now mandatory
- some condi amulets removed
- some condi amulets added

Predictions: Overnerfing Warrior to S2 state. Overnerfing Engi. Out of the blue buff to Ranger. Minor tweak on Ele that won’t change anything. Thief now gets 3 additional dodgerolls

What I would like to see:
Warrior: Small adjustment of Adrenal health. Maybe add an ICD on Cleansing Ire
Ranger: No changes
Necro: No changes.
Elementalist: Reduction of self condition cleanse, making him die easier.
Mesmer: No idea. I think the class is fine
Thief: Reduce dodge. Make Basi venom ignore damage reduction effects.
Revenant: No changes.
Guardian: Trait that reduces Trap cooldown when they don’t get triggered.
Engineer: No changes. The class is fine honestly.

I would like to see reflect times being shaved. I would like warriors / engis passive survival traits to be more active somehow.
The removal of Revenant, not cause the class is broken anymore but because I absolutly just plain out hate everything about it.
Celestial amulet back, so that eles are not forced into a healing role.

We are going back to Season 1 match-making and the smurfing will be possible but the “higher” players will get no pips.

I would rather have a rollback to 2014 Leaderboard, but… well.. season 1 MM didn’t consider pip-range nor divisions to put team of equals skills together.

It was so good, many “top players” did QQ because they had a hard time going on Legendary, when bad players where already there.

I guess, the “pips” should be trash and divisions reflected the MMR directly. So, top players playing together with a 50% win ratio would still be top players.

What I would love to see is unused builds becoming viable again. I am not even asking for build diversity, I just want classes to be able to run something different to what they have been running for the last 2 seasons. If that means nerfing all the current builds into oblivion so be it, I just want to see all classes running different builds. Balance is great at the moment in terms of how strong each class is but it becomes boring to play the same builds for months.

With all that said, I do not think that will happen (Though I would love to be surprised with awesome changes like that) so here is what I expect:

-Warrior to be nerfed quite significantly, maybe less conditions on mace and a nerf on healing.
-Guardian to remain less competitive than other classes due to lower-level players struggling against it.
-Reasonable nerf to support ele and a buff on ele scepter (hopefully enough to make it viable).
-Druid to remain pretty much the same as it is.
-Scrapper sustain and damage nerfed, possibly making it one of the weaker classes.
-Revenant to be slightly nerfed but remain a mandatory class at pro league level.
-Thief to remain pretty much how it is now.
-Necro to be buffed, probably given more access to stability or just a general sustain increase, damage to remain the same.
-Mesmer to stay how it is.

Not sure how realistic this would be but based on a lot of the complaints I have seen in game and on the forum, this is what I expect.

Dream: keeping all the changes above limited to PvP. If they gut ele sustain, Druid heals, and thief damage, it would be another disastrous PvE off-nerf patch

>What I hope for:

-More amulets, runes, sigils…maybe bringing back Celestial and adding a new option
-Warrior slight nerf to Mace Berserk Burst, small ICD on Adrenal Healing
-Some slight Mesmer nerf on their condi-application rate
-Removal of Boonstrip of Necro Scepter AA3
-Indirect buffs to Power builds all around, except for Warrior and Scrapper
-Slight shave to Scrapper sustain/boon output
-Revenant fixes to their bugs, rework to sword skills to make them less AoE centric (2 and 3) and more single target focused
-Core traitline buffs and reworks all around
-Ranger Tyria pet buffs, Shortbow buffs
-New PvP mode revealed
-Ele shave to support (not personal sustain)

>What we will get

-More amulet/sigil removal. Maybe a new add-on if we’re lucky
-DH gets some cosmetic change or another nerf
-Warrior overnerfed
-Scrapper barely touched or over-nerfed
-Revenant nerfed because lolRevenant
-Ranger nerfed (again) because lolRanger
-Mesmer slightly nerfed or slightly buffed.
-Overnerfed or untouched Ele
-Necros untouched or buffed
-Barely any bugfixes unless they’re beneficial to a particular profession

I hope in a 22% buff to shatterstone

Dragonhunter: More trap nerfs, rather than reworks.
Herald: A small nerf, probably to a sustain mechanic.
Chronomancer: One or two skill nerfs. Random buff to Dueling traitline. Inspiriation traintline nerfed hard.
Tempest: Useless scepter buffs instead of reworks. No nerfs to Tempest.
Berserker: Adrenal Health nerfed to uselessness. No rework to Arc Divider. Other Berserker buffs that don’t help sustain.
Reaper: A few condi nerfs. Boon corrupt taken off scepter AA and added to another weapon. No changes to GS.
Scrapper: One or two sustain nerfs. One nerf to a hammer CD. No nerfs to hammer damage or AoE.
Druid: One or two sustain nerfs, probably through NM traitline. Significant overbuffs to MM traitline, making it and longbow mandatory for Druids.
Daredevil: Useless buffs to Deadly Arts and Acrobatics. No nerfs to Daredevil GM traits. Dagger/dagger 3 nerf.

Any of those will happen. All Revs, Thieves and Mesmers will QQ hard, no matter what happens.

If adrenal health goes back to what it was or equivalent, warriors will be back to being one of the weakest class. On the other hand it proves how much the class’ sustain relies on a single trait which should obviously be reworked.

My prediction: Warrior’s condi application getting nerfed (deservedly since skull grinder is broken atm). Adrenal health getting nerfed to such an extent where it won’t be viable anymore in team fights. BONUS: Buggy skills like Rush, shield bash, savage leap, etc will still continue to not hit 50% of the time.

• “Reasonable” nerfs for support tempest with only one buff (see below) and Anet completely forgets that non-bunker builds use these traits and skills too.
• Anything hit by Shatterstone instantly dies.

- dh trap nerf
- bristleback nerf
- smokescale nerf
- shatterstone buff
- deathly chill nerf
- berserker damage buff
- mesmer scepter buff
- random rev weapon skill cd increased by 1 second
- random CA skill nerfed
- added something random to steal

- improved match making for more lopsided matches
- random client crash

“CLASS” balance is decent as most classes have a viable build. “BUILD” balance is kittening awful however. The difference between things like say Power Reaper and Condition Reaper is insane. Builds designed to do the same job are smashed by massively differing levels of counters.

Projectiles being incredibly unreliable atm is another example.

Odds are anet will attempt to make the build diversity a bit wider. Likely attempting to buff underdeveloped skills/weapons/lines. Or nerf the presence of certain mechanics that hard counter many other potentially viable builds.

At least that is my guess at the moment.

what i would like to see:
general: any skill/trait that apply more than 1 condi will be reduced to one single condi (the others will be removed). Condition dmg formula from confusion and torment reduced.
Delete krait runes. Delete autofear proc nightmare rune 6.

Necro: remove the absurd AA3 autoattack scepter corruption. Make Corrupt boon NOT unblockable, no more marks unblockable (learn to time your skills kittening noob necros!!!)

Mesmer: Echo of Memory too rewarding, remove the summoning of the slow phantasm, they already getting alacrity from that, you also want to get 20 stack of might and inflict 20 stack of confusion while blocking?
Continuum Split don’t reverte anymore health, only endurance and cooldowns. Reason is i think this skill is too rewarding the safe playing mode.
Illusionary Retribution trait too OP and bursty. Change it in anything else but stop the easy stackable confusion from a safe spot and stop rewarding spamming ty.

Warrior: adrenal healt proc on hit, cleansing ire proc on USE. Buff that mace plz! MOAAAR (kidding).

Scrapper: healing too hard to interrupt, the animation is wrong, when you see it has already been casted.

Thief: remove Impacting Disruption, as i said already thief has too many way to interrupt opponent, and interrupting is already a greet debuff, no need to punish more the opponent.
Steal range downed to 240 range.

What will happen instead:
condi builds will be buffed even moar, to help those pvers who don’t know anithing about timing attacks, and rewarding spam, so that in esl finals we will still hear commentators screaming “look at that condi bomb” and start thinking “is this skill?”.

So i guess the balance patch isnt today then?

Balance patch isn’t today. But as compensation you can play lovely unranked matches with backpedaling pve roleplayers who die 3v1 and who complain about you to push far instead of caping close with 3 people

I only want one thing… Amulet with main stats precision & condition damage..minor stats would be healing power & toughness… Maybe then we can finally see condi ranger make a come back in over a year…

Yannir.4132:

Class balance is very good actually at the moment, I’m only expecting minor tweaks here and there.

Only exception is DH/Guardian, which isn’t in a bad place either but it could use some more competitiveness. I’m also expecting some targeting improvements for revenants.

Ranked matchmaking on the other hand still needs a lot of work. The current matchmaking is the best one yet, but it’s not enough. It should distribute classes more evenly, and not drop 2 thieves in the same team as it does now. Or make 1 team include 4 necromancers.

DH has 3 overarching problems from a competetive aspect:

1. Lack of build diversity; all non-trap, non-medi utilities are undertuned and so are their respective traitlines. Signets, consecrations and spirit weapons all need reworking and about 30 to 40% of all of our traits do as well.

2. Significant amount of outdated weapon skills on most weapons, especially mace, staff, torch and hammer. Even on our “meta” weapons we have seemingly outdated skills; i.e GS 5 is too slow, GS2 has projectiles which shouldn’t be projectiles, third sword auto attack is a projectile (shouldn’t be a projectile), focus cds are a bit too high.

3. Too many projectiles on guardian weapons/too much aoe reflect. Certain skills and traits on other classes need some nerfing (sand squall on tempest, defensive field on scrapper). This may not actually be a problem if the projectile property on some weapon skills was removed.

Played well DH are actually quite competetive. I have almost no problems playing DH in ranked or unranked if the opposing team is lacking a tempest.

-I want to see core specs become relevant through nerfing of especs. Pre HoT had some great balance and I’d rather go back to that.
-Really want to see every passive removed and then reworked into a different, non passive, effect.
-Want to see trait dependencies removed across the board (No class should have a mandatory line)
-Want to see a reduction in the spamabilty of skills. Skills should be deliberately used to give the best results in combat not spam buttons on the meta build and faceroll to victory.
-Would love to see immortal builds having reduced survivability to the point where they can still bunker, but they can be killed without needing to 3v1 them for 5+ minutes.

the current meta build pretty much balance . maybe small very small changes

the buff should be to create diversity

power mesmer with GS
thief with pistols with untireflect ability
DH – higher cd on traps
scrapper – reduce sustain passive trait
ele – reduce sustain passive trait like condi and healing. and bring back the power ele with more sustain to handle the fight
rev- buff ventari and dwarf abilities and energy management
necro – buff power and GS like faster hit rate
warrior – reduce sustain and healing abilities
ranger – reduce pets dmg and bring more pets diversity with buff

Necro GS to be sped up and damage reduced – maybe in line with Guardian GS – could be a PvP/WvW only change, even though A-net don’t like splitting skills.

messiah.1908:

the current meta build pretty much balance . maybe small very small changes

the buff should be to create diversity

power mesmer with GS
thief with pistols with untireflect ability
DH – higher cd on traps
scrapper – reduce sustain passive trait
ele – reduce sustain passive trait like condi and healing. and bring back the power ele with more sustain to handle the fight
rev- buff ventari and dwarf abilities and energy management
necro – buff power and GS like faster hit rate
warrior – reduce sustain and healing abilities
ranger – reduce pets dmg and bring more pets diversity with buff

Out of interest which sustain passive trait would you like to reduce next for the engi? Which is the concern?

I want/need magnetic aura as core engi (not the poopy random trait one), maybe as healing turret toolbelt!!!!!!!!! And longer immobilize on pistol 5 !!!!!! Just quality of life changes …..
Other than that i expect nerf of -50% damage reduction spells.

So many people afraid of nerfs, rofl. That’s not how Anet operates. If something is broken, they’ll just buff other things to be even more broken and the cycle continues.

My prediction:

DH gets a huge sustain buff.
Ele gets a minor sustain nerf, but DH will now be “better” for the role, so ele will disappear from relevance and people will cry that it needs a buff.

Thieves will be buffed extremely (Anet always continues buffing for at least 1 patch after pulling a class from “bad” to “good enough”) and be a terror next season.

Warriors will get more minor sustain buffs that will cement them as top-dawg for bruiser-type roles.

Necros will get damage buffs, but no sustain changes that they still need to avoid focus fire.

Scrappers, druids, and chronos will get a mix of buffs and nerfs, one will be deceptively important, taking the class out of competitive usability for a while.

Revenant is a wild-card, and will get changes that people cry make them useless (the current meta build disappears), but a new build will develop that keep them about as effective as currently.

BlackBeard.2873:

My prediction:

DH gets a huge sustain buff.
Ele gets a minor sustain nerf, but DH will now be “better” for the role, so ele will disappear from relevance and people will cry that it needs a buff.

Thieves will be buffed extremely (Anet always continues buffing for at least 1 patch after pulling a class from “bad” to “good enough”) and be a terror next season.

Warriors will get more minor sustain buffs that will cement them as top-dawg for bruiser-type roles.

Necros will get damage buffs, but no sustain changes that they still need to avoid focus fire.

Scrappers, druids, and chronos will get a mix of buffs and nerfs, one will be deceptively important, taking the class out of competitive usability for a while.

Revenant is a wild-card, and will get changes that people cry make them useless (the current meta build disappears), but a new build will develop that keep them about as effective as currently.

Well if ANet listened to people on forums, Scrappers, Eles, Chronos and thieves would be nerfed into the ground lol

I honestly don’t care about the balance changes for next season. I’m more interested in seeing the PvE PvP skill split. I want more personal DPS as a mesmer kitten

Yannir.4132:

Class balance is very good actually at the moment, I’m only expecting minor tweaks here and there.

Only exception is DH/Guardian, which isn’t in a bad place either but it could use some more competitiveness. I’m also expecting some targeting improvements for revenants.

Ranked matchmaking on the other hand still needs a lot of work. The current matchmaking is the best one yet, but it’s not enough. It should distribute classes more evenly, and not drop 2 thieves in the same team as it does now. Or make 1 team include 4 necromancers.

You MUST be joking. Class balance is ATROCIOUS.

There’s only balance within HoT elite specs, but not in pvp. HoT builds have severely dumbed down this game. Yeah I’m bitter. PvP used to take some SKILL, now it’s just run your fingers across the keyboard and you get instant results. HoT builds are ridiculously powerful.

JTGuevara.9018:

Yannir.4132:

Class balance is very good actually at the moment, I’m only expecting minor tweaks here and there.

Only exception is DH/Guardian, which isn’t in a bad place either but it could use some more competitiveness. I’m also expecting some targeting improvements for revenants.

Ranked matchmaking on the other hand still needs a lot of work. The current matchmaking is the best one yet, but it’s not enough. It should distribute classes more evenly, and not drop 2 thieves in the same team as it does now. Or make 1 team include 4 necromancers.

LoL good old s\d Thief is looking at u from above)

You MUST be joking. Class balance is ATROCIOUS.

There’s only balance within HoT elite specs, but not in pvp. HoT builds have severely dumbed down this game. Yeah I’m bitter. PvP used to take some SKILL, now it’s just run your fingers across the keyboard and you get instant results. HoT builds are ridiculously powerful.

I think:

Ele-Less team support, more self support. A bunker should be just that, keeping themselves alive, not making everyone else around them a bunker.

Necro-Fine except for the Scepter AA boon corrupt. That is not skillful and should not be rewarding as a result.

Mesmer-Fine as is

Engi-Needs less reflect uptime and gyros shouldn’t self-destruct on expiration

Thief-Remove evades from weapon sets, we have enough as is (looking at you Vault and Death Blossom spammers). Give impacting disruption an ICD.

Ranger-Fine as is

Revenant-Fine as is

Warrior-Mace F1 nerf and small adrenal health shave

Guard-Fine as is, especially if all of the above get nerfs

Revitalize alternative weapon sets (Engi shield, ele staff, necro dagger, mesmer OH sword, thief OH dagger, ranger warhorn and axe, war OH sword, guard scepter)