Guild Wars 2

I’m ready for the salt and hate for this post but before you rage on me or tell me I need to L2P (Learn to Play) hear me out. I believe the new specializations need a serious balance. From Reapers chill damage to Engineers 20 second Stealth gyro. I’ve posted on forums about this before but I wanted to make a more serious note to these skills and traits in general. I believe PvP should be skill based and not who ever skills are most “Over powered than the other” wins. Guardian or the new specialization “Dragon Hunter” is very oppressive , from the 4 second cool-down on True Shot , to the traps activating and dealing massive damage even when a player dodges through them. I believe the skills need either a higher cool-down or a damage reduction. There’s even traits that make the cool-down reduced. Another skill such as the “Shield of Courage” virtue is a bit over powered. Not only does it give frontal blocks from all attacks the Hit-Box on trying to hit the player using it from behind is extremely small. The tool-tip for this skill says it blocks projectiles it does not say it blocks all damage from all sides of the player but behind. “Wings of Resolve” virtue does massive healing , which i don’t think is a problem too much other than it is base 3890 heal, where as Virtue of Resolve only heals at base for 1625, which no Healing power included. Massive jump in damage from just a Guardian becoming Dragon Hunter. Last skill on Dragon Hunter is the “Spear of Justice” there’s virtually no animation or indication to tell this skill is about to hit; Its faster than binding blades ! My suggestion would be to add a little flash to this skill just like they did with Warriors Pin-down skill on bow. There’s at least an indication it will go off and allow the player to dodge it. The skill would come in where the DH could time this pin-down right after a dodge roll or knowing how many dodges the enemy has left to time this skill perfectly, rather than just instantly having the spear locked on to someone even as they go into stealth.
Moving on to the next would be Scrapper. Not too much about this class other than the fact that every gyro has a 20 second cool-down . Especially the Elite skill , stealth gyro which is basically a moving thief’s shadow refuge. This Elite skill gives more stealth than PU Mesmer Mass invisibility which they had to NERF because it was too oppressive. So why did they think a moving Shadow Refuge stealth would be ok? that continuously gives 4 stealth stacks every pulse. My suggestion would be to increase the cool-down and reduce the stealth stacks , if it’s to be balanced correctly. Or change the mechanic of the stealth gyro so that if you leave circle you are revealed.
Next we have Revenants. A trait I really want to address is “Unwavering Avoidance”. This trait has no ICD , every trait that continuously deals damage or give a boon should at least have an ICD. This skill matched with "Enhanced Bulwark " gives 2 stability on dodge roll. Surprisingly though Enhanced Bulwark has a 1 second ICD but not Unwavering Avoidance. Also a Grandmaster trait called Roiling mist gives Revenants 100% crit chance on sustained fury . This is great and all but 100% crit chance ? Why 100% ? Why not 50% ? why not even increases precision by 150 along with power or something? 100% meaning none of their hits are ever gonna hit regular unless fumble is applied . When a Revenant is using Herald Elite specialization they constantly have fury applied along with 50% boon duration . Very oppressive in my opinion. They have evades on almost all their skills not to forget the fact that using Legendary Assassin Stance skill “Riposting Shadows” gives them 50 endurance gain , giving them more dodge rolls and even more Stability stacks with no ICD on Unwavering Avoidance + the boon duration making them able to stack at least 8 stacks of stability. All in all infinite stability stacks if you time the dodges correctly , which even the most average player can do with out any skill or effort.
Lastly I would like to address Druid and Reaper . Druid’s Avatar form is known to be healing elite specialization skill. Even base heals on a full berserk stat; healing druids are extremely effective. I think the heals were already addressed before in a previous patch but i think a fine tune could be addressed a bit more. And final , Reapers and chill damage from the Grandmaster trait Deathly chill. I think the base chill damage is a bit high, considering the fact that just about every skill from Reaper applies chill.
Thats all i have to say about the new specializations and the balance changes. It’s great that these specializations were built mainly to fight monsters in PVE but when it comes to PVP ; the core of the game basically , all of these skills i have addressed are way over powered. I hope you get a chance to read this with out ignorant comments included and understand that I am not trying to bash the game, I love guild wars i’ve been playing Gw2 and Gw1 for 3 years. I am a concerned player that believes this game has a LOT of potential and it can do better . It revolutionized MMORPG’s since the start back in 2012 .

Druid is fine; they just made it pretty much useless. Again. Hell, it wasn’t even that bad before the nerf. The problem with reaper, more than the damage, is that it’s permanent chill. There’s a reason why, before HoT, chill was limited to a few seconds at a time. The increased cooldowns alone are enough to decide the outcome of the fight.

I hope the Balance patch reviews ALL skills .. and allow more skill based PvP and not trait / utilities based. cause right now Guild wars 2 is NOT fun to play . Esspecially fighting infinite block Guardians and Super condition dmg Revenants. Condition revenants is the worse i seen so far. The unblockable confusion skill is just horrible to fight against . cause it removes the boon and then applies 3 stacks of confusion.

As frustrated as you are, you need to realize that almost all the staff is ON VACATION. Nothing will happen until they come back mid, yes MID January to even bother to start looking at it. The only thing to really blame is A-Net choosing to release leagues when they were all on vacation instead of even trying to monitor the kitten thing.

The first thing I’ve noticed behind the power creep in especs is the fact that rather than modifying and adding new types of play to the class mechanic, all they did was straight up buff them with no regard to the vanilla classes. Take guard to dh convertion for example. You listed all the changed virtues but when you think about it, there is no new role opened up by these virtues and if you compare them to the guardian, they are more useful under any situation making the dh a guard on steroids, not a new type of subprof. Same with Ranger to Druid, Druid is ranger with perma cc, ridiculously strong pets (full bunker druid can still kill things in good time due to the pets having big af damage for no skill or setup on the ranger’s part) and a super saiyan heal form. Right now, there’s no reason to not go into especs as just picking the line will improve your build under any circumstance.

Next change that needs to happen is REMOVAL of ALL passive invulns and counter cc’s. There is nothing interesting to watch or play with about a no skill, 0 counterplay cc that interrupt’s everything you’re doing and a majority of the time ends up screwing you rather than just equilizing the playing field. And why should people get free passes on death when you set up a really strong combo to down them? If you have to take the time to set up bursts and such through their heals and evades why should they get a free invuln? They didn’t do anything but get their kittens kicked.

Third is split pvp and pve balance. There are too many differences between the game modes for that stuff to be the same. You either screw the pver’s because the damage is so low they can’t kill things in good time or you destroy pvp because everyone has 1 shot builds. Splitting the balance will allow for better number changes and more efficient changes rather than a bunch of band aid fixes to try to keep the game intact.

4) Balance ideals need to change. What I mean is sacrifice needs to be part of creating builds. Thief is a very good example of this, they can never have the perfect build as they always have to sacrifice something in order to get something else for the build. As it is right now, so much power creep has happened because the devs focused so much on synergy that now everyone (except warrior and thief) has some sort of god mode be all end all build. Yes synergy is good but atm there is too much of it and it’s ruining the game.

5) Base everything needs to be reduced across the board (except warrior and thief, they are suffering enough) and scaling needs to be increased. People should have to invest in healing power if they want huge heals, should have to spec into crit and power heavily for insane bursts, etc. Right now people can run cele with 0 might and still get 4k crits on some skills because the base damage is so high and then zerkers are only getting 5-6k on the same stuff because it doesn’t scale well so why run anything but bunker in this meta if you still deal damage anyway?

6) Changes to vanilla classes need to be addressed. Thief needs a few buffs to some sets, warrior needs some love, base Mesmer could use a look, guardian needs some changes. Balancing the base classes will make balancing especs easier as it will be much easier to determine if an issue on the class is within the elite spec or the core specs.

7) Remove the mandatory nature of many traitlines by adding baselines where they are needed and spreading the remaining effects throughout the class. Take trickery on the thief for example, things like preparedness and slight of hand are needed for the class to have a basic function, blind for the d/d set, etc. Certain baselines being added could reduce dependencies on trailines and possibly lead to more diversity after compensating balance occurs.

8) Remove the idea of evade/invuln and damage simultaneously. It’s a bad mechanic to have people be practically invulnerable but still doing high damage. Things like flanking strike are ok because the damae is after the evade and is therefore counterable via cc, things like unrelenting assault are too strong considering there’s 0 risk attached to the skill and 0 ways to stop the damage without blowing through all your dodges and blocks.

9) Reaper perma chill either needs to go or have its damage reduced significantly. 600+ damage per sec permanently is not fun especially when it also lowers cd’s on skills that may be able to remove it. If lowering the damage isn’t gonna happen then the perma stack needs to leave, it should be in short durations but then keep it’s heavy damage so it acts like terrormancer and does burst condi when the wielder chooses to unleash it.

10) Hard counters need to be looked at. It’s not healthy for a game when someone can’t win a matchup no matter how good they are just because someone had a certain build. Soft counters are good because it allows counterpicking and adaptive gameplay as people have to constantly be thinking how to shift the advantage to their team. Hard counters are silly. Take DH vs. Thief, thief in order to do damage needs to be up close and do the damage quick. Guard can just block and do even bigger damage to said thief and then outheal any damage the thief did while doing more damage. Not saying guards should have blocks but maybe the whole block and do damage at the same time thing needs to be looked at too. At least amking attempts to reduce hard counters will take great strides towards achieving game balance.

These are just general suggestions. I have specifics but that’s not for this thread.

Edit: Perma cc= bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad. Needs to go.

I can’t agree more with you. However, you did make a slight mistake, the revenant does not get a 100% crit chance. It’s a 100% Crit effectiveness (it’s what the trait says) i tested it on the golems and it is indeed no 100% crit chance. However, what the mean by crit effectiveness is something i don’t know. I guess they are trying to mix things up and by crit effectiveness they mean ferocity, meaning crit damage? Anet is just messing things up on PvP. Too many builds are too easy to ‘climb high’ with. And even when you get high, there is absolutely NO difference in skill. In every league you have a sh*tload amount of noobs messing your game up, or afk’ers.

Gonna talk a bit about reaper since its the only class I play besides warrior (but they sucks so no one cares)

I think reaper is in a fairly good place.

First, contrary to the popular belief, reaper doesn’t have more chill than base necro. It makes chill stronger, and it makes it last 20% longer,but it actually have less chill application (it trades a long chill on a low cd skill for 2 chills on long cd easily avoidable skills)

Secondly, its not just a straight up better version of base necro. It might be stronger (and quite frankly I’m not even sure about that) but it’s mostly different. Death shroud has more straight power while reaper has stability and mobility. You have to give up a good trait line to take reaper, and reaper’s trait are not especially better than other trait lines.

Reaper might need a few number tweaks,but overall its a well designed spec.

The other specs though, have fundamental design issues because they just give you new mechanics instead of trading for something. As for balance, I think DH and druid are ok, daredevil is a bit UP, berserker is pure crap, tempest i cant really say since my biggest issue with them is the stupid diamond skin which is more of a design issue than a balance one, revenant looks extremely broken, sustain is insane for a spec, same for scrapper, and mesmer is just conpletely fun sucking with all those invul, block, dodge…

chibbi.3706:

Gonna talk a bit about reaper since its the only class I play besides warrior (but they sucks so no one cares)

I think reaper is in a fairly good place.

First, contrary to the popular belief, reaper doesn’t have more chill than base necro. It makes chill stronger, and it makes it last 20% longer,but it actually have less chill application (it trades a long chill on a low cd skill for 2 chills on long cd easily avoidable skills)

Secondly, its not just a straight up better version of base necro. It might be stronger (and quite frankly I’m not even sure about that) but it’s mostly different. Death shroud has more straight power while reaper has stability and mobility. You have to give up a good trait line to take reaper, and reaper’s trait are not especially better than other trait lines.

Reaper might need a few number tweaks,but overall its a well designed spec.

The other specs though, have fundamental design issues because they just give you new mechanics instead of trading for something. As for balance, I think DH and druid are ok, daredevil is a bit UP, berserker is pure crap, tempest i cant really say since my biggest issue with them is the stupid diamond skin which is more of à design issue than à balance one, revenant looks extremely broken, sustain is insane for a spec, same for scrapper, and mesmer is just conpletely fun sucking with all those invul, block, dodge…

I think one of the reasons people say reaper has more chill is…because it does. The whole “fear applies chill” thing actually adds 3 new chill sources to a reaper.

Nightmare runes. Which nearly EVERY reaper in PvP is taking.

Reaper shroud aoe fear.

And Staff 5 which is more often than not unblockable.

Thats a large amount of extra fear.

Also any fear from boon corrupts as well

If you add all that in. And add the damage on chill. And also take into account all the free damage you can land because they simply WON’T have enough condi removal to get rid of it all. And you can start to see why people are bothered by chill.

Theres a reason the only builds that can handle condi reapers on point are either those that are immune (DS Tempests) or builds that specialize in simply not taking the damage at all. Evasion/invuln/block spammers.

Right, I actually forgot about this trait. This needs to be nerfed, or even better, reworked. Something like adding a 20s icd.

Soulsignnuub.2098:

I can’t agree more with you. However, you did make a slight mistake, the revenant does not get a 100% crit chance. It’s a 100% Crit effectiveness (it’s what the trait says) i tested it on the golems and it is indeed no 100% crit chance. However, what the mean by crit effectiveness is something i don’t know. I guess they are trying to mix things up and by crit effectiveness they mean ferocity, meaning crit damage? Anet is just messing things up on PvP. Too many builds are too easy to ‘climb high’ with. And even when you get high, there is absolutely NO difference in skill. In every league you have a sh*tload amount of noobs messing your game up, or afk’ers.

Fury gives you +40% crit rather than +20% if you take the trait in the invocation line.

Everybody with druid is ok?! You lost your minds? Or you didn’t played against ruby or diamond druids?! They are so over powered with healing that u want to cry, they even kill a full health Reaper with full life force… not to mention they easily kill DH. You lost your minds, talking kitten?!
Or you are druids and don’t want nerf?

LordOtto.2650:

Everybody with druid is ok?! You lost your minds? Or you didn’t played against ruby or diamond druids?! They are so over powered with healing that u want to cry, they even kill a full health Reaper with full life force… not to mention they easily kill DH. You lost your minds, talking kitten?!
Or you are druids and don’t want nerf?

Bristleback OP confirmed.

We strongly believe that regular balance updates are one of the key pillars of building a successful competitive game. As such, prior to each season, there will be a balance update. League play will generally begin about two weeks after a balance update to ensure that the metagame has stabilized in an appropriate manner. Balance will be closely monitored throughout the season with the goal of having solid balance going into the postseason tournaments. -Anet

We strongly believe that condi revs are one of the key pillars of building a successful competitive game. As such, prior to each season, there will be no balance updates. League play will generally begin about two weeks after a balance update to ensure that the metagame remains in the worst state in game history. Balance will not be closely monitored throughout the season with the goal of having three viable builds going into the postseason tournaments. -Anet

It’s like we don’t know that Anet completely screwed up on their balancing with leagues.

Meanwhile, we have the same cheeser builds running around running the game.

LordOtto.2650:

Everybody with druid is ok?! You lost your minds? Or you didn’t played against ruby or diamond druids?! They are so over powered with healing that u want to cry, they even kill a full health Reaper with full life force… not to mention they easily kill DH. You lost your minds, talking kitten?!
Or you are druids and don’t want nerf?

First of all, I’ve never seen a druid beat a reaper easily. Even if they don’t die to it, they simply don’t have that much damage. But, aside from that, you need to look at the dates of posts before you reply. I assume that you’re referring to mine, since I was the only one to mention druids, and that post was made soon after they changed AF so that it drains within a few seconds of leaving combat, and before the bunker meta. At that point, it was literally impossible to use CAF during a typical fight; on my druid, I would only get to use CAF twice per game at best. Obviously they’ve changed it since then, but it still isn’t nearly as bad as condi reapers and bunker tempests.

chibbi.3706:

Right, I actually forgot about this trait. This needs to be nerfed, or even better, reworked. Something like adding a 20s icd.

All it needs is a duration nerf because without the trait using anything with fear would cause people and mobs to usain bolt away from you out of melee in which the spec is designed to fight. That is the reason the trait exists in the first place to keep people in melee range when you fear them.

I can see an argument for nerfing shivers of dread from 3 to 2 seconds. Sounds like a very reasonable nerf to me.