Guild Wars 2

Patch Notes on July 9th

Chaos Armor: This skill no longer automatically applies protection when activated. This buff now provides an equal chance to trigger regeneration, swiftness, or protection on hit with a 1-second internal recharge. The random condition applied now has a 1-second internal recharge per target. These changes apply to the Chaos Armor provided through combo finishers as well.———

I’ve been playing staff since it’s change on July 9th. And personally I don’t understand why there should be a interval recharge on chaos armor to begin with. You cast chaos armor, and if the caster get’s struck, the target get’s a condition, simple as that. Personally I feel this change was not needed. By doing so in effect nerfed the trait blinding befuddlement because chaos armor as you know was a great source of blind, therefore stacking decent confusion “depending on your target”, therefore in which lies the problem. Targets that have fast attack speed such as Ele or thief, chaos armor and blinding befuddlement together was good counter play. But for slower classes such as guardians, and necros, there was not as big of a effect, therefore giving other classes counter play towards it.

In conclusion, doing this change was not necessary. It therefore effected not only the skill itself, but traits as well. Even the way it was before “with” blinding befuddlement was not a serious threat to every class, but the contrary. Therefore making it balanced, and fun. Please consider this.

Countless

I agree with your idea because the original nerf was aimed at elementalists access to frost aura, causing some classes to be hugely punished for hitting into it (due to the timer it is up you pretty much needed to play into it). I agree that frost aura may have been a little too powerful but perhaps the duration of the chill could have been adjusted instead of deciding to hurt all of the abilities (Chaos armor, Fire shield, Shocking aura, frost armor).

It was not like the nerf was placed equally on all abilities either, for example frost armor has a higher duration, and a 1s recharge CD and grants 10% dmg reduction, shocking aura has a 4s duration and a 2s recharge CD no bonus, and fire shield has a regular duration (5s) while having the 1s recharge CD and gives 1 stack of might on trigger. Chaos armor in the latest patch was brought in line to have a recharge cooldown similar to the others, however it was not granted any bonus as it already had a positive effect on it. However due to these treatments that seem to be more for “consistency” than for actual balance we have to throw in the spoiled brother of all these abilities, retaliation. Why is this the only one to have a super high uptime, while at the same time has no interval recharge? I am for all the defensive abilities being treated equally and I believe removing the interval recharge from all of them (while removing the positive added effects) would increase the ability to distinguish a good player from a bad player, while also lowering certain powerful passive abilities effect by duration (frost) and re-evaluating others based on power and uptime (retal) so these passive effects can be used to swing fights based on skillful deployment of an ability.

Just my thoughts though.

side rant:
It seems as the patches come through a bunch of effort has gone through to NORMALIZE the skill level of players. This is the opposite of what any game going for e-sports should be doing. In order to bring out the fan base and impress people you have to be able to showcase skillful implementation of classes, showing that it can be played at a higher level. If all the skill levels are going to be artificially limited (such as pet abilities not being fully controlled) then the skill level difference will not be observed by a casual observer which is a large problem.