Guild Wars 2

Here’s a few things that I think are too strong at the moment.

Greatsword Mesmer – The damage is just insane, if S/D thief or Necro ever get nerfed (mesmers counters) the greatsword mesmer will just range from afar destroying people while his teammates make sure nothing gets to him.

Elementalist Burst combo – You can chain many instant cast abilities together and affectively do what any dagger thief does and bring someone from 100-0 in split seconds, but as an elementalist you bring so much more to a team than a dagger thief. Arcane spells are to blame in my opinion. Weaken arcane spell damage drastically (damage halved or a little more) but give them some kind of utility. Say… make elemental surge base line? Just reduce the burning to 3 seconds. 5 seconds would be too strong. And maybe make air spells 2 seconds of weakness because so much access to blinds is also pretty crazy. Yeah just tone down the base line elemental surge and all is well.

Necromancers – I think the rest of the forums can tell you about this one.

Sword/Dagger Thief – It just dodges too much. It is often the biggest threat on the enemy team but also the last thing you wanna focus because you will end up wasting all your spells on him while he’s dodging. Alternatively you could leave the thief himself really strong but reduce his utility. Shadow Refuge is just as strong of a rez utility as any other in my opinion if not stronger and is only on a 60 second cooldown. Lyssa runes are also pretty strong, reduce boon duration to 5 seconds instead of 10? Obviously nerfing all of this is way too much. Just choose 1 or 2. It’s also kind of odd that flanking strike aoe cleaves. That dagger has quite the wide range of attack!

Weakness – This condition went from not affecting critical strikes at all to absolutely destroying them. My arcane spells can hit a 1600 toughness necromancer for about 1700 average but if it glances from weakness it just went down to 360 damage. That is an absolutely drastic reduction of damage on top of reducing my endurance regeneration. It’s also entirely plausible to get 20+ seconds of weakness on you quite often from necromancers.

Stealth – This is the biggest one for me and I talked about this a long time ago in the SOTG and it’s just gotten more and more out of control. If you have two sources of long stealths in your teams line up your options at any point in the game and especially at the beginning are limitless.

There HAS to be a limit on how much stealth you can get. 6-7 seconds sounds reasonable to me but even then with two sources of stealth that is 12-14 seconds which will still give you tons of options and advantages over the other team. Stealth is a REALLY tough one to balance. As it is now people are walking around the map all leisure like for 30 seconds just talking amongst themselves like “Well I dunno who do you wanna 1 shot? We’ll 1 shot jimmy, no… bob! Well actually lets not even attack this node, onward to the enemy close point! Okay we are all here? Roger Roger. 3 2 4.. I can’t count… go! success! that other team can’t counter our amazing strat lol!”

Another solution is to give stealth some sort of counter.

AOE damage has been talked about in the past and I feel like nerfs to Ele burst/greatsword mesmer/necro actually solves this pretty well.

Discuss away but please be constructive.

Phantaram.1265:

Elementalist Burst combo – You can chain many instant cast abilities together and affectively do what any dagger thief does and bring someone from 100-0 in split seconds, but as an elementalist you bring so much more to a team than a dagger thief. Arcane spells are to blame in my opinion. Weaken arcane spell damage drastically (100% – 125% less damage) but give them some kind of utility. Say… make elemental surge base line? Just reduce the burning to 3 seconds. 5 seconds would be too strong. And maybe make air spells 2 seconds of weakness because so much access to blinds is also pretty crazy. Yeah just tone down the base line elemental surge and all is well.

Just to add in some practical evidence.

And yea, stealth can only be balanced by removing it.

Have to agree on everything here. AoE-stealth is out of hand, but also is a huge tactical aspect in game-play. Therefore it has to be treated very carefully, as without it conquest would be even more predictable as it is nowadays. Especially after a lost-teamfight AoE-stealth can produce very surprising and game-changing moments (I really like that in the bunker-meta nowadays).

Phantaram.1265:

Weaken arcane spell damage drastically (100% – 125% less damage) but give them some kind of utility.

Wait wait wait.
Are you suggesting to reduce the Arcane spells damage to below 0?
Like, instead of dealing damage it heals your enemy for the 25% of their actual damage?

I’d also add in Mesmer sword mainhand – Blurred Frenzy and a crippling clone generator/teleport/stunbreaker that is Illusionary Leap are just way too good.

sorrow.2364:

Phantaram.1265:

Weaken arcane spell damage drastically (100% – 125% less damage) but give them some kind of utility.

Wait wait wait.
Are you suggesting to reduce the Arcane spells damage to below 0?
Like, instead of dealing damage it heals your enemy for the 25% of their actual damage?

Don’t ask my mind was elsewhere when typing that hahaha.

I think AoE stealth is fine. It’s all about unpredictability, and removing that will just make the game stale.

The one thing I always do is check if the enemy team has a thief, if they have a thief or Engie, I expect a stealth play at any and every point after they have been wiped.

Changing ele arcane could be a solution but by themselves I don’t find arcane op. It’s more that they and earth-air burst is basicly all instant cast. Instant cast skills are always going to cause issues in gw2. Too much is reliant on dodging and it’s hard to dodge which happens instantly with really no tell.

S/D Thief’s- It’s another vigor spam build with evades on weapons. They get what 10s of vigor when they use there heal? Which is it’s self a evade with 15s cd. I kind of think they need to nerf vigor to something like 66% instead of 100%. Seem’s like all the top classes rely on high uptime on vigor to survive(except necro).

Stealth – I would like to see a 8s cap as well. Always thought ranger sick’em should follow people through stealth. I know the wvw’ers would love that.

Nikkle.4013:

Changing ele arcane could be a solution but by themselves I don’t find arcane op. It’s more that they and earth-air burst is basicly all instant cast. Instant cast skills are always going to cause issues in gw2.

Yeah there can be multiple solutions to ele burst but I think we can knock out 2 birds with 1 stone by doing this to arcane spells. Lets look at this realistically and compare arcane spells to all other utilities in the game… pretty uninteresting. Ele surge is what actually makes them a UTILITY and not just a way to up the elementalists damage haha. Also if you go try to do the elementalist burst combo without arcane spells, well, it feels really wimpy.

i play engi and think too aoe stealth is way too strong (long)
should be something like 3 second and next blast finisher +2 sec next +1sec – done – max 3 stacks

and agree with ele – not many play it good but the burst potential is just insane – i dont think it need a dmg nerf on spells but maby some icd on arcanespells ( or all INSTANT spells somhow 0,25 sec cd so they are nearly instant but cant chain all in one)

its same with shatter mesmers – just too high burst potential AND its aoe

their should be no ONE-SHOT (even many spells in a chain) situations ingame – its frustrating and ppl need a chance to react

maby remove berserker amulet^^ (or give it -vita )

edit: and for the s/d thief problem – evadespells have to cost endurance – simple. Thats the resource for it and its insane a thief or ranger can spam a spell and dodge everything while making dmg

Phantaram.1265:

Yeah there can be multiple solutions to ele burst but I think we can knock out 2 birds with 1 stone by doing this to arcane spells. Lets look at this realistically and compare arcane spells to all other utilities in the game… pretty uninteresting. Ele surge is what actually makes them a UTILITY and not just a way to up the elementalists damage haha. Also if you go try to do the elementalist burst combo without arcane spells, well, it feels really wimpy.

Fair argument, would be nice to see utility skills to gain some utility on my ele. Really just arguing against burst without cast times. People don’t really complain when they get chunked by a phoenix or a fire grab, they can always say “why didn’t I dodge/blind that”. With instant casts you have to be either a telepath or can see the future. I think instant cast damage skills are a bad design, can’t really expect anet to change that though. Idk, with the new lf earth-air is still pretty mean without the arcanes.

Weakness-Good stuff however having it go on the strongest offensive classes is just kind of kittened. Let some bunker classes get at that.
Conditions-Biggest gripe in the game. Everything else people can deal with as far as hard counters go. Skills that inflict conditions compared to skills that remove conditions are just way off balanced…. Trait reworks or something like X% reduced condition damage for each unique condition on you.
Mesmers-Phantasm damage needs reduced. Not directly no no no not that way. However the trait empowered illusions needs to be removed or replaced with something else. Phantasm mesmers are the only OP Mesmer spec right now. Moa even people that have mained Mesmer since beta think moa should go and be replaced with an elite phantasm or another elite of some kind. Beyond that give mesmers better condi removal and they will be in a good spot
Guard-Overall okay…
Warrior- They are just adding to the AOE condi spam with the sword/sword LB combo.
Thief-It has gone from HS hero to LS hero… LS needs to be blockable so there is better counter play…
Necros-Give better survivability. Get rid of dhuumfire and do something about the insane amount of damage fear does from terror.
Ele-Good changes. Could prolly use a little bit more love on the bunker end of things.
Engi-Nerf HGH mainly through making might stack runes on par with boon/protection duration runes in pvp. 15% instead of 20% and bring the stunbreak back to elixir R that was a bad move guys.

Far point/bomb engis – Just way too strong. The only counter to it is a necromancer (which we know will be nerfed). And even then the necromancer cannot stay on the point so it will get decapped anyway. This build beats everything else 1 on 1 with extreme ease AND, further to this, even if they cant kill the other person 1 on 1 then all their knockbacks will still decap the point. Being able to res yourself is just broken. The amount of spam is ridiculous. They can get so many conditions on someone by just pew-pew ing. The burning is too much I think.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Far point/bomb engis – Just way too strong. The only counter to it is a necromancer (which we know will be nerfed). And even then the necromancer cannot stay on the point so it will get decapped anyway. This build beats everything else 1 on 1 with extreme ease AND, further to this, even if they cant kill the other person 1 on 1 then all their knockbacks will still decap the point. Being able to res yourself is just broken. The amount of spam is ridiculous. They can get so many conditions on someone by just pew-pew ing. The burning is too much I think.

it doesn’t beat my warrior with extreme ease at all, probably the other way around. But it has less team utility than a BM ranger beside some cc and more selfish stability than a guardian

Guardian;
consecrations rarely get used because the CD are exhaustive and they are entirely situational. They often give a defense area that if other players try to take advantage of, it only groups them tightly for AoE damage and reduces their ability to move.

Meditations do subpar damage in comparisons to their recharge.

All signets are vanilla, but lacking vanilla flavour. Signet of mercy healing benefit is dramatically too low. Its group rez is patchy if it works or not. Bane signet sounds good, but its secondary knockdown does dreadful damage in comparison to its cooldown. The other signets follow this suit..they provide what seems like a good passive that isn’t altogether that great and their secondary effects are unimaginative.

Their weapon skills are horribly transparent and easy to avoid. Too many stalls, slow and painfully bright animations and much like the warrior, their gap closers apart from flashing blade often over shoot or rubberband. Self rooting on a channeled skill that only does 1.8-2.2k damage, even if it does reflect projectiles is damaging them. In fact self root on any melee is damaging them.

Their heavy armour provides no real advantage. In gw1 a heavy with shield took 50% less damage than a squishy. The armour meant something, and hence, so did armour penetrating skills and armour affecting conditions.

Their elite use apart from renewed focus is clumsy and blind. The first time a player uses any of the books they don’t actually know what it is going to do. The cast times on the books and self rooting again make it out and out ugly to use.

Too many inferior, unimaginative traits, also too many similiar traits. One to make wards bigger. Another to make them last longer. Another so they heal. Another so they damage..but no description of how big, how long, how much. In a fast moving game, which you describe in your own pre release video has describing as having aspects of F.P.S..a ward you place on the ground is begging that people will come stand in it for it to do anything useful, or require you to stand it. Considering 5 out 8 professions are ranged..this is perhaps as useful as making the edge of the dart board bigger. Making the wall the dart is on bigger, but doing nothing to make the bulls eye more accessible or any scoring area’s more easily targeted. Also skills that require you to be set on fire to work, so you do set yourself on fire, and then realise, this only works if a enemy sets you on fire..not when you do it to yourself with your own torch skill. Burning has the shortest duratons usually of all conditions..again,..too many traits like this that are just not useful in any way to controlling how you want to position and play.

Spirit weapons are dead as dead. All I will say is that I saw them used in tpvp by a pug team. The guardian in question got laughed at in chat panel. Their damage is low, their HP even lower and require heavy spec in grand master traits to make less laughable in pvp and dungeons, but still laughable.

Aegis gives a single block…not exactly game changing, or over powered. Blocks across the board need better after affects. A thief in stealth that gets blocked gets to try again, a channeled skills first tick gets block, nothing after that. The stand alone block provides nothing of substance that would make a person want to use blocks in timely manner. So far they are used preemptively to upset chained attack sequences..there is no strong reason to sit on them for very specific use. Hence why guardian take retreat from the movement buff..the aegis is just a tiny extra bonus.

No swiftness apart from shouts.

Hammer is clunky and painful to use against all high attack speed professions or ranged professions..so basically anyone..it only becomes useful in 1 vs 1 node attack/defense. Not to mention the huge knockback now places the target out of your reach if you manage to hit them.

Hammers 5 skill “Create a barrier enemies cannot pass through.” Engineers rifle knockback will knock them out of it. A guardians own spirit hammer will knock them out of it…again, too many skills that are worded badly and don’t follow the function they are stated as.

Despite all this, I quite guardian..they’re not entirely broken,..just subpar at everything but standing still in a node and not moving much…they are just very badly bend in many places…but little tweaks would make them far more enjoyable to play.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

Guardian;
No swiftness apart from shouts.

Sorry to be pedantic but:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Symbol_of_Swiftness

The problem with balancing Burst Eles, is that each skill is fine by itself. Lightning Strike is a decent skill when used isolated. Arcane skills are decent skills when used isolated. But the sum of it all leads to a really strong instant-cast combo. In that way, I’d say that turning the arcane skills from burst skills to utility skills (lol) is a clever idea. Keep the automatic critical for the sake of activating traits and sigils, but low the damage for something else.

However, is adding conditions (or boons) a good choice? In my opinion, GW2 already suffers a bit from too much access to conditions and boons. Almost every action and traits adds one of them, and that ends up filling the UI bar with plenty of icons. I don’t feel the combat is very strategical when it turns into a condition/ boon spamfest. Maybe if the combat’s pace was slower, it wouldn’t be a problem, but GW2’s combat is pretty fast. But then again, how many interesting ways are there to make skills diversified and interesting without adding more conditions/ boons?

But if something like this were to happen, Fresh Air would probably be a bit underpowered, no? It’s already restricted in use (only works well with scepter), so should this trait become useless someday, I would recommend fusing it with Aeromancer’s Alacrity (-20% cooldown), especially to make it more distinct from Tempest Defense (which is already a burst trait, even though it’s a bit niche), and to make it more useful to other weapon sets.

The arcane skills aren’t decent when used in isolation. No one runs arcane blast or wave alone, and shield is entirely underwhelming as a defensive option when compared to flash or mist. Additionally, arcane power is completely useless unless you’ve got a specific burst combo to use it with.

That’s the problem; they’re trash or they’re an instant 80% of your life as currently designed.

Good thread, I’ll give my feedback to the initial post before adding anything extra to the list.

Phantaram.1265:

Greatsword Mesmer – The damage is just insane, if S/D thief or Necro ever get nerfed (mesmers counters) the greatsword mesmer will just range from afar destroying people while his teammates make sure nothing gets to him.

Sword/Dagger Thief – It just dodges too much. It is often the biggest threat on the enemy team but also the last thing you wanna focus because you will end up wasting all your spells on him while he’s dodging. Alternatively you could leave the thief himself really strong but reduce his utility. Shadow Refuge is just as strong of a rez utility as any other in my opinion if not stronger and is only on a 60 second cooldown. Lyssa runes are also pretty strong, reduce boon duration to 5 seconds instead of 10? Obviously nerfing all of this is way too much. Just choose 1 or 2. It’s also kind of odd that flanking strike aoe cleaves. That dagger has quite the wide range of attack!

These two builds (along with some other) have two very important things in common: nearly permanent access to vigor and sigils of energy. This was discussed a bit in a thread about a month ago concerning perma evasion but it is worth mentioning again.

GS Shatter Mesmers are able to sit up on ledges uncontested on many maps under little pressure to dodge evasively; thus all of their dodges are able to be used for clone production for spam shatters from afar pushing their DPS over the top. Should they be put under pressure they are able to fall back on a multitude of defensive utility skills AND absurdly high endurance regeneration. There is another issue with the build in the fact that all of their damage and offensive utility (boon strips, damage increases) comes from weapons and traits so their utilities are able to be devoted wholly to team utility (portal, illusion of life) or defense (blink, portal – yes its both, decoy).

S/D Thief again is a huge abuser of sigils of energy. Withdraw gives it nearly perma vigor when traited to add into the evasion spam. The build has seen a decline in the NA scene since the nerfs last patch and I don’t think it is necessarily OP. It is however very annoying, offers little in terms of counter play (as you pointed out above) and is over all degrading to the state of the game. The one thing the old build lost (and there might be a gosu new build in EU that allows for it) is shortbow so the s/d thief lost a huge part of its standard kit. You mentioned shadow refuge, and I agree on that point but will talk about it later in this post.

While there are many ways to fix these 2 builds I feel like these changes would be the best:

Removal/Nerf to Sigils of Energy, 50% endurance on a 10 sec CD is just too good – especially when pair with perma vigor. Nerf GS mesmer range down to 900 putting it in line with other mid range weapons, there is no reason it needs to be low bow range. For thief – increase withdraws CD to 20 (25?) seconds while keeping the same heal per second. A 15 second, uninterruptable heal, that removes impairing conditions is too strong. This will also decrease access to vigor and lead to less evades. The other option would be to drop a bit of damage off of larcenous and make it share the boons it steals so it provides more utility but not as much DPS.

Next Post

Phantaram.1265:

Elementalist Burst combo – You can chain many instant cast abilities together and affectively do what any dagger thief does and bring someone from 100-0 in split seconds, but as an elementalist you bring so much more to a team than a dagger thief. Arcane spells are to blame in my opinion. Weaken arcane spell damage drastically (damage halved or a little more) but give them some kind of utility. Say… make elemental surge base line? Just reduce the burning to 3 seconds. 5 seconds would be too strong. And maybe make air spells 2 seconds of weakness because so much access to blinds is also pretty crazy. Yeah just tone down the base line elemental surge and all is well.

As someone who has played 4 different classes in the last month trying to find one that worked with my team (eventually siding with running s/d ele)I do think after the fresh air buff that instant cast eles are strong. I would hold off on any notions of broken though. It may come across as a bit bias seeing as I do play the class but there are A LOT of hard counters that exist for it at the moment. While a full air arcane combo can instant cast for backstab-ish damage you’re not doing it from stealth and the CD on it is much higher. I personally have not been running double arcane as you have been for quite some time and we also don’t run a thief at the moment (so no gibs from stealth) so this all could be part of the reasons we have differing opinions on the matter. I think arcane wave is in a good spot and when run alone is strong, but not broken IMO. Maybe it is the fact that when you run 2 arcanes it becomes over the top? In that case wouldn’t it be better to see arcane blast repurposed a bit rather than nerfing both to not hurt builds that don’t run double arcane? Nerfing it in the way you suggest essentially means that in order to achive solid burst still you are forced to then run both where there is an option at the moment. Again, just change blast to have some more utility IMO. Some more discussion here would be nice.

Phantaram.1265:

Necromancers – I think the rest of the forums can tell you about this one.

Weakness – This condition went from not affecting critical strikes at all to absolutely destroying them. My arcane spells can hit a 1600 toughness necromancer for about 1700 average but if it glances from weakness it just went down to 360 damage. That is an absolutely drastic reduction of damage on top of reducing my endurance regeneration. It’s also entirely plausible to get 20+ seconds of weakness on you quite often from necromancers.

Necromancers and weakness go hand in hand.
It has been beaten to death on these boards so i’ll keep it short. Why were necros access to fear buffed (spectral wall), fear durations increases (thus more chance at double procing terror), given access to burning, given incentive to get 30% condi duration (due to Dur. Fire trait), AND weaknesss buffed… ALL IN THE SAME PATCH. This was obviously going to be an issue, it took one look at the patch notes to know it was going to be broken and it is…. very much so.

To give some more constructive feed back:

Spectral Wall is far too strong. For a class that is supposed to be an attrition class with weakness, chill, and cripple Spectral wall gave it FAR to much self peel. Add the insane fear damage you can take from it if positioned well (fear lock someone into a wall with breaks stun is down) and the crazy team utility it has and you get probably the biggest problem skill in the game. Two things NEED to happen to this skill. One – increase the CD, 60 seconds at least. Two there needs to be an internal CD on the fear (3 seconds seems good) so you can’t lock someone into a wall with it and zone so well.

Terror + burning – This has been discussed to death, it is over the top. Nerf D. Fire IMO but there are many ways to fix this.

Weakness – On top of making condi builds (no.. just necros) crazy strong, you also increased counters to direct damage builds. 50% damage 50% of the time is just too much. With all the condi in the meta you can’t reliably keep it cleansed even with absurd amounts of condi clear that teams are running and it leads to far to much RNG in damage. Did you skill crit? Did it glancing? Both? Neither? It’s crazy, someone is at 10% HP and a triple hit phoenix glancings and it lives. I would much rather see it put to a flat 15-25% reduction to reduce this horrible RNG along with some duration nerfs that were in the original LEAKED patch notes.

Next..

Phantaram.1265:

Stealth – This is the biggest one for me and I talked about this a long time ago in the SOTG and it’s just gotten more and more out of control. If you have two sources of long stealths in your teams line up your options at any point in the game and especially at the beginning are limitless.

There HAS to be a limit on how much stealth you can get. 6-7 seconds sounds reasonable to me but even then with two sources of stealth that is 12-14 seconds which will still give you tons of options and advantages over the other team. Stealth is a REALLY tough one to balance. As it is now people are walking around the map all leisure like for 30 seconds just talking amongst themselves like “Well I dunno who do you wanna 1 shot? We’ll 1 shot jimmy, no… bob! Well actually lets not even attack this node, onward to the enemy close point! Okay we are all here? Roger Roger. 3 2 4.. I can’t count… go! success! that other team can’t counter our amazing strat lol!”

Another solution is to give stealth some sort of counter.

I agree with this in its entirety. There needs to be some kind of heavy diminishing returns on chained stealths. Some sort of stacking reveal debuff would be good – every time you restealth within 10(?) seconds of your last stealth that stealth last 33% less, stacks until 100% so you are forced to not stealth for 10 seconds. Its a rough idea, but something that should be looked at.

Now, before every thief gets out their keyboards and start to send me death threats let me say this. The thief class needs to be moved away from stealth abusing and given alternate forms of utility and survivability. Most of the recent changes have been good, even the broken shadow trap was a good start at giving thieves more utility as they get nerfed. Stealth is hard to balance in nearly every game, and GW2 has one of the strongest stealths yet (doesn’t break on damage, is a true stealth, can’t see outline ala Sc2, instant stealth, doesn’t fade to stealth). I think changing stealth to anything I listed above (particularly a fade to stealth and non-perfect stealth so you can see someone standing next to you in it to dodge burst) would be a great start. On top of that, missing a backstab shouldn’t keep you stealthed and a heart seaker that hits SOULDN’T stealth you when using out of a smoke field… they just did damage to you kitten .

Shadow refuge is elite status good. This post is getting longer that I expected so I won’t go into a lot of details but the duration it last should be less, the CD should be longer, and it shouldn’t give nearly as long of an AoE stealth… or make it an elite (the better option IMO) to make thieves chose between utility and offense (basilisk venom).

Sorry this got a big longer than I expected so I will wrap it up with 1 last thought.

Many of this builds have counters and builds that work well at countering how they play. The problem is that these counters are not strong enough to be viable when put up against other builds. The only things I feel need to be nerfed are necromancers and stealth mechanics – other things are manageable with continued buffs to weaker builds. To list some off: offensive guardians, warriors, mantra mesmers, non-stealth thief builds, engis (make elixer C a break stun for the love of god); I could go on and on.

Sorry for the long posts. Ill add more after some more talk happens

Sigil of Energy could be toned down to about 30%, and all vigor on critical traits need to be nerfed somehow as they’re way too strong. I suggest something like 6s of vigor every 10s (so that boon stripping is more relevant, and boon duration investment is required for perma vigor), but should they still be too strong this way, 6s of vigor every 12-15s could also work.

Good post(s) there Siric – I totally agree.

papaganoosh.7908:

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

Guardian;
No swiftness apart from shouts.

Sorry to be pedantic but:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Symbol_of_Swiftness

Sorry to be pedantic but i will never pick a staff as a zerker dps guardian, so according to your comment every guardian has to take retreat or equip a staff in order to get swiftness. I know he forgot to mention the staff symbol, but the point is a dps guardian has no valid options for swiftness.
On a side note i totally agree with CntrlAltDefeat, good post.

Siric.3589:

Phantaram.1265:

Elementalist Burst combo – You can chain many instant cast abilities together and affectively do what any dagger thief does and bring someone from 100-0 in split seconds, but as an elementalist you bring so much more to a team than a dagger thief. Arcane spells are to blame in my opinion. Weaken arcane spell damage drastically (damage halved or a little more) but give them some kind of utility. Say… make elemental surge base line? Just reduce the burning to 3 seconds. 5 seconds would be too strong. And maybe make air spells 2 seconds of weakness because so much access to blinds is also pretty crazy. Yeah just tone down the base line elemental surge and all is well.

As someone who has played 4 different classes in the last month trying to find one that worked with my team (eventually siding with running s/d ele)I do think after the fresh air buff that instant cast eles are strong. I would hold off on any notions of broken though. It may come across as a bit bias seeing as I do play the class but there are A LOT of hard counters that exist for it at the moment. While a full air arcane combo can instant cast for backstab-ish damage you’re not doing it from stealth and the CD on it is much higher. I personally have not been running double arcane as you have been for quite some time and we also don’t run a thief at the moment (so no gibs from stealth) so this all could be part of the reasons we have differing opinions on the matter. I think arcane wave is in a good spot and when run alone is strong, but not broken IMO. Maybe it is the fact that when you run 2 arcanes it becomes over the top? In that case wouldn’t it be better to see arcane blast repurposed a bit rather than nerfing both to not hurt builds that don’t run double arcane? Nerfing it in the way you suggest essentially means that in order to achive solid burst still you are forced to then run both where there is an option at the moment. Again, just change blast to have some more utility IMO. Some more discussion here would be nice.

Well elementalist don’t need fresh air to instagib people in a full instant cast combo. I use divinity runes with 20 air 20 water 30 arcana and do it quite often. Switch out divinity for scholar and you can 1 shot guardians and rangers with just a little bit of help, fresh air is definitely not needed and in my opinion is still not strong enough to drop my regular build. That’s a different topic though.

Good posts though siric thanks for the insight very constructive!

“The arcane skills aren’t decent when used in isolation. No one runs arcane blast or wave alone.” Sry I suck at figuring out how to quote in an edit. Anyways.

Actually running wave with flash/mist form is definitely viable. A little less burst but mist form is the difference between getting a stomp or rez or not.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Epidemic
Why then all the other professions do not have skills that would remove everything from all the dots with such a cooldown?
Why necromancer can kill your entire team opponents pressing one button?

Phantaram.1265:

Elementalist Burst combo – You can chain many instant cast abilities together and affectively do what any dagger thief does and bring someone from 100-0 in split seconds, but as an elementalist you bring so much more to a team than a dagger thief. Arcane spells are to blame in my opinion. Weaken arcane spell damage drastically (damage halved or a little more) but give them some kind of utility. Say… make elemental surge base line? Just reduce the burning to 3 seconds. 5 seconds would be too strong. And maybe make air spells 2 seconds of weakness because so much access to blinds is also pretty crazy. Yeah just tone down the base line elemental surge and all is well.

A more reasonable solution would be to have arcane wave/blast put each other on a one second cooldown when used. That slows down the instant burst without making the skills weak individually.

Phantaram.1265:

Siric.3589:

Phantaram.1265:

Elementalist Burst combo – You can chain many instant cast abilities together and affectively do what any dagger thief does and bring someone from 100-0 in split seconds, but as an elementalist you bring so much more to a team than a dagger thief. Arcane spells are to blame in my opinion. Weaken arcane spell damage drastically (damage halved or a little more) but give them some kind of utility. Say… make elemental surge base line? Just reduce the burning to 3 seconds. 5 seconds would be too strong. And maybe make air spells 2 seconds of weakness because so much access to blinds is also pretty crazy. Yeah just tone down the base line elemental surge and all is well.

As someone who has played 4 different classes in the last month trying to find one that worked with my team (eventually siding with running s/d ele)I do think after the fresh air buff that instant cast eles are strong. I would hold off on any notions of broken though. It may come across as a bit bias seeing as I do play the class but there are A LOT of hard counters that exist for it at the moment. While a full air arcane combo can instant cast for backstab-ish damage you’re not doing it from stealth and the CD on it is much higher. I personally have not been running double arcane as you have been for quite some time and we also don’t run a thief at the moment (so no gibs from stealth) so this all could be part of the reasons we have differing opinions on the matter. I think arcane wave is in a good spot and when run alone is strong, but not broken IMO. Maybe it is the fact that when you run 2 arcanes it becomes over the top? In that case wouldn’t it be better to see arcane blast repurposed a bit rather than nerfing both to not hurt builds that don’t run double arcane? Nerfing it in the way you suggest essentially means that in order to achive solid burst still you are forced to then run both where there is an option at the moment. Again, just change blast to have some more utility IMO. Some more discussion here would be nice.

Well elementalist don’t need fresh air to instagib people in a full instant cast combo. I use divinity runes with 20 air 20 water 30 arcana and do it quite often. Switch out divinity for scholar and you can 1 shot guardians and rangers with just a little bit of help, fresh air is definitely not needed and in my opinion is still not strong enough to drop my regular build. That’s a different topic though.

Good posts though siric thanks for the insight very constructive!

“The arcane skills aren’t decent when used in isolation. No one runs arcane blast or wave alone.” Sry I suck at figuring out how to quote in an edit. Anyways.

Actually running wave with flash/mist form is definitely viable. A little less burst but mist form is the difference between getting a stomp or rez or not.

Your entire thread is based on team-play experiences and your solutions would clearly benefit a team, the changes you suggest would ruin the fun for many on all different formats GW2 has to offer.

KarlaGrey.5903:

Phantaram.1265:

Elementalist Burst combo – You can chain many instant cast abilities together and affectively do what any dagger thief does and bring someone from 100-0 in split seconds, but as an elementalist you bring so much more to a team than a dagger thief. Arcane spells are to blame in my opinion. Weaken arcane spell damage drastically (100% – 125% less damage) but give them some kind of utility. Say… make elemental surge base line? Just reduce the burning to 3 seconds. 5 seconds would be too strong. And maybe make air spells 2 seconds of weakness because so much access to blinds is also pretty crazy. Yeah just tone down the base line elemental surge and all is well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MlXskSmfpI

Just to add in some practical evidence.

And yea, stealth can only be balanced by removing it.

A glass cannon ele “one-shotting” a glass cannon mesmer..who was sleeping and didn’t see a flashy dwarf with fire armor walking up the ramp …what kind of evidence is this?

Arheundel.6451:

Your entire thread is based on team-play experiences and your solutions would clearly benefit a team, the changes you suggest would ruin the fun for many on all different formats GW2 has to offer.

Could you elaborate? Are perma stealth thives, condi burst necros, and other strong builds not annoying in solo queue or hot join? Is this an issue with these for WvW, are they not a nusance there too?

I’d just ignore arheundal just based on my past experience. He just argues for the sake of it I think.

My only issue with the overall flow of PvP are the radius of each AoE attack.

I would prefer to see more single target setups and reduce the cleavyness of both power and Condi builds. IMO would promote more team fighting and situational positioning.

This goes for Warrior Longbow F1.

No attack should be larger than a whole capture point, last for 8 seconds, and do approx 10k damage to each player standing in it for the full duration.

Burning damage from skills in general needs to be put in line more with the damage a combo field burn deals, skills usually burn for 700~ while the combo field is about 300 with the same stats.

Burning is overall a bit 2 strong like this mainly on gaurdian and engi, having the tick more around 500 would seem better to me and up the combo field burn to 400 or so.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Far point/bomb engis – Just way too strong. The only counter to it is a necromancer (which we know will be nerfed). And even then the necromancer cannot stay on the point so it will get decapped anyway. This build beats everything else 1 on 1 with extreme ease AND, further to this, even if they cant kill the other person 1 on 1 then all their knockbacks will still decap the point. Being able to res yourself is just broken. The amount of spam is ridiculous. They can get so many conditions on someone by just pew-pew ing. The burning is too much I think.

Bomb engis? Really? lawls…. For them to be effective damage wise they have to be 30 in the power line and only 2 bombs are really considered “damaging” aside from the AA. Fire bomb and concussion bomb. The last two are CC of a sort.
Anyways for a bomb engi to have somewhat decent damage they have to take forceful explosives otherwise the explosion radius on all bombs is pathetic.
After that they have the option to take incendiary powder OR explosive powder one causes burning on crit the other increases explosion damage by 10%. After this they are going to take the recharge reduction. Now if they take incendiary powder, your a necro you can send those conditions back not once but multiple times through multiple sources. And at least burning from engineers makes sense.

Also they don’t beat anything else 1v1 currently the 1v1 god is a phantasm mesmer, Sorry to burst your bubble. It really seems like you and vicious just don’t want the necro god status nerfed. So many necros agree they didn’t need the massive damage buffs they got. And bomb engi doesn’t need nerfed because it is a good example of risk v reward. For the bomb engi to be effective he has to be melee leaving him open to all sorts of damage. Necro damage can be spammed from afar.

Weakness is fine, it about only few things keeping necro alive. Unless they get evasion or whatever necros really need this. (ohkitten certain op builds are op builds but there’s other necro builds around too)

Stealth needs further balancing for sure, don’t see shadow refuge as a big problem but other stealth stacking is kind of ridiculous combined with shadow step whatever escape teleporting and stuff. I’d say there needs to be risk vs reward balance there instead of stealth trolling.

Stomping should be fixed in a manner normal guy can use all same mechanics without dumb exploiting of other skills to get invulnerability/stability/invis/DS etc.

Mesmer GS is just faceroll. Can’t say what to do to it but it needs some tuning down seriously. You’ve cripples and whatever and in case you run out of mind blowing damage skills you can still use mind blowing autoattack, from range. I really don’t think it’s a coincidence that most mesmers use this weapon. Yeah I occasionally also GS with my mesmer. And then there’s shatter.. And if nothing else helps then there’s that crazy illusionary assassin.

Conditions don’t scale well with condition removal. Or hitpoints. I tried running guardian with all possible condition removals I could imagine but I still had super hard time with conditions. Cleanse conditions now I should have less conditions… wait I have them all again.. gee.. Even in 1v1 you might struggle against any condispam class pretty bad. Compared to power/zerk builds condi builds can usually also heal/tank well. It’s fragile balance but currently sadface.

Generally any practically instagibcombo is bad. No one wants to just get oneshotted. Glass cannons or not. At least not without reasonable way to retaliate. Yeah I’m fine with thief trying to backstab me one time, two times maybe even 3 times but if they can’t finish the job..

Lots of agreeable ideas in this thread, it’s nice to see something constructive and not whiny for once.

My contribution: Reducing the amount of passive effects in the game overall. Passive condition removal particularly should be more active, but only if conditions are less passively applied (autoattacks for instance).

Particularly, if this game is going to push for streaming viewership, there needs to be some understanding that watching a class do strong condition just by strafing and autoattacking (or spamming on a short cooldown), and then watching the defender drop all the conditions randomly, and then have the commentators explain that you passively apply and remove them and then describe the builds so that viewers understand, is boring.

It drastically slows down the pace of the combat, and provides a lot less active/reactive playstyles, because a condition build can just spam conditions and the only way to truly counter is to build for passive removal. Such playstyles just don’t push the competitive level of the game as high as it could potentially be, making it less fun (and harder) to watch overall.

jcbroe.4329:

Particularly, if this game is going to push for streaming viewership, there needs to be some understanding that watching a class do strong condition just by strafing and autoattacking (or spamming on a short cooldown), and then watching the defender drop all the conditions randomly, and then have the commentators explain that you passively apply and remove them and then describe the builds so that viewers understand, is boring.

Agreed, there’s to much autoattacking. I like the big cooldown big number format. Promotes counter-play, as long as skills can be anticipated or are telegraphed. When Jsharp was talking about toning down necro’s I think he mentioned grasping dead and maybe tweaking those numbers. I think thats the wrong way, nerf auto’s instead and add a tell to gd(ground goes brown during the cast, samething with marks), give players a chance to respond to it. Weakening blood is a very obvious skill animation and I think thats a good thing in this game. When explaining how to fight a condi class it should be just like explaining how to fight a power build. Watch out for ‘x’, it has ‘y’ tell. Currently, I don’t think thats the case.

Siric.3589:

Arheundel.6451:

Your entire thread is based on team-play experiences and your solutions would clearly benefit a team, the changes you suggest would ruin the fun for many on all different formats GW2 has to offer.

Could you elaborate? Are perma stealth thives, condi burst necros, and other strong builds not annoying in solo queue or hot join? Is this an issue with these for WvW, are they not a nusance there too?

Changes don’t happen with hotjoin/wvwvw in mind, that’s why any change in tpvp can have a huge negative effect on the rest of the game, there is no indication of wvwvw/hotjoin in the OP, there is no double arcane ele outside tPvP with an organized team, outside organized teams a double arcane ele get focused down and die in 3s, his suggestion to lower by half the arcane skills dmg , would negatively effect all those eles who soloq or hotjoin or wvwvwv that can’t count on an engy to watch your back.

jportell.2197:

Lordrosicky.5813:

Far point/bomb engis – Just way too strong. The only counter to it is a necromancer (which we know will be nerfed). And even then the necromancer cannot stay on the point so it will get decapped anyway. This build beats everything else 1 on 1 with extreme ease AND, further to this, even if they cant kill the other person 1 on 1 then all their knockbacks will still decap the point. Being able to res yourself is just broken. The amount of spam is ridiculous. They can get so many conditions on someone by just pew-pew ing. The burning is too much I think.

Bomb engis? Really? lawls…. For them to be effective damage wise they have to be 30 in the power line and only 2 bombs are really considered “damaging” aside from the AA. Fire bomb and concussion bomb. The last two are CC of a sort.
Anyways for a bomb engi to have somewhat decent damage they have to take forceful explosives otherwise the explosion radius on all bombs is pathetic.
After that they have the option to take incendiary powder OR explosive powder one causes burning on crit the other increases explosion damage by 10%. After this they are going to take the recharge reduction. Now if they take incendiary powder, your a necro you can send those conditions back not once but multiple times through multiple sources. And at least burning from engineers makes sense.

Also they don’t beat anything else 1v1 currently the 1v1 god is a phantasm mesmer, Sorry to burst your bubble. It really seems like you and vicious just don’t want the necro god status nerfed. So many necros agree they didn’t need the massive damage buffs they got. And bomb engi doesn’t need nerfed because it is a good example of risk v reward. For the bomb engi to be effective he has to be melee leaving him open to all sorts of damage. Necro damage can be spammed from afar.

Until this^, the post was entirely constructive.
Shame on you guys

Phantaram.1265:

I’d just ignore arheundal just based on my past experience. He just argues for the sake of it I think.

Once again you prove how short sighted you are, ignoring the fact that arcane skills have already been nerfed 3 times, you ask now to even halve the dmg, that would make them completely useless as a burst ele got no condition dmg to start with , a mere 3s burning for example would means nothing.
As the majority has not been using elemental surge up to this moment, I’d say your idea is completely baseless, no real thought behind it

/Sigh, it was going pretty good for a while there.

You’re assuming people would use it for burning(which can hit hard in a s/d with battle build), you could blind in air or use them to set up burst with an imob while in earth.

Nikkle.4013:

/Sigh, it was going pretty good for a while there.

You’re assuming people would use it for burning(which can hit hard in a s/d with battle build), you could blind in air or use them to set up burst with an imob while in earth.

When QT Vain convinced me to run that trait it was almost all Aspects being used. Chills in Ele’ fights, Blinds against important skills, immob’s for burst/chasing, fire against mesmers and thieves.

So ya. Burning is only one piece of the pie bro. In all honesty I agree they should be “utility” not “now you kill kitten faster”

Regarding the ele:

While the S/D burst ele is strong now, I don’t think it is over the top. The difference being that you can see an ele coming towards you very clearly, and you can’t when it comes to thieves. The difference between the two approaches is immense, imho.

I don’t think we can currently say that things are out of order, because the meta hasn’t settled yet. I mean, to be a pure GC ele you are using all your utility skills to achieve it. If a combo is coming up and you dodge/avoid it, there isn’t much more air in the balloon that is the GC ele, and he/she would easily be destroyed. The odds of getting off a second try aren’t good and will take a while if you manage to escape.
Something that makes the risk/reward of the build a balanced deal.

Arheundel.6451:

As the majority has not been using elemental surge up to this moment, I’d say your idea is completely baseless, no real thought behind it

The problem is the lack of global cooldown. But to completely change the mechanics of silly. It is better to slightly reduce the damage, but to ignore toughness.

Stealths
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Infusion_of_Shadow
Add 3 sec cd. The problem with constant stealth solved.
And to balance:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Bring-back-3-sec-revealed

Stealth shouldn’t stack duration. At beta it was projected as a short term defense, thats all it needs to be. When stealth gets extended far past that 3-4s mark it starts to leave the sensible side of combat pacing. Maybe the blast duration effect need be increased past 3s, but as a whole it shouldn’t stack. Remove stealth stacking duration and you’ve basically only got about 3-4s to operate, universally.

Nikkle.4013:

/Sigh, it was going pretty good for a while there.

You’re assuming people would use it for burning(which can hit hard in a s/d with battle build), you could blind in air or use them to set up burst with an imob while in earth.

Maybe you should read the OP better before posting..he proposes to remove the blind and add weakness, in earth you get a 1s immobilize , outside the air burst, everything else got a travel time therefore I wonder how exactly you would use that 1s immobilize…
Burning in a s/d burst battle build after 12 stacks of might would hit for 420 dmg for second..after 12 stacks of might mind you, an arcane blast with halved dmg would deal 800 dmg and still have 20s CD, so somebody would replace let’s say a cantrip for this new arcane blast..really?
Hard math is my language, gibberish not my tastes..

Marduh.4603:

Arheundel.6451:

As the majority has not been using elemental surge up to this moment, I’d say your idea is completely baseless, no real thought behind it

The problem is the lack of global cooldown. But to completely change the mechanics of silly. It is better to slightly reduce the damage, but to ignore toughness.

Stealths
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Infusion_of_Shadow
Add 3 sec cd. The problem with constant stealth solved.
And to balance:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Bring-back-3-sec-revealed

No arcane skills do take toughness in consideration, you can test yourself in HoM.
But yes an ICD would placate the mob, while still not making arcane skills completely useless; a 2k dmg every 20s or so while having 13k HP , I believe there must be a trade off for having so low HP and 2k dmg every 20s is really not Op at all

LionZero.3479:

Burning damage from skills in general needs to be put in line more with the damage a combo field burn deals, skills usually burn for 700~ while the combo field is about 300 with the same stats.

Burning is overall a bit 2 strong like this mainly on gaurdian and engi, having the tick more around 500 would seem better to me and up the combo field burn to 400 or so.

Burning? One of the only two conditions in this game that deals a small amount of damage that does not stack in intensity and only duration? The only condition that Guardians have; that any guardian will kitten theirself if they increase the damage on it by building his/her gear condition based.

You think there are condition damage based guardians out there who can decently survive and still do deal decent damage?

Arheundel.6451:

Burning in a s/d burst battle build after 12 stacks of might would hit for 420 dmg for second..after 12 stacks of might mind you

Well if your only getting 12 stacks of might thats your problem. Even at 420 damage thats 1260 over 3 seconds. If the blind was changed to weakness I still don’t see why that’s bad. So now you have more damage mitigation. And if you bothered to read my posts, I don’t necessarily agree with phanta’s solution. I just hate when people like you post such terrible arguments that don’t address the point at all and then make snide remarks. But Phanta nailed it earlier.

Phantaram.1265:

I’d just ignore arheundal just based on my past experience. He just argues for the sake of it I think.

This is good advice, going to follow it from now on.

Littlefeather.8623:

LionZero.3479:

Burning damage from skills in general needs to be put in line more with the damage a combo field burn deals, skills usually burn for 700~ while the combo field is about 300 with the same stats.

Burning is overall a bit 2 strong like this mainly on gaurdian and engi, having the tick more around 500 would seem better to me and up the combo field burn to 400 or so.

Burning? One of the only two conditions in this game that deals a small amount of damage that does not stack in intensity and only duration? The only condition that Guardians have; that any guardian will kitten theirself if they increase the damage on it by building his/her gear condition based.

You think there are condition damage based guardians out there who can decently survive and still do deal decent damage?

None of the DoT conditions are really problematic at all.
It’s an additive problem. Ele has burning, they have bleeding too. As do warriors and guardians and even Mesmers.
Burnings not really an issue until you put other conditions beside it. When you give a profession everything and the kitchen sink, it’s a problem. Necro’s got Torment as a new condition, devs should’ve built on that to increase their pressure alongside defenses so they can do their attrition throwing on burning is “wot?” These builds are spiking with passive DOT’s. Doesn’t even compute. If they want armor ignoring spikes they should bring back + damage, Deep wound, and/or conditionals.