Guild Wars 2

Fortus.6175:

The Good

-As mentioned above thousand times; thanks for the rewards changes.
-New skills, although underpowered and cost 25 skillpoint and costs25 skill points in PvP where everyone is supposed to be in equal footing?!
-Thieves got some nice buffs, been seeing them more lately, specially in ranked. Initiative buff does incredible things although most people dont really notice that much.
-Stealth got a minor hit, although not enough it is a good step towards getting there.

The Bad

-Elementalists in the same if not worse state than before; lots of traits moved to higher tier when they didnt need to! Thanks for moving Blasting staff but the rest changes were atrocious, sorry.
-Diamond skin: useless, completely useless, but then you face a rabid necro 1v1 and it is overpowered, completely overpowered. Overall it is just useless though, the amount of niche scenarios in which it could be slightly useful does not outweight the drawbacks, specially not considering it is a grandmaster trait. I think we can do better than that!
-Thieves and backstab, just abilities out of stealth and the lack of way to block/evade/blind them witout revealing them. Either the backstabs need toning down or blocking/evading/blining should apply reveal and make the skill miss, no way around this, sorry.

The Missing

-Elementalists need a serious boost to survivavility. Passive traits will not cut it, they need to have a survival tool specific to the class: Deathshroud/fear necros, clones/stealth/chaosstorm/chaosarmor/blinks/daze mesmer, blinds/block/heals/protection/moreheals guardian, evades/spirits/regen/protection ranger, stealth/teleports/blinds/blinds/stealth thieves, etc etc etc…. you get my point, eles what do they have? Heals were nerfed into absolutely nothing, every patch since the D/D deal, which if they were to be taken at their max potential to the current meta, they would probably even struggle. Then what? Cantrips on 75-90 secs CD, which is the equivalent to elites in other classes, a guardian can get protectio and stability teamwide on 26 seconds CD, we have something that lasts about the same, selfish, on 4 times the CD….. and no, the package does not justify it, a guardian does about the same if not as much damage as ele but a guardian can survive it all, yet it has the same hp as the ele….. same base hp, ever wonder that, even a glass canon guardian, which does aout the same damage? I think eles need to be taken to the draw board, decide what do you want attunemnts to be used as, what do you want ele’s inherent defense that does not involve putting up 4 elites worth of stuff. the only boon sharing thing we had got moved to 20 points. You need to give us something to work on, there is absolutely nothing an ele can do that anybody else cant do 4x better, without the fear of blowing in one rotation.

Man you people really don’t get it do you. Ele needs ZERO buffs. Other stuff must be nerfed. Ele is a bit of survivability away from being the new warrior. Its INSTANT UNDODGABLE damage on s/f ele is INSANE and very very very strong. If they buff the survivability then you make ele the new warrior. They should nerf other stuff as ele is fine right now. In fact ele is a little too strong. The damage is too strong. But RELATIVE to everything else it is weak. But it should still be nerfed – just less than everything else.

BUT anet are dumb and will do what you say. They will listen to the baddies and buff it to the sky and then ele will be broken/undodgable and lame bs. Just like warrior kind of is.

The Good

- PvP Rewards
- New Heal Skills (except Water Spirit and Signets, all them absurdly powerful)
- Some traits (Great Fortitude; Reckless Dodge; Crack Shot; Unsuspecting Foe; Last Chance; Spiked Armor; Armored Attack; Determined Revival; Reviver’s Might; Thrill of the Kill; Burning Fire; Burning Rage; Soothing Winds; Tempest Defense; Stone Flesh; Strength of Stone; Diamond Skin; Soothing Wave; Cantrip Mastery; Soothing Wave; Cleansing Wave; Arcane Retribution; Elemental Attunement; Sundering Strikes; Practiced Tolerance; Signet Use; Critical Haste; Opportunist; Infusion of Shadow; Vigorous Recovery; Quick Recovery; Assassin’s Reward; Kleptomaniac; Bountiful Theft)
- Reduction in CD of attunement.
- Buff in Initiative gain rate.
- Bug Fixes. Always welcome.

The Bad

- AI buff and/or incentive.
- Passive play buff or incentive.
(both, passive play and AI based play are good, but should not be so powerful. Actually is definitely unbalanced)
- Mesmer buff (Actually, Mesmer needs nerf, not buff)
- Combustive shot nerf. Definitely ridiculous and unnecessary.
- Burst Mastery nerf. Again, ridiculous and unnecessary.
- What hell are happening with Skyhammer? This map comes all time in Solo Q. Is horrible and frustrated.

The Missing

- Decrease AI spamming (Mesmers, Rangers, Necros and Engineers are abusing of AI, no coments more :/ )
- Decrease Passive play (Thieves, Rangers, Mesmers and Engineers with signets, minions, stealth and immunities)
- Unsuspecting Foe (Could synergy with all cc skills, working against every disabled foe)
- Diamond Skin (Instead one more passive skill granting one more passive immunity, this skill could reduce incoming damage according amount of buff. 3% damage reduction for each buff.)
- REMOVE SKYHAMMER FROM SOLO PVP TOURNAMENT

JETWING.2759:

The Good
- New Heal Skills (except Water Spirit and Signets, all them absurdly powerful)

Again, I’m curious, how is Skelk venom absurdly powerful? Outside of a single spec (venom share) its demonstrably worse than Withdraw and Hide in shadow in nearly every other realistic scenario. Even in a venom share build, you need great coordination to share the venom with enough people to make it worthwhile (and even then, it’s powerful thanks to 3 traits, not on its own)

- Some traits (….Sundering Strikes; Practiced Tolerance; Signet Use; Critical Haste; Opportunist; Infusion of Shadow; Vigorous Recovery; Quick Recovery; Assassin’s Reward; Kleptomaniac; Bountiful Theft)

How was the change to Assassin’s Reward good? Like I pointed out, its 1 additional healing per init spent for every 100 healing power you have. That’s not a buff, that’s a rounding error. The same for Quick Recovery – a trait that used to boost Init recovery by 25% now boosts init recovery by 10% – that change makes sense due to new init regen speed, but the fact that nothing was added to a master tier trait makes it weak, bland, and not worth slotting.

This is the problem with players opinions – there’s no qualifications to have an opinion. I just don’t see how someone who has any knowledge of Thief can say the Assassin’s Reward “buff” was something good.

The good: Spirit Rangers are still viable. Thank god. Mesmers are more fun to use. I’m loving my mesmer now with PU, bunkier build and the new heal skill.

The bad: Thieves are stealthing too much. Just get rid of these annoying stealth spammer already.

Here is the reality of the patch. It shifted skills around a bit, but didn’t impact the core issues with the meta. AOE spams are still too strong. The warrior is still OP. A few thoughts on the classes:

1. Eles. There are a lot of complaints about this class, but they are in a good place for what they are. They are a class that is good at a lot of things but isn’t great at anything. That prevents them from being added as a top tPvP class. The problem is that if you make them great at something, certain other areas need to be nerfed or they will become OP like earlier this year.
2. Mesmers. Were the best 1v1 class before the patch and are even stronger in that area now.
3. Thief . No permastealth is good, but that is really more of a WvW issue. From a PvP standpoint, they are basically forced into a GC type build now. If the goal of the patch is to increase build diversity, it was a total fail.
4. Guardian. In a good place
5. Warrior. Hambow? OP. Eviscorate? Too strong. A good start would be to nerf the base healing of the signet while at the same time increasing the tie to heal power. In other words, if they stack heal power it should heal for a bit more than today. If they go zerkers, it should heal for much less than today.
6. Engi. This class is also in a good place. The problem is that there are no many good places who use them.
7. Ranger. It is crazy that the best ranger specs do not involve a shortbow or long bow. Why is a warrior a better ranger than a ranger?
8. Necro. Has been too strong for awhile now. Too many AOE spams.

Good:
- new healing skills – mesmers signet is fun to use, and don’t feel op when fighting burst builds (ele and thief still easily kill phantasm mesmer, which is good)
- pvp rewards.
- toning down warrior dps
- less condi spam on solo q

Bad:
- few healing skills are useless, engi’s for example.

missing:
- healing signet nerf. There’s nothing more broken that this utility.

Many thanks for the changes thus far, but we still have a way to go.

I am a D/D elementalist.

The Good (what you liked about the patch)
I am going to say Diamond Skin. There’s seems to be a lot of negative feedback on this trait, but it certainly improves elementalist’s survability when faced with a condition-based foe: it does what says on the tin. Do not review this trait, allow more time for the meta to shift: the more intelligent/experienced players will find a way to counter this.

Really appreciate moving the Cantrips Mastery to the Adept tier in Water.

Earning “money” for tournaments is a great way to maintain both your PvP/PvE characters, and I hope will you introduce additional mechanisms in PvP for this.

The Bad (things about the patch you disliked)
If you really want the D/D elementalist to consider alternative trait trees without the need to go too deep into Arcane, then introduce some additional survability features. Perhaps address this by increasing the base HP slightly which will offer genuine trait tree alternatives. At the moment, I am encouraged to put at least 20 points in Arcane for Elemental Attunement; 20 points in Water for HP and healing. The remaining points I use for the Earth trait line, sadly this leaves me with just 12,805 HP with Valkyrie amulet. I would really like to put some points in eaither Fire or Air for some raw power, but as a D/D elementalist, this could be too costly on survability. Perhaps reducing the attunement swapping base cooldown yet further will automatically improve survivability as well as open up alternative trait choices. Unless you address this, the power D/D elementalist is not going to materialise just yet.

The Missing (things you expected from the patch that weren’t there)
Ride-the-lightning is still a problem. Why should the elementalist be penalised (cooldown doubled) when his foe goes invisible after invoking this spell? Consider reducing the cooldown for increased mobility, which is much needed for survability as well as going on the offense.

We should be able to take our PvP gear into PvE. It is perfectly reasonable for skins earned in PvP to be freely transmuted to PvE.

Thanks for listening.

We should have a thread like this for each profession sepparatly aswell

a lot has been said but i think profession-oriented feedback threads could be an excellent next step into letting arenanet know what we think

could be extremely helfull for the balance team !

“if you want damage, take greatsword or axe.”

No matter how you spec axe, whether;
30-0-20-0-20
0-20-20-0-30
20-20-0-0-30

If still has a massive latitude on the damage it does. You may hit a standard D/D ele for 910 if they had a armor up..you may hit 7,200..back end delivering of damage so the third strike scales higher makes this weapon unreliable with its damage. This why you don’t see a lot of axe and warrior’s are still running hammer/duel swords condi..simply because greatsword/axe are unreliable with striking, and when they do connect they don’t produce consistent results no matter how you spec them. This is part of of the reason why there is such dislike towrds current duel swords/ and the hammer. Every warrior you see is running them because axe/greatsword just don’t produce the same consistency.

This will mostly be from a WvW perspective, reason i post it here is because the WvW forums are not remotely civilized enough to discuss anything in a serious manner.

The Good
- New builds made avaliable
- Greater focus on team/group support
- New heals (this one, i will look into later)
- PvP Rewards

The Bad
- Diamond Skin; While probably ok in PvP/PvE, it is beyond OP in WvW. It allows an elementalist to simply ignore all condition specs as they cannot bring the ele below 90% health fast enough due to low direct damage.
- Thief Updates; It did nothing at all. Their still spammy, annoying and perma-stealthed.

The Missing
- Warrior re-balance; This profession has too much passive abilities at this point, that you can teach your average domestic pet to play it properly. It has gone from being a medium profession to be over the top. Among the greatest issues are healing signet passive heal, and the over abundance of passive healing from traits, along with over the top condition cleansing. This profession has become a “hard counter everything with one build” profession. And certain professions suffer immensely when trying to fight a warrior.
- Ranger Spirits; They are still too weak for WvW use. They should either be given a health-bar and NO timer, or a timer and no health bar. A mix of the two does NOT work in WvW. It makes them worthless, as they die instantly to AOE, and the respawning time of 20 seconds are far too long for them to be reliable in anything but 1v1. Separate balancing systems for PvP and WvW/PvE is paramount in this case. Removing the timer+hp bar system from PvP would make them over-the-top.
- Account Wide WXP system. It has been promised, get it implemented!
- Make professions less dependent on passive abilities.

The Good (what you liked about the patch)
- warrior’s healing signet remains unchanged. my warrior is happy!

The Bad (things about the patch you disliked)
- 25 skills point to learn new heal skill.

The Missing (things you expected from the patch that weren’t there)
- better gold rewards. current gold rewards is a good start. lets increase it!

Josh Davis.6015:

Smiley.5376:

We should have a thread like this for each profession sepparatly aswell

a lot has been said but i think profession-oriented feedback threads could be an excellent next step into letting arenanet know what we think

could be extremely helfull for the balance team !

We’ll be doing something very similar to that next year. Probably around the time we get the new profession balance forum.

Not to be too negative, but a forum dedicated to profession balance will end up in one of three ways;
Like current WvW forums where the Meta builds are hailed as untouchable and the rest should burn on a stake.
Like the PvP forums where there can be a serious discussion.
or
A complete mess with lots of yelling, finger pointing and fighting.

Josh Davis.6015:

Smiley.5376:

We should have a thread like this for each profession sepparatly aswell

a lot has been said but i think profession-oriented feedback threads could be an excellent next step into letting arenanet know what we think

could be extremely helfull for the balance team !

We’ll be doing something very similar to that next year. Probably around the time we get the new profession balance forum.

Oh my god ! All my posts about taking this CDI to a next level and working with subforums and threads and the like have actually been read !

Also when is the next CDI and what topic will it be ?

I think the following subjects are worthy to be discussed in detail(to find a solution for them specifically):

-Condi | AI | AoE rework/spam
-Passive abilities/traits
-Lacking/useless traits and synergy between traits
-Underused/bad designed weaponsets(relates directly to traits and low build diversity)

I realize these subjects more or less overlap with balance in general and profession specific balance but they are specific issues that must be adressed ! If you “fix” those things, balance will already be in a much better place. Maybe having a CDI about the first thing and discuss the other 3 subjects specifically per profession in the upcoming profession balance subforum ?

Besides these subjects i think a horizontal vs vertical progressions discussion specifically for PvP could help make pvp more exciting. The new upcoming changes are really great but i think there is a lack of progression and permanent rewards

• e.g. mini’s through pvp, more finishers, capes leaderboard/ladder/rank based(all three !, ladder & lb much cooler then rank of coarse), adding 1-2 weapon skins/month, visible (leaderboard)rank, content when you reach a new rank animal(capes, more/customizable finishers, …), PvP Guilds and a separate guild home/base for pvp guilds, adding armorsets/reworking ugly armorsets, ….

These could all be things talked about in that discussion

I’ve gone a bit off topic here but i just couldn’t resist…

Prysin.8542:

Josh Davis.6015:

Smiley.5376:

We should have a thread like this for each profession sepparatly aswell

a lot has been said but i think profession-oriented feedback threads could be an excellent next step into letting arenanet know what we think

could be extremely helfull for the balance team !

We’ll be doing something very similar to that next year. Probably around the time we get the new profession balance forum.

Not to be too negative, but a forum dedicated to profession balance will end up in one of three ways;
Like current WvW forums where the Meta builds are hailed as untouchable and the rest should burn on a stake.
Like the PvP forums where there can be a serious discussion.
or
A complete mess with lots of yelling, finger pointing and fighting.

All depends on how they implement it

Since it’s a subforum there will be 1 big topic for every profession.
People that make suggestions(in the form of 1 big constructive, coherent, orderend thread) in how to adress balance for that profession in general or specific issues with the profession should do this according to certain rules.

Replying in these threads should only be done in a constructive way following specific guidelines to avoid flame wars. Preferably an upvote system could do many good instead of being ably to reply to “balance idea threads”. Combining both will be the best way to approach it i think.

After a while the devs can make a “suggestion” on how to adress balance based on the ideas in the threads that were upvoted the most and ask us feedback.

I think this way balance will be adressed quite fast ^^ or maybe i’m just too enthousiastic

In a nutshell:

The Good
Nothing all too game-breaking was added (prolly having to do with the fact the patch was not exactly balance-oriented).

The Bad
Resources are still being thrown at a game mode that ought being scrapped and re-designed bottom-up, because there is honestly too much kitten piled up on more kitten to ever hope of fixing it all.

The Missing
A completely new addition/campaign/add-on of GW actually focusing on the pvp. You can only do so much when your hands are tied due to pve-related constraints. No joke. Being less headstrong about what YOU think is right also helps, but having to work in leg irons won’t get you anywhere (as nicely demonstrated in the past year).
Something along the lines of a f2p addition with a revamped pvp that actually delivers half the quality its predecessor did, and fulfils half the promises made prior to GW2 release.

A new year, a fresh start, just do it. Remember, one year from now you’ll be wishing you had started today.

p.s. banning me won’t help you get there.

The good
-Rewards: It feels good to finally get something in return for all the time we invest into this game. Could be some more, but PvP´ers learned to be frugal, so its ok for the moment.
-Overall balance: I think most classes are in a pretty good spot right now. Ele still lacks a bit, but things get better. Condi/burst specs are on the same level, pretty good balance over there.

The bad
-Immunity traits: Way too much immunity traits. Berserk stance is already massivly powerful, but you can deal with it by playing defensivly for the 10 seconds. Immunity without a time limit just gets absurd. Please completly redesign AR/DS.

The missing
-Skyhammer farmers: Allie told us you know who abused this and how much they did, and that you gonna protect your game. But nothing happens. After farmers now got even more rewarded by making gold out of glory by selling winter gifts, banning those players will be the last option to get this done. So finally show some balls and perma ban these players.

Josh Davis.6015:

Smiley.5376:

We should have a thread like this for each profession sepparatly aswell

a lot has been said but i think profession-oriented feedback threads could be an excellent next step into letting arenanet know what we think

could be extremely helfull for the balance team !

We’ll be doing something very similar to that next year. Probably around the time we get the new profession balance forum.

Players have been doing this for a year now, in the individual profession forums. However, I’ve seen very little done by the ArenaNet developers to capitalize on this.
Why will will things be different now with a new subforum? Could the pvp balance team not look at the profession subforums?

The Good

• fixes to S/D thieves
• buffs to mesmers
• new heals
• more incentive to PvP

The Bad

• most of the heals are underpowered. I suspect this was intentional, but would like to see an update soon
• Diamond Skin and more passive play

The Missing

• fixes to warriors, specifically Healing Signet and its 100% passive nature

evilapprentice.6379:

JETWING.2759:

The Good
- New Heal Skills (except Water Spirit and Signets, all them absurdly powerful)

Again, I’m curious, how is Skelk venom absurdly powerful? Outside of a single spec (venom share) its demonstrably worse than Withdraw and Hide in shadow in nearly every other realistic scenario. Even in a venom share build, you need great coordination to share the venom with enough people to make it worthwhile (and even then, it’s powerful thanks to 3 traits, not on its own)

- Some traits (….Sundering Strikes; Practiced Tolerance; Signet Use; Critical Haste; Opportunist; Infusion of Shadow; Vigorous Recovery; Quick Recovery; Assassin’s Reward; Kleptomaniac; Bountiful Theft)

How was the change to Assassin’s Reward good? Like I pointed out, its 1 additional healing per init spent for every 100 healing power you have. That’s not a buff, that’s a rounding error. The same for Quick Recovery – a trait that used to boost Init recovery by 25% now boosts init recovery by 10% – that change makes sense due to new init regen speed, but the fact that nothing was added to a master tier trait makes it weak, bland, and not worth slotting.

This is the problem with players opinions – there’s no qualifications to have an opinion. I just don’t see how someone who has any knowledge of Thief can say the Assassin’s Reward “buff” was something good.

About Healing Skills, new Signets and Spirits excludes Skelk Venon. I also think this skill are a weak variation of Signet Malice, and a strong version of Leeching Venoms trait. This skill could act dealing pressure on the opponent while heal the Thief. For example, without instant heal, just the next 5 attacks inflicts a venom that steal health (life steal, 150 health per second for 5 seconds. Affects only one target per hit).

Assassin Reward was a buff because get good scaling with heal power, but was moved to GM tier to force Thieves to deep acrobatics (sacrifice dps) to get one more strong heal skill.

Is ridiculous how Thieves QQ about sustain having too much heals, evades, stealth, teleport, etc…