Guild Wars 2

It seems like as GW2 has matured, skill spam continues to grow out of hand and the balance team has either lost touch with what CD management is all about, or are losing battles with the PvE team that leave them stuck with ever decreasing cool downs.

It seems this is a trend that started with condition application becoming more and more spammable all of the time, and the way they decided to balance after that damage had been done was to reduce CDs across the board.

If you look at the different weapons and compare some of the new spec weapon skills to the old school GW2 weapon skills, this becomes more evident:

• Hammer
• Staff

Revenant looks to consistently be the worst offender of this paradigm shift, and I feel like it dumbs down the game significantly.

Hopefully they decide to make skills hit harder, have longer CDs, and give the biggest hitter better tells so counterplay is more about understanding how to fight, and less about spamming skills.

You do realize that revenant weapon skills have an energy cost too right?

Do you realize that 5 energy on coalescence of ruin for 2 sec cd and 5 for phase smash for 8 sec is nothing? Where is the energy managment with just 5 energy cost?

epouvante.7392:

Do you realize that 5 energy on coalescence of ruin for 2 sec cd and 5 for phase smash for 8 sec is nothing? Where is the energy managment with just 5 energy cost?

+1

Energy might as well not exist for Rev moves such as those. They’re just insane spammable AoE Backstabs with CDs longer than the energy CD. This is like reducing Pistol Whip to 2 initiative and giving it a 5 sec CD lol.

Edit: Let me actually be accurate on this. This is exactly like giving thief 20 Initiative pool and Pistol Whip costing 1 initiative with a 5 sec CD. Oh and intiative is restored on weapon swap. This balance is some kind of cruel prank.

So the energy cost is not the best balanced. I can still get behind Revenants overall having lower cooldowns due to the energy costs. Just means more work needs to be done balancing the costs.

+1 to OP

Also compare Death Shroud to Reaper Shroud.

Even if you take the Revenant CD + Energy spam out of the equation (and energy as a mechanic right now is extremely undertuned IMO), if you look across the board at the other elite specs and their weapon / utility / elite skills, CDs seem to be creeping lower.

Look at Scrapper, Druid, and even Berserker. I mean sure maybe their theme is to play fast, but what it seems to amount to is skill spam.

BeepBoopBop.5403:

epouvante.7392:

Do you realize that 5 energy on coalescence of ruin for 2 sec cd and 5 for phase smash for 8 sec is nothing? Where is the energy managment with just 5 energy cost?

+1

Energy might as well not exist for Rev moves such as those. They’re just insane spammable AoE Backstabs with CDs longer than the energy CD. This is like reducing Pistol Whip to 2 initiative and giving it a 5 sec CD lol.

Edit: Let me actually be accurate on this. This is exactly like giving thief 20 Initiative pool and Pistol Whip costing 1 initiative with a 5 sec CD. Oh and intiative is restored on weapon swap. This balance is some kind of cruel prank.

The irony is even backstab has a higher cooldown and lower damage than CoR.

ScionKai.4907:

Even if you take the Revenant CD + Energy spam out of the equation (and energy as a mechanic right now is extremely undertuned IMO), if you look across the board at the other elite specs and their weapon / utility / elite skills, CDs seem to be creeping lower.

Look at Scrapper, Druid, and even Berserker. I mean sure maybe their theme is to play fast, but what it seems to amount to is skill spam.

Berserker (Warrior) has always had low cd’s, and gameplay revolves around the weapon swaps. Spamming war skills, though, is tantamount to failing pretty hard. As for berserk mode and “spamming” the burst skills, they’re still gated by adrenaline and either require you to burn utilities for generation, or to land hits generally in the thick of combat, or be shut out of subsequent bursts. That’s counterable to boot. Spamming AA is legit, good to punish with confusion.

Salamander.2504:

+1 to OP

Also compare Death Shroud to Reaper Shroud.

When the patch dropped, I could only stare at my necro’s build screen until I gave up and swapped characters because of this.

I’d argue that if DS had access to some stability like RS, it’d be used more and arguably better than RS in PvP environments for power builds. Condi builds get screwed only because of the slowness of the attack speed from Dhuumfire and the lack of chill condition damage.

From a power perspective, the only real advantages to RS are the DPS/cleave and stability. Otherwise, DS offers better burst, sustain, control, range, utility, and durability due to it having three trait lines.