Quickness nerf to 50% is a good thing overall I think, the 100% did leave too little time to react, specially for players with lag. It also had the upside of nerfing rangers who had it available so easily. HOWEVER:
Unless the developers have never pvped, they would have to know that would have a few very nasty side effects: it nerfs warriors, badly, who most of the pvp community already agreed were UP, that isn’t even a guess because there is a SURVEY. Indeed, on the roles of roamer/burst they could do “fine” with team support, but that relied entirely on quickness burst. The nerf to it, while keeping the whooping 50 percent incoming dmg increase, (adding one second is pretty irrelevant) makes it a pretty mediocre ability. That debuff needs to be brought down to 25%, for one thing. But fine, it was a clutch, so let’s fix warrior then. Let’s fix the large number of traits that are underpowered and useless, let’s give warriors a class trait under discipline that actually does something. Let’s make shouts viable. Let’s make it so that while condi removal isn’t their strength they aren’t complete kitten against it. You know, balance the class but then… oh, banner buffs.
Thieves were too good at two things: bursting/stealth spamming. Their weaknesses were also overtuned: providing very little team support, being incapable of staying in a team fight more than a few seconds, relying on stealth too much to survive, having a condi spec that was annoying but not very effective at killing much. So you nerf their burst somewhat, definitely breaking pistol whip for the most part, and make a minor change to stealth that doesn’t fix the spam problem. And address nothing else about the class… what?
Eles are still overpowered, but not just that, they are poorly designed. Staff is useless. Most of the traits in the top 3 trait lines are UP while the bottom 2 are way too good. So that’s what EVERY ele runs along with a very limited set of weapons. Oh and Cantrips are better than everything. Only thing that changes is the amulet depending on how tanky they want to be. So it’s not just that their healing/defenses are too good for a class with such good mobility AND pretty high dmg. But that there are very few ways to play them. So what do you do? You nerf the few burst classes that could actually kill an ele before they got to just disengage and heal to full in a few seconds, consequently actually buffing their survivability more. While nerfing nothing or improving nothing about their limited options.
Bottom line? You needed to have addressed the issues with those classes BEFORE throwing in the quickness nerf. You jumped the gun and made balance worse.
Everything else: Mesmer and necro changes are meh, w/e happened to shatter nerf and buffs to other areas? Necro stun breakers need a buff. Guardians are a pigeonholed class idk why you think they’re “fine”. Turret changes are good, though idk that they are good enough for people to use them spvp. Penalties on elixir U are too high for the bonus, just like they now are for the thief and warrior abilities its based on. I liked the changes to kit refinement, 100nades was cheesy, these look fun. See, you did one thing right.
Vidallis – 50 Shades of Pink – Engi/Warrior
