Possible Balance Changes for Next Season
Honestly, I am very impressed with the balance right now. I think revenant is a little on the weak side, but the big issues with PvP at the moment is class stacking, not the class itself being overpowered.
Honestly, I am very impressed with the balance right now. I think revenant is a little on the weak side, but the big issues with PvP at the moment is class stacking, not the class itself being overpowered.
Agreed.
And as far as buffing rev is concerned, i hope they focus more on buffing jalis and ventari instead.
The DH heal definitely heals for way too much. Without healing power and with the meta spec, it heals for a total of 10048 health, split between the initial heal, the trigger heal and the Smite Condition on heal trait tied with Monk’s Focus. That’s almost 90% of the Guardian’s base HP! Without Monk’s Focus, you lose almost 2k healing, but that’s still insane for something on a 30 second (24 seconds traited) CD. The skill also blinds and applies regen for another 1300 HP over 10 seconds, and with Monk’s Focus and Piercing Light, applies fury and slow. Now it’s fine for a skill to do a lot when there are lots of traits affecting it. But on it’s own, it still heals for too much. If it didn’t apply regen and blind, it would probably be fine for a 30 second CD. But traps always provide a boon and apply a condition, so you can’t remove those, so the only option is to reduce the healing and increase the scaling with healing power. With healing power, make it heal for slightly more than it does without any.
So, without healing power, IMO, it should heal for about 75% of what it currently does. Guardians are a class with many heals, so it shouldn’t be a weak heal. Drop the initial heal to about 1100ish and drop the trigger heal to about 5000ish. That’s about a 75% decrease. Now it heals for about 6k-6.5k instead of 8k. 2k less health will be noticeable, but not devastating. With healing power, it should heal for about 9k, and be powerful like a heal should be when using a stat that improves the strength of healing.
Then, after all this, nerf the healing of Monk’s Focus from almost 2k to about 1500 without healing power and of course improves its healing power scaling.
This should help make DHs be a little less tanky while not nerfing their damage. A damage spec should deal high damage, but not be excessively tanky. The high healing provided by Monk’s Focus and Purification is giving too much tankiness to a high damage spec. If DH’s are still too tanky after all this, then reduce the duration on F3 a bit more and give F1 a real cast time (1/2-3/4 is enough) while making the pull evadable.
Now, onto Thief. I’m surprised you mentioned Vault and condi evade spamming specs instead of the issue of the D/P doing too much damage in the wrong areas. Headshot still has too low of a cost for being a ranged interrupt, and tied with Pulminary Impact, can actually do massive damage. There’s also Shadow Shot being a teleporting skill (only requiring a hit) and doing damage almost comparable to a Warrior’s Burst skill. And what about the AA hitting so hard? I’m strongly against AA’kittenting hard in PvP, and with Anet finally doing PvP/PvE splits, they can lower the dagger AA damage without harming PvE. So I have a few suggestions:
- Significantly reduce Shadow Shot damage.
- Cut Pulminary Impact damage in half but make it able to crit, or just reduce the damage by 25%.
- Increase Headshot cost by 1 initiative.
- Reduce AA damage.
- Find ways to make the Trickery trait line less reliable.
- Make Critical Strikes line better in order to help compensate for damage reductions.
If a Thief wants to do insane burst, they’ll need to spec for it. Right now, Anet balanced Thieves around still requiring the Trickery line. And they went all out on this because they added Lead Attacks and added an extra boon to the boon stealing trait, making Trickery even more mandatory. Something needs to be done because you balanced Thieves to be able to do everything bursty without really needing to sacrifice anything. They didn’t even really have anything to sacrifice in the first place. Their defence is crap aside from evade spamming, and they don’t need lots of stealth anyway. With changes to traits, they’ll need to sacrifice the Trickery line for Critical Strikes in order to do the same insane burst they do now without the CS line. But if they want utility, they should have to sacrifice damage. Your changes in previous patches only made the situation worse, Anet. Do the right thing for once.
Edit: I had a whole thing written about Druids, but for some reason it wouldn’t post, so I’m gonna just summarize it.
- Reduce HP of the thing (I forget its name) that roots with Ancient Seeds. This keeps the counterplay while still making the trait useful.
- Massively nerf pet damage and boost Ranger damage in different areas to compensate. Do a PvP/PvE split here.
(edited by Zintrothen.1056)
Druid
-I would like to see ancient seeds get a longer ICD, perhaps 15 seconds?
Maybe the first priority would be to make this trait function as indicated by its tooltip.
Tooltip says 5 seconds of mobilize total. Last time i checked it was not. At least in the lobby and wvw it applies about twice this amount. I thought it was weird that i got stuck in between pulses on my engi with – 50% imob duration. Thats because it applies 2 second of imob per strike and not 1 last time i checked. Even if you destroy the roots as soon as you get out of the cc that triggered it, thats a lot of imob (compare this to netshot for laughs).
To verify this take a druid with no weapon swap reduction and no condition duration
the daze on staffswap and just proceed to swap staff/staff while attacking the training dummy in melee and notice the upptime.