Guild Wars 2

Was a little disappointed to see these patch notes. Didn’t really address any of the major issues. The majority of these balance changes from what I can see are underwater balance and combo finishers :s

Thief barely touched (I play thief and I know its OP). I did like the change however for the necro fear since it is a bit ridiculous that you can fear for longer than a necro can even trait for.
Rangers a little bit of a buff, better pet AI and shortbow etc but nothing serious. Other classes fairly meh, elementalist notes were only one I was happy with.

But to the point; why so many underwater fixes/balance changes? This must be the least of your concerns surely? With regards to pvp, noone even touches the water on capricorn and very rarely are there fights in WvW in underwater, typically 20 people chasing down 1 person so no matter how balanced it is, that guy will die, and I highly doubt PvE care too much about UW balance.

I’m just surprised that arenanet are even devoting any time at all on UW combat when there are still several balance issues with regular combat. Still waiting for a nerf on mindwrack for mesmers. The damage is fine IMO and there are several ways to avoid it, but its on a 10 second CD. For a skill that has a potential to do a lot of damage (that also homes in on the target while you’re still doing other skills) on a 10 sec CD, it’s a little silly. Thief mug trait, guardian trollhammer, warriors need more cnd removal, etc is the stuff that really needs attention.

Rant over.

UnholyVicar.2056:

Was a little disappointed to see these patch notes. Didn’t really address any of the major issues. The majority of these balance changes from what I can see are underwater balance and combo finishers :s

Thief barely touched (I play thief and I know its OP). I did like the change however for the necro fear since it is a bit ridiculous that you can fear for longer than a necro can even trait for.
Rangers a little bit of a buff, better pet AI and shortbow etc but nothing serious. Other classes fairly meh, elementalist notes were only one I was happy with.

But to the point; why so many underwater fixes/balance changes? This must be the least of your concerns surely? With regards to pvp, noone even touches the water on capricorn and very rarely are there fights in WvW in underwater, typically 20 people chasing down 1 person so no matter how balanced it is, that guy will die, and I highly doubt PvE care too much about UW balance.

I’m just surprised that arenanet are even devoting any time at all on UW combat when there are still several balance issues with regular combat. Still waiting for a nerf on mindwrack for mesmers. The damage is fine IMO and there are several ways to avoid it, but its on a 10 second CD. For a skill that has a potential to do a lot of damage (that also homes in on the target while you’re still doing other skills) on a 10 sec CD, it’s a little silly. Thief mug trait, guardian trollhammer, warriors need more cnd removal, etc is the stuff that really needs attention.

Rant over.

Thief isn’t OP. Anyone waiting for nerfs are likely to be waiting for a very very long time.

Yes, Thief is OP. Everyone who says otherwise is either lying or is a Thief who’s afraid of nerfs.

I don’t get why underwater combat gets all this attention: how many times do people find themselves fighting underwater anyway?

I like that we Engineers now get to use the weapon sigil bonus on our kits too, don’t really like that the grenades damage got nerfed even more.

All in all, nothing interesting/important in this patch. Gotta wait some more.

Yea, them priorities… why can we never understand them? No hotfixes, balance in big patches, underwater combat more important than on land (since e-sport will be more viable when capricorn isnt even in the rotation? yes… you are making players feel sane about your reasoning), after posts and posts about thieves in forum… why not buff the only little weak weapon setup for thieves and ignore the rest, it will make e-sport more viable for sure, it makes sense to the community. Oh and… well, I dont know what to say tbh… and I doubt the “transparancy” that never show when the devs explains their reasoning to us will make us understand their logic better.
I dont even feel the need to log in and try the patch, giving them a chance to next year…

i agree. Very bad patchnotes overall, nothing will change effectively.

Nobody cares about UW combat, they could have made UW balance fixes in the january /february patch and do something in order to create a shifting in the meta, since CLEARLY what they think ( no bunker or burst should rule supreme) is not what is actually in the game.

The patch will actually change nothing, and current overperforming builds will still be overperforming.

No serious PvP yet, try again aNet.

kagemitsu.3657:

Yes, Thief is OP. Everyone who says otherwise is either lying or is a Thief who’s afraid of nerfs.

I don’t get why underwater combat gets all this attention: how many times to people find themselves fighting underwater anyway?

I like that we Engineers now get to use the weapon sigil bonus on our kits too, don’t really like that the grenades damage got nerfed even more.

All in all, nothing interesting/important in this patch. Gotta wait some more.

I’m an Engineer, and I’m not lying about Thieves. I’d rather fight most thieves 1v1 than other professions unless they are condition thieves, and thusfar very few people complain about those compared to HS spam and backstab.

Thieves are not OP to me, especially 1v1. It’s just most people make terrible builds, and Thieves are terribly good at exposing that.

Well bunkers should survive backstab pros, mr engineer, but not all professions got viable bunker builds…. and the only option for them is going pure glass cannon. Go pure glass cannon and come back and tell us how you feel about thieves again.
There are so many issues that cant be explained but are obvious, and when developers fail to see obvious and focus on games underwater where only sharks hang out and ignore the rest… I dont know what to say tbh.

I was really excited about this patch when I heard about the fast hands fix… then I read the rest of it.

Seems like thieves and mesmers got a buff of all things, warriors got some bug fixes… everything else seemed kind of inconsequential. Seems like the classes that were dominating before will continue to dominate.

Honestly though, will somebody buff rangers? I might play a warrior, but it’s bad enough to where I feel sorry for them :P

And obviously, condition build is a powerful build as well, as backstab pros, as pistolwhip and now p/p. It’s not that thieves expose it… it’s just that everything they do is much stronger than what anyone else do. Just try and play one, you dont even need that much practice to get rewarded and glory pouring in, that’s why there are 90% thieves in hotjoins for example. It’s just obvious, and players leave, and developers can’t see what’s happening and now with time almost running out… the effort is spent on underwater combat.

pinkglow.3429:

Well bunkers should survive backstab pros, mr engineer, but not all professions got viable bunker builds…. and the only option for them is going pure glass cannon. Go pure glass cannon and come back and tell us how you feel about thieves again.
There are so many issues that cant be explained but are obvious, and when developers fail to see obvious and focus on games underwater where only sharks hang out and ignore the rest… I dont know what to say tbh.

It’s untrue, it’s just a lot harder to build viable balanced builds than bunker/burst, and a lot less intuitive, so most people shy away from them. Also, they are not as effective in hotjoin, so that further detracts from their use. And lastly, you see far fewer builds online to follow, and so that’s another strike. But don’t be fooled into thinking balanced builds don’t exist or they aren’t viable… it took me over 600 matches to find the type of balanced build on my Engineer that I can actually use universally, and I had to do a lot of playtesting. Didn’t have to do that to make my bunker or burst build.

Balance changes aren’t just for sPvP.

The underwater changes are likely mostly geared towards PvE with possible foreshadowing for WvW. Sure there’s not a huge amount of underwater play right now, but considering the lore (namely, Bubbles) the amount of underwater play is likely to greatly increase at some point in the future.

pinkglow.3429:

And obviously, condition build is a powerful build as well, as backstab pros, as pistolwhip and now p/p. It’s not that thieves expose it… it’s just that everything they do is much stronger than what anyone else do. Just try and play one, you dont even need that much practice to get rewarded and glory pouring in, that’s why there are 90% thieves in hotjoins for example. It’s just obvious, and players leave, and developers can’t see what’s happening and now with time almost running out… the effort is spent on underwater combat.

Aside S/D, which was the only weapon set actually requiring some skill to be played, and got nerfed to dust in the attempt to deal with “D/D burst damage” ( attempt which failed misrably and obtained only the effect of sending all thieves into full burst in order to be effective).

Again, this patch changed NOTHING. In EU here it’s 4 am, i am still awake because i was sincerely optimistic about this “balance patch”.

i show my gratitude to aNet for disappointing me once again.

Have to agree with all being said here!

I was a bit disheartened to hear that we wont see any real implementations of Key features to PvP until Jan-Feb (about half a year after the release of the game…) but promised myself I would just take a break and pray for some nice Meta balance and bug fixes in the promised “huge balance patch” in december.

But oh boy was I in for a let down? Under no circumstances would I call this a huge balance patch. Or well, perhaps if the “huge” part is to describe the % of the patch that was dedicated to balance..but I don’t so. And to see that almost every single profession fix/balance was to underwater abilities..Honestly? We have one out of four maps that even see any small resemblance of UW combat, and that map is pretty much hated by the PvP community, and the UW combat is avoided almost to obsession!

TL;DR: Great work on not even delivering on your promise of a “big balance patch”. It just stung enough to make me doubt that you (anet) can deliver on the key features in February. Even though it will be roughly half a year after release.

Yea, UW is very unfun. As soon as someone jumps into the water, I just leave.

I had to check so many spells because I had no idea what they do. They all were from UW. Zzzz. I am pretty disappointed