Guild Wars 2

All and I mean All automatic traits that activate if your character drops under a certain health threshold should be replaced by other traits.

This is bad design because you are encouraging passive gameplay, they can rely on an effect occuring without having to do anything. Players sometimes get saved by these traits, but it was not their personal skill that managed to save them. They get rewarded for displaying no skillful gameplay at all. Not to mention, the players have no control over when they proc. They just do when they you take enough damage, and sometimes they don’t even proc in your favour, or at least the proc timing screws up your skill rotations or make you unnecessarily revealed.

This absolutely needs to go, and I am also referring to stupid effects that proc under a certain health threshold on traits that are similar.

A good alternative is just making nice traits that give players control over when they proc and are skill based tied to their utilities or CCs or whatever. Traits like these already exist in the game, its just a matter of phasing out that threshold nonsense and replacing them with reliable skill based traits. Same thing applies for the threshold nonsense on traits too.

This is my personal take on it, but I will guess that I am not the only one who thinks this way.

Engineers with ‘Elixir S’ x 2 + Vamp runes is too much if you ask me.
Not to mention their blocks and stealth/moa :/

Im seeing a grow in Soldier Engineers using this build, as it is a bit too rewarding for making too many errors.

Either a nerf will come to Vamp Rune or CD increase on Elixir S.

Terrorsquad.4802:

Engineers with ‘Elixir S’ x 2 + Vamp runes is too much if you ask me.
Not to mention their blocks and stealth/moa :/

Im seeing a grow in Soldier Engineers using this build, as it is a bit too rewarding for making too many errors.

Either a nerf will come to Vamp Rune or CD increase on Elixir S.

The Elixir S trait has proven to be more of a thorn on the side than anything else, more often than not it will trigger right in the middle of your healing turret combo and stuff. Plus it’s just pure invincibility, you don’t do jack and CAN’T do jack during these 4 seconds compared to certain classes.

MrForz.1953:

Terrorsquad.4802:

Engineers with ‘Elixir S’ x 2 + Vamp runes is too much if you ask me.
Not to mention their blocks and stealth/moa :/

Im seeing a grow in Soldier Engineers using this build, as it is a bit too rewarding for making too many errors.

Either a nerf will come to Vamp Rune or CD increase on Elixir S.

The Elixir S trait has proven to be more of a thorn on the side than anything else, more often than not it will trigger right in the middle of your healing turret combo and stuff. Plus it’s just pure invincibility, you don’t do jack and CAN’T do jack during these 4 seconds compared to certain classes.

I know, but still its same with Vamp Runes

Passive is best.

Just do what I do and always expect things to not die once they hit 25% health only once per minute. Then you can’t be disappointed.

Honestly though I’m pretty sure, given how prevalent this is among all meta betweens, that this is one of ANet’s ways of attempting to make pure condition builds relevant, since conditions tick through these invuln’s and passives that trigger.

That’s my theory

Terrorsquad.4802:

Engineers with ‘Elixir S’ x 2 + Vamp runes is too much if you ask me.
Not to mention their blocks and stealth/moa :/

A little annoying yes, but if you’re 1v1 on a point, the engi will lose it due to so much invuln and stealth. I don’t think such a build is smart anyway, just demonstrates how bad the engi is. I mean, can he kill anyone with such a defensive build? I highly doubt that.

I just bombard people with condis and watch them cry as they die in their little invuln, “can’t do nothing” state.

This is why we need more condis in the meta guys!!!!!!!!

Elixir s and vamp runes don’t allow them to do anything while they’re in them and they can also force decaps or condi ticks.

You guys seem to only relate this issue to engineers alone.

I am also referring to annoying automatic stun breakers, endure the pain, spectral armor, decoy, smoke bomb, Armor of earth among other ones. When you pay attention to every animation, and you know they exhausted all their utilities, and you track their cooldowns, and you carefully plan to set up a CC finishing rotation for the kill.

These stun breakers ruin all of your hard effort, and your opponents literarily escape an otherwise sure death. This is an example of reward for no real effort or skill.

Not all the defensive procs are hurting gameplay. You have to look at them individually.

For example, Engineer Transmute is terrible design because it can completely negate CC conditions, and you never know if it’s going to happen. However, the Elixir S proc isn’t all that bad. In elixir S, you can’t use abilities and for an opponent, it’s pretty predictable when it will happen.

Basically, if it’s predictable or won’t significantly hinder what an attacker can do, it’s not that bad. Protection procs will slow incoming damage, but it’s not going to completely ruin a burst. However, when the defensive procs provide a huge benefit with no downside, it becomes problematic. The warrior Endure Pain proc is far more frustrating because the warrior can just keep going.

Vampirism runes are a major culprit because they give professions which are supposed to have high risk for high reward much less risk. If you over-extend or don’t back out of a fight when focused, you still get saved.

I think the game design itself is fundamentally flawed which is why it is so hard to balance. Passive procs on sigils/runes, and not restricting certain trait-lines to certain weapon sets/play styles from the get go.

However, I do think they’ve realized this with the expansion by having the elite spec unlock the new weapon for you; you can balance the weapon/trait-line/playstyle without tons of unseen repercussions.

Not only that, but some of these automatic traits trigger when you DON’T want them to. One example would be Thief’s Pain Response, which triggers under 75% life to give 10s of Regen (meh) and removes all Bleeding, Burning, and Poison on you (yay!).

This sounds nice, except it also triggers if you have none of those conditions on you and are just under 75% life, which is the case nearly 100% of the time in combat given how glassy the Thief is. And thus, what should be a good trait ends up getting completely wasted a lot of the time.

So yeah, I’d like to see those kind of automatic traits changed. Not good design.

Amante.8109:

Not only that, but some of these automatic traits trigger when you DON’T want them to. One example would be Thief’s Pain Response, which triggers under 75% life to give 10s of Regen (meh) and removes all Bleeding, Burning, and Poison on you (yay!).

This sounds nice, except it also triggers if you have none of those conditions on you and are just under 75% life, which is the case nearly 100% of the time in combat given how glassy the Thief is. And thus, what should be a good trait ends up getting completely wasted a lot of the time.

So yeah, I’d like to see those kind of automatic traits changed. Not good design.

It’s been a while since I did the math, but I’m pretty sure pain response gives more health/second than Assasin’s Reward which is a grandmaster in that line.

Very likely, but Assassin’s Reward also isn’t very good, so there’s that.

You are talking to the developers that made Diamond Skin and Stone Heart.
And they wonder why no one uses Earth Magic traitline.

_

Proc’ing traits are not the issue by design, it’s the sheer lack of creativity.

_

Just look at Powerful Synergy, look at how little went into it’s design.

Powerful Synergy: When you activate a leap combo finisher, it activates twice.

Warrior only has 1 combo field, on it’s longbow and guess what? Fire Aura’s do NOT stack in anyway. Meaning that the trait is completely useless if the warrior is alone. BUT IT GET’S BETTER! There are 9 combo fields in the game, because Auras do not stack duration, this trait only affects 4 of leap finishers, none of them on warrior!! (Minus dark leap, because 6 seconds of blinds vs. 3 seconds is still not beneficial.)
This is a grandmaster trait.

Here is an idea if you want to reward leap finishers on Warriors.

Powerful Synergy: Leap finishers are also blast finishers. Reduce the recharge of skills that leap by 10% for each nearby ally.

_

But hey, some of us has 5,000 hours of pure playing, what do we know?

200% agree with OP.

Stop Passive play!!
Stop Random procs!!
Stop (direct or condi) damage on weapon swap!!

It only rewards non-skilled players. Allows them to play low risk high reward.

Get insta gived by a Player who you CAN NOT see coming it is not skilled Play.
Example:
1) mesmer makes shater greatsword combo on you without invis —> there is a reaction time to dodge the combo, and is possible to react because you see it, even if mesmer is next to you, is posible to dodge it if you see it.
2) mesmer makes same shater next to you but from invis --> how the hell do you dodge that?? RANDOM dodge?? Really?? are we summarizing skillfull play on RANDOM dodges?? Are we crazy or what?

I made example with mesmer, but any high burst comming from stealth is flawed by design. No matter which class.

If passive traits / runes are needed because there is too much insta damage, then balance it so we are able to rely on ACTIVE REACTION TIMES.

Let us carry ourselves and not be carried by our builds.

Give us the control of our characters!!

The best player should be the most skilled and not the one with more passive play doing everything for him.

P.D: Signed a thief-main player who hates stealth.

Please A-net Please, Phase out all passive effects out of your game.

The ONLY passive things that should remain in your game are the statistical boosts (in power, toughness, etc..), and everything else should be tied to the players’ control.

Man how I HATE double Endure Pain. Ther problem is, a Warrior without it is probably a easy to kill waste of space in PvP. That being said, it’s also way less obnoxious than other passive traits. Defy Pain is very predictable. It’s garbage like Blinding Ashes that are killing any kind of skilled gameplay.

It’s not a trait that you carefully time, it’s just a added effect that greatly increases your sustain in small scale fights. Fire used to be the time where you could really start applying pressure but now you get easy passive sustain because you can passively blind incoming CC. The blind duration is also really long.

Traits like Transmute are also annoying because of how difficult to predict it is. Shared Agony and Mirror of Anguish aren’t bad in 1v1s aren’t bad but in team fights you have no idea if your CC is going to work or flop due to a passive trait.

Runes and Sigils can be terrible as well. Do I eat that AA and risk a double proc? Or should I avoid it and open myself to another attack?

I would like to see more things tied to specific skills and actions so that I can not only predict what my enemy may do, but what I’m going to do as well.

well yeah, ppl have been saying that for the better part of GW2’s existence… :P

I don’t think playing full-glass is always the best way to go, but so many people are asking for buffs to it by proxy of nerfing other classes, especially conditions. The consequences of this wouldn’t bode well for the game.

Not long ago, I played against a team with 2 glass thieves. Either one of those thieves could down an unaware player in a few seconds. They, of course, played hit and run, which was the right strategy for their build style. However, while they could down players super fast, they also were likely to get downed super fast too, even to passive effects.

To me, this seems a fair trade for going full glass. If you want to kill fast, then you are at risk of dying fast.

In fact, I believe passive effects are a fair defense against pure glass. They require glass players to play smarter and not just repeat a combo over and over again. Of course, thieves hate them because they counter the way many thief players want to play. But the way that they want to play is not fun for anyone but themselves. No one likes going down in a few seconds with no chance to react. When thieves could do this, these forums were filled with far more complaints about thieves than thieves now are making about other classes. Passive effects give non-glass players a chance, and pure glass players need to adapt around them. This might mean reducing some damage for more survivability. Or a simple acceptance of the consequences of the build. Otherwise, the only counter to pure glass is to go pure glass and the winner is who presses 1 first. Clearly, this isn’t what Anet wants, and I doubt the majority of the players do either.

While I’d like to see passive invulns and such phased out of the game to promote more active play, I do believe we absolutely CAN’T do it without removing the ability of certain builds to instakill players. Even after it’s nerfs shatter Mesmer can insta down people from stealth and warriors can still almost 100-25 you with a whirlwind if you’re anything but a full bunker. The sheer damage available to some classes (mainly warrior and Mesmer) needs to be toned down if you want passive invulns removed. The only reason people even need them is to avoid being 1 shot by those things in the first place. Take away the ability to 1 shot and then you can remove the passive invulns without too much detriment to the game.

Ario.8964:

While I’d like to see passive invulns and such phased out of the game to promote more active play, I do believe we absolutely CAN’T do it without removing the ability of certain builds to instakill players. Even after it’s nerfs shatter Mesmer can insta down people from stealth and warriors can still almost 100-25 you with a whirlwind if you’re anything but a full bunker. The sheer damage available to some classes (mainly warrior and Mesmer) needs to be toned down if you want passive invulns removed. The only reason people even need them is to avoid being 1 shot by those things in the first place. Take away the ability to 1 shot and then you can remove the passive invulns without too much detriment to the game.

The issue here Ario is, passives need to go regardless of the existence of high spike damage builds.

Those very bursty builds that you want to see toned down are using those passive health threshold nonsense effects as we speak, which makes them even harder to deal with. A bursty spec should be easyyyy to kill when they don’t move or activate skills, and right now they are not. That’s outrageous. Bursty specs are actually benefiting from this more so than tankier builds. If that gets phased out, you can consider glassy builds nerfed harder than tankier ones.

The high reward high risk gameplay is cool even if you get burst down in 1 second, but with this kitten passive kitten, high reward lower risk is the norm.

Highlie.7641:

Passive is best.

This.

I have seen people say that these powers proc at bad times, which is a good reason to remove them, but just because you don’t like passive is not a good idea.

Good game design allows passive and active, passive gives a set amount of power which can be trumped by well executed active powers, but not so weak that people don’t want them.

tsuyosugiru.7634:

You guys seem to only relate this issue to engineers alone.

I am also referring to annoying automatic stun breakers, endure the pain, spectral armor, decoy, smoke bomb, Armor of earth among other ones. When you pay attention to every animation, and you know they exhausted all their utilities, and you track their cooldowns, and you carefully plan to set up a CC finishing rotation for the kill.

These stun breakers ruin all of your hard effort, and your opponents literarily escape an otherwise sure death. This is an example of reward for no real effort or skill.

I disagree with some of this because because you can see them. If you see a warrior with endure pain you know you cant do dps damage but you can still do condi dmg. When ele gets armor of earth you see the protection and stability boons by there name.

What i call the passive play is the the stuff you cant account for because you dont see it. For instance when you have someone on the ropes and then they turn mist. Everyone says run condi for this situation but i run a dps warrior and if i have a dps thief with me and we burst down a ele and he has a vamp rune. He gets to go into mist and use his f1-f4 skills gain a million boons and health and we have to start the process over again.

Another passive thing that annoys me is guardians shelter heal with the ability to heal and hold a point as well as a mesmer sword 2 skill. They take no dmg and can still hold the cap points yet when a warrior gets endure the pain (a trait choice) he can take condi dmg which atm mesmer/guardians/ele can apply alot of them real quick and over and over.

Another one to me is the d/d ele ring of fire, not because of the stacks but the fact i cant even dodge threw it. Like really? I get hit by by it and get 3 stacks the ele stands in his perfect circle stacking might and i dodge into him and i get other 3 stacks. With a blind and when he attunes to earth i get a cripple and potentially a bleed.

I could go on but some of the things you named can be easily counter played with other options where as there passive attacks that cant be countered such as the ones ive noted down. These are the things that need some focus on imo.

Much of this comes from the design choice of having a set amount of skills (10…or more if we include swaps/profession specific mechanics) on the skill bar. So whenever the devs want to add more effects, it often goes into passives rather than as additional skills like you might see in other mmorpgs. For better or worse, I don’t expect this to change.

It is reasonable to ask that all of the passives are given appropriate icons and ‘tells’ though. For example, diamond skin ele should have an icon on their bar or an aura on their character to let attackers (and the DS ele himself) know that the character has that trait and are currently meeting the requirements for it to be active. Or a warrior with the passive balanced stance or defy pain trigger could have something to let you (and the player) know it is on cooldown and ready to be triggered (instead of the warrior thinking…god I hope that trait is back up off cooldown).

Changes like these are reasonable and will better inform combat decisions for all players involved.

They could (and should) do a whole lot more in terms of making common buffs and traits more visually identifiable, especially as the game isn’t moddable.

kdaddy.5431:

tsuyosugiru.7634:

You guys seem to only relate this issue to engineers alone.

I am also referring to annoying automatic stun breakers, endure the pain, spectral armor, decoy, smoke bomb, Armor of earth among other ones. When you pay attention to every animation, and you know they exhausted all their utilities, and you track their cooldowns, and you carefully plan to set up a CC finishing rotation for the kill.

These stun breakers ruin all of your hard effort, and your opponents literarily escape an otherwise sure death. This is an example of reward for no real effort or skill.

I disagree with some of this because because you can see them. If you see a warrior with endure pain you know you cant do dps damage but you can still do condi dmg. When ele gets armor of earth you see the protection and stability boons by there name.

What i call the passive play is the the stuff you cant account for because you dont see it. For instance when you have someone on the ropes and then they turn mist. Everyone says run condi for this situation but i run a dps warrior and if i have a dps thief with me and we burst down a ele and he has a vamp rune. He gets to go into mist and use his f1-f4 skills gain a million boons and health and we have to start the process over again.

Another passive thing that annoys me is guardians shelter heal with the ability to heal and hold a point as well as a mesmer sword 2 skill. They take no dmg and can still hold the cap points yet when a warrior gets endure the pain (a trait choice) he can take condi dmg which atm mesmer/guardians/ele can apply alot of them real quick and over and over.

Another one to me is the d/d ele ring of fire, not because of the stacks but the fact i cant even dodge threw it. Like really? I get hit by by it and get 3 stacks the ele stands in his perfect circle stacking might and i dodge into him and i get other 3 stacks. With a blind and when he attunes to earth i get a cripple and potentially a bleed.

I could go on but some of the things you named can be easily counter played with other options where as there passive attacks that cant be countered such as the ones ive noted down. These are the things that need some focus on imo.

You misunderstood what I said, let me rephrase it.

When you face someone who has these traits selected, and you pay attention to their animations, and you know they exhausted every utility skill and their F1-4 skills, then you proceed to plan a finishing rotation that starts with a CC (when they are still above 25% of their health threshold, meaning you cannot see those buffs on them when you make the decision to go for the kill), they escape an otherwise sure death thanks to a passive proc.

In other words, you actually agreed with everything I said, because you can’t see the effects when they don’t proc yet.

lol my bad, my reading isnt so good obviously

tsuyosugiru.7634:

All and I mean All automatic traits that activate if your character drops under a certain health threshold should be replaced by other traits.

This is bad design because you are encouraging passive gameplay, they can rely on an effect occuring without having to do anything. Players sometimes get saved by these traits, but it was not their personal skill that managed to save them. They get rewarded for displaying no skillful gameplay at all. Not to mention, the players have no control over when they proc. They just do when they you take enough damage, and sometimes they don’t even proc in your favour, or at least the proc timing screws up your skill rotations or make you unnecessarily revealed.

This absolutely needs to go, and I am also referring to stupid effects that proc under a certain health threshold on traits that are similar.

A good alternative is just making nice traits that give players control over when they proc and are skill based tied to their utilities or CCs or whatever. Traits like these already exist in the game, its just a matter of phasing out that threshold nonsense and replacing them with reliable skill based traits. Same thing applies for the threshold nonsense on traits too.

This is my personal take on it, but I will guess that I am not the only one who thinks this way.

You know what you get if you don’t have any passive traits? World of warcraft, where you look up macros to manage the crazy amounts of skills that are drowning your interface. I say keep the passive skills but try and make a type of notification so people know if they are on CD.

Firebird.8324:

make a type of notification so people know if they are on CD.

We need this soooo hard

There is no way to phase out all the passive effects from this game. in fact, a mix between passive and active mechanic can keep things interesting and less predictable.

some passive trait types do need some icon on character bar adjustments like mirror of anguish Last stand and the like, Incendiary Powder, auto Elixer S and Endure Pain.

Generally, the passives that trigger at percentages of health are fine. They should alter or remove the ones that straight up stunbreak, though. RNG stunbreaking is too feast or famine to be good design.

Amante.8109:

Generally, the passives that trigger at percentages of health are fine. They should alter or remove the ones that straight up stunbreak, though. RNG stunbreaking is too feast or famine to be good design.

I agree with this more than I disagree with it.

The fact that passive stun breakers should be removed is something that I strongly vouch for, but I might be even satisfied with just passive boons/condi removal (No invulns though).

Not everything needs to be active. Having absolutely everything be active would be massive to keep track of and passives enhance the class without forcing it into a specific thing. Also the point of traits are to be passive. That said, I do think some passives need to be altered. Passive stun breaks and condi removal is fine (functions as a safety net but won’t save you if you suck), but invulnerability is not because it can’t be countered.

>The wizlands

I dont particularly care about active active skills’ excess. I care about the removal of unnecessary passives that only hold down PVP, and prevent it from becoming something amazing.

I am sure if Arenanet spends enough time on fixing this issue, they would come up with creative solutions that would replace this passive automatic no brainer stun breaking kitten and give us better alternatives that would feed into build diversity and viability as well as skillful gameplay