Guild Wars 2

Oh Boy! Is it time for another transcript again?
This is a belated transcript of “Helseth’s Opinion on the 2014-1-17 Ready Up Show”:http://www.twitch.tv/helsethgw2/c/3565511
(only 5 days late)

These are not my words. Transcript as follows (Some errors will follow):

Sup stream. Let’s just do this as fast as possible. I should add that…You know, I’m not even going to need this overlay. I’ll just go into camera. That’s me beautiful…
So what I’m going to do is obviously I’ll upload a highlight of this. And that’s the way I’ll reach almost all of you. For those of you that are here right now, what’s up? Make sure you spam it around because as you are all aware, I’m kind of muffled.

Anyway, what I have here is a list of changes that have happened and before I say anything I want to say that keep in mind that first of all this isn’t set in stone. Nothing that they [Arenanet] say is completely set in stone. And it’s very likely that things are happening as they said it. But it’s not completely set in stone. Which means that if there’s something that you really don’t like be vocal about it, try to do something about it. You won’t get anything from uh, just accepting things as they are. More importantly when you’re being vocal about it make sure you’re doing it in an as constructive of manner as possible [sic], since you’re really not going to reach them if you’re like, completely just whining.

With that said, let’s get onto the list for a bit. I am completely aware this is not everything that’s on this list. It’s just what they said on the Ready Up show and that will have more later. But I’ll work with what I’ve got right?

• Funny thing about this critical damage change, I was actually looking forward to it a lot. I was like, “oh my god the power creep is disappearing!”, because that was something that I’d been vocal about forever. And then there’s at the end of the description of the whole critical damage thing I was like “oh 10 percent less critical damage this is awesome, great start for everything” and then they went “by the way this is not for PVP.” So the critical damage thing doesn’t matter. This is right away, I’ll jump into [sic] what I believe is the biggest issue of this patch. The changes that are coming in. And again, this could be not as bad if there’s a lot of nerfs to the sigils.

• I am of course talking about the double sigils and the fact you can stack, well, on cooldown effects. For example the first thing that comes to mind is a Necromancer with Geomancy and Energy. Or a Thief with Air and Fire. Thief with Air and Fire is really wierd, because it could essentially mean that a Thief could have, for example a Backstab Thief would be able to have enough damage to just 100-0 people with viable builds, mind you. Viable builds that could 100-0 people. From Stealth, with Backstab. And Instant, mind you. It’s not something you dodge. So that’s going to exist. That’s going to be a thing and I don’t see why. Fire, Air, Energy, Geomancy, all of these were not weak by any means, rather the opposite. So this change is confusing to say the least. They’re buffing, a lot. This is a huge power creep. This is by far the worst change. And the problem with this change is that it’ll lead to so many more problems in the future. The sigils are going to be really problematic in combinations in the future, and they’re going to have to nerf sigils that would have otherwise been fine.

• For example, the Immobilise. When they made stacking Immobilise work, which was never a good idea – they still did it. They now had to nerf the Engi Turret Immobilise. Even though there was nothing wrong with it. Even though there was nothing wrong with the skill itself, they’re now forced to nerf perfectly okay skills just because they introduce new systems that just shouldn’t be there in the first place.

• There’s a lot of disgusting combinations I could give. But I’ll just leave it at that. It’s a really really really scary idea. It furthers the Power creep and I am not at all excited about that. The Runes, I don’t know yet, obviously. Like, they just said some random thing about the Strength Rune which is too little information for me to make a conclusion. What I can say is…maybe I should do this. Give me one second. I’m going to show my screen so you guys can follow what I’m doing a little bit more. It will have the drawback of you guys not seeing my face in fullscreen completely. And truly, I do apologise about that.

So where we are now, is the Runes. And what I’m more afraid of with the Runes is the idea that they want to [omitted for repetition] remove, remove the idea that the game can be just completely open for everyone. Like, you can’t just go in as a Level 1 player and just compete with me on equal terms in terms of gear. Right now they’re adding these new Amulets, they’re continuing to add more Runes, possibly with a cost. People will have to grind to get in and there’s already way too little people in PvP. And this is just going to make it even worse.

Again, a huge mis-step in my opinion and I hope the community will be vocal about it and will be constructive when they’re vocal. If you complain, you can do something. Soloqueue wasn’t on their [Arenanet’s] plan until people talked. So many things that have been changed has been changed because people have been vocal about it consistently, and there’d either been people that have been great posts and videos and whatever about it and it does lead to a change. So be consistent. Continue with mentioning what needs to happen if you want something to happen.

They’re fixing bugs on armours which is hilarious. I mean, I’m happy that it’s happening, I suppose, its just that it’s been years.

• And yeah, this: “Adding new unlockable stat combos for PvP”. It’s a really bad idea in my opinion and I don’t like it at all.

So let’s get to the Balance Preview for a little bit, why not.
“Signet of Restoration restored to full power” – doesn’t matter. The problem doesn’t lie in the Elementalist sustain, rather, it lies in the the damage of the game having increased so much. The largest source of damage back then, when Eles were common and viable was Mesmer with Sword and Staff. Right now,

Mesmer is the least damage dealing out of all the damage professions, and Mesmer’s running Greatsword now. That’s, that means that there’s a huge difference in damage and that restoring the Signet isn’t going to do anything to fix it.

“Armour of Earth cooldown goes from 90 seconds to 75 seconds” – not going to do much at all. Might be good versus Warriors, but that’s about it considering that Thieves can just eat their boons, Necros and all that.

“3 seconds of Regen added to Water Trident” – which is hilarious to me. The idea that this is supposed to do anything at all. “Shave” they say. But changes like this are bad for the same reason that changes for the Bleeds for Necromancer were bad. There wasn’t any problem with the Bleeds for Necromancer.

• And the PVP developers tried to keep Burn as it was while nerfing everything else on the Necro like, “okay let’kitten the bleed, let’s keep hitting the bleed, nerf Enfeebling Blood, nerf this, nerf that.” And they kept nerfing the other things about Necromancer and now they’re butchering Dhuumfire.

• And what you’re left with is a weaker Necromancer than what you had to start. And this is the same thing, although to the other direction. They’re going to keep doing buffs, small buffs, over and over again. Until they’re like, “Screw it.” And then they’re going to give a massive buff to the Ele.

• And all of a sudden, the Elementalist will have all these ridiculous options, and every single one of these buffs will matter. And they’ll matter for the worse. All of a sudden it’s been on top of the broken stuff. Similar to how Healing Signet, Cleansing Ire, was not a problem about Warrior. But then Cleansing Ire became a huge problem when Healing Signet was brought up. And this is similar.

If you make these shaves, then you need to be consistent about it. You need to shave everything down to the same level, and you need to shave everything up. You can’t just shave, then give up after 3 months, then just take an axe and just chop it. You’re not going to shave it that way. At all. And that’s the – we’ve had the same difficulties with them not wanting to go overboard but they always seem to do it.

This is another example: “Burning Speed – evade” [Burning Speed now Evades during cast]. Won’t do anything, really, meta wise, at all, but this might be a problem along with many other things when they finally just give in and try to ridiculously buff this.

“Net Turret immobilise” – There was nothing wrong with Net Turret of course, the problem is Immobilise stacking. Something that every single top player – naturally including myself – have been very vocal about being an issue. The sooner, the sooner you guys – the sooner you balance developers realise that the issue isn’t with Immobilise, similar to how the Bleed stacks weren’t the issue with Necromancer, or how the issue isn’t the lack of 3 second Regen to Water Trident. The sooner you realise that, the better. Because otherwise you’re just going to keep nerfing all sorts of Immobilise things; eventually the Immobilise stacking will have to be nerfed or changed drastically and then you’re left with an even weaker Net Turret for no reason.That’s just how it’s going to be.

“Poison Grenades” – doesn’t really matter.

“Toolkit Box Of Nails” – this one was hilarious to me. Like, high level PVP changes. This isn’t even a change. Like, what is this. What. Is. This. What’s This? What on Earth is this? What’s this supposed to be? I don’t even know.
Apparently Spirit of Nature is bugged. Which is beautiful to me. I didn’t even know. But apparently Spirit of Nature is bugged and it’s been healing too much. Pretty ridiculous since it’s been a meta spec since the dawn of time essentially. The fact that it hadn’t been fixed yet, like whatever, it’s been fixed, it’s whatever. I mean shrugs.

• And here’s the Dhuumfire change – and that’s what I mean with all of this. [Arenanet nerfing things ancillary to a problem change, then nerfing the problem change, class is weaker for it.]

• Interestingly enough, they’re nerfing Training of the Master. [Damage bonus reduced form 30% to 25%]. And various different Minion Master things. Yet again, it’s similar, it’s not going to fix the main issue of what makes Minion Masters good in that it’s pretty brainless in its play. And the second that you put a big nerf on minion master now, all these things are going to stack up; Minion Master’s going to be bad. That’s just how it’s going to be. But still funny, because they’re nerfing Minion Master, but they’re not nerfing Spirit Ranger, aside from the bug fix. And Spirit Ranger is stronger than Minion Master. Just a funny note.

And of course, this is what everyone’s been asking me about. [Healing Signet passive healing reduced by about 8%, ~30HPS*]. So Healing Signet. I was really worried when I was watching the stream. Naturally, I believe, well, I’m confident that me and Arenanet – the staff – have different opinions on how the game should be. And that’s something I’ve come to terms with. But when the dev said that they’re pretty satisfied with the whole passive, but they just want to have an active so good that it will make it worth using despite the passive being like so ridiculous – that should just pop up one word in your head. And it did to me. And I hope it did to you. And that’s “Power Creep”.

We need to reduce the Power Creep at some point. Power Creep is the reason there’s so – it’s so little room for error. Like, Power Creep is the reason why someone who’s terrible at Warrior could still manage to kill me if I screw up. Because everything’s just so ridiculously strong that it’s, it’s just ridiculous. Like what kind of active will you give the Warrior to make it worth using at some point over the passive? And more importantly, why should that be in the game? Imagine what kind of ridiculous active that will be. Like will that be some buff to Power, or what would it be?

• The Pin down change is a good one [Pin down has a new animation/tell, cast time increased from 1/4 to 3/4 sec]

So, summing it up, the changes that I believe were the most impactful, was the most meaningful? I did note it down, let me see if I have it here so I just don’t forget about it…

Oh, here we go. So Mesmers were change, the Deceptive Evasion. I think it’s, I don’t like it – the change they did to Deceptive Evasion [Deceptive Evasion will no longer create new clones if you already have full images]. Obviously not because of Clone Death, but because – for example:

• If a Thief jumps me, as a Mesmer, I want to be able to have the option of being able to dodge, then Daze him, or dodge and Shatter. But if I have 3 clones up, my Deceptive Evasion isn’t going to do anything. So it kind of hampers my movement.

• And if the only thing it really benefit to [sic] was the really facerolly Phantasm Mesmers that want to be able to spam dodges while having 3 Phantasms up without overwriting the Phantasms. Which just makes the build even more brainless for them. They don’t even need to keep that in mind, which I don’t like at all. Like, at least you had a minor form of management before, but now it’s even more brainless.
  Luckily Phantasm mesmers aren’t good builds – in particular a very good build. So that’s not much of a problem in the meta. But it’s still a bad design decision in my opinion. But yeah, that was Mesmer and there are other changes to Mesmer like Vigour.

• I would recommend to all Mesmers that once Confounding Suggestions is nerfed, you go 20 in the Domination line, 20 in Duel line and 30 Chaos. You get the Boon Duration and that was already a build we were already starting to lean towards anyway. So just go Prismatic Understanding, get some Stealths along with you, and you’re still going to have Vigour, you’re going to have some Protection. You’ll do fine. Don’t worry about it, breathe. But it’s still not an enjoyable nerf to have.

• The Pin down nerf. I like it a lot, obviously, because Pin Down is ridiculous. So that will be really good. There’s not much else I could say about that, it’s just a good change that needed to happen earlier.

• And the Sigils. The third thing: Sigils no longer sharing cooldown. That one I’m not excited at all about. See, that one, how do I put it, without wanting to just cry. I obviously, all I can say is kind of – if they don’t nerf the Sigils – all of the Sigils – sweeping nerf, then that change is just ridiculous power creep. That’s the – one of the biggest Power Creep buffs that they’ve [Arenanet] have ever done. And there’s no reason to do it. The reason they said they did it was because it was confusing or something. What? What? You don’t do buffs like that just because they’re ‘confusing’. STOP IT. I really hope that they’re nerfing the Sigils along with that.

• And I really hope that they look deep – alright. Devs, before you do this change – Fire/Air, those combinations. Look at Geomancy, oh my god there’s just so many ridiculous changes with that. The Sigil thing is not ready. I’ll say that. You need to prepare that with a bunch of shaves if you are going to do that. Otherwise you’re introducing yet another broken concept. And we don’t need more of those.

• And the final, absolutely final thing, was the progression thing. I don’t want new players to come into this game and lose to me, and feel like they have to grind to Level 80, or get whatever skill point or get whatever armour set. Because we don’t know what the meta will be in half a year. The metagame for what we know might be full equipment of nothing but what you have to unlock. You don’t want to put – one of the greatest benefits of Guild Wars 2 PVP is that you don’t actually have to care about gearing up. If you put that in, then you’re hurting your playerbase a lot and we don’t need more of that. That’s about it.

In summary:

• Helseth is of the opinion that the community should be vocal, consistent and constructive about upcoming changes discussed on the 14/1 Ready Up show.

• He is disappointed that the nerf to Critical Damage will not make it into PvP.

• He is concerned that the addition of a second sigil to Two handed weapons, along with removing the shared GCD of Sigil procs, will be an immense creep in power across all classes. The potential for abuse is massive, and in his opinion, the PvP meta is not ready for it unless many things are shaved or all sigils are significantly nerfed

• With regards to unlockable Runes, Amulet statistic combinations and Skills, Helseth feels that the change is overwhelmingly negative. It will hurt the playerbase and turn new players away from PvP. At the moment, new players are in no way disadvantaged when they enter PvP but these additions will not make it so.

• He feels that the Balance direction requires critical re-examination. Many “shaves” of nerfing and buffing he feels will do too little – until Arenanet “gives in” and gives a massive buff to a certain aspect to a profession and makes a monster. As an example, he gives the Healing Signet buff and how this single change has made Warriors jump from non viable to ridiculous. Or the Dhuumfire changes.

• Regarding Dhuumfire – he brings this up as a change that leaves Necromancer overall weaker than when Dhuumfire was introduced. Ancillary nerfs, like hitting the Bleed stacks and Weakness have left the class weaker without Dhuumfire and now that Dhuumfire is being hit, Necromancer (condi) will overall be weaker for it than if Dhuumfire had not been introduced in the first place.

• He also feels that some changes, like the 3 Second Regen on Elementalist Water Scepter 3 or Signet of Restoration change, do too little to bring a class back into a fold, while also potentially becoming a problem later in the lifecycle. A massive buff could occur to Elementalist later on, and things like Dagger Fire 3 Evasion could become part of a multi-factor systemic problem of Elementalist OP. He claims that this has already happened to Warrior.

• He feels that Power Creep is a massive problem and that developers will need to be very cautious with things like Double Sigils because there is very little room for error.

Anyway, Discuss

big wall of text but atleast an summary

he says nothing i don´t saw here in the forum in last days

you helseth fanbois start to be annoying

Looks like this guy is an magnet for people with no own brain. He is loud bout what comunity says in an twitch channel – nothing more. But looks like is enough to make some people happy.

Really? A transcript? That’s pretty sad

Fanboys of a terrible troll player in solo/team q who plays the worst possible class in this game and isnt even a top player.

Hmm kk, even hitler had some fanboys.

Oh i forgot, that guy is permanently banned from forums for bad behavior.

Hmm kk. And hes got fanboys. Lol.
Internet.

Nary Why Irk.8150:

Fanboys of a terrible troll player in solo/team q who plays the worst possible class in this game and isnt even a top player.

Hmm kk, even hitler had some fanboys.

Oh i forgot, that guy is permanently banned from forums for bad behavior.

Hmm kk. And hes got fanboys. Lol.
Internet.

You’re the one playing Spirit Ranger though.

Nary Why Irk.8150:

Fanboys of a terrible troll player in solo/team q who plays the worst possible class in this game and isnt even a top player.

Hmm kk, even hitler had some fanboys.

Oh i forgot, that guy is permanently banned from forums for bad behavior.

Hmm kk. And hes got fanboys. Lol.
Internet.

Fanboyism is pretty sad, but hating just for the sake of hating (which is what you do, I have seen you hate on helseth here forums countless times) is just as sad. There’s fanboys, and on the other end are the haters (you), both are pretty pathetic.
And calling someone that wins esl on a weekly basis a terrible player, while you’re some unknown solo queue spirit ranger hero isn’t really a smart thing.
The thread was already pretty stupid and you made it worse.

and im sorry if some people still play mesmer, not everyone is so gutless that they reroll to autopilot spirit ranger just to join the cheese train.

You want to know how you know if some is stupid, they convince themselves there right then make a video preaching there right!.

THIS COMMUNITY IS KITTEN

All i see is sever cases of:

Being bad
Playing faceroll build
Abused it to get upper leaderboard(wich is fairly easy with such a small playerbase)
Post kitten in forums with a “pro” attitude
Being convinced anyone cares or their opinion matters

I am not talking about Helseth his points are actually legit especially on the sigils

are you serious?? you took the time to actually write them down? Even the "im so beautiful " parts??? :O

Avead.5760:

are you serious?? you took the time to actually write them down? Even the "im so beautiful " parts??? :O

Are you serious? You took time to mock someone for doing this. He did it maybe because he cares. No reason to be a total kitten