To me the vigor nerf is a massive warrior buff. (and necromancer etc, but i wanna talk warrior).
Hammer has 3 stuns. Now you can dodge two, and how you can connect the third dodge. Vigor gives you most of time enough time to breath a bit. With vigor nerf, you will definitely have to eat one of the stuns, giving warrior a free burst lock. What’s more you will have to get past warrior Signet of stamina (wich is NOT nerfed), heavy armor, most hitpoints of game (apart maybe from necro with ds), invulnerable/resistance skills, etc. Doenst look fair to me. Especially to a class that’s been leading the meta so hard (just look at Rom for what the class can do, and how hard it it’s to counter).
Unless the so called boosts (we still have to see how they play out) of other profession really buff them enough, i’m afraid boring warrior will still be leading pvp (conquest) with banners, shouts, condi removal, and all the not so fun stuff connected with it.
As for wich professions will be leading:
I see room for thief to grow (but not get overpowered as some say) in pvp. Though the engie trait lock on, might negate that completely.
Ele has some very nice specs now especially for wvw, for pvp i’m not sure, especially with celestial nerf.
Ranger has some really nice grandmaster traits now with 3-5 effects. This gives ranger more room to breath for minor/adept/master traits. Maybe some super combo’s appear. I especially see the 66% cooldown on next swap used skill as a potential dangerous pvp skills.
Engineer is getting mobility nerfed quite a bit (speedy kits). Some of the traits are real improvements. Purely traits talking though I feel it lacking as in, it used to be 100% freedom on a very flexible class on how you combined traits. Now this will be gone mostly since ‘if you have X playstyle you choose II + IV + XII’. But if you have playstyle Z you choose I + V + XI. I hope this is not true but for engineer it really seems true and a nerf of flexibility. Weapons seems like mostly an improvements, (faster bomb explosions), explosions boosting traits, etc). Grenades range (as a wvw player, where pirate ship meta makes 900 range really underpowered)is really bad, though good for spvp. To bad i don’t like spvp that much. The mortar kit seems like a huge nerfed down grenade kit, written over the slow, clunky mortar kit. I really hope it’s better then this, cause this is the only weapon engineers mostly can rely on in pirate ship wvw. Though the combo fields are very nice. (this last part might get engies into GvG meta).
Not to excited about necro’s. To much predictable changes, that dont help them to much. Like the lich form 15 sec duration now, ouch. This skill is quickly becoming a bad skill, they might as well make the animations faster, cause nr 2-5 animate to slow to justify a 15 sec duration.
Of all the healing skills in game that got boosted cooldown, i think Consume condition is the least justified one. The skill is easy to interrupt and vital for non Spectral focused builds to survive (like scepter builds). Adding longer cooldown to it is no-go, even with compensating trait. The support they get is nice though (Transfusion and blood is power).
