Guild Wars 2

See title, please discuss! I would love to see a variety of points of view here.

I’m posting this thread here as I noticed the following in the 4/19 patch notes:

“Damage Changes
These damage modifiers were reduced, as they applied too much spike damage to targets at range and didn’t allow for enough counterplay. We do want to keep ranged combat viable in WvW scenarios, but we don’t want it to be the best option in open-field combat. As with the other changes, we’ll continue to watch and make adjustments where it’s deemed necessary.

True Shot: The damage of this skill has been reduced by 20%."

So in other words, this nerf was largely influenced by true Shot’s performance in WvW. In my opinion, the change was not warranted. Did anyone even complain about true shot? True shot wasn’t a problem in WvW as I recall. It quite literally only took two tempests to make an entire zerg of longbow DHs useless. True shot certainly and easily did “allow for enough counterplay,” unlike the patch notes say.

If we’re going to talk ranged spike damage with little counterplay in WvW, lets compare true-shot to a very similar skill, Coalescence of Ruin. Both true shot and CoR have the same range and cast time, but….

-True shot can be reflected or blocked by projectile bubbles, CoR cannot.
-True shot does less damage now, AND has worse dps.
-True shot is a much narrower attack and is less capable of hitting all 5 (target limit).
-True shot is a bit faster than CoR (well, here’s like the ONE pro it has).
-True shot roots the attacker, CoR does not.

I’ll admit, true shot did do quite a bit of damage to anyone with around 2500 armor or less. I found myself consistently hitting 9-10k against the squishier roamers which in my opinion is too much on a 4 second cool-down. True shot needed a nerf, especially for spvp reasons, but 20% was too much in my opinion.

So did we really need a 20% nerf to this skill? It’s now far too weak of a skill to use unless you’re a glass canon of a guardian. At least before this nerf, a tanky or even half-tanky guardian could get okay damage out of the skill. There is no reason for a front-liner, condi, or otherwise non-full zerker guardian to use this skill with its current damage. I think there’s a good middle ground we can achieve though – a good fix for true shot could involve one of the following:

-Only a 10% damage nerf
-Keep the damage as it was, but increase the cooldown to 6 seconds.
-A mix of the two: 7% damage nerf, cool down increased to 5 seconds.
-The dark horse: Keep this 20% nerf, but add some sort of functionality to true shot so that it’s useful outside of being a damage spike. Perhaps landing true shot could grant the user a boon, or gain stability while casting true-shot.

Nerf to TS and not to CoR really just…

Maybe that just got left out.

I wouldnt mind if they took the root off this skill, but it was a little to strong, they did buff the damage of the 3 and 4 skill to compensate. CoR is very difficult to use on uneven surfaces, the damage is a little high, but its not always usable. Most of the time a rev using a hammer is just auto attacking.

Yes, next question

Absolutely. I don’t understand what anets fascination was with short cd high damage skills in HoT, and if you ask me a few more should go on the chopping block. Most notably CoR.

X T D.6458:

I wouldnt mind if they took the root off this skill, but it was a little to strong, they did buff the damage of the 3 and 4 skill to compensate. CoR is very difficult to use on uneven surfaces, the damage is a little high, but its not always usable. Most of the time a rev using a hammer is just auto attacking.

I think a lot of guardians would actually be happy with the nerf if they took the root off. You’re right, they did buff LB3 and LB4. Lets be honest though, the LB4 buff doesn’t get anywhere close to making up for the true shot nerf. The LB3 buff is nice though.

I understand CoR has terrain problems, but that’s not a valid argument for why it’s balanced compared to TS. It isn’t meant to have those terrain problems.

Terrahero.9358:

Absolutely. I don’t understand what anets fascination was with short cd high damage skills in HoT, and if you ask me a few more should go on the chopping block. Most notably CoR.

Agreed. Really wish they would have looked at some other skills along with true shot. CoR stood out as an extremely obvious choice and I honestly don’t think I would have made this thread had it also been nerfed.

I think it is fine now.

I am still hitting 5-6k damage often on my DH who is geared pretty tanky. It is also piercing which makes it pretty strong in WvW.

Admittedly there are a lot of projectile hate right now but you really can’t rely on them in a highly chaotic environment in WvW, especially against a skill with such low CD.

The damage was pretty crazy. The skill does feel kind of useless now and the high 35 second or whatever it is cooldown for hunter’s ward makes longbow kind of pointless unless you really need a ranged option. With the meta changing because of stability, longbow isn’t the best option but it can still be viable.

Doesn’t make sense they didn’t nerf CoR aswell, especially when it can’t be reflected.
Gunflame definitely feels weaker also in comparison, there’s much less burst than Killshot and no piercing, but the AOE and velocity makes it still alright to use, just the burst is much lower.

The damage was high for the class, though in a 1:1 comparison it wasn’t anything special. We have to consider the myriad defensive abilities that DHs have along with all their other powerful aspects. Honestly, even with that change, they’re still fairly onerous when it comes to counterplay due to instantly arming traps that damage and CC, all the rest of their CC and their ability to just negate ranged damage for so long in addition to all of their blocks and what not. There’s nothing to aim for when fighting them because they have the answer for it all.

OP, are you kidding me??? I would have nerfed it further.

We just did full DH event in Gunnar’s Hold (50+ DH running around in the big zerg), and it was great success. We wiped enemy blobs created with “normal” class balance many times. I admit, they probably lost because of surprise – are GH really stupid enough to run DH-only blob? But it also worries me, as no class should be able to do this.

Returning to DH, is it useless now because TS nerf? No.
Are there more skills or traits that could be nerfed? Yes.

As long half the WvW group is made from DH they remain OP.

I think it was fully warranted. It should have been accompanied by 50 other nerfs, though.
For True Shot specifically, it had a 2.5 damage modifier (to put that in perspective, backstab is 2.4). The current 2.0 is much more reasonable, but honestly still quite high by pre-HoT standards.

These new easy-to-land, super high damaging skills on short cooldowns are a disgusting violation of the game (yes, I’m brine-level salty about this).

I would have rathe seen the cd changes to 6 secs…but yea it needed some sort of nerd

vana.5467:

These new easy-to-land, super high damaging skills on short cooldowns are a disgusting violation of the game (yes, I’m brine-level salty about this).

^this

An incomming damage or cooldown nerf to bow #2 was verry obvious.

It surprises me that heavy light wasn’t changed/nerfed 2.

vana.5467:

I think it was fully warranted. It should have been accompanied by 50 other nerfs, though.
For True Shot specifically, it had a 2.5 damage modifier (to put that in perspective, backstab is 2.4). The current 2.0 is much more reasonable, but honestly still quite high by pre-HoT standards.

These new easy-to-land, super high damaging skills on short cooldowns are a disgusting violation of the game (yes, I’m brine-level salty about this).

Yep. Too easy, too high damage, too low cooldown. The game should be less about a spamfest of whoever gets off the most high damaging skills, it should be about timing your attacks (like it was to a high degree before HoT).

The cooldown made counter play to the skill VERY difficult. It still does actually. True Shot pops up faster than players gain dodges. Add in traps that must be dodged, high sustain from the DH and basically any player without heavy sustain just eats this shot often multiple times at some point during a fight.

If the thief got this skill on the SB, the tears in this forum alone would flood Lions Arch.