Guild Wars 2

Hello Karl,

Primarily engineer player here with a couple of questions about intended upcoming changes/fixes to the engineer.

- Turrets are, for various reasons, generally considered an absolutely terrible choice for the Engineer. Despite being immobile, they have very little HP (a situation that is compounded by their enormous hitbox and vulnerability to multiple-hit AoEs). Various overcharge skills (net turret firing so slowly the overcharge may burn out beforehand, rocket turret firing in a painfully high arc) and issues with traits (‘deployable turrets’ appears to negate other turret traits) leave the engineer with a huge portion of its class-defining utility skills being considered effectively useless. Are there plans to overhaul turrets and their mechanics to make them a more competitive choice at any point?

- At current, my understanding is that engineer kit damage is roughly determined by quality of weapons carried. However, this is cut off at Exotic – as they rely heavily on kits to fight, engineers receive no benefit from crafting Ascended or Legendary weapons (aside from bragging rights). Are there plans to add ‘damage levels’ for these weapons to kit damage?

Engineer’s elite Mortar is ridiculously underpowered. It is easily the worst profession elite, and even gets beaten out by a significant number of racial elite, and racial elites are suppose to be weaker by default.

In the meantime you are nerfing, for all intents and purposes, the only Elite we actually have. Which i do not doubt will be a broadstroke, across the board nerf in all gamemodes. Surely this will thin out those big hordes of Engineers we see everywhere in pve and wvw…
And also nerf a utility skill that rarely sees the light of day because of how broken this skill-type in general is.

Why do you tiptoe around Warriors, with a fairly minor nerf to Healing Signet. 8% on a skill thats 60% more efficient then my class heal is not going to make an impact.

But you nerf Choking Gas and Poison Grenade by whopping 40%, Net Turret by 33%, and Supply Crate without a doubt more then 8%. Again, no doubt affecting all gamemodes.
Out of all the nerfs you have planned out so far, of all the professions, Healing Signet is by far the mildest and most restrained.

And lets not yet open the can of worms that is the Downed State. Completely unbalanced as some professions have flat out superior downed skills compared to other less fortunate professions.

Are these all of the balance changes? I thought that Thief had “a lot of good things coming”?

There is absolutely nothing here that is new information from the Ready Up stream. Please tell me there is more? Do we really have to wait a few months for just this?

And what happened to all the “good things” for Thief?

I don’t see acc bound wxp, so I assume it’s coming next week? :P

There is not much to comment on changes tbh. Very limited info, not really big changes (the ones we see). I’d just love to have thief SB 2. back to 1200 range…

If nothing new was being added to the list, why post this thread? Though you did take off the Deceptive Evasion nerf, so I guess that’s different, but people already summarized all of this after the live stream, and it doesn’t look like anything else has been changed or added. Are these all the class balance changes we can expect? Almost all of them are nerfs. Granted, some are warranted, but are there no plans to buff any classes in the areas they’re lacking? Looks like only elementalists will benefit from this patch.

Are conditions being worked on at all, or is that issue going to continue to be ignored? We’ve had several huge class balance patches, but nothing has been done to address this. You’re nerfing necro’s condition damage through Dhuumfire, which isn’t the end of the world, but you’re not making condimancers any more viable in PvE in return. It’s disappointing every time you do a huge balance patch and ignore this glaring problem and/or nerf necromancers more.

As for more positive feedback – looking forward to the rune/sigil changes a lot. Can’t wait to see what the new rune setups will look like. The buffs elementalists are getting look nice. I don’t play my elementalist much, but the evade on Burning Speed will be fun.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

It isn’t wanted by ANYONE. Moving it to be tied to Life Blast only further nerfs it and condition build and thanks to your overzelous previous nerfs – it will STILL be taken in condition builds due to the nerfs that have been used on everything else the class has.

Any nerf to fire-forget condition specs is a good nerf. Passive play is garbage.

Vena.8436:

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

It isn’t wanted by ANYONE. Moving it to be tied to Life Blast only further nerfs it and condition build and thanks to your overzelous previous nerfs – it will STILL be taken in condition builds due to the nerfs that have been used on everything else the class has.

Any nerf to fire-forget condition specs is a good nerf. Passive play is garbage.

Isnt that EVERY damaging condition?

Karl McLain.5604:

Warrior:

• Healing Signet: Reduced the passive heal by 8%.
  • We’re looking for ways to incentivize using Healing Signet’s active without increasing overall sustain. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Well, we have (1) a big burst heal that gives adrenaline and scales with adrenaline on a medium CD; (2) a medium heal that cleanses on a short CD; (3) a stance that heals on hit with low uptime; and (4) Healing Signet.

Since HS is a sustained regenerative heal, it would make some sense to add a boost to it that would encourage you to use the active tactically in order to get more mileage out of its (now mildly nerfed) sustain.

So, first, remove the existing heal on the active entirely. Replace it with one of the following:

(1) A substantial boost to healing power with relatively low uptime. It could add heal power in the range that Banner of Tactics does, but only for 10 seconds on a 60 second CD. This, along with the mild nerf to its sustain, would encourage you to use the active during heavy damage phases (e.g., at the start of a pull of several mobs to give you a little extra sustain until you thin the pack).

(2) A similar low uptime boost to vitality or toughness to give you a bit more buffer or a little more EHP/second to get through high damage phases.

(3) Granting Vigor with low to medium uptime as an option for non-horn builds.

Heezdedjim.8902:

Karl McLain.5604:

Warrior:

• Healing Signet: Reduced the passive heal by 8%.
  • We’re looking for ways to incentivize using Healing Signet’s active without increasing overall sustain. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Well, we have (1) a big burst heal that gives adrenaline and scales with adrenaline on a medium CD; (2) a medium heal that cleanses on a short CD; (3) a stance that heals on hit with low uptime; and (4) Healing Signet.

Since HS is a sustained regenerative heal, it would make some sense to add a boost to it that would encourage you to use the active tactically in order to get more mileage out of its (now mildly nerfed) sustain.

I suggest:

(1) A substantial boost to healing power with relatively low uptime. It could add heal power in the range of, e.g., Banner of Tactics, but only for 10 seconds on a 60 second CD. This, along with the mild nerf to its sustain, would encourage you to use the active during heavy damage phases (e.g., at the start of a pull of several mobs to give you a little extra sustain until you thin the pack).

(2) A similar low uptime boost to vitality or toughness to give you a bit more buffer or a little more EHP/second to get through high damage phases.

(3) Granting Vigor with low to medium uptime as an option for non-horn builds.

wha…? You want to boost HS or my eyes are to tired?

My feedback on the Dhuumfire change

With the suggested change to put Dhuumfire on Life Blast, condition necromancers now have a very obvious problem: There is far too much emphasis on Death Shroud.

I agree that Dhuumfire is skill-less and needs retuning, but putting everything on Death Shroud could hit the class too much.

Why this is a problem

First, it means all a good player has to do to counter a necromancer is get by Death Shroud. If the Life Blast, Doom and Tainted Shackles are dodged, the necromancer’s damage is completely obliterated and, by virtue of the necromancer popping Death Shroud for damage, the necromancer’s survivability is gutted as well.

Second, necromancer will have no condition coverage outside of Death Shroud. It will need Death Shroud for burning, terror and torment. Outside of Death Shroud, the only major source of condition damage will be bleeds. That throws the class back to the major issue it had before Dhuumfire was added: If the bleeds are cleansed, the class effectively loses all its damage. (As an aside, I feel like a lot of people completely forgot condition coverage used to be a huge problem for necromancers. Many people appear to no longer remember that condition necromancers needed to run with condition engineers in high-level play to be viable.)

Third, Death Shroud needs to be used mostly for survivability in high-level play. Because the class severely lacks mobility and is one of the first targets for coordinated teams, it’s very risky to pop into Death Shroud for anything but survivability during initial engagements, which is when burst damage is most necessary. So in those precious moments, condition necromancer will now lack the burst needed to land an early kill. (Obviously this doesn’t apply in every situation, particularly if the necromancer has solid positioning, but it’s still a concern.)

Possible solution

Put Dhuumfire on other skills that are currently undervalued by condition necromancers. Two candidates: Necrotic Grasp (staff No. 1) and Feast of Corruption (scepter No. 3). That would give both skills more play while giving necromancers a controllable — instead of a random — source of burning outside of Death Shroud.

Kenmei.7138:

wha…? You want to boost HS or my eyes are to tired?

Assuming they take away the straight heal part of the active entirely, in case that wasn’t clear. The active heal is useless, and there is no way to make a heal alone useful without making it flat out better than any other heal . . . which it already is.

So take it away and make it do something different, that will make you “want to use the active,” which is their stated goal.

Karl McLain.5604:

Warrior:
Our changes for warrior focus on providing telegraphs to stronger skills and to reduce the passive benefit gained from Healing Signet.

• Healing Signet: Reduced the passive heal by 8%.
  • We’re looking for ways to incentivize using Healing Signet’s active without increasing overall sustain. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
• Pin Down: Added a telegraph animation to the skill. Increased the cast time from 1/4 second to 3/4 second.

This hardly affects the zerker meta. My healing signet heals per tick approx 120hp. Reducing that by 8% leaves me with approx 110hp per tick.

Suggestion: When activating healing signet give some boons like fury or 5 stacks of 15-20s might. Maybe some stability? Or Reduce the cool down of healing signet and increase the base heal while lowering the passive even more.

Karl McLain.5604:

Profession Changes

Warrior:
Our changes for warrior focus on providing telegraphs to stronger skills and to reduce the passive benefit gained from Healing Signet.

• Healing Signet: Reduced the passive heal by 8%.
  • We’re looking for ways to incentivize using Healing Signet’s active without increasing overall sustain. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

That’s easy. Warriors are always short of condition removal. Tack on a removes one condition to activation and there you go.

Well, this was underwhelming to say the least…

torquemada.9157:

Karl McLain.5604:

Profession Changes

Warrior:
Our changes for warrior focus on providing telegraphs to stronger skills and to reduce the passive benefit gained from Healing Signet.

• Healing Signet: Reduced the passive heal by 8%.
  • We’re looking for ways to incentivize using Healing Signet’s active without increasing overall sustain. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

That’s easy. Warriors are always short of condition removal. Tack on a removes one condition to activation and there you go.

Better idea: Screw that passive, make it to the new active. With a uptime of 10 secs and a cooldown of 15-20 secs.

Regarding Deceptive Evasion: first thanks for listening to the feedback, that would have ruined one of the more interesting builds, decreasing build diversity.

Suggestion: Look into making Deceptive Evasion overwrite clones only but not phantasms. That would make a lot of players happy. It’s good to be able to overwrite clones sometimes, but most of the time you prefer not to overwrite Phantasms too. Currently there’s no way to control which gets overwritten.

i dont understand the reduced poison duration on shortbow 4 for thief. in the livestream they said the same for engineer poison granades and it was being nerfed because of “shotgunning” (standing on top of your target and throwing them at your feet). for an engineer this creates 3 poison aoe and the poison adds up fast. for thief tho, you would need to be spamming the poison wich costs 4 initiative. no thief can afford to spam this. i wont complain tho since the change wont effect me much, i just dont understand why they changed it.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Condition builds have controlled WvW and S/TPvP for A LONG time – that won’t change it will just make “the” condition class even worse at conditions…

Condition comps in large-scale WvW get manhandled by PoV/Soldiers and Guardians + Eles + Warrriors in general; the meta on small scale WvW is so broken because of OP stat combinations that its completely irrelevant in balancing discussions unless they delete certain stat sets.

In tPvP condition viability, in general, needs to just be murdered without remorse. There’s nothing fun and/or skillful about necros that spam their auto-attack on point and kill you while also wearing bunker gear.

As a Ranger, are there any plans to make the bows more viable overall? Maybe a revert to some of the crippling nerfs to shortbow, and have longbow actually be decent. And we have two main hand options, sword and axe. Saying axe hits like a wet noodle would be an insult to the noodle, and the sword has the infamous rooting issue. Greatsword has horrible damage overall, even for a defensive minded weapon, and maul might very well be the single most telegraphed skill in the game. “I’m going to start an incredibly slow full body wind up now, while a giant glowing bear appears above me.”

Karl McLain.5604:

Necromancer:
_One of our goals with the past few balance updates has been to add counterplay to various skills that lacked telegraphs. With necromancer, we’re changing the way that Dhuumfire is activated – allowing players the opportunity to react. This will also allow the necromancer to carefully plan their burning application.

Thats such a heavy condition dmg nerf.. Very sad that there is absolutly no compensation… I myself only play wvw/pve and I cannot understand that. Seems like it is time to run away again and hope for the next patch… A little bit damage reduction would have been enough, but forcing us into DS… That’s not how you achieve diversity. There is probably no worse solution than DS. I’m so unhappy… “Carefully plan”? You ever played a nec against a warrior, thief, mesmer, guardian ? Very funny joke… I can understand the argument and idea, but from my pov that’s simply not how the meta in reality is! :/ I’m very very unhappy with what you have (not) done to my main class since gw1 – nothing more to say.

I have a couple of suggestions for Turrets Engineers,

1) Flame Turret : Smoke Field should pulse every second instead of every two second.
Why? Because every other blinding fields work this way and it would help the turret survive against pulsing AoEs wich usualy destroy it (the Hitbox size doesn’t help either).

2) Turrets in General should have more damaging conditions.
While they do extra physical damage, traiting for them is expensive and realy decreases our personnal DPS output. Not to mention, doing so would allow better burning manadgement for Pistol&Shield while giving the control options to the Turreteer to keep our Turret “safe”.

3) Turrets cooldown should start when it is deployed.
My idea : Remove the pickup fonction, and refund the utility cooldown with the self destruct skill depending to how long the turret stayed deployed (if it is destroyed it goes on full CD).
If you do that, you actualy give a reason for Turreteers to keep their turrets alive, and doing so allows the Turreteer to build up the fight with extra buff without sacrificing to much of its DPS while making it more mobile too.

Karl McLain.5604:

Warrior:
Our changes for warrior focus on providing telegraphs to stronger skills and to reduce the passive benefit gained from Healing Signet.

• Healing Signet: Reduced the passive heal by 8%.
  • We’re looking for ways to incentivize using Healing Signet’s active without increasing overall sustain. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

I think you are looking at Healing Signet in a strange way, it takes little to no skill to activate a healing skill in PvE, as interrupts are not going to be an issue most of the time. The beauty of this skill is that you sacrifice burst heal for upkeep HP income, thus having to adjust your play to never need a burst heal i.e. active play.

IMO what signet needs, if something is a worse active (longer recharge), a health-gain cut of or sharp scale down when your HP is high and possibly a slightly higher HP/sec when on very low HP. This would make activating the signet at any given time a bit harder to call; when on low HP you would still hesitate to use the burst heal because of the higher HP/sec if you manage to keep alive using other skills, while on high HP the only way to reach the 90% scholar-bonus would be to pop the signet and be left without a heal for a while.

Anyone else feel Scholar runes will get the nerf hammer meaning, overall for high end damage builds aka the meta, a greater than 10% damage reduction?

karl, are you guys looking into making the ranger a viable choice in higher level WvW play? It’s been a year and a half guys, and rangers have no place in GvG and GvZ’s.

Hey Anet, why does your balancing seem to favor PvP so much? As a Necro I already feel pretty useless relative to other classes in PvE content, and the current proposed changes aren’t going to make things any better. In fact, things are actually getting worse.

Can you at least consider the PvE ramifications of various skill/trait changes before you go changing things solely focused on PvP?

A big selling point for Guild Wars 2 was, ‘play the way you want’ but it seems you’re doing everything possible to make it mandatory for Necros to spend points into the Soul Reaping trait line.

Another big fault is Necros are extremely lacking when it comes to combos. Axe, daggers, scepter, focus, have ZERO combo effects. ZERO. The only none aquatic weapon that has combo potential is Staff and you don’t have many choices with it. Something really needs to be done.

Josh Davis.6015:

Thief has been added to the list. Sorry about the copy/pasta fail.

Again, where’s the thief update?…….oh wait pulls out a microscope yay there it is……..

In all seriousness, a little light don’t you think?

Alasteir.7031:

For the people replying on this forum.

con·struc·tive
adjective
1.
serving a useful purpose; tending to build up.
“constructive criticism”
synonyms: useful, helpful, productive, positive, encouraging

I respect your intentions by posting that, however the ambivalence and antipathy towards the respective teams are not without reason. Frankly the listed changes to all classes are marginal at best, especially considering the time frame.

My own antipathy has stemmed from the mistreatment of the Elementalist class I love so much. Why waste our breaths being respectful when constructive feedback threads are primarily ignored.

Link’s provided below to further illustrate:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/1106-suggestions-pre-patch-0-were-ok/first

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/December-10th-Elementalist-changes/first

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Diamond-Skin-Reloaded/

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Focus-Make-some-noise/

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Powerful-Aura-1/

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/PvP-ELE-tism-Balancing-The-Elementalist/first

We have said more than enough. I know of no other game with such passionate players who provide amazing feedback and ideas only to be continually ignored, a disturbing trend shown in practically every single sub-forum to date.

With regards to the Elementalist changes, in my opinion they are inadequate to address the pathetic base survivability that is hamstringing the class.

Kimhyuna.1035:

Anyone else feel Scholar runes will get the nerf hammer meaning, overall for high end damage builds aka the meta, a greater than 10% damage reduction?

I don’t think so. The bonus is on the 6th piece and has a specific requirement to proc.

Karl McLain.5604:

Sigils:

• All sigils now have independent cooldowns, meaning you can use two on-swap sigils, or an on-swap and an on-crit sigil at the same time. You will not, however, be able to use two sigils of the same name at the same time. On-kill sigils that provide attributes, such as Sigil of Corruption, will not be able to be used simultaneously with other attribute modifying on-kill sigils.

Clarification Please
So does this mean if I have 2 sigils of bloodlust I will NOT get 2 stacks of bloodlust for 1 kill?

leman.7682:

So… That’s it?

For a couple of months of waiting and we get this?
Please communicate? Is it everything? You basically repeated the stream and then some by forgeting about thieves.

This doesn’t feel very fair and what to discuss if you post nothing new?

Look at how every single line of the first preview was picked at and there were lots of threads why the devs should remove it and why it’s wrong and they hate that class and whatever.

I guess this is what’s left of the changes? :P

RequestTimeout.7083:

Karl McLain.5604:

Warrior:
Our changes for warrior focus on providing telegraphs to stronger skills and to reduce the passive benefit gained from Healing Signet.

• Healing Signet: Reduced the passive heal by 8%.
  • We’re looking for ways to incentivize using Healing Signet’s active without increasing overall sustain. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

I think you are looking at Healing Signet in a strange way, it takes little to no skill to activate a healing skill in PvE, as interrupts are not going to be an issue most of the time. The beauty of this skill is that you sacrifice burst heal for upkeep HP income, thus having to adjust your play to never need a burst heal i.e. active play.

IMO what signet needs, if something is a worse active (longer recharge), a health-gain cut of or sharp scale down when your HP is high and possibly a slightly higher HP/sec when on very low HP. This would make activating the signet at any given time a bit harder to call; when on low HP you would still hesitate to use the burst heal because of the higher HP/sec if you manage to keep alive using other skills, while on high HP the only way to reach the 90% scholar-bonus would be to pop the signet and be left without a heal for a while.

The problem with it currently is the fact that it takes no skill to equip it, it constantly heals EVERY second and hardly anyone even needs to use the active thanks to all the blocks, immunities, movement skills and everything they have.

This change will do NOTHING, a 8% nerf is a slap in the face to everyone except Warrior because you can bet the active will be buffed my more than 8%

What it needed:
Passive: 25% nerf and i a BIG increase on the healing power needed to make it great
Active: Increase the active by 50%
Cooldown: to be adjusted

Boom. Sorted Even a 25% nerf on the passive is still going to be healing for like 300 PER a second. Could even make it 1,000 health every 3 seconds. Which would roughly be what it will be after the “nerf” anyway.

I don’t see these changes really accomplishing anything in terms of balance and build diversity. They are either addressing things that are a non-issue (poison duration stacking, really?) or completely impotent at fixing any established problems.

Again, I’m left wondering if ANet is actually playing the same game I am?

I’ll comment on Healing Signet because that’s one of the few skills I am qualified to comment on and because you specifically asked for Feedback.

To be honest, in light of the changes to crit-damage, I doubt most Warriors would even notice this change. Burst is currently what kills Warriors and if burst is cut by 10%, why would we worry about an 8% nerf to Healing Singet?

The problem is there is never a good reason to use the active aspect of HS. Unlike most Signets you use for the active effects and take the passives and “nice to have” you take HS specifically and exclusively for the passive effect. In fact using the active aspect of it is detrimental more often than not.

But that’s just part of the problem. The other is that there are so many other passive healing-sources on the Warrior that it just adds up.

Leaving the mechanics of Healing Signet unchanged is a mistake. A simple nerf to output won’t fix the problem that this skill has no element of skill, no counter-play and being highly effective.

As for a potential “active” effect, how about if using Healing Signet made you invulnerable for a few seconds, similar to Endure Pain. That way you’d be sacrificing 20 seconds of passive healing for momentary mitigation. This might lead to some more interesting depth.

3 Ideas:

• Improving dmg from flamethrower maybe by 15% additionally? (as it is weak now)
• Elixir X should have tornado only and increased time to 20s
• Healing elixir grants protection not randomly.

This 3 small changes would make eng a little bit more interesting to play, as it is NOT IN GOOD spot right now ( I dont know where this idea came from).

Karl McLain.5604:

• Healing Signet: Reduced the passive heal by 8%.
  • We’re looking for ways to incentivize using Healing Signet’s active without increasing overall sustain. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

A couple of suggestions, for creativity’s sake:

• Change the active to a laugh emote with a couple of seconds invulnerability only for the emote duration. Most warriors won’t be able to stop themselves from hitting it.

• Have the active auto-engage the trait sweet revenge for the duration of the recharge. This will give warriors a reason to use the signet if they feel they may not survive.

• Have the active grant adrenaline, might, or some other offensive boon. This will tempt the warrior to use it for purposes other than healing.

• Active heals for the amount of damage done in the next attack. This will tempt warriors to go for the big heal from an eviscerate or something, and opens them up to getting nothing from a dodge.

i’m going to provide my feedback on what has been provided on the thread itself, because i sure as heck hope it isn’t all, so i’ll leave discussing any other needed changes when we see them.

• Elementalist: I feel the biggest problem with ele sustain is that they can get a nice panic button by attuning to water on any weapon combo, but only if they spec 20 points into water. aaand… that’s about all the options eles have. eles have a few hard invulnerability options, but the only stability comes from armor of earth (not even counting tornado), and it’s a pretty crappy stability at that, on a very long cooldown (even with traiting and the suggested change). you can also spend 20 points on earth for 2 seconds on attunement swap, which is nice for stomping on sPvP and nothing more.
  Suggestion: spread out the defensive options. having a mini-burst heal by speccing into water is cool and all, but it shouldn’t be the only way eles have to live. maybe give arcane shield stability (and one or two extra stacks so it can actually be used for defense), for example.

• Mesmer: correct me if i’m wrong, but doesn’t overwriting a clone count as it “dying” for clone death builds? that still doesn’t sound right. the nerf was a bit extreme, but ignoring the problem isn’t a solution.
  Suggestion: instead of outright killing the trait, an alternative that would be that clones overwritten by skills and traits don’t count as “dying”. they shatter, but don’t trigger the clone death traits. that way the trait’s defensive option is still there, and clone death builds have to play by, you know, actually making people kill their clones, instead of doing the job themselves.

• Thief: no comment on the current suggested changes. but as a thief player myself, i hope this isn’t all. as a profession, the thief feels outclassed. burst? condi? support? all those builds might not be “bad”, but they’re outperformed by other professions. the strongest thief build right now (S/D) is borderline broken, regardless of how much skill it takes to play it. the only trumph thief has right now is high mobility and disengage, but even mobility can be outperformed.

• Warrior: i’m all for adding more visible cues to stronger skills, but i can’t help but feel like warrior is the only class that gets that treatment. so while i agree with the pin down change, maybe look into doing similar things to other classes? as for the healing signet, shaving its passive number is a good start, but short of being constantly poisoned, a warrior can stack a lot of passive healing and regen (i saw a warrior heal my 1k mug + ~500 poison in two ticks today, and that’s under the effect of poison).

maciora.9542:

3 Ideas:

• Improving dmg from flamethrower maybe by 15% additionally? (as it is weak now)
• Elixir X should have tornado only and increased time to 20s
• Healing elixir grants protection not randomly.

This 3 small changes would make eng a little bit more interesting to play, as it is NOT IN GOOD spot right now ( I dont know where this idea came from).

The “good spot” thing comes from sPvP. I’m fully convinced, having played since release and following every patch so far, that Anet simply does not care about balance in PvE/WvW and refuses to institute balance splits.

A tiny 8% cut to healing signet would only be a credible action if many other healing abilities across the other classes were getting a huge boost.

About thief:
- Venoms are still useless. Many threads were posted on thief forums how to fix them.
- Traps aswell (except shadow, and ambush for leveling purpose).
- Thief still has no viable condi build in sPvP (look below).
- Leaping death blossom and dancing dagger skills are terribly underpowered. Unusable both with power and condi builds.
- It should be possible to cap nodes using stealth under some conditions. I want to play stealth based thief in sPvP for a change.

Dagins.5163:

About thief:
- Venoms are still useless. Many threads were posted on thief forums how to fix them.
- Traps aswell (except shadow, and ambush for leveling purpose).
- Thief still has no viable condi build in sPvP (look below).
- Leaping death blossom and dancing dagger skills are terribly underpowered. Unusable both with power and condi builds.
- It should be possible to cap nodes using stealth under some conditions. I want to play stealth based thief in sPvP for a change.

I play a stealth thief in PvP. Thieves should be used for purposes of ganking and back capping… In team fights they kill the person with the lowest health and then go back cap.

Thief stealth/mobility is bar none. Instead of trying to cap a node in stealth use your stealth to get there unnoticed.

another spirit bug still exist.
sometimes, oh i mean rly much times, the spirits just dont start there active skills animation and go cooldown.

rly funny when some rezes dont work with this bug and a teamfight is lost instead won.

so if you start with nerf bug fixes, dont forget to fix the real bugs

There is absolutely nothing “new” here, this is the same exact stuff we already knew was coming.

Karl McLain.5604:

Necromancer:
One of our goals with the past few balance updates has been to add counterplay to various skills that lacked telegraphs. With necromancer, we’re changing the way that Dhuumfire is activated – allowing players the opportunity to react. This will also allow the necromancer to carefully plan their burning application. We’ve also adjusted some values for Minion Master builds based on player feedback.

• Putrid Explosion: This ability is no longer unblockable.
• Training of the Master: Reduced the damage increase to minions from 30% to 25%.
• Dhuumfire: This trait has been changed so that it will make Life Blast inflict 3 seconds of burning with a 10 second recharge.
• Vampiric Master: Reduced the effectiveness of this trait by 10%. The healing portion of this trait will now scale with the necromancer’s healing power stat.

I think the changes to dhuumfire will result in making the trait usefuless since:

- life force generation for the conditionmancer is very low.
- death shroud is a big loss of dps for the conditionmancer.
- it also forces the player to flash in and out of death shroud sacrificing to much defense of the conditionmancer.

I instead suggest to switch dhuumfire with withering precision and switch terror with lingering curse. It will make the player choose between terror and dhuumfire.

I also find the justification for the changes to the minion master build a bit unfair. You say that it is based on player feedback but the necromancers (at least I have) themselves haven’t seen a single post on their profession forum about it. It leaves us without a right to defend ourselves against (biased) opinions .

Well, let’s see if this gets me banned or post removed lol…here goes- about to talk about the elephant in the room-

Dhuumfire aside (which I wish would be removed from the game altogether and this is coming from a necro player) why are we still getting attrition nerfs when we’re supposed to be the “attrition class”? Vamp traits are already so low they do almost nothing at all even when fully invested in them, and the only semi-viable one was vampiric master. I agree the minion build in pvp was pretty strong, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that players just completely ignore the minions. Necromancers have no way to disengage from fights, so we are forced to see it to the end, yet all of our traits and skills dictate that we cannot play an attrition role. I’m not sure what player feedback you got that said MM’s needed nerfing, but it most likely was not a necromancer. MM was the only solid build we have left. And it was not op. It was solid, there’s a difference. Any advantages it may have had over other classes were an illusion created by lack of knowledge of the opponent against the minion master.

• siphons need to work in death shroud, and they need better scaling or better base numbers. Current state of them is nigh-unusable

• remove or rework signet of vampirism. No one uses it , no one wants it

• as much as people hate the new dhuumfire nerf, I think it was needed. I had even pitched the idea a while back about putting it on LB, however, a 10 second cd on a 3 second burning poses some problems:
  1.It is already limited by poor life force generation, slow casting time, slow-easily dodged projectile…with 10 second cd you’re almost never going to land that hit. Dhuumfire is nothing close to a grandmaster quality trait. It should be moved to make way for better traits.
  2. The LF generation is the biggest issue here especially on condition builds which struggle with it the most. That changes a 10 second cd to 20+ because you need to rebuild enough LF to use deathshroud again.

• reducing the effectiveness of the minions themselves poses a problem. Minion AI is already unreliable. The only saving grace was that they could do decent siphon heals and semi-decent damage. Reducing training of the master in pve and wvw is going to make that trait pointless to bring, when you could much more easily (and much more viably-reliably) get that 15% gain from your own character rather than the minions. As for the siphons, reducing them by 10% will not make a huge impact as long as the healing power scaling is adequate. That will allow the necro to chose whether they need more healing from it or not and avoid making the trait undesirable.

• While the transfusion changes were amazing, necro needs more group utility. The current support options aren’t bad in theory, but any boons (which are very few) necros can offer are such short duration it’s not desirable to trait into.

tl;dr-

• Dhuumfire is headed in the right direction, but might want to reconsider the cd on it
• the minion damage nerf is not good, the siphon nerf could be ok if scaled properly
• All siphons are scaled poorly and do little to help with attrition, which is a major problem with necro right now. Need more viable attrition
• Better group utility (support) for necros whether it be longer protection boons, longer soft cc durations, or give us back condi cleanse on putrid mark (ideally it would be all of the above)

So where are the rest of the changes?

Hey guys, I have over 1500h played on my ele and over 1300 matches in sPvp.
I mostly run the general d/d bunker build: 0/10/0/30/30. Its kinda the perfect allround build for most matches. however:

(Skill ideas for Elementalist)

Warrior
By far the biggest issue for us to kill. Their healing signet heals for about 400 hp every second and theres no way for us to counter that by any of our attacks. I suggest changing ring of earth to inflict poison instead of bleeding. I believe together with its relative low cooldown it will help us significantly against them.
Also our immobilze skill (magnetic grasp)is very important to give us some breathing space. The stats of the skill is fine but it fails half of the time (Obstructed/out of range issues) so I only suggest fixing this skill to work better with the environnement.

Build diversity
There have been some changes in an attempt to change the current bunker meta (fresh air, diamond skin)
The ideas are great but they still need to be tweaked abit in order to become more viable. For example I wouldnt spend 30 in earth to just have condition immune at 90%+ hp (ele is all about healing, we are almost never 90% hp). Water is still far more superior (condition cleanse. aoe heal on water attunement, %damage on boons)

I suggest adding a regen buff of 8 seconds (about 2k hp) when hp gets below 90% hp (20 seconds recharge). This would encourage traiting into earth and will make us less dependent on water.
The trait in its current state is useless in teamfights as we are almost never 90%+ hp, this is kinda silly for a grandmaster trait. Also poison will counter this trait so 1v1s against condi builds will not make us superior to them. The regen will last 8 seconds so time enough for the enemy to react with poison.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

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Karl McLain.5604:

Warrior:
Our changes for warrior focus on providing telegraphs to stronger skills and to reduce the passive benefit gained from Healing Signet.

• Healing Signet: Reduced the passive heal by 8%.
  • We’re looking for ways to incentivize using Healing Signet’s active without increasing overall sustain. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

I think you are looking at Healing Signet in a strange way, it takes little to no skill to activate a healing skill in PvE, as interrupts are not going to be an issue most of the time. The beauty of this skill is that you sacrifice burst heal for upkeep HP income, thus having to adjust your play to never need a burst heal i.e. active play.

IMO what signet needs, if something is a worse active (longer recharge), a health-gain cut of or sharp scale down when your HP is high and possibly a slightly higher HP/sec when on very low HP. This would make activating the signet at any given time a bit harder to call; when on low HP you would still hesitate to use the burst heal because of the higher HP/sec if you manage to keep alive using other skills, while on high HP the only way to reach the 90% scholar-bonus would be to pop the signet and be left without a heal for a while.

The problem with it currently is the fact that it takes no skill to equip it, it constantly heals EVERY second and hardly anyone even needs to use the active thanks to all the blocks, immunities, movement skills and everything they have.

This change will do NOTHING, a 8% nerf is a slap in the face to everyone except Warrior because you can bet the active will be buffed my more than 8%

What it needed:
Passive: 25% nerf and i a BIG increase on the healing power needed to make it great
Active: Increase the active by 50%
Cooldown: to be adjusted

Boom. Sorted Even a 25% nerf on the passive is still going to be healing for like 300 PER a second. Could even make it 1,000 health every 3 seconds. Which would roughly be what it will be after the “nerf” anyway.

Yeah it takes no skill to equip it as is, I agree 100%, but I do think The general idea of giving up burst heal/boons/condi removal for upkeep HP does not have to be implemented in a way that promotes passive or unskillful play, and that buffing The active is, in a way, to give up on that entire concept.

That is why I think that for example making The signet passive tick only when under, say 50% HP, would make more sense to me.

Also keep in mind that unless the balance of the whole game is entirely changed making a skill totaly depend on healing power is the same as removing it from the game for most end-game PvE players.

I play elementalist mostly, so I’d like to put in my two cents for this critical damage change.

I understand what you are trying to do, pretty much, which is make players opt for other traits instead of just going full on damage to be useful. Or, I think that is the goal here.

I just want to say that I currently use a ele build, traits, skills, items, etc, which all maximize my dps and utility that prolongs my survivability slightly so i can continue dishing out dps.

This build does not work in pvp mists and you’ll see in the pictures why it doesnt.

If the ‘downscaling’ for critical damage does not surpass the critical damage amount allowed in pvp, this build is dead.

above is what i use right now in PVP

its a healing/snare/stun assist build

pvp dps only for ele does not work

below is the stats for pvp berserker traited for one of the higher damage builds

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ArmageddonAsh.6430:

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Karl McLain.5604:

Warrior:
Our changes for warrior focus on providing telegraphs to stronger skills and to reduce the passive benefit gained from Healing Signet.

• Healing Signet: Reduced the passive heal by 8%.
  • We’re looking for ways to incentivize using Healing Signet’s active without increasing overall sustain. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

I think you are looking at Healing Signet in a strange way, it takes little to no skill to activate a healing skill in PvE, as interrupts are not going to be an issue most of the time. The beauty of this skill is that you sacrifice burst heal for upkeep HP income, thus having to adjust your play to never need a burst heal i.e. active play.

IMO what signet needs, if something is a worse active (longer recharge), a health-gain cut of or sharp scale down when your HP is high and possibly a slightly higher HP/sec when on very low HP. This would make activating the signet at any given time a bit harder to call; when on low HP you would still hesitate to use the burst heal because of the higher HP/sec if you manage to keep alive using other skills, while on high HP the only way to reach the 90% scholar-bonus would be to pop the signet and be left without a heal for a while.

The problem with it currently is the fact that it takes no skill to equip it, it constantly heals EVERY second and hardly anyone even needs to use the active thanks to all the blocks, immunities, movement skills and everything they have.

This change will do NOTHING, a 8% nerf is a slap in the face to everyone except Warrior because you can bet the active will be buffed my more than 8%

What it needed:
Passive: 25% nerf and i a BIG increase on the healing power needed to make it great
Active: Increase the active by 50%
Cooldown: to be adjusted

Boom. Sorted Even a 25% nerf on the passive is still going to be healing for like 300 PER a second. Could even make it 1,000 health every 3 seconds. Which would roughly be what it will be after the “nerf” anyway.

Yeah it takes no skill to equip it as is, I agree 100%, but I do think The general idea of giving up burst heal/boons/condi removal for upkeep HP does not have to be implemented in a way that promotes passive or unskillful play, and that buffing The active is, in a way, to give up on that entire concept.

That is why I think that for example making The signet passive tick only when under, say 50% HP, would make more sense to me.

Also keep in mind that unless the balance of the whole game is entirely changed making a skill totaly depend on healing power is the same as removing it from the game for most end-game PvE players.

What about the 8% nerf and healing for half the hp when knocked down/feared etc