Guild Wars 2

Hi,

Pros:
I enjoy the changes to sigil’s and runes, I think this is what will make the difference for a lot people whether to start using 2H weaponry as opposed to 1h. My warrior is preparing to swtich Axe/Mace for Greatsword for good now

General:
On the other hand, rest of the patch notes are frustrating and do not achieve anything. I will say what has been said a million times…please stop balancing out solely on PvP. This is a laughable idea considering the splinter of the player base actually caring for this game mode. None of these changes achieve ANYTHING in PvE and blatantly obvious issues like using of conditions in dungeon being bad remains being bad. PLEASE, either make an official statement of “we do not aim for balancing out PvE” or just use common sense. Whats the point of establishing balance in a game mode adored by an overwhelming minority, while leaving the majority of players bitter.

Cons:
The most “wtf” moment was the necromancer dhuumfire resolution which is probably the most awkward thing I seen in terms of patch notes. I do not even play necro outside of PvP and jumping puzzle opening, but this trait is so…soooo badly positioned with this patch. Who on earth will go for death shroud just to be able to deal an extra tic of fire damage. This condition trait should be not even placed in a power tree…just lower its effectiveness and place it in a relevant trait so that players can use it naturally.

BrunoBRS.5178:

• 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.

I have to fully agree. Crippling Dissipation already is very very strong. It’s 5s cripple without any cooldown. Either Deceptive Evasion should not trigger Crippling Dissipation or put a cooldown of 5s on Crippling Dissipation to prevent perma crippling.

We’ve also adjusted some values for Minion Master builds based on player feedback.

I bet non of those players were necromancer mains.

I know little but i know one class and everytime that class gets it up the *

Wait will Putrid Explosion still be unblock able with the Greater Marks trait? Also I thought engi was in a pretty bad state, why the nerf?

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

We’ve also adjusted some values for Minion Master builds based on player feedback.

I bet non of those players were necromancer mains.

I know little but i know one class and everytime that class gets it up the *

Neither is the balancing team, they don´t have a clue about necros at all.

The complaints about minion masters came from the spvp section where point defenders as mm are really strong.

Regarding dhuumfire i would agree that something needs to be done. Arenanet made a total stupid buff that nobody wanted and since then instead of admitting that dhuumfire was a mistake they decided to adjust or nerf it here and there. Imo they should remove dhuumfire as a whole and instead do something about the necro´s mobility issues or the capability to reset a fight. I wouldn´t mind a long cooldown of such an ability (be it a leap or a blink etc. etc.) but forcing us to just facetank with the lame excuse that we are an attrition class is simply cheap and shows how uninspired they are.

Is that all there is to ranger changes? That is sad indeed, can’t say I’m surprised, tho. What happened to sword root change? Or fixing our pet, their active skills that don’t give the full boon durations? Also another spirit “nerf”, haven’t spirit builds in pvp suffered enough? Give us back some condition damage in pvp.

If warriors get 360 hp/s for doing NOTHING at all, then you need to really beef up the Mesmer Signet since Mesmers need to keep 3 clones up to get their 1000 every 3 seconds.

Tone down the decap engi spec, who cares about those nails at all xD

jportell.2197:

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.

To quickly decap a node without being unnoticed you don’t use stealth, but swiftness, shadowstep, infiltrator’s arrow/heartseeker or even shadow trap. Stealth in GW2 is used as a combat mechanism, not utility on F1 like in every other MMO. Besides, even if it worked as a toggle, in 90% cases there would be no need to use stealth to get to a node.

Being unable to cap nodes with stealth made all stealth based builds very weak in sPvP; talking about top level tournaments, not hotjoin or WvW, where losing a few seconds on a node in favour of enemy may costs your team a victory.

Befor : Lf war/guard/mes for [pve content] NO RANGER/NECRO/ENG..

After : Lf war/guard/mes for [pve content]………..

Plz dev, open lfg and read, just read.

EDIT :

lfg from 11:11am to 11:13 am today

Azriaell.3259:

Befor : Lf war/guard/mes for [pve content] NO RANGER/NECRO/ENG..

After : Lf war/guard/mes for [pve content]………..

Plz dev, open lfg and read, just read.

This.
Nothing is being done to address the dominance of a couple classes over pve.
Instead, you nerf the other classes basing all your balance unto a mode that’s completely different from the other ones. Since the game was released.

i should say that mesmer is no longer required.
Meta changed to looking for WWWWW or GWWWW or GGWWW

Thief presented with only one change and yet it is one of the classes that needs the most changes. Shadow arts traitline is causing most of the problems, because:
a) It forces thief to rely on stealth too much. It is not fun to play it or play against it. It is not good in PvE nor in sPvP. In WvW it is good only for roaming and there it is close to unfair advantage. Stealth by itself is “fine”, added effects on itself are fine, but combined they are too strong (Similar case is warrior. Nothing on it’s own is OP but things put together are.)
b)Venom share. Venoms on their own are weak, near useless outside of very specific situations (compared to other abilities or abilities of other classes) and with Venom share they are over the top in small scale. In big fights in WvW they are again useless due to their way of application. What makes Venom share so powerful?
Spider Venom 6 applications per player – no there is not a problem (maximum stacking on one target is 5 anyway)
Ice drake venom – 3 applications of 1s chill – no this is hardly a problem
Skelk Venom – 4 charges of low heal – no this is not a problem
Devourer Venom – 2 charges of 2 sec immobilize – This is a problem in smallscale but not thief’s problem but immobilize stacking in general. With increased duration it can get to 4 sec per charge, that’s 8 sec per player. It is strong? Can be. If there is no other condition it is matter of condition removal, but here comes the problem. With current condition spam you are helpless if something this powerful is covered by other conditions.
Skale Venom – probably one venom that is strong with venom share but not completely broken
Basilisk Venom – strong with good coordination which is imo ok, because with bad coordination it will be weak.

Solutions:
Partial solution to venoms could be lowering immobilize stacking to 2, reducing maximum + condition duration to something like +50% and reducing CD of Venoms or completely changing how they work. For example similar to signets. Application of every x attacks as passive(only for thief), when activated they gave charges to thief (and allies if traited for venom share), but the amount of charges would be like half of the current charges.

Other solution (or it could be combined) could be moving venom related traits to one traitline (probably deadly arts) and putting so players must do choices. More charges or venom share? Lower cooldowns or lifesteal? Lifesteal + sharing or Lower cooldowns and more charges?

Other issues with thief (and not only him) is number of totally useless traits.
Those are ’+’5% damage with specific weapon as master traits
Improvisations (’+’10% damage with kits – still in game since stolen weapons are no longer bundles. That means ignored since beta.)
All on downed/in downed state traits.
Patience +1 initiative per 10 sec while in stealth. How does this promote active engagement?
Shadow protection – just lower duration, put there condition “when you enter stealth” same as Infusion of shadows and remove the fact that it cannot be applied when you already have regeneration.
Assassin reward – increase base heal amount if this is supposed to be grandmaster trait
Hard to catch – remove the random teleport – make it stunbreak + endurance refill or something useful and fix the issues with self inflicted daze while underwater using spear number 4.
Quick recovery is very weak after last update. either combine it with something(Fleet of foot?) or boost by adding some other effect to it (not +1 initiative).

Trickery line is nice example with good traits that are not useless and player has a choice.

Also solve/remove Last Refuge.

Utility skills
The problematic ones are venoms, traps and some tricks. Venoms were already discussed.
Traps are weak on long cooldown. compared to ranger traps they are joke. You want to buff ranger traps to be combofield, yet they have:
lower CD,
last after being triggered,
they have bigger area effect, easily affects more targets (I know that thief’s traps can also but it is much harder to do so),
can be thrown,
are not completely negated with one dodge.
Thief traps have above issues and also two of them remove thief from stealth when triggered while mesmer’s clones can freely attack while mesmer is in stealth.

Tricks
The problematic ones are Scorpion wire and Roll for initiative. Scorpion wire is very weak with targeting. It has terrain problems and tracking problems. Making projectile go faster + making it more heatseeking would make this skill more usable. Some PvE mobs has better working pulls than this.
Roll for initiative is nice skill but it suffers from one problem (same as shadow step). When you encounter some obstacle skill (line of warding, ring of warding, static field,…) you will get stopped and CCed which completely ruins effect of stunbreaker. Same goes for shadow step. You are in the middle of static field and you use it to get out then you will get stunned after teleport. Either do the stunbreaker at the end location too or apply short (1-2s) stability to this skill.

LordByron.8369:

CRITICAL DAMAGE:
ITs the worse mistake ever done….nobody wants it,
CELESTIAL AND WUPWUP will became trash and you will just wipe months and thousands gold from random players since for them getting any other set of a lower tier will be way more effective.

See the following post:

Roy Cronacher.1576:

I wanted to stop by and say thanks for the feedback. We do feel that the celestial stat set will be hit the hardest with the upcoming critical damage changes, so we are looking at possibly boosting the overall stats by a small amount.

Also the celestial stat set in PvP is using a much lower stat multipliers than the PvE versions so we will be looking at changing this as well. Nothing is set in stone, but I wanted to let guys know this is something we are discussing.

Just like to point out to all the condition necromancers out there.

Dhumfire is in the power trait line… if your claiming to be a condition mancer why on earth have you got a full line of power trait… if that’s the case your doing it wrong.

That being said… Moving Dhumfire into DS may help the power necromancers / Hybrids as that’s what DS is mostly used for.. It’s still not the real answer to the over problem (Just need to read everyone else’s view to know that) I hope in the future this can be corrected, because atm.. it’s not that great of a change especially when your in pvp/wvw

I’m Speaking from a purely PvE Necro PoV

As requested, in point form:

• I haven’t touched my necro in months because of all the nerfing to the class. Condition builds are getting completely screwed by balance fixes seemingly designed around PvP gameplay.

• This needs to stop. You CAN’T balance two entirely separate game modes with the same fixes, why you keep trying just boggles my mind.

• As for the Dhuumfire fix…well I think by now you should have seen that the general consensus amongst us is we hate it.

• If you wanted to give us access to burn, and make it’s use more skilful, why not have it work similar to the Chilling Darkness trait, perhaps apply burn when you apply fear or something?

General
Why can’t #1 on every weapon be as potent as the warriors axe?

Warriors axe vs hammer in PVE
I’m using a berserker warrior. Having 90% crit chance and i’m doing 2000, 2000, 4000 via #1 (skill chain). If i use a hammer i will end up with 2000, 2000, 2000 however that hammer is two-handed, it’s bigger, it has a slower attack speed and the AA does nothing special. So the overall damage is lower whicht does not make sense to me.
The damage and the killspeed are rather the same. The axe chain skill #3 is doing a lot more damage (+1000). If the two-handed are having two slots it will pretty even.

PVE Suggestion bounce on ranged
Why can’t professions that use bows, pistols have a richocet/bounce chance on their 10 trait and a penetration on their 20 trait? It’s so sucking in PVE just hitting one target. However it should not been overdone. It is difficult enough to hit something if you have a berseker-thief with unload around. P/P unload may does 7k in 2s and is as nice as axe AA.

Warrior wishes
Whirling axe should also been improved. Improved means damage

The mace AA should also do more damage (AA chain skill #3) and the attack should be faster. Seeing that thing is annoying even with that little damage compared to axe. And from my pve pov remove the weakness and add vulnerability.

The healing signet idea

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 would add +1000 up to +2000 to the active. I mean you don’t use it for the active you use it for the rather strong passive. So if this gets cut. It should be compensated. It could also been compensated giving regeneration on the active. Once it is nerfed to hard nobody will use it and switch to something better with a higher active heal.

Why is this change also made in PVE. I think most of the cry babies are in PVP.

The warriors GS
Nerf warrior GS #1 by removing vulnerability. Half the damage GS #3 does and allow moving. It’s strong enough and will be stronger if traited.

The warriors build diversity in PVE
From a build perspecitve, PVE warrior we are having 30, 25, 15 so there is no real build diversity in PVE. Maybe 30,X,Y,Z,30. So we are having that resource called adrenaline and we are rewarded for NOT using it. How about gain might for using adrenaline? Same trait line (power) on the 30.

The warriors rifle – needs improvement
Also rifle is frustrating as a warrior due to it’s single targeting, it’s damage. #1 should do more physical damage, #3 should have a lowered cool down, F1 half the reload. And a bounce would also been appreciated.

General overhaul the trait system
In general i would overhaul the trait system. I would add as i said bounce on the 10 trait, penetrating on the 20. +5 damage melee on 10, +5 damage ranged on 10, +10% crit on 20, things like +20% damage while health of foe is under 50% on the 30 so you have a standarized system. And those traits should be were they make sense. Ranged into precision, melee into power.

Ranger traps and traits
Ranger traps are currently in the precision trait line… Traps do not benefit form that it would make more sense if they were in the power line.

The new trait system
Another thing regarding traits: Lets assume i would like to use hammer as a berserker i don’t need those traits in the health, toughtness trait line since i’m having enough control.

So +5% damage to ALL melee weapons etc. in the power and so on.

Power vs condition vs control – Let US decide
Let us decide how much control we would like to use from that weapon (like hammer on the warrior or even mace). If we want power builds please accept it.

Thedenofsin.7340:

If warriors get 360 hp/s for doing NOTHING at all, then you need to really beef up the Mesmer Signet since Mesmers need to keep 3 clones up to get their healing.

This.

Furthermore, as has been said a million times in this thread: underwhelming.

We’ve been waiting for months for proper balancing and then we’ll have to wait more months for some basic changes like this, whilst in many ways the most obvious problem classes (UP or OP) are not being addresses properly.

Now, I’m not a programmer but I can’t imagine this will take two months to code and test, so I sure as hell hope that the balance team is working on much more that we’re not aware and that they haven’t announced yet. As much as I like this game, I’m losing patience quickly with the dreadfully slow changes.

HardRider.2980:

Just like to point out to all the condition necromancers out there.

Dhumfire is in the power trait line… if your claiming to be a condition mancer why on earth have you got a full line of power trait… if that’s the case your doing it wrong.

That being said… Moving Dhumfire into DS may help the power necromancers / Hybrids as that’s what DS is mostly used for.. It’s still not the real answer to the over problem (Just need to read everyone else’s view to know that) I hope in the future this can be corrected, because atm.. it’s not that great of a change especially when your in pvp/wvw

As a rebuttal…why then, is there a condition trait in a power line? Going 30 into Spite to pick up Dhuumfire isn’t entirely uncommon in condition builds, especially in PvE. As condimancers in PvE we try to maximise our access to different conditions, especially damaging ones, meaning that for many of us 30/30/x has become a staple because bleeds+poison+burn+terror have the best damage potential we can get.

You also seem to forget that Spite also adds +30% condi duration, which is NOT entirely useless to a condimancer.

@Ihales
Yeah, I forgot to mention totally useless traits in my post. All +5% dmg traits give pretty much nothing. We have +5% physical damage on shortbow, which is a hybrid weapon, resulting maybe in 2-3% total dmg increase – are you sure this is a trait for master tier? Who came up with this idea?

Look at merciless hammer of warriors – 20% cooldown reduction with +25% dmg increase to CCd foes – now, this is a trait I might seriously consider to pick, or even build around… and then, we have thieves with +5% dmg on daggers, what forces me to pick a trait from adept tier insead (all other traits from master tier are equally useless)…

MonMalthias.4763:

These are meta shifting changes ; yet you have chosen to incorporate them into a patch months away despite a stultifying PVP community and into a huge balance shakeup of rebalancing nearly every single Rune and Sigil.

To be fair, if they were to patch them any closer there’d be endless threads about how unfair such changes are without a warning months in advance.

So, are 2H weapons going to get nerfed now that they can hold a 2nd sigil?

I have a few suggestions for the Necromancer traits, mostly centered on Terror and Dhuumfire.

As can be seen from the posts in this thread, Necros are not happy with Dhuumfire nor with the new version. Too much of the Necro’s abilities were rebalanced due to Dhuumfire and this update severely limits it’s application in condition builds.

I have the following suggestions to make, it may seem like a lot but everything is already in the game so it’s pretty easy to apply these changes.

First of all, swap Lingering Curses with Terror and undo the Terror nerfs. Second swap Withering Precision with the new Dhuumfire and increase Dhuumfire to 4 seconds of burning ( since it’s no longer in the Condition duration line) and change Withering Precision so it applies 6 seconds of Weakness ( 8 in practice due to condition duration) on crit with a 15 second cooldown. Finally change the trait Near to Death so that instead of decreasing DS cooldown to 7 seconds the cooldown begins ticking upon entering DS instead of leaving it, this can easily be done by bypassing the code that resets the cooldown. This code already isn’t triggered if the Necromancer comes out of DS when he runs out of Life Force instead of toggling off the ability. Near to Death would now bypass this same code instead of changing the cooldown to 7 seconds on reset.

So this is the thought process behind these changes:
Lingering Curses is considered a rather lackluster GM trait and moving it down to master makes sense.
Terror and Dhuumfire add burst potential to the condition build. Conditions should have very limited burst potential, this playstyle is supposed to be “slow and steady wins the race”, having access to both abilities was breaking this design. Now that both abilities would be mutually exclusive, a Necro needs to make a choice whether he wants to use his Fears as a burst tool or if he wants to add burning to his conditions repertoire. Both traits can also receive a slight buff to make keep them as attractive options in their new location.

Withering Precision has been in a bad spot since the new weakness was introduced, it has very low uptime with it’s huge ICD. Moving Withering Precision to a Spite GM slot makes it compete with Close to Death, a pure dps increase trait. This adds choice to the Spite GM, do I want more damage or do I want a more defensive trait? Remember that Spite is also our condition duration trait line, so it’s attractive to all condition control users.

The final change in Near to Death is to increase the viability of the new Dhuumfire and to fix limitation introduced by the trait. Many of the Necro’s “upon entering DS traits” are held back because of Near to Death, changing this trait allows more liberty for the balance team in designing those traits. Keeping the CD ticking along while in DS also greatly helps the player to time Dhuumfire applications, maximizing his use of the trait. Although this would probably lead to both condition builds always going 30 in Curses and 20 in Soul Reaping, the final 20 trait points are free to spend wherever they wish, a much greater liberty compared to the static 30/20/0/0/20 we always saw before.

Engineers are possibly in a good place in PvP (apparently, I can’t really speak for it though), but they’re still one of the least played, least loved professions in every other game mode. It would be nice if balancing stopped looking solely at PvP.

Two main talking points the way I see it:
- FT#1 needs to be buffed and some of the FT’s other skills need to be reworked.
- Turrets need to be fixed and improved, like ASAP.

I’m going to talk here in a PvP perspective, about elementalist. I have 2000 hours played with just elementalist, so I feel pretty confident talking about the class. Feel free to disagree with me, but do so in a constructive manner.

Although I like these changes, I feel they only barely start fixing ele’s problem.
The problem here is that anything that is even only half berserker can shut you down pretty fast. I usually play scepter focus, for a fresh air build with decent survaibility, but any thief can simply burst me down, make me use my invulnerabilities, take my burst, go into stealh, heal and procced to kill me, cause my defensive skills are on a huge cooldown. Doesn’t really matter if I time my skills perfectly, cause most of the other classes will just vanish or insta heal, and procced to kill me while im on cd. This doesn’t happen most times, but it does more frequently than I’d like.

My suggestion here, is that you take some of the underpowered/useless skills, and create some defensive mechanisms out of them. By this, I mean most signets and glyphs.
Keep in mind that I will only be analysing and stating the problems, Anet would be better than me to suggest improvments. Now, onto the:

Signets

The signets actives are mostly not used, because they don’t really do anything worthwhile.

• Signet of Fire gives a burn, on a 20sec cd, with 3/4sec casting time. yay -.-
• Signet of Water chills someone for 5secs, on a 30secs cooldown. Again 3/4sec cast time, it may not seem much, but it is enough to get killed in pvp, or for your opponent to handily dodge it.
• Signet of Earth immoblizes for 3sec, also with 3/4sec cast, which is kinda ok, but we will lose it’s passive for 30secs, which is mostly the reason why someone would pick it. (it might be able to set up some combos, but most of the othere classes can remove the immobilize pronto…)
• Signet of Air is the best one, by giving a stunbreak, and an aoe blind, on an instant cast. The passive 10% movspeed doesnt really help much, but it is a nice signet overall.
• Signet of Restoration, heal skill, it is good, will become viable again after that buff. Although taking it means you’ll have even less condi removal, which is a pain. But we will see.

Are you planning on doing something to all the kittening player that are using exploit and glitch for money farm in Arah and AC?
I know (and i see) player soloing those dungeon using the so called “water” exploit.
For god sake, stop them. They are ruining the game, and idk if you can do something like ban them.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

[about necrmoancer] Just curious, do you EVER plan on giving the class ANY attrition?

kitten will be kitten when we will get something.

Glyphs

They seriously need some kind of improvment, as some of them jhust aren’t used:

• Glyph of Renewal. Hum. Buggy, 3sec, downed state revival glyph, on a 165sec cooldown. 2 things: first, in 3secs, your mate goes from downed to dead, and most likely, you too. 2nd, on such a cooldown, no one is going to use it instead of a cantrip. I mean, no one. You can completely rework this one to become somthing viable, that fits into your idea of increasing defensivness
• Glyph of Elemental Power, can’t really say much about it, as haven’t tried it much, so I won’t, to prevent me from saying something that is not true. It does seem nice, instant cast, breaks stun, and gives your skills a chance (low 25%) to inflict conditions for 30sec. I will definetly look into it.
• Glyph of Lesser Elementals, if you are in pvp, you are probably goin to use this before you enter the fight, and the elemental will last approximatly half the fight, at most, as any aoe will kill it quickly. If you use it while fighting, you will get some hits for it, and will have to remain in the attunment you want your elemental to be for 1 and 1/4, which sometimes mean death (because of that squishiness issue, ya know?)
  The Elite version of this skill is quite good, nothing to state about it, just reducing the cd a bit would be nice, but that’s just a personal wish.
• Glyph of Storms. I would love to be able to use this efficiently. Although fire and lightning storm are pretty useless, earth and water storms give some nice blinds and chills respectively. The problem here is the cast time, and that it is very easily avoided. In most scenarios, your opponent will just roll out, and switch to ranged for it’s duration. Although I don’t dislike it in it’s current state, the only place I can really use it is if there is a 3v3 or more fight. And by using it, I’m also losing a cantrip slot. Which intantly makes it not worth in most cases.

Most of these are not used because using a cantrip instead to increase your survailability is an absolute must in pvp. Some may be good in theory, but just won’t work if you use them. I’m saying this because I tried it most of them.

Well, with all this, I just wanted to state what you can probably tweak or rework, to use as a vessel to improve the elementalist squishy state. I could go on talking about some traits, like the Written in Stone, that mantains the passive of signets, for 30 points in earth (sarcastic yay), but I think this is a big enough wall of text.
This is not a rant, I love elementalist, feel free to suggest tweaks that could be applied to this signets to make them viable.

TYVM, you’re awesome if you read it all!
(sry for any mistakes in my english, not native)

Ahahahaha they deleted my fail post despite it is completly true.

What have they done in the past 2+ months? Instead of balancing the game they come over with ideas to mess up the game even more.

No one cares about sigil changes…instead of asking players you do that kitten and then you wonder why everyone is kittened. I mean 2 months is a lot of time to change a number (8% nerf hurray that will solve all our problems — NOT …). I promise that the sigil changes will mess up the meta even more.

And then we can wait another 2++ months until we get the next dissapointing “balance” patch….Seriously these 3 changes for each class will do nothing….So instead of doing useless kitten you could start to work….And my gosh finally do hotfixes also for pvp…after every patch there are 5 smaller patches who fix the kitten another department had done. Did that happen for pvp just a single time? NO! And you guys wonder why this game is a massive fail on twitch…

So dont call that patch a balance preview because these changes are so minor, I really wonder what you have done the last couple months.

Warrior signet needs risk reward. Doing just healing isn’t enough. It needs to be a case of we have increased defensive capabilities while having zero healing ability.

Active: Heals 30% of your health over 3 seconds, grants protection for 7 seconds.

Scales with healing power and vitality, which might bring bunker warriors into the fray. Having a downtime of 15 ish seconds of healing (yes, that’s off the top of my head) would make it a high risk reward factor. But played right, you can mitigate spikes with quick thinking, then go back to being able to sustain.

I did originally think about 50% of health, a la troll urgent. However I’m not sure if that would be a little to high?

Is that all you got for THIEF? Poisons are useless atm anyway..

Like someone said already, Thieves rely on stealth too much, so if you want to reduce stealth ability, you need to give us thieves something else.

I mean, power builds will have 10% reduction… so, the only thing I see incoming is another big nerf to thieves.

I don’t mind having steath nerfed if you give us other options, but it doesn’t seem that way. What about the good things coming to thieves you talked about?

Not to mention we’ll become even more useless in SPvP, due to the fact we need to constantly stealth, therefore can’t cap bases. At least we could roam and take someone down quickly, but after the crit nerf, what are we supposed to do?

A lot of people complain about thieves, but it really takes skill to play one properly.
If you haven’t tried it, go try one out, and tell me how hard is it to play one competitively.

WARRIORS – I can’t believe after all the feedback in the past months regarding the Overpowerness of Healing Signet you only going to nerf it by 8%. That isn’t going to change anything.

ELEMENTALISTS – Good to see some defensive boost to them, but in my opinion they will still be underpowered. And for a class that takes a lot of skill to play, I think they deserve better.

NECROMANCERS – Like the changes.. maybe you could give them the mobility they don’t have, compared to most professions.

MESMERS – They will still be overpowered. A profession like this, with clone spamming abilities that distract the opposite player, should NOT be overpowered.

ENGINEERS – They are fine… the class which in my opinion requires the most skill to play and gets equally rewarded.

RANGERS – I’m not very familiar with them, although I know Spirit Rangers’ healing and AI are broken, so good changes.

GUARDIANS – Good balance changes to them, nothing much to say.

Be aware that I’m writing more on a PvP perspective

The simplest change for Healing Signet active is to make it a strong Heal over Time for several seconds (1200 per sec for 5 sec?), adjust the numbers so it isn’t always the right decision to leave it on passive.

Just some suggestions on rune/sigil redesign, I’m hoping that combos will be worked into the redesign, e.g. instead of all the on-hit, on-crit, getting hit by enemies or weapon-swap, that there is some bonuses that trigger or have a chance to trigger on using a particular finisher, or on using one particular combo like the blasts in fire fields giving fury trait for eles, or boosting the effectivness of your combos. Whirls in particular could be boosted in this way.

Since some of the profession have some specialities, rather than trying to make every rune set desirable to every profession, it would be interesting if some rune sets were better on some classes than others, e.g. rune of vampirism being better for necros, since they have more access to life-steals through traits, rune of vampirism could give a life-steal at a low set bonus, but give interesting procs when life steals are applied at the higher set bonuses, giving one stack of might when a lifesteal is used or a chance of applying weakness (10%) to a target when they are hit with a life-steal. Hopefully, there is an effort to take some interesting builds that don’t work so well now and boost them with runes/sigils.

Shadowfall.6543:

Cynz.9437:

Will we see any chance to change stats (one time) on ascended armor? Because this change is rather drastic and full ascended set (weapons + armor + trinkets) can go up to 300g costs…

Also why is condi armor is not touched? Condis meta is ruining this game atm, why nerf direct dmg builds?

I think condition armor was not touched since it was to balance PvE.

multiple condition builds acting together step on each others toes (and some classes can’t help but overwrite powerful conditions with very weak ones (i.e. gaurdians setting things on fire with 0 condition damage. They have no choice, but it can still overwrite an elementalists 300 – 1200 condition damage fire).

multiple DD builds stack additively. If I do 2000 DPS and you do 2000 DPS than minus then we do 4000 DPS when attacking the same target. So 5 people all DPS do 5x damage. If they brought a condition damage person it would probably hurt since most mobs would die too quickly, but bringing 2 would really tank their DPS.

Condition Damage is a problem in PvP and WvW because of the HP disparity in Guild Wars 2 between players and monsters. Champion monsters will happily smile away with 25 stacks of bleed, poison and fire. If you put that on a normal person they would melt in seconds (not to mention a low HP class).

Just to add…

PvP won’t have any crit damage changes.

WvW condition damage is only any issue what so ever in small group play. When the fights scale up to zerg clashes conditions are a non-issue due to the massive amount of cleansing. So it’s basically one small section of a part of the game they don’t seem to care about much that’s having some balance shifts.

Leviathan.9850:

Engineers are possibly in a good place in PvP (apparently, I can’t really speak for it though), but they’re still one of the least played, least loved professions in every other game mode. It would be nice if balancing stopped looking solely at PvP.

Two main talking points the way I see it:
- FT#1 needs to be buffed and some of the FT’s other skills need to be reworked.
- Turrets need to be fixed and improved, like ASAP.

Here’s the thing. Engineers do well in a gamemode that is based on a single gametype, namely conquest. Using a build specialized in shoving people of a point, not killing people, just annoy them and stall them.

Where else would such a specialized nothing but CC-build be of any use? PvE? WvW? And what about any future gametypes that are going to be added to spvp? Would it be any use in a Team Deathmatch?

But because Engineers have a build thats annoying, not deadly just annoying, in a single gamemode that currently revolves entirely around a single specialized gametype, every single Engineer is going to get a nerf. Across every single gamemode.

That is beyond terrible game design. And in the meantime, the one profession who is infact dominant in every gamemode, the Warrior, is barely getting touched as Arenanet tiptoes around that one.

JS. “Allot of good things are coming for the Thief” on the last “ready up” stream.

… he didn’t say wen…

Necromancer and its problems: I honestly think all the constant nerfs to condition’s aren’t actually addressing core problem’s. Right now from a pvp perspective 1 of the reasons Conditionmancers are so popular is not just because it is a good build. Its popular because its our only viable build we have that works at high level play and because some highlevel players still refuse to use cleanse’s. No amount of nerfs will change that because. No other build can bring the same amount of dmg it can, No other build can bring the sustain it has (and even that is minimal) and No other build can handle being focused. No other Build can bring anything to groups except the Wellmancer. More and more nerfs will not fix this.
Until all this changes the only viable high level necro builds will be conditionmancers either terror or vampiric rabid and we lack the viable alternatives.

How to address the lack of viabile alternative: Well for starters instead of nerfing necromancers into the ground other classes need to be given more cleanse’s or encouraged to use the ones the have whilst at the same-time giving us the tools needed to make alternative to condition builds viable. The previous patch which gave boosts to Chill of Death, Vital Persistance and reapers protection were good starts. However they still don’t solve the problem of burst or lockdown nor do they move us away from conditions. You need to give power, Well and Spectral builds the means to compete and to do so we need mitigation. So in the short-term I would open up and improve what few options we currently have.

1. Reduce the cooldowns on all wells by 5 seconds. tho a decent build that actually has sustain the long cooldowns prevent it being competive. By reducing the cooldowns all well traits get better and thus the viability of the build as a whole.
2. Move Spectral Attunement from master to Adept: Spectral skills are among the few defensive utilities we have. However long cooldowns and short effects really kill there viability for a lot of builds and as a result its almost always better just to take more DPS skills . Moving this to adept would open up spectrals to more players and thus our sustainability.
3. Move the New Duumbfire to master: Ok this is not related to sustain but the new duumbfire is really not worthy of Grandmaster despite its well deserved nerf. Its now dodgeable, adds Little DPS and fizzles quickly.

Those are things I feel could easily be implemented before the next patch both improving prospects of other necrobuilds emerging while placating the playerbase till further changes can be made. In the Longterm tho a lot more needs to be done. I would like to see thing’s such as the merger of Vampuric Rituals and Ritual mastery, Maybe reworking the spite grandmaster minor trait ‘’siphoned power’’ to cast a well of darkness at say 25% health that also boost’s dmg against blinded foes. Thus improving both sustain and DPS. and of course reworks of the blood and deathlines which sorely need it. Why doe’s deathshroud our class mechanic not work with siphon’s our core sustain mechanic? There’s many issues with those 2 lines but I know they will take time to get worked through. I just hope non-condition builds will see play at a high level.

Anyway thanks for the preview. I look forward to reading the thread further and I hope for a reply

HPLT.7132:

(…)
So dont call that patch a balance preview because these changes are so minor, I really wonder what you have done the last couple months.

It is something at least, some classes with the right gear become quite imbalanced and OP(1vsX), effort to kill is like press buton to win while the effort to survive while fighthing those builds raises alot (obviously..).
Anet also needs to check some condi builds spam besides thief where the conditions spam is so great it is almost impossible to react or try to cleanse, since it will be harder to max crit damage and to counter this builds also do being more tanky than any guardian build.
For the updates/changes im reading and the builds i know of there are some builds that will be even more deadly despite they can fight already vs several targets(players) in WvW.

1st Q: Is Anet conscious of the damage that their classes changes are making to WvW?

2nd Q:After seing the EOTM, will be any changes,machanics improvements to the main WvW map?

3rd Q:Guardian,will ghost weapons be reworked or removed to something more worthy?
In pve they dont have any role and in WvW theres no situation this weapons can be used, even shields are destroyed before activated.

as a thief i feel we could use some love… In this patch you first nerf the critical damage (which is very important for most viable thief builds) and then you remove our aoe tagging poison fields too… why don’t we get something in return? faster ini regen (since that has been nerfed badly 10th december) or finally some more stability so we don’t get insta beaten down in wvw?

I have the feeling thiefs are getting more pointless with every patch, thiefs were mainly decent in WvW cause of the poison… now there are better options. Thiefs used to be good for ganking enemy commanders… i doubt that will work as well with the new patch… Give us SOMETHING.

Ranger’s sword needs to be reworked: #1 dodge!!!!
Ranger’s greatsword needs condition dmg for me: #4 when block add confusion at foe
Ranger’s wolf pet: #f2 is too slow*. For example fear of wolf is too slow compare to fear me of warrior or lot of necromancer’s skills.
Elementalist and the slow attack: some attacks have an activation time too slow! They are almost usefull in pvp (dragon’s tooth, churning earth, meteor shower). For example #5 of the ranger’s longbow is more quickly.
Elementalist again: lightning flash is weak compare to other professions; i propose the same effect of evasive arcana. *For example teleport of thief, guardian and mesmer have some utility effect!

Hey, you could have tried to make ranger/necro/ing viable in pve for once, instead of those war/war/war/war/war or war/war/war/ele/mes parties. But then again, i guess you’ll never get tired of nerfing necro damage.
Proofs-just open average lfg. I mean, things are really bad, when even your friends tell you to reroll instead of suffering.

I think you should take a deeper look at condition damage builds…. as you said berseker bulds are going to still be the most powerfull but THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE A GAME WHERE U CAN PLAY AS YOUR WAY. why condition dps gamers shouldnt do the same damage as a bersk??? so think in ppl who wanna play by conditions and stops doing sensseless changes

Couple suggestions for Warrior healing signet active.

- double regen.

-healing based on attacks for a duration.

-block for short duration 1.5s~. no heal. CD reduced if hit on block.

No cast time would be nice. I prefer the last one.

Huh..
I read most players opinion about new incoming “balance”.

Developer Balance Team- it looks like players want to eat You alive !

If dear Developers can say witch players give their feedback about this “balance”.
It will be much easier to know why this “balance” is going into the abyss

•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.

wonderfull now i can get to heal for 20 or more point then before since i use cleric gear on my MM and likely wont change until a minion scaling happen (no point running anything else but cleric because minion dont scale)

•Training of the Master: Reduced the damage increase to minions from 30% to 25%.

You do know that if you actualy based minion damage on a master power scaling you could likely nerf the base damage of minion a lot (about 30% or more) while keeping them able to deal decent damage for glass cannon necromancer who dont use tanking gear right? Just remove the + 30% damage from the game and give them a trait that allow power scaling, youl nerf bunker necro like crazy all while reinforcing glass cannon ones.

I dont realy approve of those change and heres why

1. Reducing the minion damage and making the vampiric master trait scale with healing power only shove MM more into the bunker path it already is in, If you realy want to make the spec viable without making it overpowered you need to give player incentive not to run it as a bunker but as a glass cannon.

2. Ive always said scaling pet stat based on the master would actualy prevent this kind of ‘’ I tank like a god and my pet deal insane damage ’’ gimmick while actualy doing the promotion of an actual decent pet spec.

From my point of view as a minion master who played the spec since game release you prety much only pushing us more and more into the bunker path wich close to everyone hate and want nerfed, the more youl push us in it the more well get nerfed and the more the build will gradualy degrade into behing useless for close to everything but SPVP where it will itself likely become useless with this many nerf or turn into the same thing as the enginer turret bunker wich itself is dead and buried 300 feet underground. Minion master needs to actualy have its pet based on the master stat and less on actual trait wich only give free proliferation to tanking gimmick.

what needs to be done

1. Reduce all pet base damage by 25%

2. Give the minion damage scaling as the tooltip pretend to like for mesmer phantasm so that we stop running a silly tanking leech build and start using our army for something else.

Result:

1. Minion master will split between Damage minion user and Tanking minion user by effectively making minion into an actual dpsing tool rather then a tanking pet.

2. Necromancer will finaly become a Physical damage viable class other then with dagger 1 spammer.

Dont nerf the spec that has actualy given its name to the necromancer FIX it so its viability depends on wich gear is used rather then on static damage not influanced by stats.

It might be helpful across many professions to classify cooldown traits as skill types. This way reduce skill cooldown a could be more effective. As an Engi primary I know this has and will continue to be done. But an example could be inventions line Cloaking device. Classify cloaking device as a gadget and thereby speedy gadgets allows a 20 vice 25 second cooldown. I understand this could be OP in some scenarios and the numbers could be juggled to combat this.

Karl McLain.5604:

Edit:
Most of these notes are simply a summary of what was discussed in the previous Ready Up stream, with a few tweaks based on feedback. This list of changes does not encompass all changes that will occur in the next feature build. We’ve got quite a few more things coming, but are unable to talk about them at this time. Soon.

I’m curious; does ‘we’ mean ‘the skills and balance team’ or ‘ArenaNet’?

Ele:

• Surely dagger water #3 would be better as an ice field instead of a blast finisher if sustain is the goal?
• Still think a solo version of Elemental Attunement should be baseline with a trait for the AOE version and the water 15 as the water attunement bonus.
• Focus still needs love.

Necro:

• Burning on DS #1 is a bad idea, doesn’t fit. Others have already posted why. The only decent alternative for burning is as a chain skill of axe #1.

Ranger:

• needs more help
• I like more fields on traps, but the best improvement for traps would be 900 range.
• Pet #2’s should probably cast a lot quicker. At least 1 pet should have a #2 blast finisher.
• Sword #1 really needs to be fixed.

Changes like these are why I haven’t been playing my necro. Just remove our burning trait or move it to our precision tree and make it compete with terror in the grandmaster slot. That would solve everything and necromancers everywhere will feel like you care.

I like that you added the scaling with healing power for vamp master. It gives more reasons for the class to go cleric and feel rewarded.

I’m also hoping for some buffs the the else signet actives because they are very very lacking =\

Karl McLain.5604:

Profession Changes

Elementalist:
Our changes for the elementalist focus on increasing sustain while maintaining the delicate balance between damage and durability. We achieved this by adding more defensive effects to a few main-hand weapon sets.

• Signet of Restoration: Removed the split on this skill so that the signet passive heal amount will be increased in PvP to match the current PvE amount.
• Armor of Earth: Reduced recharge from 90 seconds to 75 seconds.
• Water Trident: Added 3 seconds of regeneration to up to 5 allies in the radius.
• Burning Speed: This ability now evades attacks.
• Frozen Burst: This ability is now a blast finisher.

note: I will be referring exclusively at WvW area.

I consider positive that A.Net noticed how poor Elementalist sustain abilities are right now, but the above mentioned countermeasures are far too mild to impact the gameplay in a significant way.
Considering the huge nerf that will affect critical damage, our primary defense (which is offense aka “killing before being killed”) will be crippled, therefore making us weaker rather than stronger.
As if this was not enough, scepter and focus still verses in a rather disappointing state (weak damage multipliers, super slow and well telegraphed nukes, insignificant healing ecc…).
Also: dagger/dagger has been mainstream since day 1, so why focus on tweaking what’s already widely used?

Solutions, choose one or more of the following:

• truly boost up our damage to make up for the lack of mobility
• give us mobility to make up for the lack of sustain
• give us great sustain to make up for the lack of damage

My thoughts on necro changes;

Putrid Explosion: This ability is no longer unblockable.

Fair enough; seems like common sense, to me.

Training of the Master: Reduced the damage increase to minions from 30% to 25%.

Overall a fairly minimal reduction in minion damage. I’m not particularly worried by this.

Dhuumfire: This trait has been changed so that it will make Life Blast inflict 3 seconds of burning with a 10 second recharge.

Kind of weird. While I do think tying the Burning to Life Blast is a good idea, it’s weird in that it doesn’t really synergise particularly well with the other Death Shroud traits, particularly Near to Death. I’m also somewhat inclined to say that it should be moved down to Master tier, as it was noted not long ago that having condinecros go 30 in Spite and not 30 in the condi damage line is weird.

IMHO; have the trait instead apply a buff whenever you enter Death Shroud which causes the next Life Blast you cast apply 3sec Burning.

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.

Would like to know what exactly the healing coefficient is; will the 200 points from traiting in the line restore the healing to what it currently is?

There’s also the fairly consistent opinion that Terror should be pushed up into 30 Curses and something pushed down in its place, and musings on this on ANet’s side. Any new words?