Guild Wars 2

Simple collection post, for any skill, trait, or game mechanic you want:

-Fixed (bug related mostly)

-Redesign (fills a role but could use a mechanic redo to better fit that role, or it fills a role too well and deserves to be toned down)

-Remove (either useless, or indefinitely broken. Only for severe cases that have no hope)

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

All of the above

Also seems unlikely that Donald trump would be head of anet just to hire people and exercise his catch phrase.

Only reason I made this thread is because a lot of people have posted their lists of traits/skills and some game mechanics that they suggested minor or major changes for. Like the Nerf Wish List, this would be a simple collection. A little humor never hurt anyone, but try to stay on topic if you can. I’ll get the wheels rolling.

Fix- [Temporal Curtain] it should grant swiftness even if the ally already has it.
Fix- [Illusionary Leap] Allow it’s leap to slightly lift up similar to swoop or savage strike or leap of faith to better reach targets over small terrain.

Fix- [Shield Of Absorption] I noticed a couple times my projectiles were entering the dome, which seemed odd for a weapon set that is not that popular on guardian. (the skill I was using was concussion shot on ranger shortbow, idk about others).

Fix- [Dancing Dagger] Often will miss or be obstructed with no objects in the way. Projectile location and animation don’t seem to line up what so ever or it’s creating it’s own walls :/

Remove- Trait [Last refuge] Cannot work no matter what is changed. A 0 cast time stealth up against potential attacks or delayed attacks does not cooperate with one another.

Redesign- Trait [Critical Infusion] 5% with a significant sacrifice of dps is not sufficient by any means. There are trait lines with similar investments that can still provide some high damage and heal for far more. Split it’s single and AoE percentage values so it can fill its role properly.

Redesign- Trait [Reaper’s Precision] 1% life force on a critical hit doesn’t seem all that impressionable. If anything lower the chance on critical hit to say 10 or 15% and increase the life force % gain to ~3%. Its an adept trait so it shouldn’t be too strong but a high precision focused build could utilize this pretty well (in other words, an investment which is fair). Couple this and Deathly perception and your life transfer could really keep things going, that’s 8 trait points though.

Remove- Trait [Agility Training] Read the post on this and having a ranger as my 2nd 80, I agree. This trait should be passive (maybe on some pets and not others), a major trait just to have your pet get evaded is not good. People can hop up a simple rock and all melee pets are just avoided, or go up some stairs and jump off the side and they have to take the long way back to you. It’s just pathetic. Also why can’t bird pets (and mobs) follow the same movement patterns as water combat? The design is already there, why are they forced to stay on the ground?

Redesign- Trait [Healer’s Celerity] Swiftness on revival is meaningless. Plain and simple.

Redesign- [Flurry] It applies the immobilize before any hits make contact, which doesn’t give much counter play aside from running forever. MH sword has enough means to stay on target and get a cripple in, I say let the kit work with itself but to not apply immobilize unless the first hit makes contact since the precast isn’t that long. It just seems buggy for a physical type profession to be applying magical immobilize on a slashing motion to begin with but eh, I’m more concerned on the application of it rather than it being there.

Rush/rtl Discussion: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Elemenatlist-RTL-vs-Warrior-Rush-Equality/first#post4201698

Mesmer Trait redesigns: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/MESMER-Buffs/first#post4217168

Steal redesign (selfish to post my own, I know): https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Thief-Steal-update/first#post4225505

Dungeon Encounter Redesign: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Murdering-the-stacking-in-dungeon-a-solution/first#post4208488

Foot in the grave redesign: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Necromancer-Foot-in-the-Grave

Last refuge removal: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Remove-Shadow-Arts-Last-Refuge

Death shroud fix (sort of): https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Death-Shroud-Show-Skills-6-10-Cooldown/first#post4203027

Agility Training Removal (sort of): https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Ranger-Agility-Training-Should-Be-Passive/first#post4089572

List goes on. This post is meant to collect those ideas to be easier to read, hopefully making discussions on them short and to the point.

What do you think about: Stealth and Weaponskill-Evading

Black Teagan.9215:

What do you think about: Stealth and Weaponskill-Evading

I’d Say redesign.

Depends on the stealth, if its “spammable” then no (d/p thief). I think having the combo work once to get a combo is fine, since it does cost 9 initiative vs 6 while having the benefit of guartunee stealth without having to hit a target. However using a set up to continuously use this combo to wait on cd’s isn’t all that thoughtful. Simply failing over and over and being allowed to reset is not healthy gameplay, despite d/p being really, really predictable.

Otherwise, skills like the prestige, CnD, hunter’s shot only give a few seconds to reposition and/or recover. Otherwise they are very few of these to even consider to be op.

Evasion on weapon skills depends on the profession, and the time frame. If this in regards to thief, its one of our primary defenses. Thief isn’t capable of soaking up a hit and quickly recovering, they are meant to avoid hits altogether. Our healing power scales are horrible, base heals aren’t that high, and our condition removal is rather weak. Thief has to evade from actual evades or teleports or they melt rather quick. Ranger has multiple evades with sword/dagger as well, just they can’t use them as often as thief s/d. However ranger also has far better healing so its just another thing keeping them alive, they aren’t dependent on evades as much as thief.

I’d say redesign certain stealth weapon skills, primarily d/p combo and no change to evasion weapon skills. They’re either not that strong or vital to the build to stay alive.

Adrenaline Use

Redesign: This mechanic seems to straight forward in spending it, as well as earning it. There aren’t many bonus parameters to obtaining adrenaline, and there is little reason atm because of how quickly a warrior can get 3 full bars so quickly (even w/o cleansing ire). It shouldn’t be made hard, because this is the only real profession mechanic of theirs, so the only appropriate approach imo would be in how its used.

Healing Signet(not a full solution): Make it cost 1 adrenaline strike every second for the passive effect to take effect.

This opens up 2 things. First being the warrior not attacking would not gain adrenaline, so you could disable their healing signet by literally disabling the warrior (if they had no adrenaline, say after a burst skill). The second being a warrior would have to make play style and build choices and attack quite aggressively to stay in the positive gain of adrenaline. In the end won’t be hard to maintain the healing signet but it won’t be such an easy climb to 3 bars, so a small sacrifice in offense for the high sustain from healing signet.

To not nerf burst skills indirectly, there could be a small buffer for adrenaline where you can obtain more than 3 stages of adrenaline. This would only serve as a means to maintain stage 3 adrenaline and have healing signet tick and not effect anything else (% damage increases, there is no stage 4, etc)

Physical skills: Redesign

Bulls charge- change to apply 2 second daze if target foe is not moving, knockdown for 2 seconds if target foe is moving (punishes cc spam). As compensation, lower cooldown to 35 seconds. Costs 4 strikes of adrenaline.

Kick- Additional effect, if you interrupted a non-weapon skill that skill has an additional 5 seconds on its recharge. Costs 3 strikes of adrenaline.

Stomp- Additional effect, reduce the cooldown by 3 seconds per target hit. Costs 5 strikes of adrenaline.

Throw bolas- Additional effect, immobilize adjacent foes for half the duration. Max targets 3 (2 adjacent targets). (it will apply 100% of the effect if it hits a target, and 50% of the effect to up to 2 adjacent foes.) Adjacent detection is the range of a cleave. Costs 3 strikes of adrenaline.

no effect on rampage

Reason for the change is to give more options in spending adrenaline, as well as making it a more valuable resource. This is only part of a change towards warriors, my goal being make it more of a decision class where they have to think of how the skill behaves under different circumstances and reward them for adjusting to them appropriately.

Remove: Points on kill in pvp.

Reason I suggest this is with how the game is being played and has been for a long time now. No matter if it’s tournament matches or hotjoin, the time it takes to decap, then cap a point behind the full team blobbing from point to point getting 5 points a kill is just not reasonable. Even worse is when they run 4:1 squads with the 1 being an incredibly high sustain class whose only goal is to kite until the 4 man squad arrives. Being that the maps are so small, it isn’t difficult to hold 1 point, send 4 to another point, get some points on kill and turn around.

Pvp matches should be only about captures and side objectives. All killing should reward is knocking that player out of the ring for a short time so you have the upper hand. Bum rushing mid over and over gets incredibly boring very quickly to watch and play.

Redesign : The Skyhammer

Allow the laser to be blocked and evaded. Since it cannot be destroyed like battle of kyhlo trebuchets and holding that room just requires some well coordinated cc build, the laser has far to much of an impact on the map. If need be reduce the time needed to turn the laser for aiming so it can adjust quickly but there needs to be a more reasonable counter than “take the laser for your team”.

Most times I just see people camp out in there with a buddy and the laser is stronger than having those 2 allies out on the point. Teams can set themselves up to only need 2 people contesting a point, 1 capping and back capping, and 2 holding the laser room covering both. There is just too much cc related to this map with the laser and the breaking platforms.

Remove – Stealth; it is impossible to balance, especially without reveal mechanic.
Spamming stealth is serious issue in any form of pvp.
In some cases in wvw can be (and is) exploited.
The whole nature of stealth is bad for any pvp game, not just gw2, and instead of struggling to make it work, just get rid of it and act like it was never part of the game.

I’d argue against flat out removing it as opposed to redesign certain parts of it (like reveal and chain stealth).

Stealth in itself isn’t broken, its the long uptime on it that some builds can achieve that make it frustrating but not at all impossible to defeat. It’s more so a lousy mechanic than an unbalanced one, because letting someone mess up and freely disengage time after time isn’t fun to watch or use.

Also stealth does very little in pvp aside from annoy people. You can’t cap a point in stealth and most stealth based builds can’t go anywhere near a group fight without being focused and often melted.

So you have a way to replace the whole SA trait line with a not “broken” defense and healing system? The game is not focused around pvp go www then stealth shows to be more efficient and other builds as well cough cough tank.. thus come the hatred from the glass canon community.

Stating that stealth is not fun is a biased opinion nothing forces me to have glass thief all specs should be encouraged.

@Lighthammer
It’s not impossible to balance because stealth, it’s impossible because they dont split between the modes.

Removing stealth would nobody help, at least the thief. (A rework is still necessary)

ANet have to rework the time of stealth and revealed, both at least 8 secs.
Then is stealth more than a simple mechanic that they need to spam to be strong and it is possible to add effective counter.

(The same with PU-Mesmer. They aren’t so strong, because their skills or traits, they are strong because stealth.)

I play a thief, since the beta and I know, how big the different between stealth and non-stealth builds are. Also that stealth is no big help, unless against trashmobs, in PvE.

Things that need a fix/rework too, are the (Thief-) Venoms, Traps, the whole Acrobatic traitline and a few other traits.

NinjaEd.3946:

Adrenaline Use

There is a massive loophole in what you are suggesting. Making Healing Signet take 1 strike per second will make adrenaline gain a major problem without Cleansing Ire. Most warrior attacks have a 1-hit-per-second rotation. Thus, you would only gain adrenaline from swapping weapons and berserker’s stance, which is low gain to say the least.

Other adrenaline gaining traits are very lackluster, trust me. Your suggestions would pigeonhole warriors into using CI even more then they are now.

I do like the ideas for Physical utilities, although I again disagree with them costing adrenaline. I can’t think of any utility skills on any class that can not be used free of charge. One would simply not use them if it costs adrenaline.

You are grosly overestimating physical utilities when you suggest any kind of nerf to them (like the Bull’s Rush suggestion). Physical utilities are weak, only BR is adequate (and this is more because of mobility, so let’s not invoke more QQ by reducing the CD).

Onto some suggestions like you asked at the start of the topic;

-Redesign GS burst skill for warrior. As it stands, it is never used if you have half a brain. This does not advocate skillful play. Several topics about this on the warrior forum.
-Redesign Axe skill 5. Skill 4 is mediocre, but it is the 5th skill that makes axe offhand purely cosmetic. The damage is lower then the auto attack, and as the offhand axe offers no other form of utility (either CC or defense), it is again never used for anything else then appearance. Suggestion: give it a chance to block projectiles (50%?), which could be reflect if traited.
-Redesign all Tactics minor traits (the 1, 3 and 5 point ones). They are incredibly situational and, even in those situations, pretty bad.

There is more, but I don’t have time

Its not a full solution to the problem, it’s simply addressing the common one many builds have. Almost all run CI (a crutch imo), it makes adrenaline gain incredibly easy and gives them a strong condi clear. To make adrenaline management more relevant and also add a bit of thought to HS would hopefully take warrior out of the “passive” play style they get ridiculed for so much. This is with an assumption that mending and healing surge and defiant stance will be looked at to be more promising which has been talked about in the past.

There are other viable options to adrenaline gain, CI is most definitely not the only good one it’s just the easiest one to use. If you’ve ever used inspiring shouts with a good cleaving weapon or sharpened axes adrenaline gain is incredibly easy.

I never stated physical skills to be op, not sure where you got that from. In my suggestion I actually put fourth buffs with them just tied a small adrenaline cost to them. I put a cost of adrenaline vs an effect on adrenaline stage because it seemed like a lot more work to adjust numbers that are low already.

There are ways to gain adrenaline ooc so you can still use bulls charge to initiate. The daze on immobile targets is to put fourth a DR on chain cc with bulls charge. Almost always targets are mobile anyways, a small counterplay to a 35 second recharge (which can go lower with traits) means quicker potential combos with say eviscerate or 100b but also rewards enemies for having a little knowledge on its effects. If need be increase the daze duration to 4 seconds but leave the knock down at 2.

I’d like to actually take this time to put my full suggestion of healing signet as well as a buff to some adrenaline sources so that it doesn’t seem like a stand alone nerf with 0 compensation.

Healing Signet
-Passive: Heal every second while consuming adrenaline.
Healing- 315(.25 healing power coefficient) per second.
Adrenaline cost- 1 per second. no cost if you are full health
-Active: Break stun to heal. Heal for more if you broke stun this way.
Healing- 3650(.35), 7300(.7) if you broke stun.
Cast time 1 second.
Cooldown 20 seconds.

[Notes]
-The healing per second passive is disabled if you do not have the adrenaline to support it.
-To help with stage 3 adrenaline, there is now a buffer of 10 strikes of adrenaline so that you do not constantly fight to maintain stage 3. This does not act as actual adrenaline towards a “Stage 4”, this is primarily to not have healing signet’s cost interfere with stage 3 burst skills.
-The active breaks stun to start the healing, if you are interrupted during this it goes on a full cooldown. This is meant to work towards a high rish high reward effort. Tied with stability however this would be rather hard to interrupt.

Adrenaline gain

-Adrenaline rush (mace and sword): Gain 3 strikes of adrenaline at the end if you did not execute a counter attack, gain 6 strikes of adrenaline if you successfully executed and hit with a counter attack. If you counter attack and miss, gain 2 adrenaline.
-Berserker’s might: Increase to 4 strikes of adrenaline per 3 seconds.
-Short temper: Increase to 2 strikes of adrenaline per block.
Furious: Remain at 1 strike per critical hit with 1h weapons, increase to 2 strikes of adrenaline per critical with 2h weapons.
-Inspiring Shouts: now effects other warriors with the adrenaline gain.
-Powerful banners: Added effect now grants 1 strike of adrenaline per pulse (pulses every second). This effects other warriors as well.

Redesign

Invigorating Precision-

There seems to be some confusion on the point of this trait. While it fits nicely being in the critical trait line, it’s opportunity cost is awful here. You either give up a large part of your build (BS with hidden killer) or you give up a massive chunck of assassin dps that the thief is so well known for (executioner).

As it stands, this trait doesn’t work off healing power in any form and is off critical hits only. Unless all you do is crit for high numbers in an AoE (no such thing except maybe pve) it doesn’t help sustain at all. It most certainly shouldn’t be out of control to the point where it replaces your healing skill but it needs a functionality change so that all builds can look at it and feel like there is some gain from it.

The Change

-allow it to scale off healing power. For every 100 healing power you get, it increases that healing percent by 0.5%. So at 1,300 healing power(a respectable amount but not 100% invested) you get about 14.5% of your critical damage dealt in healing. In addition the base value for area of effect skills (hits multiple targets) will remain at 8% but single target skills such as unload, back stab, heartseeker, shadow shot, etc will have a base of 12% (richoet would not disable any pistol skills from receiving this bonus).

Point being this GM trait would not be tailored to one set up, it would be flexible towards all. Gm traits make up a trait line pretty well and for the most part thief has that luxury. Single target skills would not be getting any broken multiple with this trait but it will give a little return for the fact that it can only hit 1 target (compete with hidden killer for a BS build).

Thoughts?

Fix – iWarden

Redesign – Mesmer

Remove – Portal & Veil

Seems a bit too vague. Why would you want to remove veil exactly after “redesigning” Mesmer? Seems like it’d be just a punch in the kitten for no good reason.