Guild Wars 2

tl;dr: I number crunched some stuff and found ‘possible’ buffs. This thread is for anyone who goes max points in Tools, likes excessive information, or just really likes charts. Warning: May contain math formulas. Dear New Players, Math is not needed to play Engineer effectively or enjoy Engineer. This is really just how I choose to spend my free time. Seriously.

Woke up this morning and realized it wasn’t Tuesday. But I was feeling very mathematical. And I remembered that it’s been a while since I made a very unnecessary chart on impulse so I opened up Excel and got to work on some things. Yes, these are the kinds of people who you share your profession with. Many of us are hype for Tuesday changes so I decided I’d put some effort into calculating some things. Since I’m a big fan of the new Kinetic Charge, I figured that I’d start with the Toolbelt changes.

Recently, I’ve been playing with a full 6 points in Tools. That gets you the 30% Increased Recharge Rate on your toolbelt. With the new changes, all of the toolbelt skills receive ~16% (1/6) CDR baseline (rounded down to the nearest second) and the additional 15% was put into a minor trait for the Tools Specialization.

Now, if you went with reflex math, that would seem to add up to 31% but it’s actually different. For example, if a Toolbelt skill was 100s, reducing it by 31% will leave you with 69s (CD * (1 – (CDR/100)) = New CD) However, what’s actually happening is that we’re reducing the full cooldown (100) by 16% and then reducing the remainder (84) by 15% (CD * (1-0.16) * (1 – (CDR/100)) = New CD) Using the same 100s example, your new CD would be 71.kitten

for those of us who went full points in Tools, this appears to be a slight (2.4%) CDR nerf. Seemingly negligible since you’d need to be using Elixir R to actually get anything close to a significant CD increase. But there’s one thing that I remembered back from the last time I made a pointlessly detailed chart. “Increased Recharge Rate” is somehow super different from “Cooldown Reduction”. So different that what would have otherwise been a small nerf for all players who put Max points in Tools is actually becoming a small buff.

Mind you, this buff is running under the assumption that the trait we’re getting NOW is actually Cooldown Reduction and not Increased Recharge Rate like before. If that assumption is somehow wrong, then I’ve wasted a perfectly good afternoon on inaccuracies but that’s okay because this is how I spend my free time.

Anyway, onto the chart itself:
Skill Name, Skill Type, and Toolbelt Skill are self explanatory.
CD is the current natural cooldown of the toolbelt skill with no reduction.
30% Rec Rate represents the cooldown after putting maximum points in Tools.
New CD is the natural cooldown we’ll have after the June 23rd changes are made live.
Tools Spec is the cooldown after being reduced 15% by the minor trait “Mechanized Deployment” in the Tools Specialization line.
Diff is the resulting difference between 30% Rec Rate and Tool Spec column. Lowered cooldown times are represented in black, raised cooldown times represented in red.

Corresponding Notes about the Chart

• The fourth column is based on having six points in Tools trait line; resulting in a 30% “Increased Recharge Rate”. Note that Recharge Rate works very differently from Cooldown Reduction traits. Surprise Shot, for instance, would normally be reduced to 7s rather than 7.75s if it was simply 30% CDR. However, Recharge Rate follows a different formula and scales differently. I didn’t really double check this, but it’s reported it to be: CD / (1 + (TCR / 100)) where CD is the skill cooldown, and TCR is the toolbelt cooldown reduction. The values provided in this bar are simply the results that are shown on the tooltip.

• Elixir Gun’s Healing Mist is the only skill that received a 12.5% (1/8th) rather than a 16-20% cooldown reduction. Stunbreaks too strong.

• Rumble is the only non-racial toolbelt skill to NOT receive a cooldown reduction at all. I believe that this was simply an oversight and someone forgot to write it into the thread post for the June 23rd changes. In the case that it WAS intentional, its Tool Spec value refers to a 15% reduction of the original kitten cooldown. That being the case, it will be the only Toolbelt skill whose cooldown has been increased. Stunbreaks too strong ;_;

• Cooldowns shown on tooltips are rounded to the nearest quarter of a second. However, I lack the information of whether the cooldown in question is getting rounded up, down, or if the rounding even actually happens and the tooltip is only providing the estimate. Because of this, there is at most ±0.25 second margin of error for any value shown in the Tools Spec column.

Nice I just looked for sheet like this:-)