Guild Wars 2

Seems like this might be the mainfeedback thread…

Holosmith overall feels awesome. Once the initial novelty of the animations wore off a little I found myself really enjoying managing the heat mechanic.

Heat
I really like this mechanic, I like balancing it. It’s what I first liked about Revenant in HoT beta testing… but that profession has sort of evolved away from it which is too bad. I think it would be really valuable and open up a lot of opportunity if all skills had some sort of heat effect for being over the threshold. Not even necessarily unique per skill, just something per skill type would be great. Like kits give some effect for a few seconds when entered… elixirs do something… gadgets get some buff, etc. Pistol skills 2-5 do 1s of burning, rifle skills add 10% damage, just something to make Holosmith affect core Engi. Right now it feels like you are missing out if you use any utilities that aren’t Exceed, a different weapon, or a different heal skill. That doesn’t feel good from the player’s side.

Sword

1. is little lackluster, it needs to hit harder than bomb kit auto for a few reasons. It’s locked behind an elite spec, it’s usually going to be in a glass cannon build, and Holosmith only buffs itself through heat mechanic so you don’t have an incentive to go outside Exceed skills for utilities or use a different weapon. It would be a real shame if the best filler for a glass cannon Holosmith is to use bomb auto.

In addition I don’t like the % crit chance from heat thresholds. It just feels too easy/boring and will be wasted in places like raids. I think it would be better to change this to crit magnitude instead of crit chance. Or anything else really that we won’t be wasting when we’re looking at 80% crit chance in raids anyways.

1. is okay, just sort of boring. A small bleed, not a big incentive to use heat, just sort of bleh.

1. is a great skill stuck behind a faulty animation at the moment. Really needs to be a leap finisher. Give the finisher and fix the animation and this is the best part of sword by far.

Utilities
Heal – Bleh. I think a lot of Holosmiths wanted to find a reason to stop using Healing Turret and I can’t speak for everyone… but I didn’t find that. It just isn’t exciting and while the heal over time is nice and sets it apart from other heal skills, something that doesn’t remove condis is just not viable nowadays. I’ll get to the toolbelt later.

Spectrum Shield – I like this skill. It could be a tad longer. Although it’s a little harder to manage your heat level for this skill (you use it when stunned which is tough to plan for usually) I think that balances the really good CD reduction.

Hard Light Arena – Love it. It’s weird that it only gives the boons to the Engi, but I’m sure it would have to be nerfed otherwise which I am not in favor of. Cooldown is a bit rough, could be 30s or 35s. Gives a real Thunderdome feel to it, step into the arena and fight me! Two men enter, one man leaves!

Laser Disk – Fun skill, it’s what Shredder Gyro should have been really. Seems to be worthwhile damage wise, that needs to play out when we can theorycraft in raids a bit.

Photon Wall – I wanted to like this skill… I really did. But it’s so short! I mean duration not size. I think because it’s a smaller size it really can stand to gain 2-3s on the duration. It’s just too short to be useful right now, especially due to it’s cooldown. I know comparing professions is never apples to apples, but I look at the Revenant hammer skill… 6s duration 12s cooldown. There are reasons this skill shouldn’t be a copy of those times… but 3s duration 35s cooldown is just not good enough to use this skill, and really hurts the flip ability of the skill as well.

Prime Light Beam – Feels like a real elite finally! Love everything about it. It would be OP if we could move when using it, and I think standing still gives a nice risk/reward for its strength. I understand the burning field is not a real field, which is fair, but it’s a little hard to see when other effects are around. Maybe adding just the generic white circle border around its effect area (I assume enemies see red, I didn’t play against it).

Toolbelt
Okay so I split these up because my feedback is pretty similar for all of them. Cooldowns are so long!

Heal – I like the idea, but the execution didn’t really work out. You need additional condi removal to make it work, like traiting to drop condis coming out of PF. Just doesn’t feel good when I can just take Healing Turret. Cooldown is too long. Maybe add to the heat threshold some amount of resistance to counter the burns? My thoughts are counterplay wise that this allows boon removal to still make the burns hurt us? I dunno, just something more is sorely needed on this to compete with HT.

Flash Spark – Might be the worst offender. One AOE Blind, and sometimes a short Light Aura is just not worth a 30s cooldown. If it could pulse the blind maybe 3-4 times and up the light aura to 6s it might be worth that, but in current functionality I think it needs to come down to 20s tops.

Primsatic Singularity – Awesome. By far my favorite toolbelt skill, and the only one I don’t think needs changes.

Blade Burst – 30s CD!?!? This should be 12 MAX, cut the bleed down to 3 or 4s if that’s what it takes but right now this is just bad.

Particle Accelerator – Decent skill, doesn’t hit very hard which feels weird, and the swiftness thing is just gimmicky. We will never get that swiftness effect, and if an ally does they will never notice it. Take it off to give something useful. It also feels weird that this is paired with the shield block/reflect skill, doesn’t seem to match but that’s the least of its problems.

Photon Forge
Love it, it’s very fun. Skills #3 and/or #5 could stand to be blast finishers I think. They certainly seem like blasts.

Traits
I won’t hit them all, by and large these traits are very well done and definitely change how you play your Holosmith. I thought it was weird at first that they all modify PF, but it plays pretty well and feels like I’m really building my version of PF which is cool. The biggest thing I want to say is about the GM Enhanced Capacity Storage Unit. As soon as I equipped it I went combing through all my Holosmith skills to find out what was affected by ECSU… and I was quite disappointed to find it was only the sword (and even then only the bonus on #3 is really measurably better). If our build doesn’t use sword then we’re stuck missing a large part of this trait! If the might has to be toned down a little to also give second tier bonuses to the all the Exceed skills (heal/util/elite) I think that would feel a lot better (in addition to buffing the bonus to other types of skills/weapons in core Engi from feedback above). It just doesn’t feel very satisfying to have only a few skills affected and get a ton of might. I would rather tone the might back a little to make the trait more unique and interesting.