Guild Wars 2

So I was on a 5 guardian party the other day after symbolic avenger was disabled, and this 5 man glowing chainsaw cut through dungeons so fast I swear it was Photoshopped. The only organization it had was “bring a guardian and spam Feel My Wrath”. Running pure of voice was optional.

So, I sat down and decided to look at all of the quickness skills we have, and I’m pretty sure that Feel My Wrath is overpowered. Now, to compare it to other quickness giving skills/traits/blah, there’s two ways to think about it. First is the percentage uptime of quickness, which is a good metric for personal use. Second is the number of quickness “ticks” it gives out, which is the total number of seconds of quickness it outputs. This can be measured in a ticks per skill cooldown, or “ticks per second”. This is important for group use. Now, lets begin:

Frenzy: can be traited to give 7.2 seconds of quickness every 60 seconds. This is 7.2 ticks, or 12% uptime, or 0.12 ticks of quickness per second.

Elixir U: Can be traited to give 7.2 seconds of quickness every 40 seconds. This is 7.2 ticks, or 18% uptime, or 0.18 ticks of quickness per second.

Quickening Zephyr: Can be traited to give 6 seconds of quickness every 48 seconds. This is 6 ticks, or 12.5% uptime, or 0.125 ticks of quickness per second.

Haste: Can be traited to give 6 seconds of quickness every 48 seconds. This is 6 ticks, or 12.5% uptime, or 0.125 ticks of quickness per second.

Time Warp: Can be traited to give 12 seconds of quickness to the whole party every 180 seconds. This is 60 ticks, or 6.67% uptime, or 0.33 ticks per second.

Heightened focus: this one is a bit complicated, since it is situation dependent. On a single target it’ll give 4 ticks every 15 seconds, but only half the time. Against a slew of ongoing targets it’ll give quickness as you cut them down. I’m going to use a single target (champion, for example), and say that, since it is up about 44% of the time (half the time, adjusted for DPS increase from the trait), that it gives a total of 4 seconds every (adjusted) 34.1 seconds. This is 4 ticks, or 11.7% uptime, or 0.117 ticks per second.

Instinctive reaction: Not a reliable source, unless there’s some crazy ranger tactic I’m unfamiliar with that involves constantly playing at half HP.

Zephy’rs Speed: Can be traited to give 3 seconds of quickness every 16 seconds. This is 3 ticks, or an 18.8% uptime, or 0.188 ticks per second.

Flanking Strike: Just uses Haste. This is 6 ticks, or 12.5% uptime, or 0.125 ticks of quickness per second.

Furious Interruptiom: This gives 3 seconds of quickness every 5 seconds. This has a maximum stats of the following: 60% uptime, or 0.6 ticks per second.

Feel My Wrath: When traited, this gives 5 seconds of quickness every 24 seconds to the whole party. This is 25 ticks, or 20.8% uptime, or 1.04 ticks per second.

Feel my wrath has the second highest personal uptime next to the rather dodgy furious interruption, and also is the only skill that gives more ticks per second than actual seconds. This has lead to the unique phenomena where a group of guardians can get permanent quickness by spamming this skill whenever its off cooldown.

Now, I know that mesmers have low personal DPS, so the quickness for them is warranted. But are guardians in such a state that they need to give the whole party 20.8% quickness uptime to be competitive? Are perma-quickness 5 guardian pugs meant to be a thing?

I wouldn’t ask for much of a nerf. Change it to 6 seconds of quickness every 60 seconds in an AoE, not factoring in traits. That way, when traited it gives the same amount of personal quickness as haste/quickening zephyr/frenzy, but gives it to the whole team, so it is still 5 times more useful than the other skills.

Am I alone in thinking this?

Leave this sub-forum and stop asking for more nerfs for this class that is already getting hammered down non-stop by Anet.

I don’t have 8 characters to play when my favorite one and the one with good stuff (gear, skins) get nerfed every single time.

Stop.

For me personally, 30 seconds is the difference between a skill that I use whenever I can and a skill where I hesitate to blow a cooldown. I like the skill how it is.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

But are guardians in such a state that they need to give the whole party 20.8% quickness uptime to be competitive?

Yes.

As for your comparison, you compare non-elite skills to an elite, except for time warp, which has slow. Also, since when do we play the “every class must have equal access to everything” game in GW2? Sorry but no.

It has easy solution. Don’t go to the party with more than one other guardian or change the elite skill if you think it’s OP. I play mostly solo and for me is enough that they disabled SA for now although I had only 10% bonus. I know it must be fixed. If they will change this skill, I’ll use again only Focus Renewal. I have at least some options now and I can take what I really need and not just FR because there is nothing better as before.

aophts.9862:

Leave this sub-forum and stop asking for more nerfs for this class that is already getting hammered down non-stop by Anet.

I don’t have 8 characters to play when my favorite one and the one with good stuff (gear, skins) get nerfed every single time.

Stop.

Idont mind nerfs in the only class i actually play, if they have bring some sanity to the gameplay, but problem is Anet never bring the other classes to guardian level has “balanced”.

Feel My Wrath certainly is too much. In fact it has given WvWvW zergs perma quickness. I think the 6 seconds duration and 60 s cooldown sounds reasonable. This would limit quickness into bursts and not like whole match lasting boon.

Guardian definitely isn’t in a bad place. WvWvW is full of guardians (and has always been). Spvp has lots of guardians. Pve has lots of guardians. If guardian would be so weak, this wouldn’t be the case.

Yeah 30s cooldown is just too much. This trait should be moved to 60s, or increase the cooldown to whatever point it needs to be for Renewed Focus to compete with it. As it is currently, it’s way too strong.

Quickness shouldn’t be this easily accessible because it’s extremely strong.

To soon to balance skill CD’s, damage values vs hp ar to high unless anets really prettends the fast kills (build to win) game.

Feel my wrath is currently a bit too strong, id be in favor of pushing it to 45 seconds however, if it gets changed to 60 seconds it will never compete with renewed focus in pvp.

It’s a bit much. But, uptime isn’t the be all end all of analysis, I think the low duration is a tradeoff. That said most of those comparisons are to self only skills, this is group, so that’s enough to be a nice tradeoff for the short duration. 45-60s I think is right. More than that and I feel it should have an increased duration.

And as people have noted, at 60s, well, not sure I’d ever use it over FR in a PVP environment, so my leaning is very much towards ~45s.

Also, the idea of traiting for this… I don’t know, honor is not a tree I’d go into for anything but Writ of Persistance, so I wouldn’t give that up to get the 6s off my cooldown even with FMW being what it is.

Feel my wrath is useless at anything than pve.

The only broken thing about FMW is the no target cap bug on shouts that they supposedly fixed.

At least I find myself using 2 different elites now compared to only Renewed Focus, everywhere.

I kittening love that comic in your sig, farz.

I just hope they dont nerf it too much. >40s recharge and/or <4s quickness would ruin it.

Besides, for a profession that was suppose to be support play style oriented, it severely lacked offensive support. And now it does. Working as intended.

Nerf it !!! yall already have renewed focus (op) to use. In fact no nerf that skill too.

I agree that Feel My Wrath is too much as things are now, but I don’t think that nerfing the skill is going to fix everything. In order to mitigate the impact that FMW is having on the PvE/WvW metagame, you’d have to raise the skill’s cooldown far past 45 seconds, or the problem isn’t going to be solved. You would just go from perma-Quickness on PvE/WvW zergs to 80% Quickness uptime, or you just stack more Guardians to make up the difference. Even in dungeons, 5 Guardians could still stack 30 seconds of Quickness at a time, so even raising FMW’s cooldown to 90 seconds could still give Guardian-centric groups with 33% Quickness uptime a good chance to outperform mixed compositions.

Unfortunately, nerfing the skill significantly enough to break the Quickness meta in the aforementioned settings would mean rendering it useless in areas of the game like PvP or WvW solo roaming. In the end, it would probably mean that RF would once again become the Guardian’s sole viable elite. With Symbolic Avenger disabled/nerfed and burning damage likely up next on the chopping block, most Guardians aren’t eager to lose more options for builds.

The problem right now is Quickness itself, which is an absurd boon that never should have become so prevalent and easily accessible. Cap Quickness duration on each player to 5-10 seconds at maximum, reduce the duration of Quickness currently available on all skills by at least 2 seconds, possibly increase FMW’s base cooldown, and then give FMW some other bonus effect(s) to compensate. Maybe have it provide super speed for 5 seconds to help address our mobility concerns, and/or make it a stun breaker. Maybe it could take some inspiration from Reaper Shouts and inflict Burning on nearby enemies in addition to providing support. Those are just a couple of random ideas off the top of my head, though, so don’t take them too seriously.

The point is that if FMW is going to remain competitve with RF after being nerfed, it’ll need to bring something else unique to the table. Whatever it does, it should be facilitating new playstyles for Guardians, or we’re going to find ourselves once again locked into the same type of builds we’ve been playing since launch.

Once they nerf this is will no longer be worth using & we’ll have 1 Elite again. I’m amazed that it’s taken them 3 years to get the Guardian up to 2 usable Elites & it’ll most likely get canned.

Its cooldown could always be split between PvE and PvP, not that I expect ANet to think things through enough to come to that conclusion.

Problem is the boon it self. Should not be stackable in duration at all.

At present, I must admit it could do with some tweaking, however I’d say that FMW, has opened up a whole new position that guard was lacking until recently; APS clutch-style offence and defence, as quite a few of guard’s skills are over 1 second time activation, it can really help to create fast spikes and bursts of damage otherwise unattainable to guard without synergy with other proffs.

In other words, I wouldn’t aim to change the skill effects, its CD or the length of boon duration, but rather its team-play effects. It is undoubtedly the best quickness application in the game, and shouldn’t suffer for that reason alone, perhaps something along the lines of:

“Give resistance, retaliation and Fury to allies (undetermined dur.), standard range for shout, for each ally you buff (max 5), receive a 3 second tick of quickness for yourself only.”

I am sadly, at a loss though, when it comes to thinking of a good balance with this skill, all I can really say so far, is that an elite shout is a very welcome addition to the guard skill roster, and so is quickness likewise a nice addition to guards relatively sedate play-style.

Lag Spikes.9253:

Problem is the boon it self. Should not be stackable in duration at all.

How many stacks can you have of it right now?

SlayerSixx.5763:

I kittening love that comic in your sig, farz.

I’m up there competing with ArenaNet writing!

A traited FMW gives 20% quickness uptime for 50% dps boost, or 10% AoE dps boost.
An untraited Discbanner gives 75% banner uptime for 170 precision+ferocity (8% critrate, 11.3% critdmg) ~ 10.5-11% AoE dps boost.

I don’t see the problem. You can perm-quickness all you want, but you pay for that by having lower personal dps x5, and missing out on damage boosts from other classes. Nerf this, and guardians will once again be using nothing but renewed focus.

Why not. I mean we get nerfed every single patch, why break the streak

Landaren.9875:

Why not. I mean we get nerfed every single patch, why break the streak

That makes it sound like we are complaining the correct term is “balanced”, after all “we are in a good spot”. Right guys?

Hayashi.3416:

A traited FMW gives 20% quickness uptime for 50% dps boost, or 10% AoE dps boost.
An untraited Discbanner gives 75% banner uptime for 170 precision+ferocity (8% critrate, 11.3% critdmg) ~ 10.5-11% AoE dps boost.

I don’t see the problem. You can perm-quickness all you want, but you pay for that by having lower personal dps x5, and missing out on damage boosts from other classes. Nerf this, and guardians will once again be using nothing but renewed focus.

This ^.

Ragnarox.9601:

Feel my wrath is useless at anything than pve.

And this ^.

You want to nerf it, alright. What will the guardian get as compensation to keep them viable compared to others.

The Majority of trait choices for guardians already range from lack luster (creativity wise) – to bad (design wise) compared to many other classes.

The guardian also has several weapon abilities that are bad as well as several that could stand to be updated & changed.

Not to mention all the spirit weapons range from extremely gimmicky to laughably bad.

Hayashi.3416:

A traited FMW gives 20% quickness uptime for 50% dps boost, or 10% AoE dps boost.
An untraited Discbanner gives 75% banner uptime for 170 precision+ferocity (8% critrate, 11.3% critdmg) ~ 10.5-11% AoE dps boost..

I’d check the math again. On zerker guard I came up with a 10% increase when applied, totaling to a 7.5% when factoring in uptime. This is assuming the banner is maintained throughout multiple fights.

When traited, FMW gives a 20.8% quickness uptime, plus another 41.6% uptime on fury. This causes two stages of buffs: 1st is 1.5 × 1.14, totaling a 71% damage boost for 20.8% of the time (14.8% party DPS), then 14% DPS for the 20.8% remaining effect time (2.91%), totaling the party contribution to 17.71% party DPS.

Quickness, unlike banners, are not static additions. They are modifiers, with a straight 1.5x damage boost to action speed. So thus, while the overall contribution of banners decreases as you add more things (might, fury, spotter, etc)), quickness multiplies every single bonus. Including banners. Quickness also stacks in duration.. Banners are unique buffs that do not stack.

This isn’t the whole story, either. There’s an additional factor that needs to be considered: Fight length. If an enemy group dies in 5 seconds, then FMW effectively has 100% uptime for that incident. If the fight lass 10 seconds, 50% updtime. 24 seconds has the 20.8% uptime, but 30 seconds has 33% uptime, since it gets used again. So really, FMW actually has an oscilating uptime that bottoms out at 20.8%, giving a much higher quickness uptime in the relevant situation: the fight.

This is the reason why it is that, on the 5 guard group, we still effectively had perma quickness even though not all of us took the honor line. With the recharge being reduced from the travel time between fights, to only using the skill during relevant moments, the actual uptime of quickness is higher than calculated. The 20.8% is the minimum, assuming a permanent fight.

Now this does apply to banners, but it is not as beneficial when compared to something like FMW. FMW is a short effect on a short cooldown, where’s the banner is a long effect on a long cooldown. This causes a problem, in that the travel time between fights sees the effect tick away, doing effectively nothing. The travel time during the down time does increase the efficiency of banners, but FMW does not have an overflow issue like banners do.

Because of this, I’m not sure that a 6 second quickness (+ either 10 or 12 seconds of fury) on a 60 second cooldown would be useless, or even underpowered. It would still be 5 times stronger than all of the other quickness skills, and it would still be used in groups to increase offense (whereas renewed focus is basically an invuln skill on a 90 second cooldown). It is still twice as potent as time warp, whether both are traited or both aren’t.

You’re comparing a bunch of non-elites to an elite skill. What you’ve outlined as a fix is hilariously under-powered with or without traiting. Of course they did this calculation before they put this out into the wild. They probably intended this uptime to create builds like this for the meta.

What needs to be fixed isn’t FMW. Instead elite skills like Time Warp that are on par with the rest of the elites need to be buffed. Halve the time it takes to recast Time Warp and increase the duration a bit IMO. In fact, elite skills in general need to all be buffed up to FMW and RF levels. There are currently only a handful through all classes that are any good.

Elites should feel elite like FMW and RF. Every elite should be awesome and enable builds to be created around this.

The only time this becomes a problem is if this skill becomes the greatest thing for every gaming aspect (i.e. PvP, WvW, PvE, roaming, world bosses). Thus far it has proven itself in dungeon PvE and that is all. With that, it’s still hilarious because there are many other group combinations that clean house in dungeons WITHOUT an elite.

Lag Spikes.9253:

Problem is the boon it self. Should not be stackable in duration at all.

I would be fine with this. It would tone down it’s usefulness in PvE but the skill remains good enough to be an elite and still be viable in PvP.

Pretty much the must-have elite for bunker guards in PvP now. I personally think it would still be very strong on a 45 sec cooldown and would continue to use it.

did you see someone using that signet elite? 180s cd is really mad for skill that has 4s cast time imo

Amityel.5324:

did you see someone using that signet elite? 180s cd is really mad for skill that has 4s cast time imo

I would use it if the didn’t have a ridiculous 4sec cast time.

So let me get this straight, one of the few actually good things which happened to guardian this last patch should be nerfed because you think the dungeon’s were easy? Is this some kind of joke?!?! People are never happy about anything when you give them something. “No this is broken it should not be like that”, when its suck’s “Bla bla bla we didn’t get anything” and so on. Stop crying and write useless post’s, about a class which suffers from the most from every other.

I think the point is gonna be kinda moot when Chronomancer gets dropped in HoT. Seems anet wants us to have more access to quickness.

Talyn.3295:

I think the point is gonna be kinda moot when Chronomancer gets dropped in HoT. Seems anet wants us to have more access to quickness.

Because we’re also probbly going to be getting alot of slow casted at us.. People fail to realize that right now, you don’t fight mobs that put slow on the party.. but once they do… “PLZ Nerf this mob, slow too OP, Need more quickness” and the crying will start .

ThyShadowPaladin.9521:

Talyn.3295:

I think the point is gonna be kinda moot when Chronomancer gets dropped in HoT. Seems anet wants us to have more access to quickness.

Because we’re also probbly going to be getting alot of slow casted at us.. People fail to realize that right now, you don’t fight mobs that put slow on the party.. but once they do… “PLZ Nerf this mob, slow too OP, Need more quickness” and the crying will start .

Exactly, that has been on my mind as well. They made it a boon, they let it stack and they took away most of the huge penalties that used to be associated with skills that granted quickness. I think Anet had to have known this skill would be powerful on a 30 second cool down. Just like they had to have known that Portal would be used for jumping puzzles etc. People don’t give anet enough credit. I don’t know what they have planned for the future, but if they are changing how quickness works, I am assuming they have a reason for it.

aophts.9862:

Leave this sub-forum and stop asking for more nerfs for this class that is already getting hammered down non-stop by Anet.

I don’t have 8 characters to play when my favorite one and the one with good stuff (gear, skins) get nerfed every single time.

Stop.

Listen to him. This is what exactly how it felt.

My 2 cents on this…

I have absolutely not feel this happy playing my guardian since release. FMW gave guardian a totally different play style, i feel i have a meaningful useful elite for my party and myself while roaming and solo pve.

I absolutely have fallen in love w guardian again and I hope it stays the way it is. The short cooldown gives me a feeling of RARW DESTROY every fight when i press it and wwrath those mobs like crazy tornado. It feels so satisfying…

Idk why people would want this such amazing skill nerfed… I mean, its like we have been clamoring for a super awesome skill other than renewed focus for years, and when they gave it to us we just go “we dont want it”.

You guardians really shouldn’t be asking for a nerf for your elite. O_O You realize Anet will nerf it so that it really unviable. I mean sure some of you are saying “make it a 45 second cd” which seems reasonable, but knowing Anet they will make it much higher. I’m kind of shocked and wonder whether the people calling for nerfs are guardian mains. I’m not even a guard main (ranger here) and I don’t think your elite needs a nerf.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Hayashi.3416:

A traited FMW gives 20% quickness uptime for 50% dps boost, or 10% AoE dps boost.
An untraited Discbanner gives 75% banner uptime for 170 precision+ferocity (8% critrate, 11.3% critdmg) ~ 10.5-11% AoE dps boost..

I’d check the math again. On zerker guard I came up with a 10% increase when applied, totaling to a 7.5% when factoring in uptime. This is assuming the banner is maintained throughout multiple fights.

When traited, FMW gives a 20.8% quickness uptime, plus another 41.6% uptime on fury. This causes two stages of buffs: 1st is 1.5 × 1.14, totaling a 71% damage boost for 20.8% of the time (14.8% party DPS), then 14% DPS for the 20.8% remaining effect time (2.91%), totaling the party contribution to 17.71% party DPS.

Quickness, unlike banners, are not static additions. They are modifiers, with a straight 1.5x damage boost to action speed. So thus, while the overall contribution of banners decreases as you add more things (might, fury, spotter, etc)), quickness multiplies every single bonus. Including banners. Quickness also stacks in duration.. Banners are unique buffs that do not stack.

This isn’t the whole story, either. There’s an additional factor that needs to be considered: Fight length. If an enemy group dies in 5 seconds, then FMW effectively has 100% uptime for that incident. If the fight lass 10 seconds, 50% updtime. 24 seconds has the 20.8% uptime, but 30 seconds has 33% uptime, since it gets used again. So really, FMW actually has an oscilating uptime that bottoms out at 20.8%, giving a much higher quickness uptime in the relevant situation: the fight.

This is the reason why it is that, on the 5 guard group, we still effectively had perma quickness even though not all of us took the honor line. With the recharge being reduced from the travel time between fights, to only using the skill during relevant moments, the actual uptime of quickness is higher than calculated. The 20.8% is the minimum, assuming a permanent fight.

Now this does apply to banners, but it is not as beneficial when compared to something like FMW. FMW is a short effect on a short cooldown, where’s the banner is a long effect on a long cooldown. This causes a problem, in that the travel time between fights sees the effect tick away, doing effectively nothing. The travel time during the down time does increase the efficiency of banners, but FMW does not have an overflow issue like banners do.

Because of this, I’m not sure that a 6 second quickness (+ either 10 or 12 seconds of fury) on a 60 second cooldown would be useless, or even underpowered. It would still be 5 times stronger than all of the other quickness skills, and it would still be used in groups to increase offense (whereas renewed focus is basically an invuln skill on a 90 second cooldown). It is still twice as potent as time warp, whether both are traited or both aren’t.

Why do you consider it a 1.5 increase to damage? For Hammer maybe, but the other weapons it just means you get back to auto attacks sooner. Meaning it’s not a full 1.5X damage, just a nice increase.

With the damage as crazy as it is in WvW at the moment(i was taking 5k burn ticks, walk 2 steps, lose 10k health, and got backstabbed for 7.8k on my 3100 armour Guard) it’s hard to say where this sits. Once the damage is scaled back to a more sensible level, then would be a better time to pass judgement on this ability. As it stands with the DPS out there atm it is busted, rampage warriors + quickness is pretty lulz to behold as players melt in seconds.

This and RF are easily the best 2 to take now, the signet still is too long on the cooldown and too long to use, 4 seconds is way too long with the burst out there. And the passive works out at about what 100-150hps a sec? Not even worth a mention with the damage flying around out there now, mesmer bursts for 12k, 5k burning ticks, backstabs for 10k, all this on decently armoured classes.

ArkisTruefire.1746:

You’re comparing a bunch of non-elites to an elite skill.

See time warp. Also irrelevant: putting a broken skill in the “elite” box doesn’t make it right.

Zlosnica.8936:

So let me get this straight, one of the few actually good things which happened to guardian this last patch should be nerfed because you think the dungeon’s were easy? Is this some kind of joke?!?! People are never happy about anything when you give them something. “No this is broken it should not be like that”, when its suck’s “Bla bla bla we didn’t get anything” and so on. Stop crying and write useless post’s, about a class which suffers from the most from every other.

I see this kind of thinking a lot. In other forums. About their classes. Kind of funny, isn’kitten

This is not how balance is supposed to work. Giving one class inferior (debatable) prowess just so one OP skill can compensate just means that things are polarized and broken. If you feel that guardians have been nerfed unfairly, you should make a topic about that. If guardians need a skill like FMW to compete, then that means guardians should be buffed so they don’t need FMW to be so over the top.

Jerus.4350:

Why do you consider it a 1.5 increase to damage? For Hammer maybe, but the other weapons it just means you get back to auto attacks sooner. Meaning it’s not a full 1.5X damage, just a nice increase.

For hammer and main hand sword. Technically it is a DPS increase (damage per second), but I just call it damage for short. You do bring up a good point, which makes it more complicated to get the actual effect of quickness out there.

If you look at any individual skill, it is a 50% increase to DPS because the skill now only takes 2/3rds of the time to cast. In a long chain, this additional air will be filled by auto attacks, which can be considered as just having a 50% damage increase. This has a compounding effect, where you both get to auto attacks faster, and auto attacks do more damage.

Unfortunately, making a formula for this is a bit hard. To get the DPS increase overall, you’d need to take a sampled time frame, see how many attacks you can do in that period, and then compare that to a quickness period. For example, lets take the guardian greatsword. In 10 seconds, you’ll do the following:

Symbol of Wrath (0.75), whirling wrath (3), 7 auto attacks (0.83 each)

On tooltip, this comes to 4386 damage. Compare that same 10 second interval using quickness:

Symbol of Wrath (0.5), whirling wrath (2), 13 auto attacks (0.55 each)

Tooltip damage: 6395, or a 45.8% increase. This is slightly off, since the tooltip doesn’t factor in the projectiles from whirling wrath. This also doesn’t factor in things like the increased might stacks from greatsword auto attacks.

This is true for any class. DPS can be summed up as

(Auto attack x Time for auto attacks + Spike skills x Time for spike skills) / total time.

And the contribution that quickness makes is

(1.5 x Auto attack x (Time for auto + 1/3rd spike time) + Spike skills x (2/3rds spike time)) / total time.

Overall I generally consider quickness to be anywhere from 40% to 50% modifier. I go with 50% as base, because otherwise you need to go very heavily into specific weapons and builds and timing.

Talyn.3295:

ThyShadowPaladin.9521:

Talyn.3295:

I think the point is gonna be kinda moot when Chronomancer gets dropped in HoT. Seems anet wants us to have more access to quickness.

Because we’re also probbly going to be getting alot of slow casted at us.. People fail to realize that right now, you don’t fight mobs that put slow on the party.. but once they do… “PLZ Nerf this mob, slow too OP, Need more quickness” and the crying will start .

Exactly, that has been on my mind as well. They made it a boon, they let it stack and they took away most of the huge penalties that used to be associated with skills that granted quickness.

This, I am not so sure of. The history of quickness has always been a turbulent one. Originally it did double damage, and lasted for 5 seconds. It was nerfed to 1.5 damage, recieved one additional second, and kept all the negative effects.

You can actually extrapolate this from the math on this thread, but I’m assuming no one else has done this, so I’ll do it here: most quickness skills suck. I mean, sure, FMW is currently twice as strong as a banner, and Time Warp has the most powerful debuff you can put on an enemy. But FMW is 9 times stronger than the other quickness skills, so in relation most quickness has roughly the contribution of 2/9ths of a banner.

This long-term ineffectiveness means that quickness doesn’t warrant the negative effects that came with it. While I suggested 60 seconds untraited with 6 seconds of quickness, that is to put it into the scope of other quickness skills. As a whole, I wouldn’t be surprised if most quickness skills had their base recharge reduced to 45 seconds. Then, FMW 2ould go to 45 to stay equivalent.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

ArkisTruefire.1746:

You’re comparing a bunch of non-elites to an elite skill.

See time warp. Also irrelevant: putting a broken skill in the “elite” box doesn’t make it right.

Zlosnica.8936:

So let me get this straight, one of the few actually good things which happened to guardian this last patch should be nerfed because you think the dungeon’s were easy? Is this some kind of joke?!?! People are never happy about anything when you give them something. “No this is broken it should not be like that”, when its suck’s “Bla bla bla we didn’t get anything” and so on. Stop crying and write useless post’s, about a class which suffers from the most from every other.

I see this kind of thinking a lot. In other forums. About their classes. Kind of funny, isn’kitten

This is not how balance is supposed to work. Giving one class inferior (debatable) prowess just so one OP skill can compensate just means that things are polarized and broken. If you feel that guardians have been nerfed unfairly, you should make a topic about that. If guardians need a skill like FMW to compete, then that means guardians should be buffed so they don’t need FMW to be so over the top.

Jerus.4350:

Why do you consider it a 1.5 increase to damage? For Hammer maybe, but the other weapons it just means you get back to auto attacks sooner. Meaning it’s not a full 1.5X damage, just a nice increase.

For hammer and main hand sword. Technically it is a DPS increase (damage per second), but I just call it damage for short. You do bring up a good point, which makes it more complicated to get the actual effect of quickness out there.

If you look at any individual skill, it is a 50% increase to DPS because the skill now only takes 2/3rds of the time to cast. In a long chain, this additional air will be filled by auto attacks, which can be considered as just having a 50% damage increase. This has a compounding effect, where you both get to auto attacks faster, and auto attacks do more damage.

Unfortunately, making a formula for this is a bit hard. To get the DPS increase overall, you’d need to take a sampled time frame, see how many attacks you can do in that period, and then compare that to a quickness period. For example, lets take the guardian greatsword. In 10 seconds, you’ll do the following:

Symbol of Wrath (0.75), whirling wrath (3), 7 auto attacks (0.83 each)

On tooltip, this comes to 4386 damage. Compare that same 10 second interval using quickness:

Symbol of Wrath (0.5), whirling wrath (2), 13 auto attacks (0.55 each)

Tooltip damage: 6395, or a 45.8% increase. This is slightly off, since the tooltip doesn’t factor in the projectiles from whirling wrath. This also doesn’t factor in things like the increased might stacks from greatsword auto attacks.

This is true for any class. DPS can be summed up as

(Auto attack x Time for auto attacks + Spike skills x Time for spike skills) / total time.

And the contribution that quickness makes is

(1.5 x Auto attack x (Time for auto + 1/3rd spike time) + Spike skills x (2/3rds spike time)) / total time.

Overall I generally consider quickness to be anywhere from 40% to 50% modifier. I go with 50% as base, because otherwise you need to go very heavily into specific weapons and builds and timing.

Isn’t that a knowingly going to an extreme though? It’s a 50% decrease in attack time. We know that for Mace or GS namely that the strength lies in their burst skills while having a lower auto attack. All I’m saying is it’s worth putting a <50% for assumptions in that regard, acknowledging that it’s not a full 50% increase

Also even with Sword you consider the offhand which are all burst skills. So not quite 50%. Other than hammer you won’t see a full 50% increase.

how often do you have all 5 guards? last time i checked, party are at least 3 mesmers.

Feel my wrath was only considered superiorly OP because of the bug when actuality this skill is actually quite balanced. If you are going to base this off a dungeon run…..I am sorry this game is not based around dungeon running for skills. The Skill sets are interpreted for vastly the majority of PvP and WvW players cause they have to coincide where it will be reasonable for those two spectrums. There is a lot of balancing that goes on. But basically the skills is based of Zealot’s Fervor from the tome of wraths number 4 and its a fairly reasonable skill. And its not even a DPS skill its a support……if you think this contributes to a high spectrum of damage then…..I am sorry to say the only thing that might is Fury….but even than guards have a lot of fury……quickness does nothing but speed up your attacks and the quickness doesnt even last that long.

Jerus.4350:

Isn’t that a knowingly going to an extreme though? It’s a 50% decrease in attack time. We know that for Mace or GS namely that the strength lies in their burst skills while having a lower auto attack. All I’m saying is it’s worth putting a <50% for assumptions in that regard, acknowledging that it’s not a full 50% increase

Also even with Sword you consider the offhand which are all burst skills. So not quite 50%. Other than hammer you won’t see a full 50% increase.

I wouldn’t say so. A 50% bonus isn’t an extreme, its the default. The overall bonus is deviated from by adding additional skills. The whole “technical” aspects of it muddy the waters a bit, mostly negative but sometimes positive (for example, Auto Attacks which apply might/vulnerability achieve higher stacks, leading to an additional damage increase). That is the issue with technicality: if you want to delve into every single possible detail you’ll end up with a 20 page document trying explain something that can be said succinctly but imprecisely with a phrase.

If you’re talking about PvE Dungeons, problem is also there, most foes there are quite limited due to poorly thought same design over every foe in it.

“Berserker Fodder”, since direct damage is unrestricted damage type, while condition damage is restricted by time. Majority of foes don’t possess defense against direct dmg (vs. armor+Protection boon), but can have very high HP (vs. Conditions), rarely use boons (vs. Boon manipulation), rarely use conditions (vs. Condition manipulation) and have no serious abilities or are ranked Champion and above too easily (vs. CC)…

Although quickness is good for speeding up condition application…

It just wierds me out that retreat has a higher CD. srsly