Guild Wars 2

On 9/7 stress test there were some changes to FB. I didn’t play in the original PVP play test but I was told about the problems it had.
Yesterday they made the following changes that I found:

Tome of Justice cooldown reduced to 21s with virtues traits
Tome of Resolve cooldown reduced to 31s traited
Tome of Courage cooldown reduced to 61s traited
Tome of Courage cast time reduced to 1/4s from 3/4s
Renewed Focus cooldown reduced to 72s traited (the old cooldown)

Of course, it was really inconsistent, sometimes they would revert to old cooldowns and I’m not sure why.

Did anyone see any other stealth changes?

Nope I had same big cds with big casting times. I hope those werent actual changes….but knowing anet….

Interesting if its true. I haven’t seen any official post with balance changes though, so don’t hold your breath. But if it’s true that means they reduced the cool downs of Tomes by 20%. It doesn’t solve some of the other issues such as the relatively small range/radius of the supportive Tome skills, weak healing on the Tome of Resolve and lack of offensive support on all the Tomes.

I still believe cool downs on Tomes should be removed and a page regeneration system would make Tomes more flexible. I feel like the developers are struggling with shoehorning the three different aspects of Tomes without making them too powerful. The result is that the little bit of extra support we can pump out with Tome of Resolve and Courage doesn’t give the guardian leverage to become a support class.

Renewed Focus already has 90s/72s cooldown, the increased cd is only for pvp.

The tome cooldowns have to be wrong, though, or at least you rounded the numbers. 21s cooldown when traited (15% cd reduction) doesn’t correspond to any natural number untraited, so either you are misremembering things, or the cooldown is 21.25s when traited and 25s untraited.

In any case, it’s a drop in the ocean, tomes started with 50% higher cd for F1 and F2 than base virtues, and double cd for F3, such a tiny cooldown reduction doesn’t help at all, when the tome skills themselves on F2 and F3 are as bad as ever.

The spec is dead on arrival.

The cooldowns OP mentioned are not new since the demo weekend event.

I noticed that if virtues is traited and you enter, say ToJ, the cooldown you see after exiting isn’t exactly the 26s predicted by the 15% increased recharge rate. It is usually 21 to 22 seconds, provided you spend 5+ seconds in the tome. If you spend more, that time doesn’t go any lower. Similarly, for ToR and ToC I noticed something closer to 35s and 70s respectively.

Why? Not sure. Maybe something to do with a percentage of the CD time being subtracted if you spend a certain amount of time in a tome before exiting. Seems like a bug.

Anet, please note: Bug or not, cooldowns on the tomes corresponding to 21s, 35s and 70s are STILL far too long (especially ToC).

I observed the same thing as Arcaedus as well but didnt reflect upon it since i assumed cd was calculated from when you entered the tome.

I realise now that what i saw was probably a bug.

The cooldown reduction on virtues is bugged at the moment. It’s 30% for both justice and resolve and 15% for courage. I personally believe it should stay at 30% for everything but I know as soon as Anet realizes this (don’t worry, Anet only looks at Guardian once a year) they will nerf it to be 15% just like how the bug in Pure of Voice got nerfed even though it was perfectly fine at 2 conditions removed.