Guild Wars 2

At this stage, with no response I’d rather hear from Anet that in future they won’t be changing the order of skills if the cooldowns are changed. Having been out for some time now changing it back is likely to infuriate those that have adjusted.

I am honestly very sad by this. Guardian was the only class that I was absolutely in love with… and it was because of the greatsword. I had a build that worked amazingly and the armor that perfectly supported it… I was in love…

This change has destroyed my build… I have no idea what to do now… my armor doesn’t fully support any other style… and none of my builds fully support my playstyle. I really wished that this never happened…. I have been buying dozens of dye packs to make my guy look stunning…. now all I can think of doing is rolling a different class.

Well, the symbol order now makes swapping with the mace less natural. The mace symbol and the GS symbol were on the same key. Now they’re not. It’s just a little thing, I suppose.

I thought I did something weird lol, but looks like it was official. Meh already getting the hang of the new layout, through kind of sucks that the symbol of wrath’s recharge rate was raise a bit.

Guardian greatsword went from being my favorite weapon set in the game to now one of the least favorite…in my opinion, made the gameplay a lot less smooth and completely nerfed the builds I was trying to run…

This is really frustrating. I keep on using the wrong ability, or canceling one.

Still frustrating as heck, and still no response from Arenanet, do they even bother to read these forums? Why is messing with the order so important to them? instead of some vauge comment in the patch notes about combofinisher?

It’s pretty sad that they can mess with players interfaces like this, without the option to change it back they way you like/had it before.. then ignore official forums.

-50 points to community confidence.

/bbl re-rolling warrior.

Dear devs,
Either change my skills back to the pre-patch arrangement or let me the placement of my 1-5 skills on the toolbar. This change with the patch was completely unnecessary and only serves to kitten me off when button mashing the wrong thing in the middle of PvP.
kthx

Fix my order of skills back to the order they were. You can’t expect players to level to 80 and put all this time into learning and gaining memorization of where skills are and then just switch the order!

Sacrx.6721:

Wow epic epic fail. Why the hell would you change the way moves are ordered. You have any idea how hard coded my brain is to the old layout.

They should just allow moves to be mapped by the players or better yet, add more options for weapon skills.

Kudos to ArenaNet for obfuscating the damage done to the GS-symbols build by re-ordering the skill order. So many are up in arms about which buttons they are pushing, that they have completely missed what those buttons do.

To the devs, change it back…..!!!

After playing a couple of days after the change of our greatsword hotkey arrangement, I’ve already adapted. It’s really not that big of a deal, guys.

I tested the greatsword in cursed shore, and I can confirm that now 80% of our attacks are auto-attacks waiting for cooldowns.
This really questions the viability of the greatsword at end game.

And I add that the leap skill still misses alot. It is more glaring because of the shorter cd.

I don’t care about cd!!!!!!
I just need to fix the order of the skills back to the order they were before patch
Yesterday i was playing WvsW and it was really a disaster

I stand by my previous comment, even if it were removed for the fact I was indeed remarkably frustrated, for which I apologise to whomever it may have offended at the time.

So yes, this update still is rather nonsensical. If you wish to fix one thing, do not break another thing to try and achieve it. Retaliation needed a review, and a tweak. So, I get that. But I don’t see why exactly that affected the entire mechanic of the Guardian greatsword?
More importantly, why the keybind swap? Of course, readjusting takes a few minutes, maybe an hour or two at most, but it is still rather vague as to why this was done in the first place.

If nothing else, it’d be nice to be able to just drop and drag the skills for each weapon as we see fit. I’d have used the actual keybind menu to do it myself, but that means I also juggle all other skills on other weapons across my entire account.
That only worsens the matters… so some sort of extra “fix” would be nice, eventually.

Also, for those seeking alternatives to this clunky new greatsword layout:
Mace/shield and sword/torch are rather fluent, the latter in particular can ditch out some fair damage, especially if you can trait into lesser cooldowns and more damage.
Just a shame the Zeal traits are losing their usefulness like this.

@auruan: yes thats one the rare “strange” design decisions I don’t understand. Nowadays UI in games equates with customization, and having fixed slots for weapons feels archaic.

Don’t worry guys, once they have nerfed us into the ground and made us non-viable, maybe we get buffed again. Until then, who knows…

What now, Anet? Are we going to have to relearn our characters every time you change a skill recharge? I get what you people were trying to do, but as a player who quit GW1 because of your destruction of the dervish and who nearly didn’t buy this game for fear of having what I liked playing destroyed again for the sake of “improvements”, I see I should have saved myself the money. Let the flaming begin, everyone who is going to tell me I’m wrong for having an opinion on the internet.

Thermopylaes Finest.9034:

What now, Anet? Are we going to have to relearn our characters every time you change a skill recharge? I get what you people were trying to do, but as a player who quit GW1 because of your destruction of the dervish and who nearly didn’t buy this game for fear of having what I liked playing destroyed again for the sake of “improvements”, I see I should have saved myself the money. Let the flaming begin, everyone who is going to tell me I’m wrong for having an opinion on the internet.

I’ll agree that I’d like to see a more thorough response from our Devs. I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet; this is an amazing game that’s reasonably balanced (especially considering how recently it was launched).

What concerns me most is that the changes and their stated reason don’t match. This was by far a bigger nerf to GS symbol use in general (and to associated traits) than to retaliation (which is still near-permable). Either someone made changes without fully understanding the effect they would have, or the reason given was…. incomplete.

In what way is a weapon where your cd lowest an any ‘real’ ability has an 8 sec cd fun to play?

It is just awful to play now.

Not to mention the overall damage nerf is somewhere in the vicinity of 20%. I fire off my ability then sit there and autoattack for 8 sec… its an eternity.

Its boring as puss.

And 2 of our other weapons, scepter and staff are garbage.

Relentliss.2170:

In what way is a weapon where your cd lowest an any ‘real’ ability has an 8 sec cd fun to play?

It is just awful to play now.

Not to mention the overall damage nerf is somewhere in the vicinity of 20%. I fire off my ability then sit there and autoattack for 8 sec… its an eternity.

Its boring as puss.

And 2 of our other weapons, scepter and staff are garbage.

The damage nerf alone would’ve been fine in terms of balancing the Guardian, as I totally and entirely agree they are really rather powerful compared to some other professions. And yes, retaliation was a part of that.
The thing is, you have an immensely solid point, Relentliss.
It’s become BORING. Greatsword is the only non-clunky weapon with decent damage output for Guardians, which was great for a main weapon. Even if I can get the job done with sword/x or mace/x, it is slower, it’s endless, it isn’t as much fun.

Wish they’d just adjusted retaliation, or removed it from the symbol for all I care. Let the greatsword be the pure damage weapon (glass cannon sword, all aboard!), and chuck the retaliation onto scepter or staff to give those more use as well.

Ah well. Still got my fingers crossed for some very solid in-depth explanation as to why exactly everything – cooldowns, keybinds and uses – was juggled around like this.

Faster gap closer is a win in my block any time.. the change of skills.. get a grip, just keybind em-_- not the end of the world.. ppl you need to adapt in every situation.. and this is a minor change tbh.. I understand if they changed the whole concept of the GS.. but they didn’t:)

@ Pheonix, have you actully read the thread and what this change actully affected?, it is far from a minor change.

I really think a lot of people simply don’t understand the big issue with this- it broke a lot of traits for the GS and ruined the trait line that deals with the GS and Symbols for this weapon – it completly killed a Symbol/GS build.

It is not a minor change – IT’S MAJOR, and they really need to answer us on this issue.

You will always have those that will say “get a grip” just because they gloat, don’t care or are just not affected (ie not using the weapon). Nothing new.

The good aspects of the changes:
- shorter cd of leap (by 25%), which is, btw, broken and does not function consistently

Negative:
- uncomfortable (and yes, I will probably adapt if they do not change the skill order back, but they make the game for US PLAYERS, so ceating disconfort quite needlessly is just not understandable or acceptable
- 100% increase of Symbol CD
- big loss of dps (we do not have a viable ranged weapon with decent damage, now our primary ae damage weapon is also quite meh)
- loss of game enjoyability while using gs due to a more passive ae weapon setup (overall cds were increased, so auto-attack must be used more often)
- loss of survivability due to less condition removal and combos

And those are just of the top of my head, if I would think about it a few more minutes then I would probably come up with some more…. besides the fact that they should maybe decide where they want to go with the guardian. This would be nice to know as by consistently nerfing the class (and guardian has received more nerfs than any other class pre and post launch) at least my frustration level rises!

Despite the condescending tone of the person above me towards those of us that say to get over it, I have not been affected at all by this change, besides getting used to the new layout for 20 minutes.

I cannot fathom how this patch “broke symbol builds”, it makes it so you can’t spam them all the time, big deal, it didn’t “break traits”, it made ONE symbol CD longer. Throw 30 points into Honor for Empowering Might and Greatsword CD reduction. With my current build, I didn’t notice any significant DPS drop from this patch at all, and I’m glad Retaliation Spammers aren’t going to give us a bad name anymore, it was OP in WvWvW/PvP and that was that.

Don’t use a cookie-cutter build from a forum post that doesn’t make any sense to you. Make one you understand and enjoy, and you’ll pull numbers just the same as before patch, and if not then roll an easier class, like Warrior.

All the guardians who are annoyed about the GS/Symbol builds and in general what this nerf did, please post in this thread to keep it at the top. Please keep the posts in it on topic and don’t just go on about the skill order – that is an issue yes, but it’s minor compaired to what it actully affected.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Suggestion-Please-fix-Guardian-GreatSword-Traits-GS-Symbol

We really need to get Anet to notice what they messed up when going after retaliaiton on the GS.

Despite the condescending tone of the person two slots above me towards those of us that do feel bad about the changes and at least want some more explanation on the why and where of the changes, I have to add that many of the discussions you see here are not about the retaliation aspect of the change. You may also note that in my whole post above I have not once used the word retaliation.

Not sure how you can defend a decrease of a skill through such extremes. Nerfing/adjusting is through careful testing and chipping away at the opness of said skill. You don’t just go ahead and lay down the hammer on a skill making it near useless. Symbols are bad enough in pvp since no one ever stands in them for more than maybe a second. Now one of the symbols cd’s has been increased dramatically thus decreasing survivability, damage and the ability to perform combos. Symbols are one of the corner stones that makes the Guardian unique as well as retaliation and protection. When you take away any of these, there must be a balance and compensation from another source must be rendered.

There’s a reason why the Guardian has been put on the lowest health tier and it’s because of these unique skills bestowed upon us. Once again, take any of that away, you end up playing a lesser powered Warrior.

Edit: It seems to me that the Guardian might be going through major changes and by major, I mean skill changing. If I were to have any input about it, i’d gladly change symbols into a more mobile skill.

“Symbol of Wrath” was bad from the beginning vs moving targets since it roots the guardian ~0.5-1sec with the animation

now its even bad in static fights

iowen.4217:

“Symbol of Wrath” was bad from the beginning vs moving targets since it roots the guardian ~0.5-1sec with the animation

now its even bad in static fights

Once again, this further reinforces the change of this skill. Mobility is key in this game, why hinder someone when there’s a way around it?

legendde.9340:

Despite the condescending tone of the person two slots above me towards those of us that do feel bad about the changes and at least want some more explanation on the why and where of the changes, I have to add that many of the discussions you see here are not about the retaliation aspect of the change. You may also note that in my whole post above I have not once used the word retaliation.

I do not see any condescension in my post. The Retaliation comment was not in regards to you in any way, but in regards to the official patch notes, seeing as they state clear as day why they made the changes:

“We are moving towards retaliation being more of a counter to taking many hits rather than a general boon to keep up all the time. We also wanted to improve the combo finisher of the guardian, so we reorganized guardian greatsword skills to the following:
Skill 2: Whirling Wrath (10 second recharge)
Skill 3: Leap of Faith (15 second recharge)
Skill 4: Symbol of Wrath (20 second recharge)”

Retaliation was being abused in PvP and WvWvW, seeing as you could keep it up indefinitely, thus Symbol of Wrath had its CD lengthened.

ANET states that they “wanted to improve the combo finisher of the Guardian”, so they shortened the CD on Leap of Faith.

In addition, it makes the Symbol builds based more on bursting and situational awareness in my eyes, as the list of traits affected by this change are all AoE bursty or AoE Healing, the later of which is quite strong if allowed to be up constantly.

I’m not sure what you’re still wanting an explanation on, but I was not intending to turn this into a flame battle, despite my snarky first comment.

They wanted to improve it by reorganizing the skill-set, not because of the shortened CD. It even it says that exactly within the dev statement, don’t add onto it based on your own perception.

WrathxCrazy, you’re missing the point.

Patch note claims aside, Retaliation was a minor part of the change (and near-perma Retaliation builds are still possible anyway). It may be only 1 symbol, but its the only symbol that GS gets and its CD was doubled. That means all symbol related effects for traits/buffs/debuffs/heals/etc were effectively halved for GS.

It isn’t a ‘minor’ change, and the patch notes don’t even comment on this.

I fail to see how this is an improvement:

Skill set before: Combofield → Finisher → Finisher
Skill set after: Finisher → Finisher → Combofield

The old skill order war much more intuitive than the new one. First a filed then a finisher. Now you have to move backwards. Thus I really do not understand their comment.

This is why I go backwards now 5,4,3,2,1. Is this the way new player should learn it?

It’s so… backwards. Oo

I died 2 times because of the layout change – using LoF in a puzzle instead of WW :/ I understand cooldown changes, but changing layout after 150 hours in beta and 250 hours in shipped game is just dumb.

“I kittened about it in map chat until somebody said to just re-bind your keys back to the way it was”

And then you switch weapons and the buttons will be different for that set up XD

Don’t care about the nerf,I can work round that but please just change the skill slots back please.

I care about both the nerf and rearrangement of skills. Can we please get a response from a developer? There have been many cases where some of us have shown that it was fine before and in some cases, the nerf did a lot more damage than expected.

the nerf to retaliation all cuz of sPvP whiners… Yet another game where the devs can’t manage to balance pvp without detriment to pve.

No one gives a crap about the retaliation nerf, most if not all of us here only care about the 100% increase to the cd and the skill placement……

My 80 guardian is on hold, i dont mind changes in power of skills, but making stuff less fun as in longer cd is not good.
Atleast fix hammer, the 3rd auto attack takes a year to complete and simply NOT FUN, dont care if it would do 2000000 damage.

This nerf is just absolutely awful i don’t care about spvp i played all the maps i’m bored of it this is about pve thats where the nerf has greatest impact on players.
And developers gave no reason for this? they just changed it overnight. how would they like if suddenly all the controls on their car was changed gass became clutch , clutch break etc. and then just “Hey i’m sure you get used to the new controls.” and why the symbol nerf? fine delete the retaliation but keep symbol and cd the same! they affected all traits used with symbols and greatsword. and its obviously not overpowered in pve. still no response from developers i personally enjoy the game way less than i did before this nerf and i hope the developers understand it was a mistake so it get reverted.
the nerf benefited none in pve.

Good Gravy !

I can see this switch upset a lot of folks and I’ve already mentioned my concerns but this is a possible slippery slope that will really hurt a lot of players and not just us guardians if they plan on re-arranging skill bars every time something is adjusted. They had also better make sure they can balance P vs P separate from P vs E.

Have we forgotten the HUGE failure in GW 1 concerning all of that ? I had at one time almost stopped playing and low and behold they started to balance the skills separately. I also never laughed so hard when I heard it mentioned in a certain clip on U-tube ( which I’m too lazy to look up ) when even a certain Arena.net employee said " Thank God " when it finally happened during one of the convention Q & A’s.

Whoever is calling the shots now could learn a bit from that history. Keep screwing with P vs E for P vs P changes and you will loose some of your player base, you did before. I’ve supported Arena.net many many times but this is something you did wrong then and are doing wrong now.

• Waiting on the fence *

Makes perfect sense.

Nerf retaliation by changing its position.

In the making of book Arenanet says ‘without you community, we would not able to make such a great game, so thank you for all your suggestions’.

This god incredible against that. First there were LOADS better suggestion then the current change. EPIC FAIL. Secondly you don’t even respond in this thread. In my humble opinion, a destructive change like this (it is destructive to the ‘fun’ part of gameplay – even though it may balance better now – so this really is a cheap solution) demands for justification. You should answer in this thread RIGHT NOW. But you don’t. And maybe i get you don’t wanna start wars. It’s a common mmo strategy to never ever answer ‘rant’ posts, because they know they might drawn unwanted (bad) attention. However messing with core gameplay is not something to take lightly. Not something to sneak under the players keyboards. You talk about it. You think about it. You think more about it. You take suggestions into account. You ignored all of it and destroyed the gameplay of guardian. (again balance may be better, but balance alone is not the decisive factor to make changes like this, instead a well weighted decision between fun – balance and smoothness is what should lead to a decision).

Thid point. No pve and pvp split. Epic fail. Especially with how the mobs work. The mobs right now are overpowered (not field mobs, but Orr/heavy aoe/dungeon mobs) are overpowered to people with mediocre/good gear. Only exotic/rare geared people with full sigil/ring set have a decent chance/gameplay/fun. (Warrior being exception because to overpowered – or other classes underpowered).

Guild wars 2 is a GREAT idea. But your destroying it peace by peace. It seems now the most ppl bought it already, you are not afraid of mistakes and just smash the ‘change profession’ decisions without fear of retribution. I hate ‘pay fee to play mmo’s. But maybe guild wars 2 should have one too. Then you guys will instantly feel a lot of player quit when you keep acting like this and suddenly rewind bad decisions.

I know you wont read/listen to this Arenanet but please stop this nonsense updates. Nerf underpowered classes even more? (ele/mesmer/necro). Fail. Prioritize Pvp over Pve (balance) Fail. Make Core game elements useless, so people die fast and need to quickly pay a lot of repair money? (Dodge is broken against some Orr/dungeon enemies, they slash (melee, not aoe) right tru a dodge roll – making your only defense useless, and auto-die/loose 2 silver repair cost). Fail. Do i need to go on? The only reason i’m here is because gw1 was such masterpiece (not perfect but pretty close). Gw2 has the potential.

But face one fact. You wanted weapon binded skills. Ok i can live with it. You wanted more active gameplay. Ok i even like this. Now you nerf weapons into the ground and increase cool down? No way. You kill the fun and fast gameplay. You kill the reliability in very fast monster spawning area’’s (dungeons, events). The very precious thing that makes guildwars 2 so much fun is getting beaten in the ground bit by bit.

The weapon system YOU ARENANET introduced, demands active gameplay as compensation for the ‘not so diverse’ skill. It’s fragile against any form of nerfs. Especially cooldown nerfs. Exactly what you are doing to mesmer/guardian and others right now. A big mistake i soon hope to stop. STOP FOCUSING ON PVP.

There will always be an underdog in pvp. (Look at warrior gw1 or paragon). Face it accept it (arenanet). Or split pvp/pve skillsets. Then you might get close to perfect balance. But you can’t have both.

Rant over. And guess what Arenanet will ignore it. (All pages here have zero Arenanet responses, hurts my feelings, where is the beta ‘enthousiasm’. Every dev in every topic answering/listening. I want it back.

Haven’t logged any significant time on my Guardian since the patch. I’m now back to my Engineer main (still kind of kitten but at least I don’t have to sit and auto-attack 80% of the time). Rolling a Warrior as well since they seem like the golden child of GW2 balancing. I wish the devs would at least offer a response to this change and why they felt it necessary to mess up the Greatsword skillset in order to balance retaliation.

Who ever thought changing the button order was a good idea for the Guardian greatsword should be punched in the face, because it was a horrible idea. Please change this back to the way it was or allow us to move the skills around manually. And no I don’t want to change my key binds for every weapon and character I change to. Again a horrible, horrible idea. Completely handicapped(carebear status), please please change it back or again let us move the skills around.