Guild Wars 2

Line of Warding: This skill now lasts for 5 seconds instead of 8 seconds.

In case you missed it.

Honestly. What?

I play maybe one of 5 staff guardians on my server. I can easily rattle off dozens of skills that are far better than line of warding and aren’t completely negated with such advanced pvp techniques as ‘dodging over it’.

Really not a good start with skill balancing here, anet.

Line of Warding also interrupts the moment you touch it, doesn’t it? I’m not a Guardian player, but against Guardians, I always found it a bit strong for too long. :P

If i remember right the staff skill 5 always said 5 seconds but was bugged and lasted for 8.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Line of Warding also interrupts the moment you touch it, doesn’t it? I’m not a Guardian player, but against Guardians, I always found it a bit strong for too long. :P

Lol learn to run around it?

Haha oh boy. ANet has no problem nerfing the duration on a much needed staff utility but still can’t seem to fix players dodging and jumping over line and ring of warding. We can see that priorities rest not on fixing broken abilities, but rather “balancing” an already almost negligible guardian weapon

Kromica.2831:

DiogoSilva.7089:

Line of Warding also interrupts the moment you touch it, doesn’t it? I’m not a Guardian player, but against Guardians, I always found it a bit strong for too long. :P

Lol learn to run around it?

Not when it’s put in a door, a stairway, or any place where the skill is best used at. I was actually thinking of those contexts when I made my comment.

And when I want to run around it, it’s not the duration that is going to stop me, honestly. And if I can dodge through it, well, yes, I can, if I’m willing to waste a dodge for this. I don’t know, it seems fine to me.

i was gonna curse but instead of the filter doing it to me, i will just type it out myself

This is motherkittening kittens, staff is already kittening fringe and it honestly didnt need kittens to kitten the kittening kitten that kittens the kittening kittens

Really, I mean really? Hammer Ring of Warding duration is 5s too, if anything this change makes sense. It brings it in line and creates consistency. 8>5s is not the end of the world.

This change does not need such a negative reaction.. Staff will still be a good weapon alongside Hammer to block off choke points in both WvW and PvP.

Agreed with most, it’s not that big of an issue at all. The big issue if the fact they didn’t change it so people can’t dodge over it.

Not to worry, apparently anything longer than a blink of an eye is bad for Guardian skills.

Wrathful Spirit: This Honor trait’s retaliation duration has been decreased from 10 seconds to 3 seconds.

If anything, the minor Virtue of Retribution (3s of Retaliation when using Virtue) along with Stand Your Ground + Hammer are still ample sources of Retaliation. Wrathful Spirit didn’t seem that powerful in comparison as Courage has the longest CD out of any of the virtues, unless you also pick up Retreat. That’s going out of your way to buff two lengthy CDs.

I didn’t see the appeal in the trait because of that and remain unaffected.

I think SiNoS is correct, I also remember the description saying five seconds.

I was gona make a thread about this as well…

Line of Warding: This skill now lasts for 5 seconds instead of 8 seconds.

Why make this skill even more useless? You can already dodge through it… You guys are starting to take away the tactical edge with crap like this. Why not make it 30 seconds as is? Or 5 seconds but you can only pass through with stability?
Why have it in the game at all if all its gona do is trip someone up who cant see it or when it hasnt rendered for them? What is it used for now?

If anything, the minor Virtue of Retribution (3s of Retaliation when using Virtue) along with Stand Your Ground + Hammer are still ample sources of Retaliation. Wrathful Spirit didn’t seem that powerful in comparison as Courage has the longest CD out of any of the virtues, unless you also pick up Retreat.

I made a thread for this discussion… but anyway, that’s more reason why the duration is important since we’re not exactly magically generating protects every few seconds. Retaliation is underwhelming as it is, now we have to focus on it and lose utility? that’s just bad balancing right there. You wouldn’t say:

“Hey, i can do X from time to time, so the boon i get from X should be shorter because i can source it from many things.” while in fact you had to give up a lot so that you’ll have to get enough X sources to make that even work.

Line of Warding is not useless. It’s probably one of the most powerful spells you can have.

Anything that allows a player to control a field can be terribly unbalanced if done wrong. And if I remember right, the tooltip stated it was 5 seconds already, like previous posters said.

If you can get behind something that a Line of Warding can completely block (such as a Tower entrance in WvW), dropping one plus a Wall of Reflection on top of it means 5 seconds of really annoyance.
Combo that with a few elementalists AoEing that area and you get massive QQers on the forum.

But again, you always have people QQing for pretty much anything they can think of…

“Dodging through Line of Warding” is obviously a bug, and I’ve personally never seen it before. They propably just had Stability.

Also, it was always intended to be 5 seconds, and it’s just fine for PVP, you just need to use it smartly. Even on the open field it’s at least a knockdown if you use it ahead of a running enemy

I know a lot of this conversation is related to WvW or PvP, but I’ve also found the skill quite useful in dungeons in the past. But 3 seconds now… not so much any more. It’s just not worth the time it takes to cast, imho. It was previously one of the more useful crowd control abilities for helping the group in trash fights.

the real question, is why make our ranged option even more terrible? it almost looks like that they didn’t expect some to use staff, and wanted to correct this anomaly.

They only corrected a bug with the 5th skill. Dont see what the complaints are about.

It always lasted 5 seconds.

And Retal builds were (and maybe still are) OP.

Doding throw Line of Warding or Hammer 5 is impossible. But stability does indeed counter it.

@SiNoS (quoting doesn’t work again): That’s the standard reaction to loss of power. It doesn’t matter that the power wasn’t intended.
And I can somewhat understand it. Line of Warding is a strong ability, especially in all kinds of PvP, but it has an adequately long cooldown and is tied to a weapon that is only brought to PvP by necessity that I think 8 seconds on Line of Warding is reasonable.
That being said, there are no “nerfs” in the patch notes that I find really bad. I’m a bit disheartened that our problems weren’t addressed, but those problems aren’t things you can quickly fix with a simple patch.

@Ynna

While i understand that i use the staff all the time in pve. What im looking at is if it had never been bugged and only 5 seconds honestly no one would be complaining about this change.

it was always intended to last for 5 seconds, but was lasting for 8 due to a bug which they corrected. i wouldn’t have a problem with this fix if they had fixed the issue with players dodging/jumping over the line in the same patch..

The issue isn’t the nerf as much as the actual skill sucking tremendous amounts of balls. It’s useless. It doesn’t effect boss mobs and players can roll over it. You could completely remove it and we wouldn’t be any worse off.

3 second nerf to Line of Warding? Sweet. Drop it to 1 second, ANet. Might as well.

Wanna know something funny.
They buffed Line of Warding between die BWE’s:
Line of Warding:5s duration?8s duration; 45r?40r (leaked patch notes)

So the tooltip never was right, they just forgot to change it. And I bet they already forgot about the change they did, only looked at the tt and thought the duration is bugged so they changed it to 5 seconds…

No sens of it!
Staff suks and they ref it???

People can jump / dodje / walk aroud the wall… this stupid wall got an infinit CD and low performance. And they nerf it?

Orb of light is useless and half of the time the orb disappear in the ground… and they nerf the wall????

Come on… Anet hate supporter. This is the truth…
I told this thing a lot of time… GW2 removed the “holy trinity” and create a game only for DPS players…
I’m sure, in a couple of moth all the supportive players will be forced to play dps cause all the supportive skills will be nerfed more and more…

Leeain: I know I don’t have any actual authority and you have no reason to listen to me, but if you word your ideas constructively, you’ll get better responses.
The change (it’s not a real nerf) was done to make Line of Warding the intended length. You could argue that this is a wrong direction to take, true.
I personally feel that the cooldown could be lower, since it’s slightly less useful than Ring of Warding.

The latter part of your post doesn’t make any sense at this point. You claim to see an evolution, while this is only our first data-point. Unless support-abilities get weaker in the future can you make such bold claims.
I’ve also taken the opportunity to rephrase your post, but keeping the message the same.

I don’t mind a small “balance” here and there, but when they decide to “balance” skills that are already broken without fixing them at the same time. I can’t help but wonder where their priorities lie.. They seem happy enough to let us deal with broken skills that players are exploiting in pvp.

Ynna.8769:

Leeain: I know I don’t have any actual authority and you have no reason to listen to me, but if you word your ideas constructively, you’ll get better responses.
The change (it’s not a real nerf) was done to make Line of Warding the intended length. You could argue that this is a wrong direction to take, true.
I personally feel that the cooldown could be lower, since it’s slightly less useful than Ring of Warding.

The latter part of your post doesn’t make any sense at this point. You claim to see an evolution, while this is only our first data-point. Unless support-abilities get weaker in the future can you make such bold claims.
I’ve also taken the opportunity to rephrase your post, but keeping the message the same.

I can’t see the constructivity in a game you’ve been waiting for a long time with a lot of expectations, and than you discover that penalize supporter player… obviously is my personal opinion.
Since I was 12y (baldur’s gate time) I played only supportive roles… and now i feel forced to be something I don’t want.

According with the international laws on freedom of speech, I’m free to criticiza a game choice that disappointed me.
I’m sorry if you dislike my way to explain my point of view, but I’m spontaneus… so if I think that something is not good, i simply say “It sucks!” and not “Could you please reach me in my livingroom for a cup of the, so we can discuss about the wrong gaming policy? And don’t forget the cookies!”

So… I appreciate your help and tnx for rephrase my post, I will surely learn on it… but honestly I prefere next time people will keep more attention on my CONTENTS than on my bad english (expecially cause is not my language).

Look, I feel you. Ever since I started playing multiplayer games, I found that a supportive role suits me better, both online and offline. When I go airsofting, I find it sad that there’s no real support role for me I did a student job that consisted of making sure other people could do their job, and I liked it a lot.
But support is still in the game, and the Line of Warding change isn’t that big of a deal. You can’t really do dedicated support, but that was never advertised.

And I don’t have any issues with your language. English isn’t my first language either. It’s more the definitive tone of your statements that irk me.

I was using line of warding a lot to disrupt WvW retreats to great effect

Honestly the nerf doesn’t really affect me much, because as long as they get knocked down once, they will be eaten by the zerg.

This does nerf my ability to retreat from battle without using any other skills, but I’ve got loads of other solutions from that.

You right, Line of Warding change isn’t that big of a deal.
The problem is that is not a PRIORITY.
Guardian got a lot of problems more important… starting with the orb of light Z-axis.
So, why they did it?
Why Anet doesn’t focus on more usefull fix?

In this way it seems to me they prefere keep going to penalize support players than create a game that reach all player’s needs. :S

My tone is a “badly disappointed tone”. I’m sorry if it irks you… but i’m irk too (not with you, of ourse!).
And trust me… even if i say the same things in the kindest way in the world, Anet will never listen to me… or you… or all of us…
Do you really think that they read all the suggestion and all the post in this forum?
I don’t.

I like how they reduced the duration, when what really needed to happen was fix it so players don’t just dodge over it whenever they feel like.

Keep in mind that the fixes we’ve seen are all relatively easy to implement (from what I understand from coding). Making it undodgeable, fixing the orbs, improving the Scepter… are probably a lot more work.

In WvW multiple Guardian’s can basically prevent an entire enemy raid from crossing choke points by rotating Walls and Sanctuaries. It’s incredibly powerful and this patch doesn’t change that.

Except for the fact that you can roll through it, completely negating the whole ‘wall’ aspect of the skill.

Also, I was unaware, but apparently you can also jump over it.

edit: Whether or not any of that is intended behavior is another story.

Listen, play WvW and use wall of lining on choke holds and see if the entire enemy team rolls over it. I even use it to block the enemies retreat and you’ll watch them bunch up and bounce into it helplessly.

In WvW in my guild me + 3 other guardains Guardians + 10 defenders managed to hold off 40 attackers on a Keep for over 50 minutes by constantly dropping barriers and sanctuaries at the entrance.

The reason it got “nerfed” was because the tooltip said 5, but it really lasted 8, but considering how game changing it is in WvW I don’t even care. Take 4-5 coordinated Guardian’s and you aren’t getting through.

As Gandalf said; " YOU SHALL NOT PASS ! "

I was bothered by the reduction in spell duration at first because the staff is one of the two weapons I use. However, I realize that 8 seconds of blocking incoming monsters while other players can attack the monsters with ranged attacks without getting touched is a bit unbalanced. 5 second line of warding is cool with me.

As a non-guardian, I’ve noticed that I get KD’ed by the line just by being near to it, I don’t even need to touch it. An AoE crowd control that doubles as a KD and a rupt is very strong, can caught people off-guard (so they won’t have time to react and dodge), and even when they waste a dodge to prevent it, it’s not all that bad (makes them more vulnerable).

As a heavy user of Staff #5, I can understand why they dropped the length. I use it all the time to close off choke points or as a constant interrupt on people (if you through it right on them as mentioned above).

Staff needs a buff in other areas, but 5 is nice. I would LOVE for Staff to be effected by 2H mastery.

Staff doesnt get affected by 2H mastery?
I thought it did, at least it was the last time i had that trait on.

Maybe im just seeing things

Lothair.8942:

I would LOVE for Staff to be effected by 2H mastery.

Last time I checked it was being affected. Had my orb skill (Staff skill 2, sorry bad with names) reduced to 2 and half second cooldown.

I’ll check next time in game, it could simply be me changing my skills and not noticing! I run a few different trait setups – thanks for confirming