Guild Wars 2

I’m talking about the Staff skill ‘Symbol of Swiftness’. Before it granted 8 seconds of swiftness and any additional pulse granted 1 second if you already had swiftness on you. While this may be a decent buff in WvW, it’s a big nerf in general.

Buff: In WvW you will get swiftness and have this buff on you like 95% of the time while you’re in a zerg. Here it’s a decent buff as your Symbol of Swiftness will now provide 4 second swiftness to whoever walks over it instead of 1 second. But the thing to consider here, is that even before it got buffed, you would’ve still had swiftness on you 95% of the time, so it wasn’t a really big issue to begin with.

Nerf: And it’s a big nerf everywhere else. Before you would put the symbol and get an instant 8 second of swiftness. While now you have to wait on the symbol for 3 seconds to be provided only an additional 1 second (9 seconds) of swiftness compared to before. So to even make it worthwhile now compared to before, you have to wait the entire 4 seconds on the symbol to be provided a total of 12 seconds swiftness, which is only a tiny increase of 4 seconds compared to the old function.

All I’m asking, is that you please consider giving Symbol of Swiftness a 5 seconds of swiftness per pulse instead of 4 seconds.

The way it is currently is a pain…not only do you have to stop but you have to stop just long enough to get the maximum buff. Move too soon and you lose, move too late and you lose. I am hating that change with a passion.

I dont like the change to Symbol of swiftness.
In stead of buffing mesmer, the last character without perma-swiftnes, they just took guardina dont do mesmers level.

Guardian and mesemer are now 2 guys without perma swiftness and just feel so slow.

Temporal curtain is actually more useful than symbol of swiftness in a lot of situations now, imo.

The new version of SoS isn’t a buff at all, ever.

I tend to think of it as a sidegrade, leaning toward a buff. I’m finding the loss of the initial “burst” is making many of you think it was great, but it really wasn’t. This iteration is making it much easier for me to maintain large amounts of swiftness with staff. Unfortunately, I don’t like staff all that much, especially when oriented towards damage. However, that is a different thread’s discussion. I would gladly take this iteration over the original.

Kelnis.1829:

I tend to think of it as a sidegrade, leaning toward a buff. I’m finding the loss of the initial “burst” is making many of you think it was great, but it really wasn’t. This iteration is making it much easier for me to maintain large amounts of swiftness with staff. Unfortunately, I don’t like staff all that much, especially when oriented towards damage. However, that is a different thread’s discussion. I would gladly take this iteration over the original.

It depends on your build. With max boon duration the old SoS gave me and my party perma swiftness if traited for 2 hand mastery, or only couple of seconds away from it without.

Now uptime is at less than 50% for a single tick which is all a pug group will ever be in the symbol for when running from a -> b.

I really don’t understand the hate against the SoS change. Before you got 7 seconds to start with, which was ok, then 1 second refresh, which is nothing. Now you get 4 seconds, but can stand in it for 20+ seconds, then get 4 second refreshes as you move.

If you’re standing around waiting for a zerg to start moving, you can continually recast it to get a very long duration.

Honest question. How is the change to SoS a buff? I cannot seem to move from one point of the map to the other in perma swiftness now. What am I missing here

New change is pretty garbage. You had perma swiftness before. The only problem was if you had perma swiftness from somethin else already the skill wasn’t credit (but then you didn’t need it ’cause other people are givin you warhorns or whatever).

Now you don’t have perma swiftness in a lot of common situations (at least that I encounter) without having gained any situations where you’d get perma swiftness without having it before.

Stopped running staff for now.

I actually like the new change… with a little pause to get a couple ticks of SoS I can now have perma-swift without needing shouts like “Retreat!” in my build (which is ironic as I’ve never once used it to run away from anything)

Imperatora.7654:

I actually like the new change… with a little pause to get a couple ticks of SoS I can now have perma-swift without needing shouts like “Retreat!” in my build (which is ironic as I’ve never once used it to run away from anything)

That pause wasn’t necessary before the patch. I honestly think all the people who think this is a positive change didn’t know how to maintain perma swiftness prior to the nerf.