Guild Wars 2

So, one of the biggest problems I see repeatedly in GW2 is the overnerfing of a “problem” because of an issue, and THEN building it back up. Collateral damage always occurs, as certain skills become utterly useless while they normalize from the floor they have now created.
Guardian Spirit Weapons, for example, were un-targetable. Then a patch hit that made them targetable. Spirit Weapons were NOT designed with this in mind, however, and had low HP and pulled aggro often. This made them useless. Slowly, they have been increasing the HP of Spirit Weapons and increasing their damage, but for a few months in there, 1/4 of the Guardians skills might as well not have even been in the game.
So now we have Illusionist Celerity. Obviously, something had to be done. Every Mesmer took this trait no matter what the build. Shatters wanted more clones, Phantasmers wanted faster Phantasm spawning, even straight Glass cannons took it because some of their damage skills would come off cooldown faster.
The problem with moving it is that there were so many skills affected by it, cooldowns need to be looked at again. It’s fine to move it to 25 in Illusions- IF you re-evaluate the cooldowns that were affected by it and re-adjust them. This was definitely not done. Now, we are in this weird zone where things definitely cooldown too slowly, but it will take months for the Devs to go through and change all the skills.

So, what would you have done? Would you have waited a month on the Mesmer changes and then released the trait change AND the skill changes all at once after you tested it? Would you have implemented a public test server and let the players give feedback on a change while you tweaked it until it was ready to go in it’s entirety? What about changing how the trait worked so it only functions on clones or somesuch, so that certain builds (like Phantasms) wouldn’t want it?
What would you have done to remedy this problem if you were a dev?
Additionally, Blurred Frenzy was a serious problem. Traited, we were invincible for 2 seconds every 8 seconds, which is too much, especially in PvP. It was double-nerfed, though and that seems extreme. What would you have done differently?

What would I do? Fire the current balance team and hire a professional one.

Ramiah.5648:

So, one of the biggest problems I see repeatedly in GW2 is the overnerfing of a “problem” because of an issue, and THEN building it back up.

Is it a problem? Do they consider it a problem. They have admitted this is their preferred method of seeing what effect this has on a class and the community.

Since they cant the trust the whiners who are constantly crying nerf at every little thing, and no way to seperate them from genuine people with genuine concerns. And testers are only a small sample group compared to the whole, and dont necessarily represent all skills levels and experience groups.

I would rather a skills power be slowly increased over time until they find the sweet spot than have any class running around for months being OP lowered down until they find the same spot.

if somethings OP nerf it. If you overnerfed fix it. Seems fair to me.

I am not taking IC. My cooldowns are fine.

Make “Illusion Celerity” not affect decoy, mirror images and other clone utilities while reducing the cooldown for those skills. We’d still have 32s decoy and traiting IC would only affect the CD on clone generating skills(1-5).

Make blurred frenzy an evade without increasing the CD (If I’m not traited in sword I get 12s BF, wth)

With this patch, too many CDs got increased:
1) Sword got generally nerfed: 20% CD on BF and 20% CD on leap (since IC is no longer easily accessible)
2) Decoy, Images, Disenchanter and Defender got their CDs increased for any non-shatter build

They wanted build diversity but instead I feel cornered into playing a shatter build, since I don’t like having long CDs on everything.

PS: The torment on block is ugly. It might be useful in some situation, it might deal decent damage but it’s ugly gameplay-wise. I just don’t like the concept of applying this kind of dot on a block.

I would have liked to see confusion replaced by torment for the 3° scepter skill and leave block as it was. This way scepter would have been more viable because:
- No longer confusion on scepter (since you kittented confusion to the ground)
- Good block burst
- 3° skill finally becoming rewarding

At the moment we have really unhappy options for mainhand:
1) Sword got nerfed
2) Scepter is still ugly

How sad we’ll probably have to wait months before a new patch kicks in.

Illusionists Celerity

Really strong for an adept trait, that’s why every single player was using it. Moving it was ok imo but they should have lowered some CDs to compensate for that. Going through every single CD would be too much for a short answer but some of them should be slightly lower.

Blurred Frenzy

Still a really good skill. Yeah, the nerf sucks but it changed the skill from a complete no-brainer to a more balanced skill. Retaliation hurts now but once you get used to it it’s only a small problem. Besides that a lot of builds don’t include this boon anyway. Imo the nerf is not as bad as most players say.

Changes

I think releasing all changes at once is better. Anet is already pretty slow when it comes to patches, making them even slower is something I wouldn’t like to see. A public test server would be a waste of time imo since most players don’t have enough knowledge about how to balance a game to give proper feedback. A closed test server for certain players would be much better since you can choose who is testing and who is giving feedback. I can’t tell you which players would be good enough for that but I’m pretty sure Anet already asks a lot of them (Nemesis.8593 for necro players is someone I would suggest for example).

I can think of a couple of things.

1. Reduce the effect of the minor trait to 10%, leave it where it is, reduce the cooldown of clone traits by 10% see what happens..
2. Same as above but move IC to grandmaster.
3. Reduce the cooldown of clone traits by 20% replace IC with something completely new, maybe make compounding celerity (as it was) the minor trait.

Edit: The main problem I have with what they did is that if requires a determination that 1. Shatter builds are fine and 2. Every other build needs a nerf.

Seems wrong.

agree with most things the op said except for taking confusion off the 3 skill of the scepter 5 stacks of confusion potentially does more dmg than 3 stack of torment. I think scepter would be fine if they didn’t reduce the dmg of the 2skill by 50%

See my opinion on this thread :
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/IC-nerf-OK-but-not-in-PVE-or-rework/first#post2294679

Every patch should have a open PTR, just like every game should have a open beta