Guild Wars 2

“For staff cd trait – conditional recharge is something new we’re trying out. The high cd reduction uptime that we were seeing right out of the gate wasn’t something we felt comfortable with. If it feels really weak after this we’ll come back to it and look at it again.”
Josh Davis

So we’ve had some time to play test this and does it indeed feel too weak?

Personally i think it feels much too weak now and would use a different trait if any other suited my build. (not a fan of long cool down passive traits and don’t need condition damage)
I like the idea of the conditional recharge and it was indeed a fun mechanic but at the moment its sub-par to the old chaotic dampening trait – flat 20% reduction.

I’d like to see the trait at possibly 4% or at 3% with an added cool down reduction to staff 4 / Trident 3 Chaos armor (20% – 28 seconds) built into the trait.

This second option could combat the problem of balancing the skill for the people that only use staff vs those using both staff and glamour utilities to leap through.

If you only balance the trait around staff it makes it too good for those using glamour utilities to leap through and balancing around staff + glamour utilities makes it too weak for just staff users.

It should have never been nerfed to 2%.

3% would’ve been the most reasonable. This change implies the devs were thinking “oh but Mesmer can stack soooo much Chaos Armor so it’ll still balance out.” but that is a very narrow perspective.

• Chaos Armor only reduces skills already on cool down. Using chaos armor for the protection before chaos storm ends up hurting your ability to reduce cooldowns. This also assumes we’ll ALWAYS use Phase Retreat (or iWarden) BEFORE Chaos Storm.

• 2% means we need 10s of Chaos Armor just to get the standard 20% reduction. It is pretty unrealistic to assume we’ll always be able to combo on our field and restricts certain applications of Chaos Storm (like casting it on a zerg or to save a far off ally)

• In order to be effective, Chaotic Dampening needs to have a meaningful reduction with a single cast of Chaos Armor. 3-4% would be reasonable while still promoting combos and careful play.

Plus how often do you overwrite Chaos Armor with Chaos Storm/Phase retreat or Staff 4 because you want to swap weapons.

The whole point of not being 20% CDR is that you should be able to go a bit over 20% if you do your rotation in a specific way, but if you are forced out of your optimal rotation you end up a bit below 20%.

8 seconds of Chaos Armor being what I’d usually get at best, 40% CDR was nuts if only 5 seconds, it was still 25%. They didn’t really think that through did they.

Now at 2% per tick, 8 seconds of Chaos Armor gives 16% CDR and at 5 seconds 10%. This is way too low, lets look at 3%.

3%
8 Seconds: 24% CDR
5 Seconds: 15% CDR

Well look at that, that almost looks balance Devs, wouldn’t you say.

Even if someone does get another full duration leap through a utility, that’s still only 11 seconds for 31%, and hey if your investing that much of your build into getting that, I’m fine with it.

Agree with all of above, it is meaningless to invest that much in your build and playstyle to get chaos armor to have it perform just on-par with the standard 20% cdr.

Being able to get a full rotation of chaos armor stacking with staff alone grants you 20%cdr on one of chaos armor or chaos storm and only 10%cdr on the other. At the same time the other two skills phase retreat and phantasmal warlock can benefit from that only if you use them before gaining any chaos armor.

If the devs ever want to push for such conditional cdr idea, it has be be implemented in a way that putting in effort grants better cdr than the standard 20%. If they are not comfortable with that, plz give us back the flat 20% cdr.

The other torch trait has the same problem. 1.5% per second in stealth is really low. You will almost never reach standard 20% unless you intentionally just stack stealth.
As many of us agree, PU should be nerf’ed. But at the same time should this trait be buff’ed so that it can see some light?

Hopefully they will change it to 3% seen that way it seems to be a good balance. On the other hand their aren’t really any competing traits in that tier so i feel kind of meh about that tier in general

Anet gonna Anet. It was fine the way it was man. Anything fun is breaking to them. Staff is far from an OP weapon. I can understand if this trait affected something like GS then yeah I’d be semi ok, but this is just silly.

ICEverfrost.8567:

Plus how often do you overwrite Chaos Armor with Chaos Storm/Phase retreat or Staff 4 because you want to swap weapons.

The whole point of not being 20% CDR is that you should be able to go a bit over 20% if you do your rotation in a specific way, but if you are forced out of your optimal rotation you end up a bit below 20%.

8 seconds of Chaos Armor being what I’d usually get at best, 40% CDR was nuts if only 5 seconds, it was still 25%. They didn’t really think that through did they.

Now at 2% per tick, 8 seconds of Chaos Armor gives 16% CDR and at 5 seconds 10%. This is way too low, lets look at 3%.

3%
8 Seconds: 24% CDR
5 Seconds: 15% CDR

Well look at that, that almost looks balance Devs, wouldn’t you say.

Even if someone does get another full duration leap through a utility, that’s still only 11 seconds for 31%, and hey if your investing that much of your build into getting that, I’m fine with it.

What are you on about with this 8 seconds business? Chaos armor is 5 seconds long and you can get it twice just with staff skills. That’s 10 seconds optimally if you don’t bring glamors.

Personally I wish they would remove the protection from the trait and return it to 5% so that we can actually have something fun and unique to use. However anything is better than 2%.

Xenon.4537:

ICEverfrost.8567:

Plus how often do you overwrite Chaos Armor with Chaos Storm/Phase retreat or Staff 4 because you want to swap weapons.

The whole point of not being 20% CDR is that you should be able to go a bit over 20% if you do your rotation in a specific way, but if you are forced out of your optimal rotation you end up a bit below 20%.

8 seconds of Chaos Armor being what I’d usually get at best, 40% CDR was nuts if only 5 seconds, it was still 25%. They didn’t really think that through did they.

Now at 2% per tick, 8 seconds of Chaos Armor gives 16% CDR and at 5 seconds 10%. This is way too low, lets look at 3%.

3%
8 Seconds: 24% CDR
5 Seconds: 15% CDR

Well look at that, that almost looks balance Devs, wouldn’t you say.

Even if someone does get another full duration leap through a utility, that’s still only 11 seconds for 31%, and hey if your investing that much of your build into getting that, I’m fine with it.

What are you on about with this 8 seconds business? Chaos armor is 5 seconds long and you can get it twice just with staff skills. That’s 10 seconds optimally if you don’t bring glamors.

Personally I wish they would remove the protection from the trait and return it to 5% so that we can actually have something fun and unique to use. However anything is better than 2%.

Yeah. It is 10sec optimally. I think he was thinking about a blast finisher that gives you 3sec of chaos armor.

Make it 3%-3.5% and we’ll be happy. Staff desperately needed love. GS is already disproportionately favored.

Exciton.8942:

Yeah. It is 10sec optimally. I think he was thinking about a blast finisher that gives you 3sec of chaos armor.

Ah, my bad.

I’d rather they just changed them all back to a flat 20%, especially the torch one.

Ozzio.8024:

I’d rather they just changed them all back to a flat 20%, especially the torch one.

Obviously with current numbers, you will be better off with a flat 20% for both of these traits in most realistic situations.

It feels a little on the weak side, since to get at least 20% reduction on both Chaos Armor & Chaos Storm, you have to bring another ethereal combo field. Since in a typical 4, 5 -> 2 sequence, Chaos Storm doesn’t get the recharge reduction from the first usage of Chaos Armor. (Because it’s not currently recharging)

If you manage a 3rd or 4th chaos armor through yet another ethereal field, then you can manage better reduction, but only if the skills are already on cooldown. So it’s not nearly as easy to use as a guaranteed 20% reduction.

I do like the idea, I just think the reward (in terms of recharge reduction) isn’t quite there.

Of course it does. The whole point of the conditional recharge was that it should give you MORE of a benefit if you can keep it going. Now, it’s no better than a flat 20%, worse really. Overnerfed, as usual. So much for “rewarding active play”.

From my point of view, 2% is definitely not enough to use this trait over others.

And my problem is that it is impossible to evaluate a trait change in isolation; we have to evaluate whole traitlines. This change to Chaotic Dampening made me swap from Chaos line to Domination line, effectively changing a 06660 build into 66060 one, even if I still use a staff. To reiterate, for this staff user (me), Domination line became stronger than Chaos line in support/control build.

Why:

My playstyle is a fun, low-stealth control~support > damage. I play glassy (Berserker or Sinister or mix of those; Berserker or Rampager in sPvP).

When Staff had 5% recharge, I could share quite nice Protection, I could do the “boonstorm” and create area denials. It also forced an interesting decision: “do you use Chaos Armour when off cooldown and ‘waste it’ or do you use it when you should for defense”? Sure, I have lots of Protection, but Chaos Armour is more than this and it was sometimes worth more to NOT use Chaos Armour to maximize uptime but to wait. It actively changed the way I played.

Now with Staff on 2% recharge it is simply pointless to focus on Chaos Armours. Protection is still there and the trait DOES help, but Chaos line – which had 2 strong choices (Chaotic Dampening and Chaotic Interruption) has now one strong choice – grandmaster. And if you compare this to Domination line, you get the following traits working with my build:

- Blurred Inscriptions; this ones allows me to load Signet of Ether to recover the high iWarlock uptime, so I am able to do an iWarlock burst if needed; on top of that by using Signet of Ether I can drop 3 conditions (+ Mender’s Purity) and give Distortion to whole party. Combined with Inspiration GM trait it means that although I generate less boons, I share boons more often (and auto-Distort from time to time cleansing 1 condition). So it is a Chaotic Interruption class of a trait in this build; very strong choice.

- Power Block; here, weakness is the winner. Confusion + Weakness from interrupts is weaker than Confusion + Immobilize + something, but still works. Combined with a vigor nerf it means I have one more tool to deplete enemies’ endurance which is awesome in party play. And of course Halting Strike + recharge denial, which is also a very strong choice.

- Confounding Suggestion or in rare cases Empowered Illusions if I decide to go “turret iWarlock Berserker mesmer style”.

If you gave me Chaos line before the first patch hit (before everything became fun again, that is, before damage > sustain) I would go like: “WOW! Bountiful and Chaotic merged? I can get traited staff too? And wow, Manipulations have now Mirror and I can trait MassInvis?!”. But in the new world there are simply options STRONGER than the current Chaos line and – although I tried – for now I cannot see a build I would like to use which is able to capitalize on current Chaos better than, say, Domination or Illusions. Not even with a staff.

From MY POINT OF VIEW you may not agree with:

The problem is the amount of stealth we have, not the staff cooldowns. Mesmer was always about “quick, short stealths” to disengage or reposition not “lalala you will never see me while I burst you to death”. In practice, you can counter staff with range (example: LB ranger – which is why they fill a very important role – to counter glassy mobility classes) or boon corruption.

Staff becomes a problem in heavy stealth builds giving them too much sustain; I do see a condi build able to passively spam clones and phantasms staying in invis with PU (Sw/T + St, 06606 for example) with very low time of being visible, and then usually with Protection and Aegis (note St2 does not break stealth, neither does phantasm casting). But when I encounter something like that (basing on my experiences and different tests) I should be able to either outrun it or use Temporal Curtain to simply reflect/group those clones. I may not kill this mesmer, but I won’t die either.

Stealth is a problem, not Chaotic Dampening.

i think the thing is this trait can be too powerful if you choose to use more glamour fields and well under powered if you don’t. so if you want it to be effective you have to change your whole play style. they need to make the active CD something else or this will always be the case. or make it grand master and have you intentionally fit your build around it.

They nerfed the recharge bonus from 5% to 2%. This is a 60% nerf of the resulting absolute recharge bonus. What I do not understand is:

• Why didn’t they realize the power of this trait sooner? There were many here in the forums, who did the math in like 5s (well, a bit overestimated maybe^^) after they released the trait info.
• Why did they not go with 20% steps? Reducing it first to 4% recharge rate. And if that still was too much, they could have lowered it to 3%. But 2% is without a doubt too less of a benefit and I myself stopped using it.

I say the next step (and please not as late as 2 months in the future or so) would be to set the recharge bonus to something around 3 to 4%.

Perhaps we could get something like the ele traits that grant a flat -33% cooldown reduction +10% dmg or +190 precision to 5 skills
instead of ‘somewhere between 10-20% reduction to 3 of your skills if you do a bunch of stuff’