Guild Wars 2

So The Pledge trait is being changed to:

The Pledge:

Torch skills remove 1 condition from you when activated. While you are stealthed torch skills recharge 1.5% of their maximum recharge every second.

The recharge on this is terrible compared to what it is now (-20% recharge). To put this in to prospective you need to be in stealth for about 14sec back to back to gain approximately the current -20% charge to both torch skills. Also note accumulating a percentage recharge every 1 sec gives diminishing returns. Even with PU (+100% stealth time) I would prefer having the full percentage up front.

I noticed they changed their minds on doing the same “active play” on the Greatsword and Sceptre trait, so why leave it on The Pledge. Having a trait give its full recharge reduction on selection means you can time it better in rotations because it has a fixed recharge speed, but now it will be all over the place.

What do you guys think?

I agree, although you don’t have the diminishing returns as the skill says “of the maximum recharge” so it always takes 0.kitten per second of Stealth.

As you said, pretty terrible IF we’re understanding how this works. I was going to make a thread like this, but I felt that it’s so bad that surely I’m not understanding something about this.

They’re completely incorrectly balancing this on the assumption of a PU build using MI, and ducking in Stealth the entire time just to get TP up or chuckle another still fairly poor sounding pMage. (Util all of these projectile attacks get at least a 50% speed increase, they’re all basically bad. Scepter, Staff, and pMage all suffer from this terribly slow projectile. They fix this for almost everyone else in the game, but leave ours crawling along failing miserably.)

I hope they go back to the 20% flat reduction on The Pledge. It’s just not a good idea with the percent reductions. If you raise it to something reasonable like 5%, then it’s a bit OPd for PU builds, but anything else means you’re completely dependent on remaining Stealthed for prolonged periods just to get back that 20% we’ve always had on traited Torch.

Flat 20% is balanced, and a reasonable return on investment.

Agreed! Should have changed the values on Pu instead of affecting the recharge on prestige while all or most (honestly I don’t remember if it’s all) other classes weapons recharge traits act better than this.

I agree. It encourages players to sit in stealth for ages to get the same recharge back – and seems to be directly tied in with PU – as if no other build will be using the torch…

I would like to see this modified before next week, even just stick the flat 20% recharge back on with condition removal. It doesn’t need to be changed.

I tend to agree. The 5% per second during Chaos Armor that Staff gets seems way more feasible. With it, the torch by itself can only grant 15% reduction with the potential for more if you go for an invisibility build.

It’s especially curious if they intend that it be good enough that someone will weigh whether or not to take it. The current torch trait is nice, but it competes with Shattered Concentration (and the GM traits are good enough that if you were to go 6 into Power, it would not be to take a second Master trait). In the future, it will be in competition with Compounding Power.

I can run torch without the trait currently. If the future trait were the same as the existing one, I might consider taking it over Compounding Power (but probably not), depending on opposing comp. As it is, I don’t see it being worthwhile.

I might just end up taking Compounding Power cuz this change is just ridiculous.