Guild Wars 2

So there was a thread about perma stealth and in it there seemed to be some ambiguity about how much the torch trait reduces cooldowns by. It says 1.5% recharge reduced but it seems more like 1.5s for every second in stealth.

The point of this thread is to discuss:

1. Is it over/under performing.
2. Should it really work by sitting in stealth to reduce the cool down.

With PU and the pledge I was having the cool down of the prestige at about 21.5s and with using mass invis you could get it down to about 13s which meant you could keep stacking stealth upon itself. I was able to get the phantasm down to about 16s with using the pledge, PU and any 6s stealth ability and 11.5s with PU and MI for constant stealth.

At the same time the cool down reduction with just using the torch skills is very lacking at being anywhere between 0 and 2s in reduction without any other stealth and only the trait The Pledge.

My personal feelings are that I don’t like how it promotes stealth camping and when combined with PU, makes for a balancing nightmare as well as giving stealth builds a very high uptime on torch abilities. It also isn’t as useful to game modes where sitting in stealth is detrimental to the game mode and so you may not get much benefit from the pledge.

Thoughts and opinions below and try to keep it civil.

My opinion is the same as it was when they first introduced this revised trait- give us back the flat cooldown reduction.
I like being able to use the torch in a variety of builds, some of which do not include:
A) other sources of stealth
B) the PU trait (or the chaos line, at all)

The trait goes from 2 extremes as it is now. Its powerful in a stealth-heavy PU troll build, but then borders on useless if your build doesn’t go all-in to focus on those things.

So how would you try to change it Mikkel?

I agree – encouraging stealth camping is not good, and it apart from the condition clear it is pretty pathetic if not taking PU and camping in stealth.

Revert it to 20% flat cooldown and be done with it.

I agree with all that is being said here, although the objective of a focus party is to camp in stealth and wait for the other team to reveal or to move around the blob without being seen and burst down the range. This is all easier if I have my own stealth > torch4 > gs2 > F1 combo and then also hop back into stealth as I swap weapons before combat and can then use cooldowns at my leisure. The aim is not to camp, but to out sustain the enemy which I am worried when running with thieves you can do vs. another focus group. Mindful I am running PU and The Pledge for this.

I’d put 20% back into torch, and shave the cooldown on iMage a little, and add another burning stack to the iMage’s attack. Or improve iMage’s attack speed by a fair bit.

At 20% cdr and condition removal on activation, I think The Pledge is plenty competitive. If you want to make it more interesting though, have it improve the burns on the torch in some way, maybe instead of buffing iMage.

iMage kinda sucks right now, and The Pledge just reinforces its only use: too much stealth.

Yeah I was thinking of things like -1s for each stack of burning or something like that to keep the spirit of an active cool down reduction but quite frankly I think 20% as it was is just a lot simpler to balance around. Especially with PU.

In theory I really like conditional recharge skills.

However, the pledge specifically has an issue in that it requires you to run a stealth-centric build, and more specifically, it’s power depends massively on whether you pick PU or not.

That’s… bad design, IMO.

A better one would be Reduces CD by X every time you deal burning damage to a target. Both torch skills provide burning, both can multi-hit giving it a clear focus, however it’s not as other-trait-dependent as the current one is.

Yeah I had thought of something like that Carighan, the question is, does it promote active play and to essentially keep you seen and in combat as well as the limit on the recharge etc.

Perhaps it would be worth changing it to everytime you inflict burn just to see how it goes then if it’s not having the desired effect go 20% CD.