Guild Wars 2

Thief/ranger main here.

All of you mesmers probably feel incredibly frustrated with this new update, and you might be surprised that almost every other class player understands where you are coming from.

Yes, mesmer did need tweaking to adjust several of the traits – it was agreed that there were some incredibly overpowered traits that had no counterplay.

But ANET once again revealed how disconnected they are from the players and community.

They keep preaching diversity and balance, but it seems like everything they do is a kneejerk reaction and nowhere near the calculated, logical response most balance teams have. They nerf mantras but not PU, why? They nerf rampage for warriors but don’t think about the lack of synergy for many warrior traits. Instead of balancing taunt and fixing shortbow range, they buff offhand skills.

The consistency between their balances is that they…
1. Don’t really know how to balance. You can check their Linkedin, they were hiring for a PVP balancer and that was several months ago. Who knows how they are actually approaching balancing.
2. They preach diversity but create updates that do nothing but hurt diversity (d/p thieves? what else is viable?)
3. They don’t follow through. Every update they make comes with the promise that tweaks will be made and updates will be built on. How many times do they promise things and not make fixes/communicate with the players?

I don’t feel incredibly bad that there were mesmer nerfs, but it showcases that they don’t understand what needed to be nerfed and what buffed.

Just take a moment and think of how many traits on all the classes are garbage and how many are so overpowered you are forced to take them. Think of how many really great PVE or PVP builds for each class there really are. And be disappointed.

Hopefully this changes with HoT, but chances are…a company with huge issues on their dev/balance/design side will continue to have the same issues later on.

I feel fine with the changes, but I multiclass so I’m not biases (as much). I’m glad that mantras got nerfed, that kitten was pure cheesey godmode. Sucks that my PU shatter bursts will lack a little without that GS bounce, but its a fair shave imo, that loss in 2k damage won’t make a huge difference in the longrun.

The condi builds I play for funsies will be pretty much the same, so thats good.

What you said about mantras is exactly their problem on the balance side. Instead of sitting down and doing the hard work of thinking through viability/balance, they go the incredibly lazy route of just straight up nerfing the mantras. What about PU? What about thinking through how to really increase diversity?

That didn’t happen, because they are straight up lazy and won’t take the time to really work with the community to make the game better.

Because PU isn’t an issue in PvP, mantra was , and it quite broken but you’re right – they balance horribly and always choose the lazy route, not only with mesmer but almost every class. They don’t care about WvW balanced as much.

^^Right, but that opens up the bag for another issue. It would take so much more effort for them to balance the game for PVE and PVP/WVW right?

They need to manage both sides of the game differently or atleast find a better way to balance between the three. For instance they made stealth reveal longer in pvp vs pve, and that is fine. Why not create more changes surrounding each game mode rather than create a 1 size fits all solution? Oh yea, effort.

blitzkrieg.2451:

They don’t care about WvW balanced as much.

Yes and no.

The problem with WvW is WvW. By that I mean it is hopelessly imbalanced all throughout.

You can have Johnny Greenshoes turn up at level 24 with blue gear of whatever he found, boosted to 80 and no traits.

On the other side you could have Zeus McPurplebolts who has full ascended everything, legendaries for on the fly stat change with foods, traits, those expensive runes and no small ring to hold him back.

Short of turning it into a choose amulet, rune and sigil mode like PvP they can’t balance it, likewise a trait overperforming there but nowhere else isn’t grounds to nerf as there’s no way to pin down what aspect is wrong or if it’s a L2P issue.

I’m actually very pleased with the update….

I currently Main a Ranger and am leveling a Mesmer for WvW utility, and all in all I think the bug fixes/changes are a step in the right direction. Am I a little sad the Mantras got hit so hard? Absolutely. But I also know that, overall, both the classes I’m playing atm are in a solid place and having fun!

Why would they nerf pu? The main mantra build went inspirations.

lol watch the QQ fly as everyone respec to pu max shatter. They nerfed lockdown but not shatter because all the mesmers in wts teams are playing pu shatter. This patch is just forcing us melt people even faster than before.

Mogar.9216:

lol watch the QQ fly as everyone respec to pu max shatter. They nerfed lockdown but not shatter because all the mesmers in wts teams are playing pu shatter. This patch is just forcing us melt people even faster than before.

That would be a balance. Current pu cant deal well with condI burst.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Mogar.9216:

lol watch the QQ fly as everyone respec to pu max shatter. They nerfed lockdown but not shatter because all the mesmers in wts teams are playing pu shatter. This patch is just forcing us melt people even faster than before.

That would be a balance. Current pu cant deal well with condI burst.

If you are in a team you don’t need condi cleanse as your team mates will do that for you. When you are not in a team you can simply replace portal with mantra cleanse .

Mogar.9216:

Daniel Handler.4816:

Mogar.9216:

lol watch the QQ fly as everyone respec to pu max shatter. They nerfed lockdown but not shatter because all the mesmers in wts teams are playing pu shatter. This patch is just forcing us melt people even faster than before.

That would be a balance. Current pu cant deal well with condI burst.

If you are in a team you don’t need condi cleanse as your team mates will do that for you. When you are not in a team you can simply replace portal with mantra cleanse .

Sure they will. Nothing has changed in condi removal in pvp but everything has changed in application.

I don’t understand this thread.

The nerf to Mirror Blade was possibly the easiest way to bring our burst in line with similar classes (thieves).

PU is useless in PvP and they balance around PvP.
Nothing to see there.

The only change that really stings is the one to Mantra recharges, because they go back to being very clumsy.

All the rest were bugfixes.

I’m not unhappy with the update. We really needed the nerfs. Just look at the subforum. Everyone is happy, clapping their hands because it was such a needed change. Because once it becomes common knowledge that mesmer is not OP anymore, all the people who were just there to play the flavor of the month will vanish and the rest can go back to be special snowflakes. Being special snowflake is what mesmers want to be after all.

We can justify every nerf instead of realizing what you wrote in your post. This whole company has no clue how to balance a game, classes, pvp, pve, anything. Thus they “balance” based on forum/reddit complaint posts. “Ah yes, we have to do something about profession X because there are 90 reddit posts complaining about it”

Curious how we had to deal with turret engineers for several months before they were finally taken down. They never changed pewpew longbow rangers even though there have been a lot of complaints about those too. I guess Anet developers have tunnel vision.

Probably because this forum blows itself up. Not that much self hate in other forums.

I thought they were fair and reasoanble balances.

denis.9487:

Probably because this forum blows itself up. Not that much self hate in other forums.

No, Anet blows us up. We ask for surgical precision to cut away the cancer, but nooo, ANet has to use their frickin lasers.