Guild Wars 2

I didn’t have time to do a full gauntlet of tests. But the small sample I collected suggests they “fixed” the cat critical damage bug by simply lowering the normal damage range, rather than restoring the previous critical damage range.

Prior to the Feb patch, the cats’ Maul skill did:
- about 2x the damage of a regular hit on the first attack
- about 4x the damage of a regular hit on the second attack

After the Feb patch, Maul did:
- about 1.5x the damage of a regular hit on the first attack
- about 3.5x the damage of a regular hit on the second attack
Criticals were goofy though

The numbers I’m seeing for Maul after this patch are:
- about 1.25x the damage of a regular hit on the first attack
- about 2.5x the damage of a regular hit on the second attack

Looking over the data, it looks like the Feb critical “bug” was caused by the coder lowering the minimum damage in the skill’s range but not the maximum, then doing the opposite for the damage range on criticals. I dunno why they’d code normal and crit damage ranges separately, or even code damage ranges at all when you can just code a coefficient and a + / – 10% spread, but that’s the hypothesis the data I collected best matches.

i.e. They intended to nerf cat maul in February, they just botched it resulting in the critical damage bug we saw. And this patch they’ve nerfed it correctly.

Just to reiterate, it does not affect overall DPS that much, since Maul is on a 20 sec cooldown. But it seriously reduces the cat’s burst damage. And Anet seems to be on a roll trying to reduce burst damage of late.

Yet another constructive post that ArenaNet will ignore and hope that we don’t notice.

Keep the data coming and maybe one day they will visit the Ranger section.

They seems to destroy every possible build of our profession. I wonder when traps will also be nerfed.

Someone created a kittenin build? Cmon guys, lets nerf their cats!

and i just reset my traits for a beastmaster build thanks to the QZ nerf and now even cats got nerfed lol. Thanks god i didn’t buy any gear and was just testing how it goes. What i am going to do with my ranger, WHAT?

What the heck! So should we all just go a GS trap build?

Solandri.9640:

I didn’t have time to do a full gauntlet of tests. But the small sample I collected suggests they “fixed” the cat critical damage bug by simply lowering the normal damage range, rather than restoring the previous critical damage range.

Prior to the Feb patch, the cats’ Maul skill did:
- about 2x the damage of a regular hit on the first attack
- about 4x the damage of a regular hit on the second attack

After the Feb patch, Maul did:
- about 1.5x the damage of a regular hit on the first attack
- about 3.5x the damage of a regular hit on the second attack
Criticals were goofy though

The numbers I’m seeing for Maul after this patch are:
- about 1.25x the damage of a regular hit on the first attack
- about 2.5x the damage of a regular hit on the second attack

Looking over the data, it looks like the Feb critical “bug” was caused by the coder lowering the minimum damage in the skill’s range but not the maximum, then doing the opposite for the damage range on criticals. I dunno why they’d code normal and crit damage ranges separately, or even code damage ranges at all when you can just code a coefficient and a + / – 10% spread, but that’s the hypothesis the data I collected best matches.

i.e. They intended to nerf cat maul in February, they just botched it resulting in the critical damage bug we saw. And this patch they’ve nerfed it correctly.

Just to reiterate, it does not affect overall DPS that much, since Maul is on a 20 sec cooldown. But it seriously reduces the cat’s burst damage. And Anet seems to be on a roll trying to reduce burst damage of late.

Rofl…

So Guard Nerf and Cat Burst Nerf…
Gee wonder why they did that..

The worst part is the stealth nerf aspect of it in Feb. It was obvious to most BMs that relied on cats for burst that something was off. Solandri figured it out then.

I’m surprised that more rangers haven’t commented on this.

I’ve played other mmo’s but no other anet games. Did they stealth nerf things a lot in GW1?

Pendleton.6385:

The worst part is the stealth nerf aspect of it in Feb. It was obvious to most BMs that relied on cats for burst that something was off. Solandri figured it out then.

I’m surprised that more rangers haven’t commented on this.

I’ve played other mmo’s but no other anet games. Did they stealth nerf things a lot in GW1?

They were always very upfront with their balancing in gw1. They generally had HUGE patch notes for balancing listing out anything and everything they changed. I don’t recall a single time they actually changed something and didn’t let the community know about it.

I wonder why the change in their philosophy ….

Crystin Cox!

Oh wait… that’s the cause of RNG and gem store gamble…..

Ok, I managed to do some more extensive testing and… I dunno what to say. They must have an intern fixing up this part of the code or something. Cat maul looks like it’s half-fixed. The data is so messed up I’m gonna test it again this weekend with a huge sample just to be sure.

The good news (if you can call it that) is that the two parts that appear to still be broken shouldn’t really affect DPS, as one is broken high and the other is broken low, and they kinda cancel each other out. So I’m not even sure if I should submit a bug report on it and risk having whoever is working on it break it even more.

In terms of averages, I didn’t see anything that contradicts my initial post.