Guild Wars 2

There was one change between Beta and Release that I haven’t seen anyone talk about here at all. The trait Live Vicariously was changed to have an internal cooldown of 1 second while getting a massive buff to the amount it heals.

For reference the old version:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/index.php?title=Live_Vicariously&oldid=1075684

and the new one:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Live_Vicariously

I think this change is a major contribution to the slowed down charge time of Astral Force and I think this might have been an unintended part of the change. With the old version, if you healed 5 allies with one skill you got 10 charge units for astral force, now you only get 6. In addition to that are of course the nerfs to the charging through healing, both combined result in an insane reduction of the Celestial Avatar charge speed.

I will absolutely give the people that balance the spec the benefit of the doubt here and say that this might have been unintentional. If you don’t think about the Astral Force charge part, the change sounds quite nice actually (Healing amount was more than tripled), but the Astral Force synergy makes this probably a larger nerf to Celestial Avatar availability than any other change between the Beta weekend and now. Interestingly the 1 second CD version interacts with troll unguent only every 2 seconds even though TU ticks every second, which is pretty annoying considering reducing the trait ICD by a millisecond would give a huge boost to the TU healing.

What should be done at this point is to reevaluate the trait and the way it interacts with the Druids CA charging. Either considerably buff the amount of Astral Force you gain through healing (because your nerf didn’t take the trait change into account) or revert the trait change to the old version that wasn’t overpowered in any way.

Wow good catch, didn’t even notice that but it explains why I feel more sustainy.

Oh my. Another stealth nerf unannounced change.

How did they think that putting an ICD on Live Vicariously as well as nerfing the AF gain from healing, as well as a 10s GCD as well as making it degen OOC was ever going to work?

This trait was far better before.

its probably better with an ICD, because it keeps the trait more consistent between smaller and larger fights. still easier to gain AF with more allies around, but not as much.

The trait change just makes troll unguent even more superior compared to other heal. They really need to rethink how they want to proc all this stuff. Traits based % instead of per tick (same for af genration) would be much better and not require clunky ICDs. Just let that trait give us some healing power …