Guild Wars 2

Skill flow and synchronicity is an important aspect of class design. You want skills to interact well together and generally make sense irrespective of class balance. If a class needs to be brought in-line with other classes, it should not be done at the expense of the play flow of that class, unlike what occurred with today’s changes.

With a 60 second cooldown Strength of the Pack fit in with both Signet of the Wild (60 sec cd) and Quickening Zypher (50 sec cd) for buff rotations. However now with SotP at an increased cooldown, everything is out of sync.

Now you’ve got QZ with a 50 sec cooldown, SotW with 60, and SopT with 75, when everything flows best at 60 seconds (48 when reduced with traits).

Increasing the SotP cooldown does little to balance the class at the cost of making the skill flow awkward. Please revert the SotP change and seek better ways to address whatever you were seeking in this balance update.

I’m also salty about this nerf but your arguemnt regarding “skill flow issues”, is very clunky.

If you take the trait SoTP is at a 60s CD, they nerfed SoTP and WHAO because of how they perform at their absolute max efficiency (which was broken, I used it regularly), and SOTP isn’t bad with the CD increase either, it’s just annoying since it used to be 60(48)S CD instead of 75(60)

By skill flow do you mean not able to use it without thinking on recharge? Because that’s pretty much what it was.

Justine.6351:

By skill flow do you mean not able to use it without thinking on recharge? Because that’s pretty much what it was.

How the cool-down of a skill lines up with other skills and mechanics that would be used along side it, is how I’m defining skill flow.

It’s not a good aesthetics for a skill to come off cool-down too long before the skill you would combo it with recharges. QZ will come back 25 seconds early and SotW 15 seconds, before you can use the rotation.

The skills themselves synchronize very well, but now their cooldowns are all over the place. A few months back everything used to be 60 seconds, but now its 50, 60, 75. And if you want to restore any sort of skill flow you need to give up Companion’s Might, which is a fairly important trait, for Resounding Timbre solely for the CD reduction since the extra swiftness/regeneration are useless for a physical ranger. You’d be giving up something important just to bandaid the cooldowns.