Guild Wars 2

We want to know your thoughts and opinions Roy about the Phase Traversal.

• What are you thinking about the skill?
• Why did you wanted to add cooldown to the skill or was the decision in your hands?
• Could the cooldown be 3s instead of 5s or could it also be energy based?

I hope we can discuss and think about some ideas together and get also some information from arenanet balance team.

Currently this decision feels like balance team said you have to add cd to the skill.

We need more information and communication ANet about the changes and why you feel that the changes are nessessary (like you guys do in livestreams) so that we can understand the changes and also mention different possible solutions to solve unbalanced skills that you guys thought.

The most obvious answer (to me at least) is that increasing energy cost upset the flow of skills too much, and therefore the only way to apply a nerf was to add a cd. Remember that a lot of our high energy cost skills are being deemed unusable. At 20 it was already sitting at a high cost, especially for a spell that only gives mobility. Honestly as a heavy armor wearing class we really don’t feel too terrible with the way it is currently, it just means using it in a smarter fashion then we were before.

I agree with OP. Before xpac launch, Roy was always here to answer any questions we had. Now he’s about as quiet as all the other devs. I get that he is obviously very busy, but it would be nice if he could give us his opinion or something.

I’m not saying that he is wrong, I just don’t think those are the correct questions to ask. For one thing he is asking the question, “is this your fault or someone else’s?” The third question is essentially the same as the first, in regards to the answer Roy would logically be able to give.

Sorry there is just no way Roy is gonna jump in and say “yup that’s all me” or “no… that is the guy down the hall.” As a design studio they stand together and the answer to any question such as this to any professional studio will be, “We, [insert company here], made this choice due to internal testing and data collected.”

The only thing wrong with the first question is the fact that you solo him out. If you asked for the design team’s thoughts on the matter they would be more likely to give feedback.

Why did they decide to nerf it? What was the problem that they were trying to fix? Knowing this answer would help us understand why they nerfed the skill the way they did.

Had they found the skill to be too strong in every single scenario, they would have increased its energy cost or nerfed its effect. Simple, and it would solve the problem, right? But they didn’t do any of that, which implies that was not the problem in the first place.

The added CD implies that they decided to nerf this skill because of how strong it was when used several times consecutively. Because that’s exactly what a CD is meant to do. If that is true, than the addition of the cooldown makes perfect sense and I can’t of anything better that they could have done.

Most people that are upset by this change do not understand that the more tools that a developer has to balance a skill, the easier it will be to target and fix the main problems without creating secondary consequences. Balancing skills around cooldowns and energy costs gives to developers much more freedom to make better balance decisions than simply balancing around one or the other exclusively. Some people believe that the Revenant should be balanced exclusively through energy costs, regardless of when that might be appropriate or not. We have to be careful of that, because while it may make sense for some skills, it may not make sense for others.

so much this. the more dynamic you make the skill the easier it is to balance. If they find that the nerf is too hard they will lower the cd. If not it will stay the way it is. But I don’t think some of us realize just how much it would break/change the flow of gameplay to just increase/lower energy cost.