Guild Wars 2

Is there any reason behind balance stance giving only 5 stacks of stability while dolyak signet giving 10?
It would seem to me that balance stance is more “stability” oriented than dolyak signet, I mean, it’s “balanced” stance afterall, and without changing it to what stab would originally be it got changed to 5 stacks instead of 10?
Guardian “stand your ground” alone gives 5 stacks to a whole party with a lot less a CD, along with the retail it gives, so whhhyyyyy do warriors recieve less on a skill with a longer CD?

All AoE are half the stacks of the single target version utilities except for Balanced Stance. Stand Your Ground is 5 stacks AoE, on a lower timer (and can be further reduced with a trait reduction).

So unless Balanced Stance received a cooldown reduction, everyone will now be using Dolyak Signet instead.

The ANet thought was probably that well, Balanced Stance, also provides the Swiftness boon so it’s ‘balanced’. Pun intended

SO basically, Guardian have 5 sec durration and 5 stacks, also he apply it to 5 ppl! WHile warrior have self stability whcih last 11 sec and give…5 stacks! Something is odd here anet, just dunno what….

The stance is 5 Stacks offset by lower cool down and Swiftness – I can see what they were thinking.

This week is going to be interesting as peeps adjust and theory craft.

The stance does nothing for you unless you activate it, unlike +180 toughness you receive from signet when you don’t use it. Swiftness on it is a joke anyway, did anyone seriously use this skill for it’s swiftness?

RIP Balanced stance

They killed balanced stance for warriors, diminishing the profession yet again. Balance stance was your go-to skill to deal with CC in groups and zergs for 8 up to 10 seconds. Now that the system has been switched to stacks… G freaking G. The least they could have done was to make it last full 40 seconds, and not 8 mere seconds of severely limited stability.

Balanced stance has a much lower cooldown even vs a traited Signet and also gives swiftness.

I will personally switch to the Signet because I mostly use it for execute/revival situations which dont require mobility, but absolutely require reliable stability.

But yeah massively increasing the duration of balanced stance to give it more of a stance feeling would be nice, even if it means losing another stack or two.

• Fixed a bug that granted Dolyak Signet 10 Stacks of Stability. Dolyak Singet now grants 1 Stack of Stability and transforms the Warrior into a Dolyak for 1 hour.

Seriously, balanced Stance needs 10 Stacks too.

I’m not sure why it wasn’t at least 8 stacks. It just seems a bit odd that they’d give it the same amount of stacks as SYG, when the latter is an AoE ability on a lower cooldown.

I’d still let it have less than dolyak signet since dolyak signet has a longer cooldown and doesn’t give swiftness… so keep dolyak signet at 10 stacks and boost balanced stance to 8.

I thought I was the only one that would swap to Dolyak Signet. There is no reason to ever use Balanced Stance again. It should be at least 8 stacks.

I actually did use Balanced Stane for swiftness in my Greatsword / Rifle build (mostly bar compression and refusal to use Signet of Rage because of those stupid yellow fart bubbles).

Now it’s a done deal, I’m using Dolyak Signet instead, and switched out Greatsword for Sword+Warhorn.

the reason why its 5 is that you guys have access to dolyak and they dont want you having 20stacks of stab back to back. 15 is bad enough.

Don’t compare our stability to a guardian, can’t really be done.

You can compare DS to BS though.
DS: 60 second cooldown, 180 toughness (if you don’t use it), 10 stacks of stability.
BS: 40 second cooldown, swiftness bonus, 5 stacks of stability.

If you would simply multiply by cooldown, Balanced Stance should have 2/3 of the stacks of DS, so ~7. So that means comparing the swiftness to 180 toughness. Keep in mind that the toughness is lost upon using DS. So when you use the skill, DS gets you 5 extra stacks of stability whereas BS gets you swiftness and 20 seconds lower cooldown.

The question you need to ask yourself, is whether or not you will need an additional 5 stacks during the 8 seconds the skill is active. Keep in mind that a lot of people won’t waste their CC on you if they know they can just ignore you for 8 seconds, then CC the crap out of you. The only situations in which you would need those extra stacks, IMO, is either large group fighting in WvW or maybe teamfights in PvP. So, if you opt to do much of those, go with DS for sure.

There will still be merit to running both BS and DS, for the same reasons as before.

The problem I see, is that DS has a cooldown reduction trait, and a significant one at that. 48 second cooldown vs 40 second cooldown suddenly makes BS look incredibly inferior. Because let’s face it, you take either skill primarily for the stability, and at a 48 second cooldown, DS will provide it arguably better.

A solution to this would be to either buff the stacks of Balanced Stance – 7 seems like a good starting point – or reduce the cooldown to 30-35 seconds.