Guild Wars 2

• Added a 2-second grace period between exiting combat and the start of adrenaline decay.

This is long overdue, and much needed. 2 seconds is a bit short though.

• Mending: This skill’s healing value per level has been increased by 25%. Healing power contribution has been increased by 20%. Fixed a bug that indicated that this ability removed 2 conditions when it actually heals 3.

Also long overdue (Can’t believe it took that long to fix the tooltip text)

• Healing Signet: The passive healing based on level from this signet has been increased by 5%.

Why? This passive was already the strongest passive heal in the game.

• “To the Limit!”: This skill’s healing value per level has been increased by 40%.

This is needed. Thanks

• Throw Axe: The aftercast delay of this skill has been reduced by 0.5 seconds. The cooldown of this skill has been reduced from 10 seconds to 8 seconds.
• Cyclone Axe: This skill’s damage has been increased by 57%.
• Dual Strike: This skill’s damage has been increased by 33%.

I didn’t think these needed damage buffs, but ok.

• Whirling Axe: The PvP and PvE versions of this skill have been remerged, resulting in a 52% damage increase in PvE areas.

Also long overdue, but doesn’t change the fact that it has an identity struggle with the superior Hundred Blades in PVE and still lacks utility other than being a whirl finisher.

• Pommel Bash: The recharge of this skill has been reduced from 15 seconds to 12 seconds.
• Crushing Blow: The recharge of this skill has been reduced from 15 seconds to 12 seconds and its damage has been increased by 20%.
• Final Thrust: The recharge of this skill has been reduced from 15 seconds to 12 seconds.
• Fierce Blow: The recharge of this skill has been reduced from 12 seconds to 6 seconds. Its weakness duration has been reduced from 8 seconds to 4 seconds.
• Hammer Shock: The recharge of this skill has been reduced from 12 seconds to 10 seconds.
• Staggering Blow: The recharge of this skill has been reduced from 20 seconds to 18 seconds.
• Backbreaker: The recharge of this skill has been reduced from 30 seconds to 25 seconds.
• Aimed Shot: This skill now applies 5 stacks of vulnerability for 8 seconds to struck enemies. The damage of this skill has been increased by 28%.
• Volley: This skill now pierces by default.
• Kill Shot: This skill now pierces by default.
• Repeating Shot: This skill now pierces by default.
• Forceful Shot: This skill now pierces by default.
• Split Shot: Fixed a skill fact bug that indicated this ability only pierced with Crack Shot.

Didn’t think these changes were needed, but are “nice-to-have”

• Crack Shot: This trait no longer grants piercing to rifles or harpoon guns. This trait now grants bonus adrenaline when striking enemies with the base skills of these weapons.
• Brutal Shot: This ability will now roll the warrior backward (about 400 distance) when the shot is fired. This ability now immobilizes struck enemies for 1.5 seconds.

Indirectly buffed warrior’s sprint. Makes it a more viable option to take over crack shot since rifle 4 removes immobilize and movement speed is better than adrenaline gain, since warriors have plenty of access to adrenaline gain + piercing shots will hit multiple targets.

• Berserker Stance: This skill now grants resistance for 3 seconds every 3 seconds instead of preventing conditions from being applied to you. Its duration has been increased to 9 seconds.

Mixed feelings about this. Understand the inception of resistance made berserker stance a less chosen option, unsure if this is in the right direction though.

• Adrenal Health: The passive healing based on level from this trait has been increased by 15%.

Another lazy fix / still punsihes warriors for using up adrenaline

Berserker

• Scorched Earth: Enemies are now able to be struck by this skill only once every 0.5 seconds.

Understandable balance

• Outrage: This skill now grants 5 adrenaline when activated and 2 bonus adrenaline for each nearby foe.

Didn’t change much

• Shattering Blow: This skill now blocks all attacks for its duration and grants 2 stacks of stability for 2 seconds. Its adrenaline gain has been increased to 10.

The “duration” is tiny the block has limited use. Players won’t be using this to block attacks because long cooldown. Identity remains for condition warriors in PVE.

• Wild Blow: Increased adrenaline gain to 10 and moved adrenaline gain to occur on activation rather than on hit. Removes blind and weakness before the attack hits. Increased secondary knockback radius from 180 to 240.
• Sundering Leap: This skill now grants 10 adrenaline when activated and an additional 20 adrenaline if it hits any target.

Understandable changes. Wild blow had poor usability in PVE and PVP, has identity issues. Worked as a gimmicky CC on long cooldown, like physical skills HINT HINT.

• Blood Reckoning: This skill’s functionality has changed. When activated, this skill heals for a small amount (3,230 at level 80 with 0 healing power), grants 10 adrenaline, and recharges all burst skills. For 5 seconds afterward, 10% of all outgoing damage is converted to healing. Reduced recharge from 25 seconds to 20 seconds.

Removed the 25% critical hit chance. Ruined this as the choice for PVE warriors.

• Headbutt: Increased range to 300.

ok.

• King of Fires: This trait’s functionalty has changed. It now gives fire shield on a critical hit (15-second internal cooldown). Using berserker skills detonates any fire shield currently applied, inflicting 3 stacks of burning for 3 seconds to nearby foes. Increases outgoing burning duration by 33%.

Don’t understand WHY (1)the change to drop fire spreading is a good idea, (2) the burning duration increase is still there. Burnzerkers deal a kittenton of damage in PVE

• Savage Instinct: The conditions removed by this trait have been increased from 1 to 2.

ok

Lets also ignore the elephant(s) in the room

• Intraprofession balance issues still exist (Traits: looking at unsuspecting foe, burst precision, dual wielding, cull of the weak, sundering mace, Rousing Resilience, leg specialist, powerful synergy, vengeful return, inspiring battle standard, heightened focus, merciless hammer, and pretty much everything on berserker specialization, fast hands)
• Killshot / gunflame still OP (despite what you think, it’s NOT ok to oneshot people from max HP)
• Arenanet just put a bandage on warrior’s sustain issue, no real fix

Agree with everything. It’s mostly a bunch of underwhelming “that’s nice…. I guess” stuff with a couple of notably annoying things and some decent buffs to healing.

I agree with the OP. Overall though I think it’s a case where they don’t know what to do…so they make as many small changes as possible and see if it makes us ‘balanced’. The fact gunflame is still there really speaks that they have no idea if any of the changes will fix anything. Alot of the cd didn’t really need to be touched imo…mace skills sure, but final thrust and others not really.

I keep trying to make use of Rousing Resilence, but because it competes with 2 of the best traits Warrior has.

It’s not a bad trait, but its location makes it undesirable. Maybe lower the bonus toughness and swap it for a Master trait? Merciless Hammer could do with the same.

So warrior had issues with conditions PREPATCH, now lets nerf zerker stance so baddies can still endlessly spam conditions (now with Viper +condi duration) and corrupt em for even more damage so we instant die as soon as the stance wears off.

Oh well, at least I won’t get insulted when I down people for playing op classes.

Just a note that the 2 second grace period only applies to when you exit combat, so if you want to use a skill to gain adrenaline immediately before combat is it still immediately gone.

This is my bad when I do it, but sometimes I shoot rifle and anticipating it hits, use signet of fury. Well, you know what happens, when you don’t hit there is no gunflame follow up because you can’t enter berserker because adrenaline is immediately decreasing. So even here it is only a half hearted buff. IMO is should be at least 5 seconds before you lose adrenaline you gained.

It kind of shows that they are clueless that pretty much all they did was change some rifle skills which didn’t need to be changed (unless gun flame was going to be nerfed, which it wasn’t), added damage to offhand axe, and reduced some skill recharged.

The healing buffs are meh. Heal sig is still the best but the sustain is not sufficient because we did not get any other defenses, in fact berserks stance got worse. So we are still most likely stuck with triple stance of some sort, outrage or dolyak unless it is a pot shot rifle build. The healing skills needed reduced recharge in addition to the increased healing or something else that makes them useful like protection or resistance. Until there is some other form of sustain every utility skill needs to be used for sustain unless the build is something niche.

For hammer the reduced CD is nice but the hammer trait is still hard to take so it is still in a bad spot. The only things that I said, oh nice, to was stagger blow. But what the hammer really suffers from is bad animations and aftercasts that make the hammer feel clunky and laggy. My god, I had not played much hammer since HOT and play it the other day, earth shaker was so bad for its animation. Make hammer feel fluid. With the release of HOT the slow attacks with aftercats and big animations mean a bunch of them just plain miss. Sometimes from dodge but a lot of times because condis are flying around that make it hard to play (chill, blind, aegis, weakness).

I feel warrior is pretty much the same except for Rifle is better. But everyone was having fun getting 1 shot by a warrior right? Lets add to that instead of trying to fix the class. Oh, lets reduce some skill recharges on to create the illusion we cared and actually tried to do something.

Oh, and no base line fast hands.

The dumpster fire known as warrior continues to burn.

In a nutshell, I agree with everyone. I am very disappointed in the patch notes,

There is A LOT of work that needs to be done in terms of balance (interprofessional AND intraprofessional aspects), but instead, the balance patch was limited to a narrow scope and only addressed certain parts as opposed to everything in whole.

I made a post a while back proposing arenanet to take balance more seriously, and the advice wasn’t heeded
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/ANET-Take-more-time-if-needed

I created a thorough breakdown of the warrior profession, and designed a complete rebalance, and the advice wasn’t heeded
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SHhAr84r7L7sKK4B_hfHxBWp5cgt3fsLAh0EvlDUKnQ/edit?pref=2&pli=1#gid=852159247

These LAZY BALANCE PATCHES are destroying guild wars 2’s entrance into the “E-Sports” scene, with ridiculously volatile balance ideas and lazy fixes, such as modifications to cooldown percentage and number fixes, when there are CLEAR USABILITY FLAWS IN MECHANICS

Good thing is that Mercenary’s Amulet. Signet Hambow became strong again.
Stances are good because scales with boon duration(Vigilant + Leadership rune), but Last Stand still weak. Last stand could decrease recharge in 20% and have Empowered trait merged with him to become paired with cleansing ire.
Then change Frenzi, Balance Stance and Endure Pain to every 2s grants Quickness(2s), Stability(x2 for 2s) and Protection + Aegis(2s each) for 4s for a total of 6s of each stance(with 0 concentration)
Berserker stance isn’t granting full adrenaline. Could grants 10 adrenaline and resistance(2s) every 2s for 6s.

I like the patch overall.

I’ll go into a comprehensive feedback when I get a chance, but I will ask why people were expecting something more substantial? Were you guys expecting enough buffs to make us godlike?

Just curious.

As always, lazy way to patch things and “balance” the game. Root problem is still there.. aaaaaaaand there’s no wars again.

Agree with OP.

The adrenaline decay “buff” (two second grace-period) is pretty much the only one that even attempted to address core Warrior problems, albeit in a weak and half-hearted way.

The Mace/Hammer cooldown buffs are nice and all, but they don’t solve any of the issues we’ve been discussing since the June 23 patch, which are numerous.

The Rifle “buffs” still managed to throw in significant nerfs, depending on your perspective (I relied on piercing from Crack Shot in a number of situations). But I guess the baseline piercing on some of the skills compensates.

Burnzerker got nuked from orbit, but I guess we should have seen that coming.

Sykper.6583:

I like the patch overall.

I’ll go into a comprehensive feedback when I get a chance, but I will ask why people were expecting something more substantial? Were you guys expecting enough buffs to make us godlike?

Just curious.

The belief that substantial buffs were on the way was unjustified, given ANet’s history of “balance.” So I guess that expectation was unjustified.

That doesn’t mean that anybody wants “godlike” buffs. We just wanted some action on the core issues we’ve identified, which we’ve been beating a dead horse over for the past six-plus months: Fast Hands, adrenaline decay, Stance dependency, poor trait placement, useless traits, etc.

But hey, I guess we should be grateful we got any “buffs” at all. My bad.

Sykper.6583:

I like the patch overall.

I’ll go into a comprehensive feedback when I get a chance, but I will ask why people were expecting something more substantial? Were you guys expecting enough buffs to make us godlike?

Just curious.

If you didn’t read any comments, they’ll give you a general idea.

The patch is more or less a buff for warriors, but not what the warrior needs. In other words, the “buffs” are moves towards the wrong direction, while simultaneously neglecting almost every “bright fluorescent elephants in the room”.

I shouldn’t be surprised though. Each and every “balance patch” ends with the same result. Lazy fixes, limited scope, and lack of general direction. It’s as if the developers don’t even play the game they made to get a grasp on what even needs fixing. Instead, they play around with numbers, increasing/reducing damage or recharge- on things that never needed changes in the first place.

Give back blood reckoning, some people want to survive in raids and fractal 77.

What I would’ve liked to see was fixes to buggy skill for now it’s still #RushBugForLyfe and #LelEarthshakerDoNuthingOnSlightestIncline. Hammer CD reductions are, nice I tried running merciless hammer yesterday and the CDs were really low and the amount of CC potential was very big but the after casts are still gigantic, seriously Earthshaker, Backbreaker and Fierce Blow still have insane after casts, I don’t understand why those weren’t fixed seeing how many other after casts were, at this point the aftercasts of Backbreaker and earthshaker are so big you lose a somewhat significant portion of the actual CC duration.

Also zerker stance…I really like how you don’t have to pop it preemptively but can rather pop it after u get condi bombed and ignore the condis, but making it rely on a boon given the amount of boon corruption that got handed to one specific class is a bit questionable, they clearly knew this and still went with it.

Warrs used to be a counter to necros, but with the introduction of reaper and its stability and thanks to RS’s sick dps reapers essentially can now stay face to face with a warr, trade punches and come out on top. As of this patch necro hard counters warr VERY VERY HARD. Corrupt boon completely DESTROYS signet of rage’s active (which I, and most of us use I assume) as well as balanced stance and essentially turns it into cripple, fear and bleeding (bleeding if taking last stand) and its on a super low CD. Trying to play a berserker warrior with eternal champion (pulsing stab) essentially means giving the necro the ability to on demand fear you and since scepter auto #3 corrupts 1 boon the necros can assure that you’ll have perma weakness on because guess what? Might becomes 10seconds of weakness and we get might on weapon swap \o/ It sort of bothers me that one of the only classes we could counter became quite hard to counter a few months ago and is now countering the kitten out of us.

I see anet read some of my suggestions. Happy to see the hammer and rifle getting love.

It’s too early to say warrior isn’t viable. I think it is viable now, I just hope it isn’t because warriors need rampage.

Rampage
I personally think rampage is too strong but engi and warrior variant. It does too much damage and the CD is too long.

Savage instinct
This trait should clear more than 2 conditions. I think 3 is fair.

Shouts.
They need an overhaul similar to rangers. A few of them are really useless.

Omy mark is a good example. Fear as a pretty long CD.

Shake it off doesn’t clear enough conditions it should go up to 3 without soldier runes. Shake it off was based on a game mode without torment, slow, or any of the new conditions added to the game. 1 condi doesn’t cut it.

For great justice. The might was nerfed so its not really that effective anymore. It should go up to 5 might stacks and a longer duration of fury.

Healing shouts don’t heal for enough. ANET was thinking that taking banner regen and healing shouts would be too strong. I think it is but 1k is nothing.

Don’t know how you can even state that it would be too early to say that warrior isn’t viable.
Everyone with a basic knowledge about pvp-meta should know that warrior won’t be viable right after reading the patch notes.

firstly I’m PVE retired, WvW only pretty much some pvp guildhall but not alot.
overall I’m happy, passive heal is ‘lazy’ but after the condition uncap, heavy armor got nerfed by default this seems a good solution.
cant see it helping pvp, but I can use the save in the fishball.
they trimmed cooldowns which feels more pvp for chains which helps- as its timings on utility that are more wvw so feels balanced.
likewise the adrenaline extra is good and can be used by all . overall they helped the profession no matter your build can’t complain.

berserker, I loved old king of fires, I held onto my adrenaline, waited for them to stack and bang! wahoo rifle . happy days. I’ve tried the new version and it seems to encourage spamming and frontline. hmm we have plenty of that in the berserk trait already… likewise old rifle 4, was cripple and chase now its an extra dodge? I have 2 already. why? sad.
the might stuff sucks since it got nerfed to kitten no-one takes it , you barely see warriors in wvw, let alone old school gs warriors. my gs is staying in the cupboard the update didn’t change that. pity the people that made twilight.
lastly burn. I’m having alot of fun with it , but cant help notice the difference between burn and condi damage/duration isn’t enough. I can be cleared once yet only receive minimal comparable increase on items and consumables. this needs to change.

Also I struggle to recommend warrior over guardian or rev for wvw, I’m not sure what we have extra now everyone has all weapons between them. I’d like to see warrior dual weapon increased as weapon specialists or some such.

and lastly like everyone else I’m feeling the wrath of necromancers, who are now solo roaming as gods.