Guild Wars 2

Exactly what is says on the tin. Does Lifesteal Crit? Because if so, Vampiric Presence basically adds 0.025 to the power multiplier (although this increase doesn’t benefit from any other damage mults) of any hit from an ally within range…

I know I had nothing to do with the addition of these two stats, but it still makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside to know someone at ANet is thinking about the same things I am .

Has anyone tested whether the 100% cap is still in place on condi/boon duration? Seems like with more boosting gear, they might have snuck that change in there…

I don’t think you understand my issue.

Ever single minor trait—every single one—in Devastaion triggers off of vulnerability. Sword is the only weapon set that procs vulnerability. Therefore, you have to wield swords if you want any benefit from minor traits in devastation.

Furthermore, sword gives very little benefit to the other legends. It doesn’t have any damaging conditions to synergize with Mallyx. It doesn’t have any outgoing healing to synergize with Ventari. The Dismantle Fortifications and one skill that procs weakness could help Jalis, but that’s the extent of cross-legend synergy for the sword.

In other words, if you are in Devastation, you are obliged to use swords have have either Shiro or Jalis as one of your legends. Weapons, traits, and legends are too tightly coupled to one another.

No real contribution, but the might+resistance on blind idea sounded pretty awesome and like a good fit for rune of the revenant.

So I’ve been stewing on a nice, big, multi-page “this is what I want from the Revenant” post, but then ANet went an implemented a lot of what I wanted to suggest. Thanks a lot, guys, for ruining a good rant :p

However, I still think there a big, gaping flaw in the Revenant—specifically, too much of your build is a foregone conclusion once you’ve chose which two legends you want to equip. This is because there is an optimal legend and an optimal trait line for each legend. For example, if you choose Mallyx for a legend, you are shooting yourself in the foot if you don’t also take the Corruption line, and don’t pack mace/axe. They are too tightly coupled.

The best ways I can think of to help with this is:

Weapons: Give weapons different effects depending on legend, similar to the way that elementalists utilities change with attunement. Thanks to the way the combat in GW2 works, this would actually be really easy.

For example, staff could offer many forms of support besides just healing. Have it instead grant healing in Ventari, retaliation or protection in Jalis, Might in Shiro, or Resistance in Mallyx. This keeps the staff a support wepon, but makes it synergize with each legend no matter which one you pick.

Or for another example, take axe. Instead of temporal rift causing Torment no matter what, have it cause Torment in Mallyx, Vulerability in Shiro, Weakness in Jalis, and Blindness in Ventari. Again, it’s a condition weapon, but those conditions can help tank, support or damage depending on legend.

Traits: This is a lot harder to solve. It seems like the traits were modelled off of elementalist traits—in the same way that ele has a trait line for each attunement plus arcane, Revenant is designed to have a trait for each legend plus invocations.

That sort of design works for the elementalist, who is going to have access to every attunement regardless of what their trait loadout is, so it makes sense to build with 3 elemental trait lines or 2 plus arcane. However, for a revenant that can only have two legends equipped, it doesn’t make sense to do anything but equip the two legend-specific traits plus invocation, because every line is so tightly married to a specific legend.

The best way I can think to counteract this, is to focus more on the things that are common between legends within the trait lines. This is especially important for the minor traits that come baked-in with the trait line itself—for example, it’s hard to justify taking Salvation unless you have Ventari equipped, because the grandmaster minor trait only helps Ventari.

This idea is pretty radically different from how the traits are currently arranged, but I think it could be done. There are common desirable features that are sorely missing from the trait lines now that could easily be added—like reducing cooldown on legend swap, increasing energy regeneration, and decreasing upkeep costs on toggle skills in addition to the usual universal helpers of extra % damage, or conditions/boons. The number of legend specific traits needs to be lowered, and the number of universal traits needs increased. Making the changes to weapons will help with this somewhat, since then weapon-specific traits can synergize across legends, but more could be done.

Honestly, we need more ways of controlling our energy production anyway, and traits is the best way to do it. Maybe lower passive regen to 3/sec, and trade out some traits to increase regeneration while affected by a condition/boon. Maybe grant reduced toggle upkeep while channeling. Or grant boons when using a legend utility (ANY utility, not a specific legend like Demonic Defiance). That sort of thing.
________________________________________________________

The addition of weapon swap, adjusting cooldown/activation times, and tweaking modifiers was greatly appreciated, and it’s definitely the biggest step to making Revenant meet its full potential, but there’s still a little bit more that’s needed to make the class match its potential.

skowcia.8257:

I assume people that asking for weapon swap are people that cant handle 100% melee and need a ranged option which will carry them. I dont see any problem equipping hammer before “troublesome” pve encounters. Everyone does that already, other than that they run pure melee. Have you even seen a warrior using longbow/rifle or guardian with staff/scepter in speedruns? Lol. Autokick.

Dungeons aren’t the only PvE, you know…

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

Dibaryon.7469:

or the ability to channel more than 2 legendary stances. Three legendary stances would be great, so that we can match the 3 specializations accordingly.

I was rather disappointed myself that we could only use 2 Legends at a time. It would be nice if they changed it to more than two.

The problem with that is, there are only four non-elite legends planned for you to choose from. Might as well just make all of the legends accessible at that point…

ANet really needs more than the four non-elite legends they have lined up. If we had more to choose from, a lot of the issue with lack of options would be greatly helped.

skowcia.8257:

But staff is also effective at melee range, all it damage comes from aoe. You just lava font everything. Leta also not forget that conjures weapons has charges either way.

Sure revenant doesnt have that choice but he dont need it either. If you talking about pve then theres not many encounters where you want to use ranged wep unless you want to range every boss, but then prepare for insta kick. Meta in pve is pure melee with staff ele being excption but its still used in melee for stacking purposes. In pvp there also melee builds without range option (or subpar ranged) which does fine, d/d ele actually being over the top.

Imo instead of asking for weapon swap, ask for 4th upkeep utility that will let you conjure mist weapon. That will fix your problem, weapon swap is not a solution. Not to mention that it wont happen for a really simple reason;

Light and medium classes has one class without weapon swap. Revenant was designed to fill this gap, by adding another class in heavy category without weapon swap.

I don’t think you understand the difference between a ranged weapon and a melee weapon.

Yes, staff does same damage in melee as it does at range. Aside from a couple exceptions, that’s how all ranged weapons work. However, melee weapons do more total DPS, and all have damage mitigation/survivability moves (dodges, blinds, prot, etc) in their move sets that you can include in your DPS rotation without taking a severe DPS hit. So yes, you can use a staff in melee and it will do the same amount of damage as it does at range, but it will do less damage than LH and it won’t help you survive—only escape—if you keep yourself surrounded by elite mobs, whereas I go toe-to-toe with loads of mordrem in Silverwastes all the time with LH.

Revenant needs to be able to switch out 1-5 so they can fill multiple damage roles—which includes melee, ranged, CC, condi, direct DPS, support, and probably a bunch of other roles I’m, forgetting— just like everyone else can. Changing utilities isn’t enough to allow this. The combat in GW2 wasn’t built around camping in a single set of 1-5 moves all the time.

If ANet comes out with some way of doing this that doesn’t involve normal weapon switching, fine. However, it needs to be fun and interesting. Saying “Revenant doesn’t get weapon switch so all armor weights have a non-weapon-switching profession” is stupid. Revenant should only not get weapon switch if it leads to interesting gameplay, not to fulfill some arbitrary symmetry requirement.

skowcia.8257:

But who use axe? I dont even know skills on conjured axe as nobody use it. Ice bow? People pick it olny for it strong aoe on skill 4 then drop it as everything else is useless there. I think you need to try harder.

Fine (although has anyone used axe since Jul 9th update? It might be viable now…)

If an elementalist wants to be effective at range and in melee, they can pack a staff and switch to lightning hammer for high melee DPS and a cleaving blind / blast-finisher auto attack. D/D might not have effective ranged options, but neither does a warrior running GS/Axe-Mace. Just because they can spec to only melee/only ranged, doesn’t mean they have to.

Revenant doesn’t have that choice. They can either be ranged or melee, not both. For that matter, they can’t switch for more support, more AoE, or more condis either. They get to pick one focus with their weapon, with no way to switch in combat—better hope it’s a good one…

skowcia.8257:

1. Thats why they have to make 2 extra utility skills for current legend and bring up the gap. Jalis uses long ranger hammer but doesnt have ranged attack skills? Make 2 extra utiltiies that focus on ranged combat. Imo its laughable that rev has olny 12 utility skills compared to old classes with 20 and its something i been complaining for a while.

2. If you choose d/d ele youre pretty much stuck in melee. Naturally their melee is not a “real melee” as they have a bit longer range but you dont have ability to shoot fireballs from 1200 range at will. Engi is the olny one that can swap between close-medium-long range atm. Howered i dont see a issue with full pure melee if the class have enough sustain to perform well there.

2. Bologna. D/D ele is one Ice Bow or Fire Axe away from ranged. with Conjurer, you can keep it up constantly.

You can’t just ignore the weapons elementalist an engie can pull from their utilities. They make a massive difference in versatility.

skowcia.8257:

But revenant doesnt need weapon swap. Engi does fine without it so does ele. Its an issue of revenant desing that they tied weapons too close to specific legend, nothing else. Making it similiar way to ele glyph would solve that issue while still keeping weapon roles.

Staff would still be a support for Shiro for example, just in a offensive way as opposed to ventari which focus on healing.

Nonsense, ele and engie both have weapon swaps—they’re called kits and conjured weapons. Elementalist actually has the second-most options for weapons they want to bring to a fight, second only to warrior—and that’s not even counting attunements.

Reducing the coupling between specific weapons and specific legends will help but it’s not going to solve the problem by itself. Every single class—including engie and especially ele—has vastly more versatility on the 1-5 skills for range and utility than Revenant, even if legends changed how the weapon skills worked.

Math here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/Lack-of-Customization-the-Real-Rev-Problem

Rune Darkmoor.3269:

Thinking about it a little, I don’t mind our heal, utility, and elite being locked to legends and swapping them like weapons.

IMO though, if we are not able to adjust utilities to customize builds to match to weapons, maybe instead they can introduce the ability to select different skills on each weapon to account for it. That way each weapon can be customized to suit the legends utilities. It’s not entirely a radical concept, given most utilities and traits in current classes are selected to match the locked weapons skills. Just turn that concept on its head. I’d even be willing to be locked into one weapon set during combat if this was the case. Because I can see how swapping legends which swap utilities and being able to swap to another weapon set all in combat is not quite fair.

I don’t know how achievable such a system would be however in GW2s with the way weapons are set up.

I’ve thought that, but then what’s the real functional difference between Revenant and Elementalist, except revenant only gets 2 swaps? Is switching 6-0 with a customizable 1-5 distinct enough from switching 1-5 with customizable 6-0 to justify charging cash-money for a new class?

skowcia.8257:

Morfedel.4165:

I’ll also agree with others that simply having a weapon change with legend the way eles do with attunement might be a good solution.

And i disagree with it being a good solution or weapon swap in general. Maybe i want to play sword/shield Jalis?

I think he meant the weapons skills would change with legend, not the weapon itself. I’d be down with that—then f you want to play a sword/shield Jalis, the skills could change to actually be useful in Jalis.

If the intention was to completely link weapons with legends and allow swapping, however, I’m not down with that. The problem as it stands is that every weapon is too coupled to a specific legend; coupling it more is not going to help, it’s just going to reduce variety even more.

My absolute favorite idea: have some skills increase energy and some decrease, with passive regen (if any) moving toward the middle. Not mine originally, but here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/A-Dynamic-Solution-for-Energy-s-Problems/first#post5282045

This is my take on the idea: skills 6/7-0 (not sure where healing should go) represent you channeling the legend, so they increase the energy of the legend flowing through you. As you channel more and more, energy goes up.

Skill 1-5/6 represent taking the power of the legend and focusing it through your weapon, channeling it away from you before the legend overtakes you.

If you go over the threshold in either direction, bad stuff happens. Not just “can’t use skills, not enough energy,” really bad stuff. Off the top of my head: going above the threshold inflicts taunt, burn, and torment on yourself as the legend overpowers you. Maybe even make the bad stuff different for each legend (e.g. taunt in Mallyx, stun in Ventari, and petrify in Jalis), but there should be a CC with damaging conditions alongside it. If you didn’t completely mess up your opponent with the unleashing of your mist powers, you’re hosed.

Going below the threshold should also be bad, but not quite so bad because the 1-5/6 skills are less powerful than the 6/7-0 skills. Again off the top of my head, have it inflict a pulsing blind, slow, and/or weakness as the mists drain from your body, robbing you of your source of power and sight. Enough that you are severely weakened, but you can still run away.

With these changes, get rid of regen on legend switch, instead retaining whatever energy level you are at, and open up some possibilities for cross-legend chains. Bonus points if you make the 1-5 skills function differently in each legend, so discharging your energy in (say) Ventari vs. Mallyx works differently.

I would play the crap out of a revenant that worked like this, though I doubt my wish will come true.

I really, really like your idea. An additional benefit to moving energy regen to weapons instead of legend swap, is that then you can change it so that energy reserve is retained between swaps. That way, if I’m spamming with energy charging skills, I could either follow up by immediately hitting with the utilities in my current legend or swap and hit with the other legend, or a combination of the two. It opens up the possibility of cross-legend chains.

In this vein, however, I feel like weapons would need to behave differently in different legends. Otherwise it again becomes predictable if I unload energy with my elites, because I’ll always have to follow up with the same “gathering” skills.

This would take an overhaul-level re-balance, but it would add SO MUCH nuance to the profession, and make the legends interplay with each other in new and interesting ways.

DresdenAllblack.1249:

I’m with you Abnaxis. Just saying I will judge it at a later date. And also think some of those polishes people are screaming for might take away from the feel of the class. Choice of legend to weapon I think will always remain a static thing.
Fix the DPS and people will accept boring, uncomplicated, and vanilla. They want to burn things down as fast as possible

Given the way people embrace the meta, I wouldn’t argue that there aren’t many players willing to accept uncomplicated vanilla as long as they get their DPS.

However, I’m not one of them, and from all the threads of “please let this be the end of ‘go zerk or go home’ meta” in response to the changes in condis, I don’t think I’m alone. In fact, I think ANet might agree with me—a big consequence of specializations is that you aren’t locked into a single set of traits, even if you want to spec full glass-canon, and I’m pretty sure that was deliberate. On elementalist, for example, I can leverage every single trait line to get more DPS with different play-styles.

As a class, revenant seems like a face-heel turn in the other direction, from what I want and from what ANet seems to want to create. If I want to direct DPS on a rev, I have to use Shiro. I have to trait Shiro, I have to channel Shiro, I have to use the Shiro weapon set and only the Shiro weapon set, and I don’t even have the capacity to switch out one or two utilities to make it fit my style better. It’s like one step forward and two steps back.

DresdenAllblack.1249:

I once got a copy of the first Wolverine movie BEFORE the special effects were put in. Complaining about the Rev NOW is the same thing.

It’s really not. The problems people are complaining about in the Rev are largely issues that can’t be fixed by tweaking a couple modifiers or adding a couple legends, which is all we can reasonably expect at this stage of development. The fundamental design of the revenant is already finalized, and as it stands the profession is lined up so that once you’ve played with/against it for an hour, you’ve seen everything the class has to offer.

99% of the complaints outside of “DPS is lackluster” stem from this problem, and it’s a “drawing board” problem. That’s why everyone wants weapon switching, or utility customization, or weapon skills to change with legend—all of these are trying to get at the problem that there’s no variety to the Rev, and no dev has even hinted that they plan to do anything about it.

My understanding is that with the expansion they’re modding all the maps outside the starter areas to function similarly to Dry Top/Silverwastes. Maybe that will solve this issue as well?

Like the title says—my main criticism of the Revenant, is that it is fundamentally designed on every level, to limit the ways a player can customize their character:

Utilities completely depend on legends, of which there will only be 5, and even choosing the fifth one forces you into an elite spec. From the five, you can choose two. I wrote about this in another thread, but this gives you a total of 5C2 = 10 possible combinations for utility skills. Other professions have at least 4 healing skills, 20 utilities to choose 3 from, and 3 possible elite skills—so 4 * 20C3 * 3 = 54,720 different combinations for the 6-0 half of the bar.

Most of the 55k choices in the base classes lead to interesting modifications in play styles and customization to make your profession fit what you want to do with it. Every utility/healing skill has a situation where it shines, a proper way to use it, and a set of traits to support it. Legends take that systemic depth and toss it out the windows without offering a suitable replacement

Revenants can’t switch weapons. Of all the design choices, this one makes the least sense to me. Clearly, each weapon is built to favor a certain legend—which is constraining in it’s own right but we’ll ignore that in favor of more quantifiable issues—yet you only get one weapon with two legends. For comaprison, here are other profession loadout options:

• Warrior: 4 (TH) + 3(MH) * 5 (OH) = 19 sets, from which you can pick 2 so 19*18 loadouts = 342
• Elementalist: (1 + 2*2)[possible equipped sets] * (5C0 + 5C1+5C2+5C3) [possible utility conjures] * 2[possible elite conjure] = 252 without even counting attunements
• Guardian: 3+3*3 = 12, 12*11 = 132
• Ranger: 3+2*4 = 11, 11*10 = 110
• Mesmer: 2+2*4 = 10, 10*9 = 90
• Necro: 1+3 * 3 = 10, 10 * 9 = 90
• Engie: 3 * (4C0 + 4C1 + 4C2 + 4C3) [utility kits] * 2 [elite kit] = 90
• Thief: 1 + 3 * 2 = 7, 7*6 = 42
• Revenant: 2 + 2 * 2 = 6

Note that I’m not even counting the extra option elite specializations will add to everyone, and giving ANet the benefit of the doubt and assuming Shiro will add another main-hand/off-hand option to the revenant. Even with these biases in favor of the revenant, ever single other class has an order of magnitude more tool sets they can bring to a fight. Heck, even if revenant could switch weapons they would still have the fewest loadout options, at 30.

The entire skill bar bar requires energy. As a revenant, you can either spam AA or you can forget about using your utilities. No other class has to give up half their skill bar to use the other half, so I can’t quantify this problem as well as the others, but it’s bad.

This one, at least, could potentially be helped by a re-balance of how fast energy is accumulated and how much skills cost in energy. However, I think I’ve already demonstrated how little freedom revenant offers players—the current consequence of the energy mechanic is to offer even less freedom in play-styles.

In short, the Revenant is broken, and it’s not an issue of balance or “it’s only partially finished.” Revenant is broken because unless there are some massive changes coming to the class that haven’t been announced, when ANet is finished with it, every single revenant will play the same. When revenant was still an idea on a whiteboard, ANet made a terrible mistake in designing it so that once you choose two legends and a weapon, your entire build is pigeonholed. Even if all the bugs were fixed, all the promised features were added, and all the weapons properly balanced for activation time and damage coefficients, this class would still be fundamentally broken.

I really like the concept and the style of the revenant. I want it to work and be fun. However, the class has deep issues that are not “Beta test” issues, which make it less fun and which frankly defies the core principles GW2 was built on when it first came out, eschewing the Holy Trinity because of the way Trinity games constrain players into specific builds.

I don’t like being so negative, but revenant really needs a lot of help. I’m hoping better defining the problem will be constructive.

People keep talking about lack in build variety, but I would like to talk about it in slightly different terms…

The legends mechanic makes for extremely few meaningful choices in building out a revenant. Utilities are, by far, the greatest source of customization for characters. Take (say) warrior, for example. With 4 healing skills, 20 utilities, and 4 elites, that’s 13.680 different skill loadouts you can bring for for 6-0 slots.

Revenants, on the other hand, have 12 options for the 6-0 slots—assuming there will eventually be 4 legends for which we can pick 2. Heck, even if they add a fifth legend, we’ll have a whole 60 possible utility loadouts to choose from

And to add insult to injury, Revs don’t get weapon swap. Factoring in swap, warriors have well over a million different specs that can run with before factoring in traits(1.231.200 to be exact), while the revenant will be lucky to break 3 figures by the time they finish adding weapons.

Now, some of those million+ builds the warrior has available to them won’t be viable, but that’s an issue for balance—in a well-balanced system, all million choices would be interesting and fun to play. Even if ANet managed to perfectly balance the Revenant it would be boring because the legend mechanic MASSIVELY pigeonholes the options available to players, reducing the interesting choices/customization available to us by 3+ orders of magnitude.

The class really, really needs weapon swap. It also needs many more legends than have been proposed thus far, and those legends need to have a more interesting dynamic beyond swapping out slot 6-0 (as has been suggested by others). These are the only things that give the class build variation, which is what lets players make it their own.

Mo Mo.1947:

I don’t understand why someone would come in here asking for their utility options to be limited when some classes already have enough utilities that are close to mandatory.

Fall damage is a niche situation that only occurs in certain kinds of gameplay situations. People can be running a variety of builds in those situations and utilities are significant to rounding out a build. Fall damage isn’t a build, it’s a situation.

Fall damage reduction has been a trait for 3 years. Any difficulty you’re facing incorporating it into your trait setup now with the new trait system would only be more aggravating if it was stuck on one particular skill out of the entire skill pool…

Except now you have to switch out the enitre trait line if you want to trade in fall damage protection temporarily. The fact that it’s a niche situation is why it would be good for a utility slot instead—you make one change and it’s done, one change and it’s undone, instead of having to shuffle around six different traits every time you want to do a jumping puzzle.

epsilon.2698:

Things I know: I wish I hadn’t paid for two expansions prior to the patch.

Honestly, the lack of testing and insight into your own game is astonishing.

You should have just released the trait changes while trying to mitigate damage changes. You could have rolled out damage changes later, in parts, or not at all since it wasn’t necessary. Now your task of balancing is made more complicated. You have trait changes and damage changes to consider at the same time when trying to determine why something is broken.

I purchased this game after being a GW1 player for years specifically because the developers assured up front this wouldn’t be a gear grind:

“We have no intention of adding a new rarity gear such as Ascended” – Chris Whiteside

Ascended armor was introduced and that was nearly enough to make me stop playing there. Sure, I could grind away for hours making armor for all my characters on my different accounts, but that’s not fun for me and as much as some would like to extol the joy of crafting, it simply runs counter to one of the fundamental principles laid out prior to launch, regardless of how people want to spin it.

How does this relate to the OP? Well, the gap between the have and have-nots has grown, and the stability of damage and mitigation thrown up into the air. After 3 years of balancing, the meta has been undone and there’s now even more reason to have to craft to compete. I just can’t see the sanity in wasting all my time doing that though when stats are rendered useless with as little thought as I see with this patch.

So, I guess my question is, is it possible to get a refund?

If you mean the condi damage changes, I have been wanting them since day one. They were definitely necessary, and one of the worst cases of the game not working as promised there was. Before, condi damage specs were punished if anyone else in their party also ran condi. Players shouldn’t be hamstrung by their own allies.

Arioso.8519:

Abnaxis.4593:

snip

Removing bleeds from the game is a really bad idea. Plus bleeds thematically make sense for conditions on classes like warriors, so removing it messes with those classes. you gonna make swords cause burning? No thanks.

Thematically, I don’t see a huge load of difference between bleed and torment. Burn on a sword does seem kinda silly, but torment from a sword not-so-much-so. Torment was kind of the “crap, classes are doing more bleed than we have stacks for so you can have this condition so you don’t overwrite your own stacks” band-aid anyway.

I will admit that taking bleed out would require a lot of individual “what makes sense in its place” sort of decisions, which in turn would play heck with balance. I still think it’s boring to have bleed be “exactly like burn, but slightly less than half as strong” from a tactical standpoint though. That means either bleed or burn has to change/go away in favor of more strategic dynamics.

Arioso.8519:

It’d be really tough to balance though, because if the heal is just per connected hit like a backwards retaliation, then attacks like rapid fire or the engie flamethower would basically give some classes a free heal.

IF they can catch you and IF they have adequate healing power to overcome your condition damage, which in turn sets HP up as a counter to a potentially powerful condition damage build. It could also reward charging into a zerg to see just how many you can bring down with you…

This is where tactics and strategy come into play.

Arioso.8519:

A curse might last around 5 seconds, so that gives the victim about 5 seconds to get rid of it or suffer the full damage.

It’d be a pretty interesting tool for necros that fits the theme of the class. And it could possibly be limited to them like alacrity is to chronomancers. The only other class I could see throwing curses are Revenants, or maybe a new elite specialization on thief or mesmer.

See? That’s sounds cool too. Something to make conditions more interesting, tools to control the battlefield more effectively like torment and confusion do, not just bland DoTs.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Define last minute? There is no telling when that information was changed. We were originally given an unedited list, so the information could have been wrong.

Bleeding is one of the most pervasive conditions, and it is possible for individual classes to drop a stack of 25 bleeds on a target solo. With the change to how conditions work it would be necessary to lower that value per stack for potential quantity.

It’s called balance. Balance isn’t there to make you happy with how much damage you can do, it’s to normalize damage so no one has a specific advantage.

So…classes could hit 25 stacks solo, and now….classes can still drop 25 stacks solo, except now they won’t be boned if they party with someone else doing the same, and the bleeds do less damage.

Classes aren’t doing more damage with the cap lifted, they’re just not being penalized by engine limitations. Why does that require weakening bleeds? That’s not how balancing works…

LastShot.4762:

Well, from my understanding, bleed still gets an extra +2 per tick, not much of a buff but at least you can’t call it a nerf.

At level 80, bleed used to do 42.5 + 0.05 * CD. Now it’s 22 + 0.06 * CD. That’s less damage until you get to 2050 CD, and it’s only very, very slightly more if you stack every CD buff available in the game from might, sigils, runes, and banners (about +10DPS/stack). It’s unambiguously a nerf.

Right there in the title. What prompted the last minute change to the bleeding formula? I was excited by the 0.075 scaling the Josh told us we were getting, looking forward to dusting off my old necromancer with the new build. Then the patch hits, and bleeding actually does LESS damage.

I know I’m probably just going to get a bunch of sardonic replies as other players vent their frustrations, but in the vain hope that someone with authority a ANet will answer I have to ask: what was the thought process? What made bleeding stand out as needing a nerf?

How about this, for a bleed-alternate: Get rid of bleed entirely. Add a new condition called Curse.

The way curse works, is it does massive damage, more than burning even. However, every time the curse victim lands an attack, they are healed for every stack of curse on them. It’s like the opposite of confusion, except you have to actually connect with a skill use, not just use skills.

It doesn’t make sense to replace all bleeds with curse, but ANet should be able to distribute all the other damaging condis in where bleed is to make them make sense.

Obviously, necro would be very curse-heavy, but it wouldn’t be exclusive to them. If Plague self-inflicted curse, it would be really interesting—it’s a suicide button, unless you are actively enveloping your opponents.

TrustyBoulder.4305:

Abnaxis.4593:

snip

Hm. I see your point about the minor traits at least. Some of the interesting choices were always majors though, like Burn on Block. Actually sorta made Mace/Focus have a nice damage component along with utility tools, which comboed with ANOTHER trait that gave aegis on block for more party support. But thats probably a niche build most people wont run.
The only thing I might suggest is that instead of making BURN the conditional one, as it IS powerful right now, why not let it get a SLIGHT nerf, so that when stacked properly is still is a powerful condition on its own, and make BLEED the conditional one? Significantly more classes have it, and I assume no one else is STUCK with it like guardian is with fire, so it wouldn’t significantly hamper any classes if they end up hating the mechanic. So the classes that you’re saying play with condi soup all day wouldnt even notice, while the ones that do have a new mechanic to play with.
I mostly say this because lots of guardian abilties, the best ones anyway, do not have any significant ENEMY CONTROL components like the ones you’re saying should be comboed. AKA immobilize/stun/etc to keep them from moving. Guards rely on blinds and aegis mostly. Scepter has ONE immobilize. And we have a few fields to nullify/reflect projectiles. If you make burn reliant on control, which most guard builds have fairly little of, you run the risk of making 90% of guardian builds unusable with condition damage entirely.

Most of the condi output from necros is bleed (though really, I would prefer they get consolidated into doing more torment instead of bleed as my wish-list bullet because I think torment fits them well). I would be cool with fiddling with the bleed mechanics that if it meant they get differentiated from burn.

Hrm…my guardian alt isn’t level 80, and I haven’t had the heart to load her to see how messed up her traits are. I thought I remembered there being more “ward” skills that you might be able to use to pin down a foe, but hammer’s the only one that has those. I also thought GS 5 immobilized, but I’m remembering wrong there too.

OK, so maybe the immobilize idea doesn’t work so well for guardian. Still, there might be other implementations that work—maybe burns do more damage while in combat, but quickly dissipate when out of combat? I’m just spit-balling here.

JonPeters.5630:

Cheshire.8761:

Are you going to address how you forced characters to train into builds using their hero points without their consent? :o

Why not. Basically there were two options, both with a large number of edge cases.

1) We wipe your stuff and let you respec as you see fit. Because so much had changed this was our initial plan. Here are problems it ran into.

• People return from a long hiatus and don’t remember what they were running
• People log in and the first thing they have to do before they can play is learn both the new unlocking system and the new build system.

2) We look at what you had equipped and unlock the necessary skills and traits to re-equip you. Here were some discussions points around that:

• We might give you stuff you don’t want
• at least this won’t matter for lvl 80s if we make all the unlocks possible by just reaching lvl 80.

There is a third option which I’m sure you will bring up.
3) let players choose
Here are some reasons we did not go with that:

• Its twice the work
• Its actually more than twice the work because it would have required temporarily saving both options until you choose which is more complex technical work.
• People who were unlikely to understand or want to explore the new system were going to be potentially more confused by the choice.

At the end of the day we wanted to ship this build so we had to decide. Based on instinct we erred on the side of helping people we thought would be more overwhelmed by the opposite choice, and I would make that choice again because it has less edge cases, impacts more expert users, and leans towards over unlocking for free to benefit most of the edge cases anyway.

Hope this info helps you understand our process a bit more.

Thanks,

Jon

Mail a soulbound retrainer tome consumable to all pre-existing characters. If you want to be really fancy, spend five minutes coding it so they only go to sub-80 characters.

Problem solved.

TrustyBoulder.4305:

Abnaxis.4593:

snip

The only guard minor that causes condi at all is new, and its 33% chance to burn from SYMBOLS, which only 3 guard wep sets have, none of which are part of the normal fire build, unless you’re going for block spam, which is somewhat viable I guess.
And if we’re specifically talking damaging conditions, I ONLY have burning. One condition. There is no condi soup here. If you stop my ONE condition, I have no damage.
Can agree though that there seems to be a habit of making traits only affect direct damage despite them being in the middle of condi trait lines, and occasionally some of the opposite as well. And the lack of condition duration is strange considering they decided to make it available as a sat in the first place, although I generally prefer increased applications over duration anyway, especially now with stacking intensity.

Guardians don’t have a trait, because they automatically get passive burn applications with VoJ. Who needs 33% chance to burn on crit when you automatically get a burn every 5 attacks? (3 if traited? Haven’t loaded my guard alt since patch)

The problem with passive condi procs on minor traits is that conditions aren’t an interesting build choice, they come automatically lumped in on specializations, and on guardians it’s more automatic. That being said, guardians at least have some neat major traits they can choose to synergize with VoJ, so at least there’s that for build diversity…

And again, to make myself clear—I don’t want to nerf burning. In fact, I want it to keep doing the massive damage it’s at currently or more—if you play right. I want guardians who focus on burns to play differently than necros who focus on bleeds, and right now the only difference is that burn hasn’t been nerfed into the dirt yet. Once it is the two classes will be virtually the same as far as condi damage goes.

TrustyBoulder.4305:

Abnaxis.4593:

JonPeters.5630:

Let’s be clear, this version of condition stacking and condi builds being viable in all games modes is a large part of our goal. We just want to make sure we don’t create imbalances that actually make the game less fun. Don’t expect huge balance swings, but rather our balance goal has always been to make more small adjustments.

Since you’re re-balancing conditions, is there any talk about doing something with burning to make it at least a little unique? Right now it’s exactly like bleed, except harder-hitting. There’s no tactical difference.

I liked the idea one other poster had on a different thread—make burning deal more damage to stationary targets, like torment with the formulas flipped. That gives burning a niche, and you can probably just copy-paste the torment code and move some numbers around.

Oh god anything but that. Burning is literally Condition Guardian’s only damage. Why would you think making it a niche skill would make any sense? It’s our bread and butter. If it doesn’t work under normal conditions, then the ENTIRE BUILD doesn’t work under normal conditions.

Maybe ‘niche’ is the wrong word. What I want, is for burning have a special place outside of “a bleed that hits harder.” As it stands right now, ANet could replace every burn with 3 stacks of bleed and there would be no difference. That’s boring.

In fact, more than any other problem with conditions, this is the real issue. Conditions are boring. One of the things I like about GW2 is that “every profession can do anything,” with an implicit “…but they all do it differently.” If you want to maximize survivability, you are going to play a LOT differently if you are a thief, versus a mesmer, versus a warrior. Same goes for maximizing damage—all those “+% damage” traits trigger on different conditions, like having buffs or HP levels or in certain attunements, that encourages certain playstyles and makes the professions play uniquely, even if they can all deal out roughly equal damage.

Conditions don’t have that. Almost without variance, every single condition build uses 1-5 skills to dole out stacks. Every single condi build trait is “X% chance for condi on crit,” that you automatically get from a minor trait from choosing a specialization. Every single class has access to all but one or two of the damaging conditions, so they always dish out condi soup with no regard needed for whether a particular condition is good for the situation where it’s applied.

If I had my dream, this is what would happen with conditions:

• Change the mechanics of burning. Maybe not the “more damage while holding still,” but I’m favorable toward “melt the flesh from my enemies if I properly control the engagement” so I’m still biased toward that one. The idea is, you wipe the floor with your enemy if you land big stacks followed by some CC.
• Greatly reduce the number of conditions available to each class. Since it’s possible for all conditions to be viable in PvE now you can get away with this. Note this doesn’t mean to reduce the STACKS, just the VARIETY—instead of 3 stacks each of bleeding, burning, poison, and torment in the skills, consolidate to 9 stacks of bleeding and 3 of torment.
• Take the boring “X% chance to proc” traits out of the minor traits, and move one of the major traits in to replace them. Adjust proc sigils (earth, blight, etc) with lower cooldowns so people can still build a crit-proc condi build with them if they want.
• Replace the displaced major traits with INTERESTING condi traits. Add 100 Condition damage for 3 seconds after a successful block/dodge/distortion. Extra 300 condition damage while dancing (OH DEAR GOD THAT ASURA NECRO IS DOING THE ROBOT! THE HUMANITY!). Maybe repurpose some of the “+X% damage” traits to add condi damage instead, especially in the condi-focused specializations. Bear in mind, though, that since condition damage happens over time, you can add bonuses from things that aren’t attacks and still give players a boost to damage.
• Give us more choices to boost condi duration.
• Balance after you make the fixes, because you know the fixes are going to play hell with the balanace when they first roll out.
• For the love of Zommoros, refund hero points so people can start for scratch if you’re going to overhaul the skills/traits system.

All of this would require an overhaul that makes the current patch look like a minor balance update, so I’m not holding my breath. It’s nice to hope, though…

JonPeters.5630:

Let’s be clear, this version of condition stacking and condi builds being viable in all games modes is a large part of our goal. We just want to make sure we don’t create imbalances that actually make the game less fun. Don’t expect huge balance swings, but rather our balance goal has always been to make more small adjustments.

Since you’re re-balancing conditions, is there any talk about doing something with burning to make it at least a little unique? Right now it’s exactly like bleed, except harder-hitting. There’s no tactical difference.

I liked the idea one other poster had on a different thread—make burning deal more damage to stationary targets, like torment with the formulas flipped. That gives burning a niche, and you can probably just copy-paste the torment code and move some numbers around.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I’m currently at 2100 condition damage exactly. With no food/utility, krait runes, and a malice sigil. No stacking sigil or might either.

That will put me at 2100+250+100+70 +300 = 2800 max with full might and stacks.

Edit: however with no duration you pretty much NEED 100% uptime of food/utility to maintain a decent stack of conditions on anything.

2100 is way more than 1087*1.3 (armor/weapons are supposedly 30% more stats) + 100 (runes) = 1540. Does condition damage have a base higher than 0 now? Where’s the other 600 coming from?

On the bright side, that 2050 CD is quite doable if you run alongside a PS warrior…

On the less-bright side, you’re still only talking 9 DPS per stack extra on a ~130 DPS bleed, even in these ideal conditions, with full might and banners :\

One of these days I will figure out the source of all the hate for conditions

Sigh….I should have known better than to hope for a little variety in PvE. Of course they backpedal away from making condis do more damage to make up for the drawbacks. Wouldn’t want to give us actual interesting build choices to make in PvE.

I dunno, maybe I’m being pessimistic. I’ll play it some before rendering full judgement, but it’s annoying that they dropped both the bottom (22 DPS v. 42.5) and the top (108 DPS v. 112.5) of the scale, on a damage type that already greatly unperformed versus direct damage. Probably wanted to curb PvP fits.

Where are you getting that bleed formula? The dev post here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/June-23-Specialization-Changes/first

Says it’s .075+26. That’s only 220 condi damage to break even.

pdavis.8031:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/This-patch-kills-condi-necros-in-PvE/first#post5195002

Condi necros don’t think so…

I’ll hold my comments on it until I actually have a chance to play it though.

Erm…they have the wrong formula? Going by the dev post here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/June-23-Specialization-Changes/first

The dev formula says 26 + 0.075*CD, while the necromancer thread says 20+0.6*CD.

The formula in the necro thread does indeed seem terrible.

So, I did a quick calculation on the new scaling for condition damage, and it seems like it got a sizable boost for characters that focus on condis even before factoring in the fact that vulnerability helps now. If you go full sinister, for example, you’ll do 132.5 DPS per bleed [26+.075*1423] instead of 112.25 DPS per bleed [42.5+.05*1395](not counting food/boons). That’s an 17.8% increase that’s multiplied even more by vulnerability. At max vuln, it’s even better, clocking in at a 47% boost.

Seeing how focusing on condition damage didn’t result in THAT much of a dps loss in the last meta, that means condis can do considerably more DPS, at the cost of taking time to ramp up. Maybe we’ll see some sinister gear alongside all the berserkers out there?

NOTE: I’m at posting during lunch at work and can’t play the patch yet. I’m going off of notes for the new formula and promises of gear that gives +30% more stats as a trade-in for trait stats.

Pardon the slight necro, but I had to add that making burning do more damage to stationary targets sounds like a really awesome idea.

I’m really disappointed to see the change to burning is a simple “stacks in intensity” that makes it not much different than bleeding from a tactical perspective. If ANet did something like this bonus to make an interesting dynamic between burning/bleeding/torment it would be awesome.

PLUS, I bet they could reuse code from torment to implement it, so it wouldn’t even take a major overhaul under the hood…

So, I made the following changes to my calculations:

• Added Static Discharge procs, and extended time period so they can recharge. This added about 1% DPS to the max-DPS build (though adding grenade barrage itself added a lot more than 1%). In the celestial build, OTOH, Static discharge is a drop in DPS (3%) vs. Energized Armor when self-buffed, and about 0.5% better when fully buffed to max might/perma-fury, so I switched between the two since it’s easy to re-spec.
• Switch to ascended gear for both comparison builds, since celecstial gear is hand-crafted on a time delay anyway. Optimized assassin’s+berserker gear so that crit chance is 62% on max-DPS build, so that chance is 90% with fury + banners to prevent losing benefits of Target the Weak
• Ran numbers for Celestial using both Accuracy and Strength. Accuracy is better than Strength, if someone else in the party can provide might. Otherwise, accuracy is ~12% worse than strength if the engie is completely self-reliant for buffs. Calculations for strength runes assume 10 stacks of might, between the sigil and bursting the fire field on the flamethrower
• fixed SE calculations for direct damage, which wasn’t properly calculated for attacks with multiple hits

New numbers at steady-state:

Self-buffs only:
Max-DPS: 12,186 (1670)
Cele w/Strength: 10,210 (1130) or 83.4% of max
Cele w/Accuracy: 9,120 (940) or 73.7% of max

Max-buffed:
Max-DPS: 18,270 (1100)
Cele w/Strength: 15,442 (1080) or 84.5% of max
Cele w/Accuracy: 16,100 (950) or 88.1% of max

In conclusion, even after re-configuring my calculations, we’re still talking low- to mid-teens DPS drop for switching to celestial gear, given all the assumptions I listed. Also, as I was expecting before, celestial gear can be much more consistent in the DPS it deals since condition damage has less variance than direct damage when crit chance is not close to 100%. The difference in spread drops with fury and precision buff from a warrior, however.

Couple things:

1) I already have a zerker warrior and a zerker ele, I don’t need to L2P. Zerker’s all fine and good that 25% of the time when you’re in a PUG that is halfway decent, but for the rest of the time I usually switch to warrior because trying carry everybody else is PAINFUL in a cloth glass-cannon versus a warrior with some damage mitigation, even if I can get better boon stacking/party DPS on an ele.

Also, as I already said, I don’t JUST want to do dungeons and fractals. I want some happy funtimes doing other stuff—where optimizations outside DPS actually matter—without making it impossible to do dungeons.

2) I can run the calculations over a longer time period to account for static discharge procs (in fact I probably should because my uncertainty numbers kinda relied on normal approximations when I probably didn’t have a large enough sample for that in the span of 1 rotation) but I’m confused about SD. Does it proc on non-damaging toolbelt skills? Only 1 toolbelt skill in the build does direct damage (Grenade Barrage), while the other three (Incendiary Ammo, Regenerating Mist, Healing Mist) are all support, which is why I discounted it. When I’ve used SD in my own experience I never notice any damage on using these skills, but maybe I need to aim better? Also, does barrage proc 5 SDs if all explosions hit?

Jerus.4350:

snip

I factored in the 10% at 50% counting it at 5% overall. According to my calculations, you can juuuuust get to 100% when the 10% kicks in alongside fury and banner with a celestial build. Accuracy is definitely sub-optimal in assassin’s, but since the second signet is usually “whatever floats your boat” I didn’t bother researching around a whole lot for the “optimum” signet in the second slot. Since this is an alt, I don’t want to have to craft a handful of rifles to switch out for when it’s nightime/fighting specific enemies/whatever. Though, I guess it would be easy to sub zerker in for assassin’s until you can get the full benefit of an accuracy sigil…

To your second point, there’s only 1 toolbelt skill that does damage on this particular layout (grenade barrage) with the others either healing or adding a 15s more burn. The grenade barrage packs a decent wallop, but shaving 3 secs off the 30s cooldown isn’t going to make a huge difference

What I’m going for, is a “whatever I feel like doing today” build. If I want to do open world, or soloing, or dungeons, or WvW, or whatever, just go out and do it with the same set of gear. Of all the stuff I like doing, dungeons seem to be where builds gonna matter most (and I always PUG) so I wanted to know exactly how much of a DPS hit adding a fair bit of survivability would incur.

I went through all this work under the assumption that ANet will make conditions more viable in the near future. Call me an optimist.

So, I have a freshly-minted 80 engineer from level up tomes/scrolls, and started looking at builds. I found this:

http://www.dtguilds.com/forum/m/6563292/viewthread/15457607-dnt-engineer-build-127-patch

Now, my main is an elementalist, and I remember reading about the difference in DPS between full zerker and full celestial, also on DnTs forums, and that the takeaway was the full cele = 30% DPS drop.

Since Engies work a little different from Elies, I decided to run the numbers myself and see if the drop was quite so precipitous since engineers use more conditions and what-not. Also, since it seems like they’re making some changes to conditions to make them more viable in HoT stacks-wise I wanted to see how rosy the world could look if I was able to realistically utilize conditions.

For my calcs, I utilized the same build as the DnT one, except 6/6/2/0/0 instead of 6/6/0/0/2 for Energized Armor, because the 100-ish power the trait gives is better than the 100 Ferocity 2 points in Tools gives DPS wise (though I didn’t run the numbers with Static Discharge in the rotation so this could be off).

Other assumptions made: 25 vuln all the time, all exotic equipment, calculated both with 0 might/fury and 25 might/fury/damage banners. Runes are force and accuracy, and scholar at 70% uptime. Permanent burning from the Flamethrower, and permanent poison from the nades. 5 conditions all the time for Modified Ammo. If an ability ticks or has a variable multiplier, then whatever it’kittenting will be hit for all ticks/max damage (for blunderbuss/acid bomb). Obviously, this is idealized, but my hope is that the numbers I get will be roughly proportion to what I’ll get in practice.

Using the assumptions, I calculated the DPS from the rotation given in the build above. For funsies, I also calculated the standard error of the DPS, to see if there was a huge different in the randomness of the damage the builds did (on average about 66% of expected damage from one full rotation will fall within 1 standard error).

Final tally:
Full Assassin’s with zerker trinkets:
no buff ~ 10,190 DPS w/ SE 1320 (so 66% interval ~ 8,870-11,510 damage in a rotation)
full buff ~ 16540 DPS w/ SE 770 (15,770-17,310)

Full Celestial:
no buff ~ 8,680 DPS w/ SE 1000 (7,680-9,680)
full buff ~ 14,310 DPS w/SE 1090 (13,220-15,400)

Interestingly enough, Celestial does right at 85% damage of assassin’s/zerker, regardless of how much buffing is going on. Also, while the damage is more variable for Assassin’s gear without buff, it becomes much less random than cele with buffs (mainly because fury gives 100% crit chance, negating that source of variance)

That 15% drop in DPS is in exchange for about a third more HP and a quarter more Armor, plus a oh-why-the-hell-do-I-care amount more of healing power.

I’m thinking I’ll start working toward a celestial set for pugging…

I have a few thoughts:

• Will the condi duration cap also be removed? I always assumed the cap on condi duration was related to the stack cap—performance reasons.
• Can we get more gear to boost condi duration? I think it would be interesting if duration went the same way as crit damage—make a new stat that increases duration by x % per attribute similar to Ferocity
• Could we move the condition proc on crit traits to major slots and increase the stacks generated by them? This would effectively “let conditions crit,” but it would have sucked if you did that with the cap in place.

Everyone keep saying condi builds only need to focus on 1 stat. That’s not even remotely true—condition duration, condition damage, and precision will all increase condi damage if a character optimized for condi damage, it’s just that we have a cap on one of them (duration), milquetoast ROI for another of them (proc on crit conditions from high precision all come from weak minor traits and lackluster sigils), and a cap on stacks (destroying effectiveness of condition damage in PvE). Plus, even if the engine-imposed restrictions weren’t there, there’s no condi version of zerker gear that boosts all three stats at the cost of defense.

Are there plans to fix any of the other issues, or are we just removing the stack cap (baby steps and all…)?