Guild Wars 2

Oh Snapalope.1378:

Druid spirits are still 5 targets. Considering warrior banners are 10 targets now, is this an oversight that will be addressed very soon?

This was not an oversight. Making something affect ten targets is not something we want to do across the board for unique buffs.
They are pretty costly performance-wise, however this is not to say it will never happen.

cranos.5913:

Since alacrity is now no longer mesmer exclusive, are there any plans on making quickness more widely available too? I realise other classes currently already have the boon, but it’s nowhere near the 100% uptime chronos can dish out.

We’ll place quickness where it is appropriate, but don’t have that as a specifically targeted plan.

Chronomancer is the time-themed elite specialization and their being able to grant quickness and alacrity better than anyone else is spot on…

(Until we add the Quickenator Elite Specialization)

Svarty.8019:

Are Arenanet unwilling/unable to totally rework abilities or just in number tweaking mode?

Does it take the resources of an expansion budget to totally rework an ability?

We’re able, but it is a question of time tradeoffs.

- Tweaking something requires quite a bit of testing to see that it will not have dangerous consequences.
- Re-working something entirely requires even more testing for those dangerous consequences as well as functionality and potential bugs.

If it is needed and we have the time resource then we’ll do a re-work, but we’ll use tweaks when they’re deemed sufficient.

Biological.3297:

So im not sure on alot of things with this patch, but I think i can live with/ get used to it. All except one. Wvw. red circles AoE even if its freindly. NO. If its a test for lag then its a bad bad choice. no idea where is safe and where is not. Been doging these circles for years and now we wont have to doge them, maybe.

This is a bug. It’ll get fixed hopefully soon.

Kerivek.5740:

My main concern is the fact that Spirit Weapons went completely untouched. One of my favorite things about Guardian when I began playing back in beta was my Spirit Weapon build. Spirit Weapons seem to be relegated to the realm of “just for fun” rather than having any remotely competitive applications. I would really love to see Spirit Weapons and other neglected skills get some love rather than just tweaking what is already being used ad nauseum.

TexZero.7910:

<snip> when are elixir’s, gadgets, and gyro’s going to be viable choices over kits ?

We would really like to do some in-depth passes on underused utility types across most professions. We did not have time to do that for this update, sadly.

Kits on Engineer are an outlier; as utilities they provide an insane amount of versatility. Inherently it is difficult to bring a single skill up to the level of five skills. This is a difficult conundrum and one we discuss regularly. That said, we do have a few ideas for creating gameplay with other utility revisits in the future.

In particular I’d like to review and revisit Elementalist Conjures, Guardian Spirit Weapons, Engineer Gadgets and potentially Mesmer Mantras.

XeonJab.7529:

“Specializing in chronomancy grants mesmers access, through traits and skills, to a new effect called alacrity. " Chronomancers. “Chronomancy is the only specialization allowed access to this powerful effect.” Chronomancers. So why do revs have alacrity now?

Chronomancer was given Alacrity because it was incredibly thematic and felt within its kit.

From a group content perspective, alacrity is so strong that if no other profession gains access to it then Chronomancers would push others out of groups because it feels necessary. As is, they are likely to remain the best ways to grant alacrity to others.

The game evolves and we decided that keeping this feature exclusive may not be in the best interest of the game as a whole. From a general game perspective, specializations are places where a profession may gain access to features from a different profession.

OriOri.8724:

• Why did AT on mesmers only get a CD reduction in PvP? It doesn’t see any use in PvE so what harm would it be to also reduce its CD in PvE as well?

There may not have been too much danger in changing this game-wide. The PvP impact ,from internal testing, was where we wanted to see more of how this change would play out. This is something we’re open to revisiting in a future update.

After putting in the request and thanks to Joel Helmich’s masterful sleuthing into ancient systems and programming magic our Ranger Pets will now retain their customized names between sessions across all your pets. No more sticking to a single pet to keep their names between logins!

WOOHOO!

The number of strikes was reduced from 7 to 5 and the cooldown on Smoke Assault was reduced from 24s to 20s, the damage on the strikes was not reduced

Hey all,

Looks like the paired Smokescale patch notes were missed:

After hearing a lot of player feedback the Smokescale F2 ability is now Smoke Cloud.

The Smokescale Smoke Assault skill had its cooldown reduced from 24s to 20s and the number of attacks from 7 to 5.

Yeah, not intended.

Player minions don’t carry over their player’s critical chance; phantasms are a special case.

A reduction was intentional. THIS much of a reduction was not intentional. Going to see what we can do about this to keep it both visible, but not obfuscating.

Ancestral Grace placing you in combat was blatantly unintended. I should have a fix in for that to go out… hopefully sometime soon.

Going to be investigating this. It may require some change to Smoke Assault, since the active skills are intended to be a little stronger than the passive skills.

Thanks for spotting this! Definitely unintended behavior on Jump Shot and Rocket Charge.

If regen were removed it would be in all modes. I’ve seen that in PvP it is also a pretty heavy gating, but in PvE it is appears worse due to the more frequent travel time between engagements.

This change reduces duration of conditions applied by 95% and the amount of direct damage by 95%.

This was the systemic change to help with pet survivability that I’d alluded to earlier.

I’ll be listening for feedback on the changes to see how the 95% damage reduction feels and whether we need to tweak the numbers some more.

Simply posting here as well for the red tag visibility.

This was indeed the systemic change that I was referencing before.

The systemic change we’ve been working on to get in place for Heart of Thorns to help with pet and spirit survivability can be read about now

Due to a design discussion that arose yesterday the recharge on gyros are going back to starting on the death of the gyro.

To help with the recharge going back to the gyro death the recharge themselves are being dramatically reduced. Below is a before and after to help clarify what is happening.

On Cast Medic Gyro CD: 35s
On Cast Medic Gyro Duration: 14s
CD at full duration: 21s
New Medic Gyro CD on Death: 20s

On Cast Purge/Bulwark CD: 35s
On Cast Duration: 15s
CD at full duration: 20s
New Gyro CD on Death: 20s

On Cast Sneak Gyro CD: 45 seconds
On Cast Duration: 30s
CD at full duration: 15s
New Sneak Gyro CD: 20s

This amounts to an overall buff to gyro recharge as the net recharge time is reduced on all gyros except sneak gyro, which is effectively a buff if the sneak gyro would have been destroyed anytime before the final five seconds of its duration.

Blast Gyro’s toolbelt skill, Bypass Coating, is going to be a stunbreak.

It means that if your pet has 5 stacks of might (durations don’t matter) and you have 10 stacks of might (durations continue to not matter) that when you hit WHAO you’ll gain 5 stacks of might for 10s and your pet will gain 10 stacks of might for 10 seconds.

Hey all,

As we hurtle toward launch most of my time is locked into Druid and Scrapper changes.

After much tribulation I was able to make a change to WHAO to remove the static boon stack application on Might and Stability stacks being copied; this was actually a fairly difficult change to implement as we don’t really have support for copying boons with preset durations.

This’ll go in with the 23rd.

Hey all,

Since the third beta weekend there’s been a lot of great feedback – thanks!

Below are some of the more solid changes to the Druid since the beta weekend that were made to address some concerns regarding net damage loss in a raid, celestial avatar form feeling gated by staff and glyph reward scaling.

• Grace of the Land: This trait has been re-worked. Instead of its former behavior, allies affected by your celestial avatar abilities gain 3% damage and condition damage increase for 8 seconds. This buff stacks 5 times.

• Lingering Light: This trait has been re-worked. Instead of its former behavior, when you heal an ally their next outgoing attack will heal them (based upon your healing) and blind their target.

• Glyph of Unity: This skill now has a 400 initial effect radius and a 600 radius leash.

• Glyph of Empowerment: The radius for this skill has been increased to 600.

• Glyph of Alignment: Increased the weakness and cripple duration on this skill from 3s to 5s. Reduced the cast damage by 66%. This skill now applies 3 stacks of poison.

• Ancestral Grace: Is now an evade and will immediately end upon reaching your destination.

• Celestial Avatar Form: Entering this form now has a 10s CD. Charging of Astral force by healing has been reduced by 40%. Charging of Astral force by outgoing strikes has been increased by 200%. You now retain half your current astral force if you decide to break form early.

• Celestial Avatar Form: Skills that heal have had their base heals reduced by 15-25% and increased their healing coefficients from 100-145%. This should leave base heals solid while really rewarding players who elect to use healing power stats.

• (Celestial Avatar) Lunar Impact: Reduced the daze on this skill from 3s to 2s. This skill is now ground targeted and will blast finish correctly.

Well wishes,
~Irenio

Bonus: Bristleback Pet F2 is no longer the Sharpen Spines ability. The F2 is now Spike Barrage to give you more rewarding control.

’allo fellow Engineers,

Since the beta weekend there’ve been a fair chunk of posts regarding the Function Gyro, Hammer and Gyros… a bit fewer regarding traits that weren’t contingent on those other components. Below are the more solid changes at this point.

At this point we’re not going to be able to change the elite specialization mechanic very much. There are still going to be changes to it with the possibility for expansion of functionality post-launch.

Hammer was generally well received and many of you pointed out some flaws and potential changes that were in line with our intent for the weapon skills.

Gyros are going to be affected by a systemic change that should increase their survivability quite a lot. In addition to that several changes to how Gyros follow you and their rate of travel were made – they shouldn’t zig-zag randomly about anymore even if you’re not moving and try to stay pretty close to you while you are moving.

• Function Gyro – The gyro should appear and begin stomping or reviving more quickly and no longer seek to attack anyone that strikes it, focusing instead solely upon its task of stomping or reviving. The cooldown on the gyro has been reduced to 20s from 30s and its duration has been reduced to 10s from 15s. This is intended to increase the frequency of availability while still giving it enough time to complete its purpose. The range at which the function gyro can be used has been increased to 900.

• Hammer 1 Autoattack Combo: Went in and removed most of the aftercasts from the swings, so this should feel a bit smoother and it is a functional damage increase from the reduced rotation time as well as slightly increased might and vulnerability uptime.

• Rocket Charge: Will no longer leap about once you’ve reached your target, instead leaping ensuring that the gap remains closed and your leaps are more closely synchronized. The leap finishers from this ability now happen at the start of each jump, like other leap finishers. Also smacked the bug of this ability being affected by movement-speed.

• Shock Shield: This skill now starts you blocking immediately upon and will cease blocking the moment the skill effects end, hopefully giving you better control and sense of the block time so your anticipation and reaction time are more rewarded.

• Several Gyros received increased movement speeds to help keep them close to you as you move and some skill changes to make them more effective at their jobs, like increased range on their abilities.

• Gyros now start their cooldown upon summon rather than upon gyro death. Medic, Shredder, Purge and Bulwark gyro now have a 35s cooldown, up from 30s. Sneak Gyro needed a cooldown that was longer since it would otherwise have potential 100% uptime, so it now has a cooldown of kitten , up from 30s (its 30s duration remains). This should encourage players to keep them around to gain their benefits for longer.

• Impact Savant: This trait now affects dazes in addition to stuns.

Well wishes,
~ Irenio

Edit to add additional post for visibility:

Due to a design discussion that arose yesterday the recharge on gyros are going back to starting on the death of the gyro.

To help with the recharge going back to the gyro death the recharge themselves are being dramatically reduced. Below is a before and after to help clarify what is happening.

On Cast Medic Gyro CD: 35s
On Cast Medic Gyro Duration: 14s
CD at full duration: 21s
New Medic Gyro CD on Death: 20s

On Cast Purge/Bulwark CD: 35s
On Cast Duration: 15s
CD at full duration: 20s
New Gyro CD on Death: 20s

On Cast Sneak Gyro CD: 45 seconds, because they’re not cute and furry.
On Cast Duration: 30s
CD at full duration: 15s
New Sneak Gyro CD: 20s

This amounts to an overall buff to gyro recharge as the net recharge time is reduced on all gyros except sneak gyro, which is effectively a buff if the sneak gyro would have been destroyed anytime before the final five seconds of its duration.

Blast Gyro’s toolbelt skill, Bypass Coating, is going to be a stunbreak.

Your constructive feedback has been really awesome so far and I trust will continue to be. I understand your concerns with not enough being communicated and I’m looking into getting more information out on some of the more solid changes we have.

Your constructive feedback has been really awesome so far and I trust will continue to be. I understand your concerns with not enough being communicated and I’m looking into getting more information out on some of the more solid changes we have.

There are two components I can mention right now, the rest you’ll have to wait until the 23rd to see:

Gyros should be a good bit more snappy when it comes to staying near you and are also going to experience some additional survivability.

Rocket Charge will have the leap play at start rather than finish (like other leaps) and isn’t going to be so erratic once you’ve closed to your target.

There’ve been some changes to Druid staff, glyphs, traits and Celestial avatar skills.

One change I can mention is that Ancestral Grace will now end as soon as you reach your destination rather than having to wait out the animation. We weren’t able to do this before with point-based movement, but an awesome programmer threw together a way for us to script it in.

As Belzebu calls out: You’ll have to check out the rest of the changes on the 23rd!

We’ve got a fix coming for this with the 23rd.

We’ve isolated the issue and it’ll be fixed with the release on the 23rd.

With AMR not working on Cleansing Burst it looks like there was more than one bug that was causing this – sigh. I believe I’ve fixed all of them this time. Fingers crossed.

Just had these threads merged and posting here for red tag visibility. I’ll be keeping an eye on things here as well.

Thanks for gathering Scrapper bugs together I’ll be smacking (with a hammer) these around as time allows!

The animations for staff are getting looked at.

Thanks for the tremendous amount of feedback regarding the Druid. I’ll be modifying swaths of the druid (and scrapper) to fix bugs and account for your feedback this week and reviewing things like glyphs effectiveness, celestial avatar skill differentiation, astral force charging rates and some of the staff skills.

In general the Celestial Avatar form’s base heals feel a bit too high and heal coefficients didn’t feel rewarding enough to go with healpower stats. The heals themselves seemed to be working at decent values, so I’ll be tweaking the base heals down and coefficients up some in order to better reward selecting healing power stat combos as a druid.

Thanks for the solid feedback and spotting some unintended behaviors that I’ll be going over and modifying or changing, including things like the hammer autoattack aftercasts.

I’ll be checking what we can do on the AI side to help the appropriate gyros keep closer to you – this feedback and that rocket charge felt erratic are high on my list for today and tomorrow as modifying animation and AI can take a lot more work than other changes.

I’ll also thread in as many more easily implementable tweaks and bugfixes as I can (to several things like rocket charge being affected by movement-affecting boons and conditions). I’ll review gyro durations/recharge start times as well.

Welcome to post new pet feedback here as well.

Hey all.

Now that the Beta Weekend is upon us and you’re able to try out the Scrapper, please post your constructive feedback here.

Hey all.

Now that the Beta Weekend Event is live and you’re able to check out the Druid please post constructive feedback here.

The underlying system of combat is built around area attacks. This is why the majority of base weapon attacks strike multiple targets in the affected area, unlike other games which strike one target – the one you have selected. Our system makes things like positioning and facing far more important and engaging; this also means that the concept of ‘AoE’ is not as easy to distinguish and thus handle in different ways.

That said, we are currently looking at systemic ways to help with player pet and minion survivability.

Hey fellow Engis,

I am reading here and the ranger forums heavily. As others have called out (accurately), working on the last two elite specializations to be revealed is taking up the vast, vast majority of my time, even with assistance from the rest of the team.

This weekend you’ll be able to test out a lot of the theorycrafting (some of which had my eyes widening – in a good way) that you’ve been doing and offer even more awesome feedback.

Things you’ve brought up, like the Scrapper’s lack of a stunbreak on either their utilities or traits is getting acted on, as well as a few more changes to core Engineer and bugfixes.

We are, indeed, reading.

We particularly take time to read the constructive and well-crafted feedback posts.

I don’t want to make promises, which as many of you have pointed out can go horribly awry for a variety of reasons, but we are hoping to make some changes to the old ranger shouts (pre-WHAO & SotP).

The new pets do not require that you have the druid elite specialization.
They will require that you find and tame them (outside of PvP).

The pets can be found on new jungle maps, so you’ll need to have Heart of Thorns to gain access to those new companions.

I hope that clarifies some of the confusion!

I wanted to quickly mention – we’re investigating the med kit 1 issue right now!

Hey all,

We’re aware of these issues and have a pair of fixes in progress!

Hey all.

I just returned from San Francisco and am going to crash hard from the busy weekend at Twitch Con very soon, but first I wanted to clarify something:

During the skill balance stream on Friday we weren’t able to go into depth or even talk about the reasons and expected results for changes we did reach due to time constraints[sub]1[/sub]. Because the June 23rd patch was mentioned during the stream many people seem to expect a patch of that size and magnitude.

This coming patch is NOT that big.

Tuesday’s patch will have those changes we discussed in the livestream, some bugfixes, and more, but it is a step in the right direction. It is not the end-all.

There shall be more.

—

1. (Although maybe Ice Bow 4 changes didn’t really need explanation)