Guild Wars 2

June 23rd Update

“The skill-use damage will also now trigger when the affected target is interrupted during skill activation.”

Zlater.6789:

So my question is, do you have any plans in the future to standardise common buffs and turn them into boons? Or would it be something you’d be interested in doing soon?

We don’t have any plans to turn buffs like alacrity and superspeed into boons. Boons have ways to extend their duration so their power levels can fluctuate heavily based on equipment and trait selection making powerful effects very difficult to balance.

KOPPER.1458:

When you balance for PvE how much do you take into consideration what current compositions look like for content like fractals and raids? Do you try to balance in a way that more classes become optimal for that content or do you aim for general viability?

We always consider raids and fractal composition when balancing. We gather input from a lot of different teams whenever we do a balance pass, including suggestions from fractals and raids teams. We try to keep in mind feedback from a variety of different sources when building our balance changes.

Regarding class optimization. I’d say that it’s more accurate to say we want every class to be viable in each game mode.

saerni.2584:

Also, can you comment on the devious change adding in a cool down on Stealth Attacks? This was never explained, and one question that is more pressing than the “why” is whether or not the team is satisfied with the cooldown and open to making changes to this in the future.

Unlike other thief weapons skills, stealth attacks do not have an initiative cost. Previously they did not have a cooldown as well. Guild Wars 2 frequently uses recharge as a cost to casting a skill as a result, these skills were essentially “free”. With the previous version of stealth attacks, you could spam your stealth attack until it hit at essentially no cost while your opponent had to use resources like aegis, blind or evasion to avoid it.

tldr; We added the recharge to stealth attacks to insure that there would be appropriate cost to failing to hit with a stealth attack. We’re pretty happy with this change and aren’t planning to revert it.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Do you generally consider reworking skills when working on the balance patch or is this something you’d only do in a “last ditch effort”, when the skill just can’t be put in a good place?

We generally try to avoid reworking skills in a vacuum. If we feel a skill is slightly out of line, small tweaks to things like damage, recharge or cast time can usually be enough. We’re more likely to do skill reworks when doing major updates to a given skill category such as some of the changes to mesmer phantasms this time around, but for one-off skills we try to avoid it if we can since it can come across as random and affect players who like using the skill as is. That’s not to say we wouldn’t do it, but it would have to be a fairly extreme case.

OriOri.8724:

• The additional effects on phantasm summons for mesmer are interesting (still have to test them myself to see how effective they are), but why didn’t iBerserker or iWarden get the same love?

We’d actually planned for more phantasm changes in this update including iWarden, but we weren’t satisfied with how some of them turned out. When developing these new phantasm skills it was important for us to add functionality that had meaningful combat effects without deviating too much from the purpose of the phantasm or the weapon. We’d like to do more of these in the future but we are being careful not to power creep them so much that we have to weaken the phantasm to counterbalance it.

Salamander.2504:

It looks like you increased the healing a bit to compensate for the change, which makes sense, but perhaps more importantly, did you guys consider scaling the lifeforce generation up from 1% to 1.5% for example?

We did consider increasing the lifeforce gain, but some preliminary tests showed that you could generate a very large amount of lifeforce from only a few skills so we didn’t end up increasing it. If the trait ends up under-performing in the future that’s probably the first place we’ll look for improvements.

Carlos.7915:

I guess necromancers need to live in their own instances apart from the rest of the game, not being able to support or receive support

I’m fairly confident that boons will still apply their effects to necromancers even if this trait is not equipped.

To provide some context on this change:

We felt that Blighter’s Boon was providing too much survivability, especially with the amount of boon output that Heralds and Tempests can provide. (This is especially true in WvW and large PvE Zergs). I did like the interaction this trait had with your allies, but boon application from allies is too broad of a category for us to reasonably balance in all modes of the game.

We considered a lot of other possibilities for this skill including adding an ICD, limiting the procs to specific boons, limiting the number of procs from allies, but the majority of these types of fixes ended up taking agency and control away from the reaper which we felt wasn’t optimal.

Ultimately we felt this change helped to make the trait more specific to some builds rather than the best trait in all situations.

EDIT: It seems like there is some confusion about the reasons behind the change. Even though I use PvE and WvW as an example, we think it’s providing too much in all areas of the game, PvP included.

Thanks for the report. I’ve put in a fix for this, it should be out with an upcoming hotfix. (In the future also post this to the bugs forum.)

Azure.8670:

Dont expect any word on scepter until a few months after HoT. due to the amount of clones scepter produces, pretty sure the devs are keeping a close eye on chronomancer to see what crazy builds people come up with. Scepter may become much more popular than it is

Scepter is difficult to balance because of the clone generation on AA. As a mesmer player I’d like it if the last attack wasn’t so slow too, but increasing the speed of the final attack risks imbalancing mesmer DPS by increasing clone generation speed.

Angel de Lyssa.4716:

If the necro, already has two unique conditions (fear dps and chill dps), why not also make mesmer, have their own unique condition “wastrel”? Specialized only for the scepter.

Fear and chill are not unique to necromancer. Necromancer has traits that modify these conditions but what you’re asking for is an entirely new condition which has a lot of balance implications to it and is very unlikely to happen.

One of the reasons we are more conservative about axe when it comes to balance is because axe uses a unique attack action in our game that cannot be avoided using positioning. Normal melee attacks have an attack arc and normal ranged attacks use projectiles. Enemy players can use positioning and movement to avoid these attacks. Axe 1 and 2 by contrast just hit you when you are in range regardless of your positioning. While some utility skills (like Corrupt Boon) also use this targeting method, it’s rare on weapon skills and thus we are wary of buffing it too much.

As for the animation on axe 1, it was changed because of an exploit with cancel casting that allowed players to get significantly more damage from the skill by continually canceling it. At the time I tried to just adjust the original animation so we could keep it but due to its construction that ended up not being feasible. The resulting animation looked extremely choppy and didn’t sync well across races. You are always welcome to make suggestions on alternate animations you’d like to see, but going back to the original animation at this point is extremely unlikely.

Chrisco.5732:

RR with Bezerker could become interesting. The 130% buff is a bit vague (duration? healing? both?).

Just the healing.

ronpierce.2760:

What about moa form?

Moa specifically will still destroy them. When we decided on these changes we felt that the behavior of Moa vs pets was one that needed more discussion. We didn’t feel comfortable changing this behavior for this patch as it affects more classes than just necromancer.

Lich and Plague form was more of a clear cut issue of “hey, let’s not punish minion masters for pressing their elite”.

tobascodagama.2961:

Silverkey.2078:

Do they mean the focus now stacks swiftness?

Not quite. I think they mean that it’ll always set your Swiftness to exactly 12s?

It means that Temporal Curtain will always apply it’s full swiftness duration (12s) the first time you pass through it. Previously if you had swiftness from another source it would not apply. There are a few other details but I’ll leave those until Tuesday.

Warcry.1596:

We keep our minions when transformed!!!

I want to quickly clarify something about this note. The change is that specifically Plague form and Lich form will not destroy your minions. We can’t do this universally for all transforms because it can cause problems with the balance of events or story steps that transform you.

A raid boss having defiance doesn’t mean soft-CC won’t be valuable in a raid encounter.

There has been a lot of discussion on this point so I’d like to explain a bit about the decision to change the Illusionary Avenger’s attack type and how we ended up with the attack that we’re showing in BWE3.

The main feedback we got from BWE2 was that the effects applied by this phantasm were unreliable and hard to control. We wanted to make a more reliable way to apply alacrity and slow that players could respond to which is why we ended up with the AoE attack.

We had tried other ideas but the important aspect of the one we chose is that it keeps the delivery method consistent. We considered many of the versions suggested in the feedback threads such as the one where he throws the shield but applies alacrity around himself, but realized that this basically amounted to two different delivery methods in one skill. While this kind of behavior is okay for player skills we felt that it was too complex for a phantasm attack. This attack already has different effects based on if it hits an ally or an enemy so it was important to us to keep the attack on the Avenger easy to understand for both allies and enemies. This is why the PBAoE version was selected.

Kamui.3150:

Hey Robert, one thing I was curious about was Sundering Leap, mainly that it seems to be a bit strong when compared to another skill, namely On My Mark. SL is a Leap finisher, damage, 10 Vuln for 6s, 6s Cripple, gives you 5 Adrenaline, and has a 25s CD (with no CD trait, but that’s totally fine, Rage skills have low CD by default) and all that’s in a decent AoE. Meanwhile OMM is a Shout with a 30s base CD (24s traited) that puts 10 Vuln on one target at 1200 Range for 10s, and that’s it. Is this something that could potentially cause OMM to be buffed (More Vuln and/or AoE effect?), would SL get nerfed, or working as intended? Mainly figuring that there’s no reason I’d take OMM while SL was an option to put on my bar.

This is a fair concern. With the previous round of testing we felt that Sundering Leap wasn’t offering enough for a skill that put you into the middle of a fight so we buffed it accordingly. It’s always possible that we went too far though and I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays in the next BWE. I think OMM still has a place in some builds though. The fact that its a shout gives it a place in builds running Vigorous Shouts. Additionally unlike Sundering Leap it’s also unblockable and instant so you can use in in the middle of other attacks without interrupting your flow.

Please let me know how you feel about this skill after the next BWE!

Zenith.7301:

Stop=/= degen.

If the rate at which the degen happens does not overcome the rate at which the bar recovers, it is not stopping.

And the degen is pathetic to be honest. Did you even play the last beta weekend event? This solution was already in it, and my chills hardly contributed to a broken bar.

I want to correct a few misconceptions here:

1. Not all defiant bars have regen, in these cases soft CC will degen the bar as long as they are up until broken.
2. This new system was not present in BWE2, it is new as of BWE3.

Kraav.8136:

Robert:

Please make the elite “Chilled to the Bone” usable underwater.

Thanks!

Done. Although you might not see it for BWE3 it should be in by launch.

Jzaku.9765:

I feel that you’ve missed the point a little, it’s ok for some mechanics to have both a cost and cooldown, but this is the defining mechanic of the specialization.

The fact that its the defining mechanic of the specialization didn’t really have any bearing on the decision to make this skill have the costs it does. The adrenaline cost is there to require a build up and the recharge is there to provide some downtime.

Mooncow.6847:

Second, can a dev please expand on gun flame? Can you elaborate on the absolute best case scenario? If everything goes right what is the maximum targets I can hit?

The explosion hits 5 targets. If you don’t have the piercing trait you get 5 maximum targets. If you do have the trait it will hit 5 targets from the initial explosion plus 4 more from the piercing bullet.

Absconditus.6804:

But wait, Robert, isn’t this something that you could do through scripting? The entry Portal is placed. As we do so, the player co-ordinates are temporarily stored for its life cycle, indicating its location, then we calculate a radius from these co-ordinates while polling the players movement, to either show or hide the red line, indicating if the player has moved outside the range of which where an exit Portal will be functional?

While I appreciate the suggestion, this kind of thing isn’t scriptable. Unfortunately I can’t explain the exact mechanical reason since it could reveal sensitive information about our internal systems.

Adding a timer buff is simple, but having a range or direction indicator is much more difficult due to how the skill is implemented. Portal is managed heavily through code rather than script due to its unique functionality so adding something like this would likely require changing some of the underling structure of the skill.

Jzaku.9765:

Berserker’s special mechanic is not only gated behind a cooldown, it’s ALSO gated behind a cost.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having cost and cooldown to some mechanics.

• Revenant has cost and cooldown on several utilities.
• Chronomancer has to spend illusions to use F5 effectively.
• Reaper spends lifeforce while using F1.
• Core warrior burst skills cost adrenaline and have a cooldown.

All of these skills have both cooldown and a secondary resource cost as part of their functionality.

Fay.2357:

Just to reiterate, could you clarify the cooldown of well of eternity? In BWE2, it was 20 seconds. Is it being moved to 25 or to 30?

Sorry that was a bit of confusion on my part. The correct recharge is 30 seconds. I’ve edited the original post to reflect this.

SaintSnow.6593:

One thing though, any clarification on the wells finally being distinguished as ally or enemy? For the last two weekends they have had ally rings on them regardless is if it is an enemy’s. Needs the red line for distinguishing.

Thanks for mentioning this, I hadn’t seen any reports on this yet so I’ll look into it.

Fnix.5608:

Not sure if I like this change at all, very sceptical about this one. Sure, I want to test it first – but placing phantasms in melee range, and only hitting one target with slow at the time is a big nerf overall to this one.

Slow is also applied AoE.

Zenith.7301:

So the question is, once that bar irons up, will status effects still apply for the purpose of still allowing traits to proc/function? Or will people have to wait until the bar is uncovered again to start benefiting from their traits?

You’ll still be able to apply them. Edited original post to reflect this.

There have been a lot of questions coming up recently from several different profession forums regarding the use of soft-CC effects (cripple, chill, slow, etc) on bosses with the new Defiance system in HoT. We have a solution in the works for this but we wanted to make a post to explain how it’s going to work.

A hard-CC like a stun, daze or knockback will deal direct damage to a defiance bar, lowering it by a flat amount based on the duration of the CC. As an example, a 2 second stun on a 6 second defiance bar will take off 33% of the bar.

A soft-CC like chill, slow, or cripple will deal damage over time to a defiance bar for the duration of the debuff. Additionally soft-CC effects will apply to the creature for the purposes of triggering traits but not apply their debuff effect. As an example, chilling a foe with a defiance bar will cause their defiance meter to degenerate over time and place the chill debuff on their status bar, which will allow a Reaper to benefit from the damage reduction effect of the trait Cold Shoulder, but it will not affect the creature’s movement speed.

The exact numbers on the degeneration rates for each type of soft-CC are still in flux, but we hope this helps answer some of the questions about the viability of certain elite specializations in HoT.

EDIT: Even if the defiance bar is not vulnerable to CC, the conditions will still apply for the purposes of triggering traits.

Shiki.7148:

Now can we please have CttB work under water please? I really want to be able to run something other than Plagueform.

I’m not sure if this change will be in BWE3 (been making changes in a lot of different places) but I’m intending for all shouts to be usable underwater.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Additionally, can you comment on Deathly Chill? This skill currently doesn’t work on 90% of PvE enemies. Any update on this?

I think the new icon will help with this. The damage is probably getting lost with the other attacks.

Solzero.5380:

I noticed that the rage skills sundering leap and headbutt do not remove immob when traited with warrior sprint.

Thanks for pointing this out, I’ll see if I can get a fix in for this!

Kidel.2057:

No 5 target limit on Gun Flame explosion? Not even damage reduction?
This primal burst is still WAY more powerful then its normal burst.

Gun Flame has a 5 target limit for the explosion. It had this previously to, but it was per explosion, so you could hit 25 targets with the old version.

WhiteOil.1836:

we can trait for immobilize already. Rupturing blow was useful for area control and spacing, offence and defense, taking a rick leaping into an area just to immobilize is weak!! the damage was fine

Rupturing Smash has a significantly higher target cap than Earthshaker which is why we limited the immobilize duration. Each portion of the cascade strike can hit 3 targets, and there are 5 strikes per wave (minus a few where they would otherwise overlap) and 5 waves. I’m actually still worried this one might be too strong.

Fanolian.8415:

Thank you!

Robert Gee.9246:

• Gravity Well: Now performs a knockdown, float and then pull. No longer gives stability on end. Increased final damage by 50%

Why not pull -> float -> knockdown? Stacking enemies should be a preferred starter to land following skills. And CCed targets are harder to escape from the center despite the small radius.

The primary reason for the order of effects is due to how it looks with multiple foes. I tried other permutations during testing but this one looks the best for the following reasons:

1. Putting the pull anywhere but last makes the rest of the skill look bad because the enemies are all in one ball the whole time with their models overlapping.
2. When the knockdown is placed after the float the animations don’t blend properly resulting in the skill looking like the knockdown was out of sync.

Greetings Chronomancers, it’s that time again to talk about the next set of changes to the chronomancer specialization based on feedback from the last BWE. Chronomancer remains one of the more solid elite specializations going into BWE3 so we are continuing to tune up a few of the clunky or lackluster elements.

Shield Functionality Updates
The single block on Echo of Memory didn’t differentiate it enough from the block on offhand sword and could be difficult to use in some of the more intense areas of the jungle. BWE3 will change the single block to a continuous block, however as a cost to that the phantasm is now summoned at the end of the channel even if you block an attack at the start. This allows you to have more control of which enemy the phantasm is summoned on but don’t cancel the skill or you won’t get the phantasm! The phantasm itself has also been overhauled to be more reliable about spreading its buffs to allies and enemies alike. Finally Tides of Time has some new behavior to bounce if it hits a wall, however given the variable amount of terrain in our game there may still be some instances where it will not return.

• Echo of Memory/Deja Vu: Changed functionality. Now blocks all attacks for a short duration rather than a single attack. If this skill fully channels, summon an Illusionary Avenger. Deja Vu is available if any attack is blocked during the channel time.
• Deja Vu: Fixed a bug which allowed players to constantly cancel cast this skill to get a longer than intended uptime of the block effect. Canceling this skill now removes the Time Echo buff.
• Illusionary Avenger: Increased damage of this phantasm by 20%. Fixed a bug which prevented this skill from displaying the benefit from Empowered Illusions. Increased alacrity given to 2 seconds per hit. This phantasm no longer shoots a bouncing projectile but instead initiates a melee attack that slows enemies and gives alacrity to allies within a 240 radius around the target. Removed old phantasm description.
• Tides of Time: This skill now attempts to bounce back if it hits a wall. Fixed a bug where the time freeze caused by this skill would not show a stun icon in the status bar.

Well Tuning
Most of the wells have been changed to have more consistent effects. While the idea of duality and affecting enemies and allies works for some wells, we felt it would be better not to go overboard trying to force it when it didn’t. Gravity Well, Well of Eternity and Well of Precognition now have better defined effects for the situations they should be used in. Well of Recall now pulses despair and ends in happiness.

• Gravity Well: Now performs a knockdown, float and then pull. No longer gives stability on end. Increased final damage by 50%
• Well of Action: Increased damage per pulse by 17%. Lowered aftercast by 0.2 seconds.
• Well of Calamity: Lowered aftercast by 0.2 seconds.
• Well of Eternity: No longer gives vigor per pulse to allies but instead removes conditions from them. Increased recharge to from 20s to 30s. Increased base initial heal by 25%
• Well of Precognition: Updated functionality. Now gives blur for 1 second per pulse during its active portion instead of on end. When it ends, allies within the well regain 35 endurance.
• Well of Recall: Lowered recharge from 45 seconds to 40 seconds. Updated functionality of this well. It now chills for 1 second and deals damage every pulse then gives 5 seconds of alacrity to allies when it ends. New pulse damage is 70% of previous end damage. Effects have been updated to reflect this new behavior.

Traits
We didn’t feel that many changes to traits were necessary as they feel like they have gotten to a pretty good place at this time. However there are two I’d like to talk about in more detail.

• Illusionary Reversion: No changes.
  • There is a pretty clear division of people that would rather have an ICD on this skill and those that prefer the illusion requirement. After some thought we’ve decided we prefer the current version (illusion requirement) as it is an easier to understand limitation when compared to internal cooldowns. I know that some have asked that this requirement be toned down to 1 illusion required but this wouldn’t solve the original problem of being able to get large bonuses from your shatters without an investment.
• Lost Time – Added a 0.25 second delay between earning stacks of this buff. Fixed functionality: This trait previously applied slow on the first critical hit after generating 4 stacks. It now applies slow on any hit (does not have to be a critical hit) after 5 stacks are generated.
  • We’re still looking at good ways to limit some of the power from this trait. For now we are trying a small cooldown on the rate at which stacks can be generated. This primarily affects skills like Greatsword 1, and shouldn’t have a high impact on other weapon skills.

Bug Fixes

• Continuum Split – Fixed a bug which caused the Continuum Rift to take no damage from attacks.
• Flow of Time: Fix the description to show it gives alacrity per illusion.
• Illusionary Reversion: Fixed a bug which caused this trait to fail when used with Continuum Split.

That’s it for this round of changes, I hope everyone enjoys playing chronomancer in the next BWE!

The Reaper feedback from the last BWE was much more positive this time around so this set of changes will be less about large sweeping changes and more about smaller adjustments to numbers and timing to improve the overall feel of the specialization. Some of the more unpopular traits are also getting their functionality updated to be more competitive.

Reaper’s Shroud
The speed of Death’s Charge was increased to be more in-line with other gap closers like Savage Leap. I’ve also done some small animation changes that should reduce incidents of the skill going in the wrong direction. The small recharge on enter was also removed to make the functionality consistent with normal Death Shroud.

• Reaper’s Shroud: Removed the small recharge that was applied to the Exit Reaper’s Shroud when this skill was activated.
• Life Reap (Reaper Shroud 1c): Reduced aftercast by 0.2 seconds.
• Death’s Charge – Increased movement velocity by approximately 30%. Improved animation consistency.
• Infusing Terror: Removed incorrect fear skill fact from this skill
• Terrify (Reaper Shroud 3 toggle): Reduced casting time by 0.15 seconds. Adjusted animation speed.

Greatsword
With the last set of changes to greatsword the weapon is starting to feel like it’s in a good place. Some range adjustments to a few of the more difficult to hit with skills should help bring the rest of it together. Greatsword 5 was not changed in this iteration but we are aware of the problems it has and are working to improve them without changing the unique functionality of the skill.

• Dusk Strike/Fading Twilight: Fixed an issue where these skills would occasionally not award their listed lifeforce values.
• Death Spiral: Increased width on this attack by 33% to put it in line with other melee attack skills.
• Nightfall: Increased radius of this skill by 60 for all pulses. Maximum radius is now 360. Added effects to show damage/combo field radius. Fixed an issue which caused the combo field to persist longer than the effect of this skill.

Shouts
Shouts are getting to a good place but there’s still a little more to be done here. “Chilled to the Bone” and “Your Soul Is Mine” are getting buffs to make them more worthy of the slot and “Rise” is getting an update to make it more reliable as a defensive skill.

• “Chilled to the Bone!”: Lowered recharge from 120 seconds to 90 seconds. Reduced chill duration from 8 seconds to 6 seconds.
• “Nothing Can Save You!”: Reduced recharge from 35 seconds to 25 seconds.
• “Rise!”: Updated minion models. Increased vitality and toughness of minions by 33%, but decreased minion power by 40%. This skill now summons one minion by default plus one additional per target hit. Shambling Horrors now apply Dark Bond to their master as soon as they are summoned but must still attack to maintain the bond.
• “Suffer!”: Removed unlisted lifeforce gain from this skill.
• “You are all Weaklings!”: This skill now has instant activation. Increased weakness duration from 6 seconds to 8 seconds. Removed stability.
• “Your Soul Is Mine!”: Decreased base heal value by 25% but increased base multiplier by 16% and healing attribute multiplier by 40%. TLDR; This skill now has the same healing values as the Guardian skill Shelter.

Traits
While many Reaper traits had very positive feedback, there were a few that we felt could use some improvement. Augury of Death now adds a lifesteal component to help it fit in with the other “fighter” style traits in that row. Soul Eater similarly has had a small rework to make the CDR bonus easier to use. The lifesteal from Soul Eater was moved onto Gravedigger only since it allows us to better tune its power and provides a clearer use case for it. The change to Chilling Force fixes an issue where multiple Reapers attacking the same target could block each other from gaining the bonus if they were attacking the same target.

• Augury of Death: In addition to it’s previous effect this trait now additionally causes shouts to lifesteal. (Approximately 100-150 health.)
• Chilling Nova: Increased damage by 50%. Increased number of targets from 3 to 5.
• Chilling Force: Now has a 1s ICD but is not limited per target. Single strikes that hit multiple targets can activate this trait more than once before its recharge is activated. Increased might duration from 5 seconds to 8 seconds.
• Deathly Chill: Now has an icon attached to the chill damage.
• Soul Eater: Changed recharge reduction to a flat 20% without conditionals. Lifestealing from this trait increased significantly but the lifestealing now only applies to Gravedigger. (Approximately 140-180 health.)

I hope that everyone has fun playing Reaper in the next BWE with these changes!

Alright warriors, after gathering all your feedback, we are ready to present the next set of changes to the Berserker specialization. These changes primarily address the concerns with the torch weapon and some of the traits, but also include changes to berserk mode and several primal burst and rage skills.

Smoother Berserk Mode
Berserk mode was pretty good overall, but we felt like the global cooloown on burst skills and the attack speed not matching with other attack speed bonuses felt a little awkward in practice.

• Berserk: Removed the 0.5 recharge before you are allowed to activate a berserk burst after entering berserk mode. Increased attack speed bonus from 10% to 15%. The voice line that plays when berserk mode is about to run out will now has a 1 in 3 chance of playing (“Grrr no!”). Fixed a bug that caused the recharge of this skill to be reduced by the trait Versatile Power

More Competitive, Less Confusing Traits
We’re bringing up the power of some of the weaker or more niche traits to be more reliable while removing some of the elements from other traits that didn’t make sense (example: adrenaline bonus for Dead or Alive). These should help make the traits easier to understand while making them more competitive at each tier. Smash Brawler and Bloody Roar have significant changes this time around as feedback indicated that the top row of traits was the weakest by far.

• Always Angry: This trait now refreshes when berserk mode ends.
• Bloody Roar: Removed bonus effectiveness based on range. Now taunts for 1.5s and applies 4 stacks of bleeding at all distances. Now gives 3s of Fury for each foe taunted.
• Dead or Alive: This trait now heals for a flat amount which is approximately 100% more than the original minimum value rather than scaling with your adrenaline level. Added 30s ICD.
• Distracting Strikes: Fixed an issue which caused the the stun from Headbutt to confuse the caster.
• Fatal Frenzy: Increased quickness duration from 2 seconds to 3 seconds. Now also grants 3 seconds of swiftness when berserk mode is activated.
• Last Blaze: Increase burn duration from 2s to 3s. Changed timing of the burning caused by this trait to occur with the skill hit.
• Smash Brawler: Changed functionality of this trait. This trait now reduces the recharge of berserk mode and primal burst skills by 33%.

Torch Burns Faster
Most of the torch feedback we got tended to focus around how the torch felt to use rather than its functionality. Torch skill activation speed and burning have been tuned up a bit to make it feel more like weapon worthy of the speedy Berserker.

• Blaze Breaker – Lowered damage of strikes by 20%. Increased range from 400 to 600. Increase burning duration from 2s to 3s. Increased radius of individual attacks so it is easier to hit foes with multiple strikes. Lowered cast time by 0.15 seconds, reduced aftercast by 0.18 seconds. Fixed a bug which caused this skill to go on full recharge if it was canceled before it fully activated.
• Flames of War – Added icon to show duration of this skill. Added additional effects to final explosion. Lowered duration of burning applied by final hit from 5 seconds to 3 seconds. Lowered cast time by 0.25 seconds. Fixed a bug which caused this skill to go on full recharge if it was canceled before it fully activated.

Stronger Primal Bursts
We’re tuning up a few of the more lackluster primal burst skills and toning down Gun Flame, because as awesome as it was, it was a little too strong. Arcing Sear has had the most significant change in that it’s been changed from a condition burst back to a power based burst similar to the old Arcing Slice. This new version, Arc Divider, has some clear tradeoffs: larger range, more execute damage, but no fury to differentiate it from Arcing Slice.

• Arcing Sear: This skill has been replaced with Arc Divider. Arc Divider creates a 450 range shockwave that damages up to 5 foes it hits. This skill deals 75% more damage to foes below 50% health.
• Decapitate – The shockwave from this attack now deals the same damage as the initial attack. Fixed a bug that caused this trait to list higher than actual damage when traited with Burst Mastery.
• Flaming Flurry – Increase burn duration from 1s to 2s.
• Gun Flame: Now only explodes on the first target hit. This skill now allows player movement during casting.
• Rupturing Smash: Instead of knockback this skill now causes 1 second of immobilize on hit. This skill can no longer hit the same target twice. Increased damage by 100%.
• Scorched Earth – Updated to be a rectangular area of effect. Adjusted arrow flight type to more closely match ground AoE.
• Skull Grinder: Replaced Weakness condition with 4 stacks of Bleeding for 8 seconds.

Rage Skills
Blood Reckoning and Sundering Leap were consistently pointed out as being pretty weak in the last beta so we’re making some changes to make them feel more valuable. Wild Blow and Shattering Blow are getting increased hitboxes to make them easier to use.

• Blood Reckoning: Changed functionality. This skill now has a small heal on activation and grants 25% bonus critical hit chance for its duration. During its duration you are healed for 35% of critical hit damage and receive 1 adrenaline when you land a critical hit. Reduced aftercast by 0.3s. Fixed a bug which prevented this skill from receiving the benefits from the Restorative Strength trait.
• Outrage: Updated FX for this skill.
• Shattering Blow: Increased area of initial projectile reflection zone by 100%. Increased radius of secondary reflection zone by 33%.
• Sundering Leap: Now also inflicts cripple for 5 seconds on targets hit. Increased damage by 250%.
• Wild Blow: Increased hit box size to match other melee attacks.

These changes will be available for you to test in the next BWE and we hope that they will improve your experience with the Berserker specialization.

Even if you don’t consider the phantasm, the chronomancer’s shield 5 skill alone has higher damage output than the shield skills of any other profession. In general shields aren’t intended to be high DPS weapons. If the utility of the skills is lacking, that’s an area that can be tuned, but we don’t have any plans to really increase the damage that much.

From a design perspective, Mesmers are more about providing fields and less about activating them. It’s not just blast finishers, Mesmers lack reliable sources of many other finishers too. Necromancers fill a similar role. By contrast you might notice that Warriors have lots of finishers but not many fields.

We don’t always get this balance right (and I think there is a different discussion to be had about when we don’t) but I hope that clarifies what we were going for in the case of Mesmers.

Issues like this should be reported to our bug forums with the steps you used to cause it. Without reliable repro steps it’s very difficult to fix skill problems.

Silverkey.2078:

It just seems they don’t want this trait to work

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-August-25-2015

There are a lot of bugs in the game and often times there are enough that we can’t get to all of them as fast as we would like. Duelist Discipline not applying to Pistol 4 didn’t get into my queue until after the cutoff date for changes to the 8/25 build. I’ve got it fixed for a future release though.

flow.6043:

Since they are trying to prevent a wasted signet proc, perhaps they could also have this limiter apply to some of our transfer skills?
It happens rather often that I trigger Plague Sending with Putrid Mark, in which case Putrid Mark transfers first and Plague Signet does nothing. So maybe have the trait check for additional 3 conditions after the transfer?

This would be a nice check but due to the order of operations it’s not something that’s easy to do. The condition transfer for Putrid Mark triggers on the same hit that activates Plague Sending so from the trait’s perspective you still have the conditions (since the transfer is still happening). We could delay the activation of the trait to wait for the transfer, but that would negatively affect how responsive the trait was in other situations.

The intent on Burst Mastery is to restore 30% of the adrenaline spent when you use a burst skill, so it will restore 3 adrenaline when you use a primal burst. Sorry, no free lunch with this trait

Dual Wielding specifies “sword, axe or mace” so unfortunately it will not. That’s not to say it couldn’t change later though based on feedback from the next BWE.

Fun Fact: We experimented a bit with this kind of “low health/lifesteal” mechanic earlier in development. We moved from that idea for the version you see now because we were concerned about some of the things Atticus has mentioned. When your effectiveness was based off of being at low health we found that it turned other players healing you (a normally positive experience) into a negative experience.

I think there still may be some places for this kind of thematic playstyle though, and there are actually a few good ideas I found in this thread already, so thanks for starting this discussion.

Rage skills are a new skill type. They are not considered Physical skills and will not gain a bonus from Peak Performance.

Having condition transfer on shroud was something I was playing with when doing the trait revamp. Plague Sending originally used shroud 1 as its trigger condition rather than critical hit. I ended up changing it because shroud 1 already had several traits that affected it and I didn’t want to overload it, plus the curses line had several traits that affected shroud in some way already. I think it would be a bit overpowered though if Life Blast could transfer conditions on every hit though.

On the topic of increasing the cast speed of Life Blast: I think we would need to lower the damage multiplier if we wanted to increase the cast speed. The damage per second on that skill at its current cast time is already about as high as we are comfortable with. It’s a tricky skill to balance because we’d need to also look at adjusting all the traits that affect it.

I considered something similar while developing the skill, but passed for reasons that tabascodagama has indicated. Making sure that the projectile would line up with the player for the duration of the skill would be hard to guarantee. You run into inconsistency issues where the projectile hits an obstruction but the player is launched over it, or the players is launched off of a cliff but the projectile keeps going. The skill is already pretty complicated under the hood so I wanted to avoid adding too many potential bugs to it.

I do think it would be pretty cool if we could do it though.

Atherakhia.4086:

Any update you can give on the Necromancer changes? You mentioned you were reviewing Axe and Scepter?

I really wanted to slip some of these changes in with the BWE feedback changes but there just wasn’t enough time. Sorry.

There was a fairly large number of general bugfixes for both existing skills and BWE bugs for the next patch that took priority. Additionally the patch ended up being bugfixes more so than balance adjustments so they would have felt a little out of place. I’m hoping to bring up axe and scepter changes again next time we have a balance patch.

Nilgoow.1037:

Any comment on Slow and the interplay of Lost Time+Danger Time in PvE on bosses? Will enemies currently immune to CC get the debuff with a reduced/no effect to allow for the bonus crit, or are those traits irrelevant for PvE?

We have a tech solution in the works CC effects like slow, chill, cripple, etc on defiant creatures. I don’t want to say too much about it since I’m not sure when it will ship or how much it will change before then but we do want your traits to work on bosses.

Mallekay.8967:

Robert Gee.9246:

Illusionary Reversion: Updated functionality. You must shatter at least 2 illusions in order to generate a clone from this trait. (You do not count as an illusion towards this total.)

• Yeah I know this one probably stings but when we started looking at it it was pretty silly that this trait could let you get so much power out of just using all shatter skills back to back.

Wouldn’t it be more plausible to set an ICD of lets say 5 secs to prevent chain shattering? I also thought, this trait was intended to eliminate the need for DE.

ICD is another option I think. If it proves too weak in the next BWE we can look at trying this or some other solution.

Yeah sorry guys, this one is delayed a bit for the same reasons as the Dragonhunter one.

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Robert Gee.9246:

Sorry guys! This one is taking a little longer to get written up, but we are working on it!

What about Tempest?

Yup, same issues there, sorry about that.