Guild Wars 2

Mrbig.8019:

Thief change would make PW less strong for ress control BUT totally broken in any other situation.

Steal-inf strike-PW would be unavoidable, full damage.

Inf strike-PW alone would be enough to eat 10 k + damage.

PW being broken is more of Ini regen related than stun or whatver else.

Moreover it would make protection injection totally worthless, and any thief would be able to kill engies with no problem, while actually engi is the only real counter to thieves ( overall, not only S/P).

How can a thief of your caliber even think about this dumb change is beyond me, immobilize is already stronger than any possible stun aside maybe for ress control.

PW balance is clearly off, and i really have no idea how to fix it without making it more broken or totally useless without redesigning it totally.

Well, lets list the differences between stun and immobilize:

Immobilize stops you from moving
Immobilize stops you from dodging
Immobilize can be stacked

Stun stops you from moving
Stun stops you from dodging
Stun interrupts you
Stun Prevents you from casting skills

You can remove immobilize much more easily than a stun.
Stability does not protect you from Immobilize, but there are other ways to be immune from conditions.

From this I’d say immobilize, same duration as the stun from pistolwhip as of now, replacing the stun would be a nerf, not a buff. Stacking the immobilize would make no difference here,with another immobilize you are already immobilized through the pw.

Also, no need to be so aggressive.

style.6173:

Mostly agree. Some additions.

Ranger:
Spirits should be weakened overall. They should provide some support but not be the best conquest build. Passives are bad.

Necro:
Same as ranger when it comes to minions. Reduce their effectiveness.

Thief:
I disagree with your immobilize idea. IS + PW would be a looooong immobilize. Instead, PW should only have a stun or an evade, but not both. I prefer keeping the stun and removing the evade.

Engi:
I don’t like total immunity, but so many people think the problem with Engi is AR. It is not. The problem is how frequently they can use waterfields / blast combos to re-heal. Personally, I’d rather keep AR and remove the water field from the turret.

They implemented the stun so you could no longer simply walk out of pistolwhip. But without the evade s/p would become entirely useless, thiefes would die in seconds. I like their immobilize idea, same duration as the stun, you can’t walk out of it but it does not interrupt heals, resurrection, etc etc, and it wouldn’t make much of a difference in immobilize since the length added to it with pistolwhip would be minor. Seems like a better choice than stun to me.

Great suggestions! Some of these balance ideas seem like they could help massively, I love the warrior change so they lose adrenaline when they miss. There seems to be no punishment for failure currently. Also lyssa needs a change badly. Overall good stuff, all of it.
I can’t really comment on any of the gamemodes, I have no idea if they’d work out, but I’d love to see a lot of the balance suggestions.

What follows is what I would love to see in the game, and what I am very worried about.

The new achievements and new content for guilds etc seems very interesting, and I am eager to see the changes.

Dungeons:
Removing rez rushing: Oh god I love this change! Even though this was not really a problem in most dungeons, it was awful for some others. The most obvious one would be in arah path 4 after the second boss, a huge enemy group would come so close to the waypoint dieing did not even matter.

“Nerfing challenging encounters”: This is one of the things I worry about the most. Dungeons are already too easy as it is. You can really throw any group together (in which all players have reached the appropriate level) and you will beat the dungeon, guaranteed. There are very few exceptions to this (arah; CoF path 3, which most people only don’t succeed in because they do not understand it) and those are currently the most fun dungeons because they actually provide a challenge. Mindlessly running from encounter to encounter and spamming skills until everything is dead is not fun.
I would not suggest to make all of them more difficult, that would feel unfair towards newer players, but please, at least keep the hardest dungeons as hard as they are.

AoE abilities balancing:

I am not going to comment on spvp or wvw, I am not a very experienced player in either of those, having less than 50 hours of playtime in them probably. But I will comment on the AoE-fix in dungeons.
You said you can get past encounters by just spamming AoE…. which you actually can just as well with single-target skills, it might just take a little longer. When it comes to more difficult groups (such as the group of risen you encounter before the second boss in arah), AoE is a lot less effective than single-target skills. Taking out specific targets as fast as possible is necessary to avoid the death of the entire group.
AoE is pretty much the only way of some classes to even be or feel useful. When I play a dungeon as an elementalist I often get the impression that I am not very useful to the group simply because of my damage output, and if I focus more on damage in my build I die too quickly. Even with full power and berserker gear I can not even get close to the damage of some other classes. I have seen a warrior do 27000 damage with a single hit. As an elementalist it takes me probably a minute to deal that much damage, and even if 5 targets were to stand still in all of my AoE attacks, it would not be as much combined.

“Ele bunker really strong, on our watchlist”: The ele bunker is indeed a powerful build, but also a very difficult one to handle. It is basically a build that rewards you for your individual skill in terms of reaction time, intelligence, knowledge of other classes, knowledge of every detail of what you can do. A bunker elementalist who does not know how to handle his build dies easily and quickly; and it’s not like the experienced one is even near the best builds in the game, even though he might be the best elementalist build for more than 50% of all situations. An example: the clone-spam mesmer. I have never seen a build this powerful in 1v1 combat. The damage-output is huge, the survability is insane. I have seen a single clone-spam mesmer duel more than 20 people consecutively, then multiple people at the same time, and it was nothing but wins, wins, wins.
What I am getting at: builds that require a lot of skill and are well thought out should reward the player with better results if they have developed said skills. This is of course not only the case for d/d elementalists, a lot of classes have builds like this, and it should remain this way. Such builds motivate the player to concentrate, to learn, to grow. Without the possibility of complexity, the game would not be the same.

But hey, I do not want to sound negative in this post. I really am looking forward to new content (and bug-fixes ^^), the lfg-option sounds wonderful, and I know what I typed really are just my worries about what you might do.

And hey, if you actually read this, here is a personal suggestion/request for some time in the distant future: Add hard dungeons. Difficult, suspense-filled dungeons that are challenging in a sense that they require personal skill (somewhat like Lupicus in his second phase) and not so much a certain profession or builds (Simin, arah path 4). Challenges are what keeps a lot of people going, and I feel like this game does not have enough right now.

Thank you to everyone who read this, and tell me what you think. I am fully aware that I might be wrong about stuff. ^^