Guild Wars 2

G kittening G ANet. As if this trait wasn’t hard enough to use properly already after the huge turret survivability nerfs, HT cast increase, and random half second CD put on detonating turrets. Congrats on removing one of the more interesting and tactical traits Engineer had.

Oh, and nice job making Kinetic Battery a hell of a lot less interesting as well. All the trait needed was a kitten icon on your bar to show when it’s off cooldown like streamlined kits.

It’s really not worth it.

HoT power creep and terrible build diversity. If I want to play my favorite class competitively, I’m stuck playing what is essentially the same boring build that’s been around since HoT launched. Everything else is just leagues behind it still.

The loss of camera control kills it for me. Would rather not have it in like this.

Explosives has been utter trash in PvP pretty much since the core specializations update. The adept tier has all of a kittenty fall damage trait, grenade-kit exclusive trait, and a tiny damage modifier with a bad health threshold attached. The GM tier has kittening thermobaric detonate which is still utter trash and a condition trait that no one will take because the actual good condi traits are in firearms (and taking both is suicide). The only good things the line has to offer are niche kit-specific traits, the e-sports rocket, and accelerant-packed turrets which has been made a lot worse by changes to turrets since the core specs update.

What balance team?

I’m fine with capricorn moving to ranked, but coliseum in its current state doesn’t deserve to even be in unranked, let alone ranked. It’s a terrible map.

I really hate it when I get immob’d by thief stolen nets and jellyfish pets in PvP.

Is it time to bump that huge ‘please no more AI’ thread we had before HoT came out?

Call me when they decide to poll the removal of elite specs from ranked.

Options → Standard Enemy Models → Enable

Power creep and lack of build diversity killed it for me. Why stick around when you’re forced to play the same boring hammer+egun build you’ve been playing for the past 5 seasons if you want to be competitive with your class?

I don’t suppose you could double the swiftness duration on sigil of agility as well? Halving the swiftness uptime halved kinda kills any interest I had in running it =\

This list is much better. Sigil of strength looks too strong though, a free 5-8 might stacks depending on duration easily beats out most of not all of the +% damage sigils for anything but opening burst. I’d also still like to see revelation dropped to 210 radius, which is still more than enough to stop stealth resses or reveal someone near you who started stealthing up. Also, a couple of these sigils have way too long cds. If purity is going to be at 10s, then generosity should be in the 12-13s range, not 15s. Energy also still seems like trash, but I’m not sure if you guys want to buff it much. Might be better off just removing that one instead.

I’d still like see a couple sigils that give or affect healing though.

insanemaniac.2456:

it already is a thing and it has a 2 sec icd and no one uses it anyways

It still has its uses as a cover condi for condi builds that need it and don’t already have vuln access. In that regard I’d say it’s actually better here, since its biggest competitor (torment) is gone and the geo/doom combo is nerfed. Still not a great sigil, but at least worth considering for some builds.

Really not a fan of the reveal and slow sigils; they definitely seem like they could be too powerful. Also not a fan of the total removal of defensive sigils. Blood/leeching may have been a bit too strong, but things like Renewal and Generosity? Nah.

Kits are as much our class mechanic as initiative is thief’s. Sure, steal may be in your f1 slot, but initiative is also unique to the profession and arguably more central. Did ANet intend kits to be more central and polarizing than toolbelt skills? Maybe not, but if not they certainly haven’t put much effort into correcting that, despite having years to do so.

Fixing forum bug.

How about adding some sigils with ‘on heal’ or ‘on elite’ effects similar to some current rune sets? Outside of stuff like that I don’t really see how you’re going to promote counterplay with sigils, as the vast majority of them are too passive by nature to play around. The only ones you can even hope to deny right now are some of the on-swap sigils with proper predictions, and leeching/intelligence which are the only ones with visual indicators for players to work with. All the on-hit/on-crit ones don’t go on cooldown when an attack that would have proced them is blocked/dodged/invulned, and there’s flat out nothing active anyone can do against the +duration ones. I suppose if you really wanted you could change on-swaps to have a wind-up animation and AoE ring before the effects are applied.

Amulet suggestions: Split amulet into 3 items with 40%-30%-30% stat split to allow some stat customization, ditch most 4-stat combinations, bring back most removed 3-stat combinations bar sentinel’s. If things look like they’re becoming unkillable, actually balance the defensive skills and sustain on those builds, instead of just removing every stat combination with any defense on it.

Runes: Maybe some sets with bonuses for the newer skill types in the game? Honestly I’d rather just see some of the overperforming current rune sets dropped down and some of the underperforming ones bumped up, we’ve got tons of them already that hardly anyone would ever consider using.

Sigils: Anything that provides a little extra fury would be nice, probably in the ~35-45% uptime area, may be a bit too strong with stacked boon duration though. Might also consider another cover condition sigil, like 1 stack of 5s confusion on hit/crit with a 2-3s cd, or another AoE on-swap like hydro/geo but with a different condition applied and preferably lower direct damage than hydro/leeching currently do.

Chances are if you see a scrapper with 22-25 might they’re just running the meta hammer/egun with leadership runes and been allowed to spam hammer autos in between egun 4/5s. Hammer autos will ramp up might stacks super fast, but they’ll drop off fairly quickly as well as soon as they can no longer land the third auto hits. Usually you’ll see this kind of auto spam when there are minions in a fight, or simply a lot of people on a small point. Scrapper in general tends to fart out a ton of boons though; you can expect ~65+% uptime on fury/swiftness/retal from just a passive trait proc when hit under 75%, as well as 100% uptime on might/regen, extra retal from light aura, decent uptime on stability and protection from traits, and whatever the hell they manage to get from transmute’s condition conversion every 15s.

If they’re not running the normal setup with 1-3 gyros and you see them holding 20+ might regularly without hammer autos, they’re probably running some elixirs, most likely b and c or b and s. Elixirs x and s don’t provide all that much might, but b and c do. B also changes that 65+% uptime on fury/retal/swiftness to 100%, while providing considerable might and on-demand stability, while c provides good regular might and whatever boons you managed to convert from conditions. They could also run u, which provides a lot of quickness as well as additional projectile denial, but you probably won’t see this often and it should be easily identifiable when you do. If you see a scrapper with more elixirs than just s or x you should remember that they’re trading some survivability for damage, and make more of an effort than usual to avoid letting them wail on you in melee or standing in their acid bombs.

Pretty much any scrapper build can also grab a sigil of might or sigil of battle to pick up some free additional might. You can expect any scrapper to be running at least 150% might duration, so those stacks from sigils can ramp up fast, especially in crowded fights with the amount of crits the scrapper will be getting thanks to AoEs and ground hazards like acid bomb and bunker down mines hitting frequently.

I’d be happy if they just made SD remove a boon on hit. Seems fair enough to me, seeing as they removed our other boon removal trait (acidic elixirs) with the core specializations update.

Just waiting on people to figure out they buffed drake’s tail swipe, and just how ridiculously high those can hit.

If you’re running wanderer’s amulet you might as well run nightmare runes with it for the +50% duration mark for covers and the free condi transfer on elite. You’re going above the hard cap on burning duration with balth there.

It was both moved and locked, and was only open for a couple hours, which is pretty sad. Expect any of your profession-specific feedback/suggestion threads to be moved to the profession boards which don’t even get read now.

Are you guys happy with the current state of elite vs core specializations? I ask this because since the launch of HoT, not a single core-only build has been meta in PvP. This seems to be at direct odds with what we had heard prior to the launch of HoT about elite specializations providing alternative playstyles that are not direct upgrades. Are there any plans on bringing elite specializations in line with cores, and can we expect the next expansions’ elite specializations to launch as strong as the current ones did?

Also, are any changes being considered to the size or frequency of balance passes in the future? I know many PvP players have expressed dissatisfaction about the rate of balance for this game in the past.

This is a terrible idea. Multiclassing and counter-comping should be encouraged, not discouraged. If build diversity was good enough that each profession had a variety of builds and roles viable at higher tiers this might be considered, but we’ve a very far cry away from that. Until that happens you’d be forced to have the matchmaking system curate teams by distributing a certain number of each role/build type to each, which would probably be a nightmare to code, or forcing players into some terrible matches that were 90% decided at the start thanks to bad comp rolls.

Relevant response here:

Balance dev here! I can’t give specifics, but we’ll be introducing a few different changes in the next update that we hope will address some of the engineer concerns with the core specializations and general pve viability. We’ll be seeing you soon! -Karl

As per Ben P’s response here on the reddit AMA. The poll on whether to remain solo/duo or not is planned for after S6.

Thoughts?

MM doesn’t care about your block or friends lists.

There are no random() calls in the matchmaking algorithm.

The duration listed on there was just supposed to be the duration of the boons the conditions were converted to. It’s a pretty misleading tooltip though, as afaik it doesn’t update to account for your boon duration stat, which the boons will use, and definitely can’t account for specific boon durations at all. All it does is show a 5→ 6 change when you trait for HGH.

Hilariously enough the tooltip also shows a “Conditions removed: 1” note when running alchemy, which is pretty misleading for a full clear. I’d be interested in seeing if that removal takes place before the full conversion (leaving you with 1 less boon) or not, but I’m way too lazy to test stuff right now.

TL;DR: Tooltip is a mess.

It may be a valid tactic with risks involved, but it’s still incredibly unfun to be kept out of the game for the time it takes to bleed out + respawn + rotate back into the action. Most of us queue up because we actually want to play the game. If /sudoku isn’t an option, I think a solution involving some combination of changes to downed health degeneration and the respawn timer needs to be implemented to prevent players from being kept out of the game for extended periods of time.

Nice. Does this mean profession specific MMRs will actually be used then? Or are the changes just to class stacking/shuffling?

Ben Phongluangtham.1065:

Should be in tomorrow.

Evan, or the fix?

Healing Turret has 3 portions, the immediate ~2.5k self heal, which will also trigger any ‘on heal’ trait/rune effects, the overcharge, Cleansing Burst, which is a large AoE, heals for the same amount as the initial heal, removes 2 conditions and produces the water field, and finally the detonate for its blast finisher. Keep in mind that you can skip the detonate and simply pick the turret back up, which gives it 3/4ths its normal recharge time, meaning you can get to its heal and more importantly condi remove again sooner. You’ll probably want to pick it up when using it to help allies who aren’t staying close enough to also heal with blasts, or when cleansing the most conditions is your highest priority, or when you don’t have any other leaps/blasts available to use in the water field and aren’t in immediate peril.

In general Healing Turret is your best heal, providing more straight healing than medic gyro when used perfectly thanks to rapid regeneration’s nerfs, and also giving you a ton of free regeneration to keep up invention’s passive +250 healing and a couple extra condi cleanses as well. Medic gyro has almost completely lost its niche due to nerfs, so we’re back to 24/7 healing turret again.

You can also use Healing Turret for some fun things like bodyblocking projectiles that don’t pierce. For example, you can block a thief’s Shadow Shot with it by putting it down and keeping it between yourself and the thief to screw over his engage. There are a lot of other fun things you could do with it as well if you took explosives for the knockback on detonate, but unfortunately outside of that explosives is kitten and you’d be gimping yourself seriously for a little bit of trolling potential.

Elixir gun #4 is hugely important and you need to be using it often for more than just the blast finisher. It puts down an unblockable damage field that deals almost as much damage total as 100 blades someone were to stand in it the whole time (they won’t, but it’ll still hurt). It also has no proper AoE indicator so a lot of people don’t know how to stay out of it and will take more hits than they probably should. Put that acid bomb down as often as possible on smaller points, downed bodies, blocking revs, or even just at your feet when a d/p thief or other melee is bothering you. The extra damage adds up to a huge amount, especially in larger teamfights, and it can trigger sigil procs for more damage/healing and can help keep pressure off of you. The damage this skill puts out really should not be underestimated.

Egun #1 is also stronger than many people think, though not in damage. It allows you to keep pressure on someone at range through sigil procs and the high weakness uptime it provides. Weakness is one of the most powerful debilitating conditions in the game, majorly reducing direct damage the target puts out as well as denying them dodges through significantly reduced endurance regeneration. Whenever you’re too far to pressure someone you need to with melee, you should be using this instead. Egun #5 is also a significant portion of your healing, so make sure you’ve got it up as often as you can, and #3 is your best allied cleanse, very useful keeping conditions off of allies in teamfights, especially on smaller nodes.

Also, I’d really recommend running either sneak gyro or elixir s. Scrapper is probably the best resser in the game right now, and a good portion of that is because you can stealth allies to deny stomps (or allow an ele to reposition safely for a free res) on top of your already ridiculous double res speed. Elxir S has the added benefit of giving you an invuln to deal with incoming pressure when your auto proc is gone or you want to preserve it, but its stealth can be annoying and is more easily countered.

It probably doesn’t. A few months back there was a CS dev post on reddit saying they only received like 6 verbal abuse reports in a day, which sounds really low to me even only considering PvP. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if the report function turned out to be bugged to hell most of the time.

Ross Biddle.2367:

EU off hours are usually way worse than NA though O_o

Give it the distance the gadgeteer version has by default so it doesn’t suck as a movement skill, and then change the overcharged version to remove additional (static?) conditions. That’ll make both versions worth using in some circumstances without removing the risk involved in giving up a potential stunbreak for it.

1 burn @ 1200 condi damage w/o bursting = 317 damage per stack second
1 burn @ 1200 condi damage with bursting = 328 damage per stack second, a ~3.47% increase.

So already we can see it’s considerably lower than the 6% damage increase you might have thought it was. That’s because instead of flat out multiplying the final damage numbers by 1.06, like the superior rune of the berserker’s ⁶ bonus would, it’s only calculating as if your condition damage stat was 6% higher, and thus the condition’s base damage receives no increase. That’s not the worst part, though.

1 burn @ 1200 with full might (1950 total) w/o = 433 damage per stack second
1 burn @ 1200 with full might (1950 total) with = 444 damage per stack second, a ~2.54% increase.

Like in the tests with no might, the bursting sigil is still only giving a bonus of +11 damage, despite your effective condition damage stat being a full 62.5% higher thanks to might. Unfortunately, bursting sigil does not recalculate its bonus when your condition damage increases from things like might, traits like pinpoint distribution in firearms, or bonuses from food/utility items. This leads to its actual damage increase again being significantly lower than you might have expected.

TL;DR: you’ll get a higher damage increase by using a condition applying sigil instead, or even by going with corruption sigil assuming you don’t suck. Bursting is trash.

Get rid of the bursting sigil. It’s been bugged for ages and doesn’t actually change with your condition damage stat, so it’s basically worthless. Also, Healing Turret >>> Elixir B, and Bunker Down is still too good to even consider anything else in that slot.

UmbraNoctis.1907:

Solstace.2514:

How do they get constant stability? I’m curious. I know they can generate a lot of regeneration from super speed if traited.

Perfectly Weighted + Final Salvo. Some might also run Elixier B.

If they’re taking elixir b chances are they’re skipping out on Final Salvo for Adaptive Armor, since medic gyro is even further behind healing turret now and running final salvo with only 2 gyros, one of which is high cd, usually isn’t the best idea.

The stability uptime can definitely be annoying either way, especially with boon duration runes thrown in the mix. I’m of the opinion that stability (and a lot of other boons) need to be scaled back to pre-HoT levels; some builds can achieve very high uptime of it with little sacrifice or effort now.

Yes. /15PowerCreeps

From https://np.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3opycg/arenanet_unveil_the_future_of_competitive_guild/cvzfp12/

“Simple answer: the elite specs should be balanced so you don’t need to have them in PvP, but can choose to use them if you like. There are plenty of top tier PvP builds today a P4F player can walk in and instantly use, that will still be true when HoT ships.

This is night and day compared to other MMO’s where you need to get all your gear, levels, etc. before you can start PvP’ing (or some other genres of games where you need to level up to get all the abilities, or all the “top” tier heroes are behind pay walls).

Hope that helps a bit, I think it’s a fair criticism and I could have been more clear in the interview with that answer. " ~Former Game Director Colin Johanson

“… the elite specs should be balanced so you don’t need to have them in PvP, but can choose to use them if you like. There are plenty of top tier PvP builds today a P4F player can walk in and instantly use, that will still be true when HoT ships. " ~Colin

kek

I propose another 1 second duration shave off of Gear Shield, maybe with a slight direct damage buff to Rocket Boots to make up for it. Am I hired yet ANet?

It doesn’t say Unique on it, so there’s a chance I guess.

I found a bug for you Evan, system shows me with 1649 rating with platinum badge, but says the minimum bound is 1650 rating. If I had to guess I’d say there’s some rounding involved with one number but not the other, but idk.

We rely too much on +duration stuff to make good use of the runeset I think, and the amulet just looks like a slightly worse version of Wanderer’s.

Exactly the changes they stated beforehand, even though the jump shot one was a nerf and not a buff as stated… I wish I could say I was surprised, but this is the same kitten they pull every time.