Showing Posts For Valesius.6054:
I think the most important question which needs to be answered about SWs for the people who like the new iteration is, do you like the new favor or the new numbers?
Everyone likes bigger numbers. If you kept the new numbers but the old pet style would you like that better or worse?
Although there are several aspects of the SWs which have changed, including SoJ new activated effect, the biggest change is that SWs are no longer pets. Is that single change good or bad?
I think it is very bad since as I said before, they could easily have made that a trait option for those who loved the old SWs. I have never used a Guardian build in the 5 years I’ve play which did not use the SWs because I really liked the pet aspect, not the pure DPS min/maxng aspect.
Favor is important to some players.
The change is bad because it destroys old functionality and play style. They used to function more like pets, now they are just clunky abilities with weird pathing issues.
And we do not really need to argue over which implementation is better. They could have enabled both options through the trait system. Instead, to make people who don’t use SWs like them better, they ruined them for people who liked SWs. It seems like a bad choice. I think we can all agree that destroying a play style which isn’t toxic or exploitive is a bad design choice when they could have easily just made optional functionality. Have eternal armory make SWs the same as before the patch, replace Mystic Rebuke with it’s current functionality (does anyone use that one?) plus the new functionality. Nobody loses.
Why the change to Spirit Weapons? It’s not a small change, it is a huge change. It completely destroyed the identity of the Spirit Weapons. Previously you summon a weapon which basically acts like a pet with an active ability but limited time span. Now, there is no real different between them and any active ability except the cast time. The new Spirit GS is mostly the same as Procession of Blades, but activates immediately rather than being a trap. It’s not a fun change. The Spirit Hammer is terrible since it has the cast time, the hammer then appears next to you and then flies to where the enemy was a some point between starting the cast and now and misses half the time. Another change that ruins the fun.
This is a bad change because it wrecks an old play style. Since I began playing GW2 during the early access period I have played scepter/sword condi with SW and Hounds of Balthazar. It was a great build for what I like to do, mostly solo play. It also gave me the tools to be able to almost solo the Molten Front Bosses. It was a lot of fun having the challenge of juggling aggro with my various summons while dodging attacks and snaring the boss/champion to help maintain distance. The change to break bars and how snares worked on champions really hindered that play style when HoT launched, but if you timed things right with the hammer knockback, knockdown and chains you could handle most break bars.
Now, that play style is dead. I cannot play like that anymore. It’s over. My nearly exclusive playstyle for the past 5 years is blown up and gone for no reason. You could have nerfed the damage, reduce the duration, increased the cool down, all sorts of changes that may have made them not a great choice for min/maxers but still left the core game play intact. Instead you just break it? Why? To add ammo counts? If you want ammo counts, just add them to the activated parts of SW. You don’t need to break them. It makes no sense.
Again, this is a really bad change. And it is a bad change because is fundamentally alters a functionality which has been in the game for 5 years. It wrecks a playstyle. Destroys it. You only should be adding new playstyles, not destroying old.
I doubt that you will care that this change wreck my fun, but it does. I cannot figure out why you made this change since it makes SW worse. SW were never strong in the meta anyway. I rarely see other Guardians use them. If the change was meant as an improvement this is an unequivocal failure. If it was meant as a huge nerf, which it is, why not remove them altogether and put something functional in their place?
Change for the sake of change is not good.
And for the people who like the changes, the SWs can be buffed in PvP without neutering them in PvE. The change is deleting an old ability and replacing it with a categorically worse version. If you didn’t like the SWs before it’s because the activated ability didn’t do enough burst damage, not because you hated that the SWs stuck around. Increased burst for decreased utility is a bad trade off long run.