Guild Wars 2

I’ll wait until it comes out to pass judgment. If it fixes the issue of “obstructed! obstructed!” then it may very well be a trait worth taking. Maybe it should be baseline functionality, but if it were, our damage on the weapon might be lower. Then this new GM trait would just be a generic +% damage boost.

What actually baffles me the most about the longbow traits in general is that you can’t take all of them. You can’t have pierce and increased range and increased speed. Why can’t we just combine Read the Wind with Eagle Eye?

And even after that, you still need to take a separate trait for cooldown reduction. It’s really a big mess in my opinion.

snow.8097:

has anyone the Feeling too that the ranger WS trait was created after a known post in CDI? xD

Considering how recent the CDI was, it kind of tips me off that they haven’t spent a long time working on these traits. They were produced on-the-spot quite recently.

Which explains how unimaginative some of them are. Most of them are passive bonuses, which is incredibly boring and doesn’t foster good play / counterplay mechanics.

The same way Roll for Initiative escaped the Initiative gain nerfs, and Renewing Stamina escaped the Vigor nerfs.

Probably because they don’t consider it a problem. It’s an indirect buff to the skill.

Flissy.4093:

It’s a blast finisher already. No skill in the game is both a field and a finisher.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Black_Powder

Only upscaled characters are allowed to have such high base stats, but they give up traits and utility / elite skills for it. At lv2 you don’t even have access to weaponswap. You end up with incredibly damaging, incredibly tanky characters…That have basically no condition removal or utility or sustain or boons or condition damage. (upscaled condition damage is garbage because of lack of coverage)

In comparison, a full zerk warrior would have more damage despite lower base stats due to damage bonuses from traits, sigils, and higher-tiered runes, and though his base survivability would be lower, he’d have the option of slotting utilities like Defy Pain and Defiant Stance to make up for it. He could bring a utility second set such as shield or offhand mace to support with CC when damage alone doesn’t cut it, or he could slot condition removal so as not to explode when a tanky condi Dire-specced character looks in his direction. Honestly, 99/100 times, the actual level 80 character will be more useful. I’ve not got a problem with the 1/100 chance where the uplevel actually gets to shine a bit, after putting work into completely optimizing his character.

Overall I think it’s just a unique way to play the game. It’s extremely painful, too, since playing on an uplevel like that means you have to constantly avoid XP from any source, or else you’ll level up very quickly and your stats will go in the trash.

tl;dr if you die to an uplevel you’re probably garbage

I find it hard to believe you “mastered” the Engineer when you’re dying to PvE mobs.

Warrior just scales insanely well with tank stats, and through things like Armored Attack and hammer’s CC, can still dish out respectable damage.

I wish I could build some of my light armored classes that way, but if I spec as something like a tank Mesmer I’m going to be doing garbage damage compared to a similarly specced Warrior.

A) Condition damage guardian, whether through unique conditions, more condition coverage, or through traiting our burns
B) Buff shield (lowering cooldowns, adding aegis to 4, etc.)
C) Lower cooldown on scepter 3, or rework it so that it’s a more interesting skill

Stuff like this is really neat. Just wish there was more of it across the game.

…Also, if she was an engineer I’d like to steal a few turrets from her. And her teleporting device.

Yamsandjams.3267:

I also don’t feel 1vX scenarios are relevant in regards to any balancing of the mechanic. People fighting 1vX are already putting themselves into an inherently disadvantageous situation to begin with, so it makes sense if such situations are punishing to the solo person. This sort of situation is inherently unbalanced, so calling for changes to the downed mechanic due to any sort of imbalance doesn’t make sense by highlighting 1vX scenarios.

1vX is extremely relevant in SPvP. Are you saying that people should automatically lose if they’re fighting multiple people? Going as far to say that “any sort of imbalance is okay” just because it’s already imbalanced is a really weird reasoning. By your logic, they could go ahead and give an instakill skill to you anytime you had an ally and your opponent didn’t. That seems properly punishing, since it was his fault anyways he decided to fight two people at once.

Most classes have a few skills or traits that are very frustrating to use, and don’t feel like they’re working properly. Some of these would only require minor fixes to improve viability.

I can list two examples from the Engineer off the top of my head, since I play the class fairly often.

-Flame turret’s overcharge ability only releases a smoke field if there’s an enemy within range. If no enemy comes within range during the duration, the overcharge is simply wasted. This means you can’t reliably create a smoke field. It’d be much better for general usage if it would fire as soon as it were overcharged, without the enemy requirement.

-Blast finishers through smoke fields. While this isn’t exclusive to the Engineer, I list it with them since they have an interesting interaction with them. Leap skills like Heartseeker and Jump Shot that deal damage will stealth you after all damage is applied, so the combo finisher isn’t useless. Most blast finishers, on the other hand, will instantly reveal you, rendering the combo useless. This means combos like Smoke Bomb → Big Bomb won’t work if there’s an enemy in range. The interesting thing is that the engineer’s shield 4 blast finisher will still apply stealth even if it damages an enemy, so I’d imagine it’s definitely possible to allow other blast combos to do the same.

I’d like it if these skills were changed. I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to implement, and I don’t believe the changes would be too powerful.

As I said, I think most classes have some “almost working” abilities like this, and I’d kind of like to compile a list of them, if anyone can think of any more and post them.

It’s very situational. It can be incredibly powerful on the one hand and nearly a useless skill on the other. Learning when is a good to use it is very important.

In particular it’s quite effective to use against blocking enemies. Because of the lack of unblockable abilities, using one whilst someone is blocking typically catches them off guard.

If an enemy walks back into the roots (they stay if they go undestroyed) they’ll end up rooted again, so you can use this to your advantage for kiting melee enemies.

Finally, forcing your opponent to take an action (cleanse) lets you predict and determine the flow of the fight. It’s far from the worst elite skill and it definitely has its moments in all game modes.

1 has a passable power coefficient, so you can use it as a mid-range bouncing direct damage source. It’s okayish for condition damage when paired with a fire field from a torch or a trap, but the 20% finisher doesn’t make it very appealing. Bouncing abilities are great if there’s both a visible enemy and a stealthed enemy you’re fighting. The bounce (or lack of one) from attacking the visible enemy will tell you the general area where the stealthed enemy is (or isn’t). Bouncing attacks also have an advantage over general AoE in that they can hit a single target multiple times. Rangers themselves are very susceptible to this: Bouncing attacks will bounce between their pet and themselves several times, typically hitting both more than once. This means that bouncing attacks are probably at their best in 1v2s.

2 is primarily only useful when used at point-blank. You’re almost guaranteed to get at least one projectile finisher, which can be useful if thrown through either healing spring or a fire field.

3 is very strong if you stack condition duration. Chill is an incredibly strong condition. The weakness is just sort of there. Weakness is pretty strong too, I guess, but since it relies on my pet actually landing an attack, I’m not holding my breath.

4 is primarily for direct damage and CC. It scales pretty well with power, so OH axe sees some use in burst-type builds. Pulling people to you can be useful to land either a 3 or a 2 more reliably. As for whether that’s a good idea to try to do so, that’s really up to individual circumstance. Do you want an enemy on top of you? Usually I don’t think of such things since CC is CC, it prevents the enemy from doing what he wanted to do for a moment or two. The CC component isn’t super reliable anyways because of its long travel distance before returning.

5’s main use is in PvE for an incredibly long duration reflect against certain mobs. For PvP…there’s a lot of things to consider. It doesn’t deal very much damage, so if you’re looking for damage, you’re probably better off spamming 1. The reflection is decent, but the incredibly obvious animation makes it pretty clear to stop using projectile attacks for the duration. The retaliation is just sort of there, unnoticeable. The skill itself roots you, so it’s a very dangerous skill to try and use. I would recommend using it to reflect just one or two projectiles before cancelling it, since that’s typically when your enemy realizes you’re reflecting attacks and starts to think of another plan. If you use it actively like that, it isn’t too bad. Standing still for 5 seconds doing nothing is just kind of stupid unless you really need to just buy time and you know your opponent has no other way to deal damage to you for the duration.

Overall I’d say the axe/axe set is workable. Offhand axe is for direct damage, Mainhand axe can go either way.

I don’t personally like the current revive system in PvP and WvW. I feel that multiple people reviving the same ally at once is too rewarding, and the downed system is too punishing in 1vX scenarios.

Could be that Anet wants you to always play the game with a buddy. Could be that they like the idea of nobody dying if they have multiple allies to support them.

I’d personally like it though if rezzing was limited to one person at a time, just like how stomps aren’t increased in speed by multiple people attempting it at the same time. I’d like it if rezzing was separated between PvP / WvW and PvE. I feel like the death penalty should be higher in PvP game modes, or the “heal” from rezzing should be lessened. I don’t believe rezzing in PvP should give you back half your health, which is typically more than the average heal gives.

It’s actually one per illusion for each shatter. It’s a very similar mechanic to Cleansing Ire, which cleanses a condition for every bar of adrenaline.

petespri.6548:

That said, I’d like to see other classes have more condition removal, since the meta is crazy with how fast people can load you up with them. I wouldn’t mind seeing a similar trait for other class mechanics such as Mesmer’s F4 (distortion), cleanse 1 condition per illusion shattered. Obviously other classes have similar options available.

Mesmer does have a trait like that. They can trait so that for every shatter, they remove a condition.

Shatters just don’t come off cooldown as fast as burst skills do, and mesmers don’t do very much damage at all when built tanky.

One small change I’d like to see is Natural Vigor stacking with the Vigor boon, if it stays at 25%. That would be a nice change.

Everything about Warrior is pretty versatile. Unlike other classes, he doesn’t need to do something like take four traits just to make a weaponset useable. The natural tankiness of the class definitely helps with versatility too, though, since investing in defense becomes a little more of an option and not a necessity.

Bazzoong.7145:

JETWING.2759:

Rabid and Settler rules now

this was in less that 10s

I smell BS, 32 hits of torment in under 10s, really?

Torment ticks twice per second if the target is moving, and it’s a stackable condition, so it’s very possible.

It really just doesn’t feel good to use now. The animation is really awkward. Before, it really felt like you were dancing around the battlefield with S/D.

I guess it was too powerful to have a stunbreak on a weaponskill, but I’m not sure why they had to give it such an incredibly long cast time.

Also, this applies to more than just wvw. I’m fairly sure TPvP is what got it nerfed in the first place.

Black Box.9312:

The sporadic updates every few months needs to stop. Balancing needs to come first and foremost, and additional content like living story needs to be secondary. People don’t care how much any new content has to offer when they feel handicapped by problems that are beyond their control.

That’s because League of Legends is a moba with only PvP game modes. Balancing is pretty much a straight shot.

GW2 is an MMO, where the majority of players are going to be playing a lot of PvE and playing just a little bit of PvP and WvW. It’s all about priorities, and we don’t rank very high on them. Sad truth.

Black Box.9312:

Allie Murdock.8152:

We’re seeing that power creep is a big problem in the game right now, so bringing the Ranger up to snuff would only exacerbate that. When we do balance patches, we like to look at every class and where they are at so we can balance appropriately throughout.

Of course, it can be hard to account for certain things when doing these patches, which is why we’re trying to do the patches less frequently so we can properly gauge what needs to be done (that’s not to say that we won’t hotfix any major issues that arise).

To be honest, I think the opposite is more constructive. When you have frequent, small balancing updates, you can adjust previous changes accordingly as you add new changes, which leads to a much steadier and more stable climb toward desired balance. Having infrequent, large balance patches gives the illusion of laziness (even though I know that not to be necessarily true; not everyone does), and can dramatically impact gameplay because of how many new elements are introduced simultaneously.

I’d agree with this. It’d be more entertaining to login and see changes, even if small ones. Not to mention, it’s impossible to implement large changes into the game and predict exactly how the playerbase is going to run away with them and use them in ridiculously broken builds. So might as well patch more often, and perhaps in smaller tweaks rather than waiting two months…to do slightly larger tweaks.

Nike.2631:

WATCH ME PULL A MOA OUT OF MY HAT…
While pet AI may not be entirely satisfactory, MMO combat is hardly a Turing Test. We can, with a little stagecraft, easily create the illusion of intelligent play.

Any time the pet takes more than 20% of their maximum health in damage (a trigger we know the game recognizes due to traits like Nature’s Protection) and they have more than 50% of their endurance left, the pet instead takes no damage, evades for 2 seconds, and performs a dodge animation/movement towards its master (whom we can only hope is standing somewhere not stupid…).

Pets now pretend to dodge.

I really, really like this idea.

Back on the topic of pets, I’ll speak from personal experience and confirm that. I don’t fear pets at all.

I imagine pets should have play and counterplay. Something like “I need to focus down the moa first, or else he’ll keep healing the ranger,” or “if I’m not careful, his bird is going to DPS me down.”

Instead, it’s pretty much just ignore the pet and kill the ranger. Bonus points if you’re a class that can take advantage of the forced pet mechanic with bouncing attacks or similar mechanics.

The only pet I really pay attention to is the wolf, since it has a fairly reliable, on-demand ability that can drastically change the outcome of a fight. But once that’s on cooldown, it’s back to ignoring the pet again.

xallever.1874:

If the pet AI is tied to the creeps in general, wouldn’t giving them cleave damage, extra range, immunity to AoE attacks also then be applied to all the other creeps in the game?

Not to mention defiant stacks that scale with the number of enemies nearby.

Xaylin.1860:

I think you are mixing two things here: Interrupt and Lockdown.

The reason why is because in GW2, the two aren’t very distinct at all. Stability and stunbreakers pretty handily counter interrupts, so rather than trying to wait for your enemy to use a skill and interrupt it, it’s often more viable just to stun them and prevent them from doing anything at all.

Maybe I misspoke though. I’d like to see Ranger as a disrupter, whether that be lockdown or interrupt. My point is that neither playstyle is viable.

Rocket boots is definitely a luxury. Most gadgets are.

The only time I ever take it is if I want both for the extreme mobility. If it’s a direct comparison, Elixir gun always wins for me.

Speaking of GW1 ranger, I’d like it if the ranger received more interrupts. Currently it’s only possible to take two at once. The entire style of “interrupt ranger” is gone, especially considering the fact that GW2 interrupts are way less rewarding – Even Mesmer, who gets multiple on-interrupt traits like Halting Strike will rarely run an interrupt-style build.

The main reason I mention interrupt ranger in the first place is because of the trait Moment of Clarity. The fact that this trait exists makes it clear to me that the devs wanted to give a nod to an interrupt-styled playstyle, but…There’s just so much wrong with our hard CC.

GS and Shortbow will only stun if you hit the enemy from behind. And even after that conditional, they only stun for 1 second. Taking Moment of Clarity will only put your stuns on the BASELINE duration of some other classes – See: Magic Bullet, Backbreaker. Even then, you STILL have the conditional of needing to hit from behind.

Considering this is a grandmaster trait, it either needs a huge buff (remove interrupt requirement for bonus damage proc, triple daze/stun duration, removes conditional of needing to be behind opponent) or ranger needs more interrupts to take advantage of it. Implementing changes based around interrupt / shutdown would complement our “sustained damage” nicely and perhaps move it closer to the dev’s vision.

Taushullu.6180:

Going back to traps:

Another solution would be to simply increase the direct damage component of traps (could be anywhere between 50-200%) and making them scale better with current skirmishing stats that way. This would also make them more viable choice for power oriented builds.

I really like the idea of giving more direct damage to traps. Just this one change would open up a new playstyle of power/traps rather than just condition/traps.

If this is done, I’d like it if more direct damage was added onto the utility traps: spike trap, frost trap and viper’s nest.

Then, the current trap traits could be moved into wilderness survival (don’t traps belong in the wildernes, anyways?) and new trap traits in skirmishing such as “knockdown on frost trap” could be implemented, so you’d make a decision about what kind of trap style you wanted to play.

Nike.2631:

Honestly, seeing this definition of “skirmisher” makes a lot of things clear to me.

I’ve always flat out HATED the Skirmisher line’s minor traits~

Tail Wind. Gain swiftness when swapping weapons in combat.
Furious Grip. Gain fury when swapping weapons in combat.
Hunter’s Tactics. Deal more damage while flanking.

To me, operating under the misapprehension that I’m on a class that’s an “unparalleled archer”, swapping weapons is a sign of weakness. It means I’ve lost control of the situation and I’m having to scramble for my back-up plan. Forcing me to take swap-based benefits on the way to picking up fundamental Archer Traits has always bugged me.

But now I see that “skirmishing” means having to whittle my foe down over a span of time so long I could swap weapons repeated… like its supposed to take 40 seconds or more to kill something (cue hip-hop beat) all Ranger-Skirmish-Style! Man, I am just so awesome against foes that stick around and let me kill them. Awesome I tell ya.

The problem is in 40 seconds I can swap to a character that can get the (*#^&$ job done. Without the enemy having to be a willing participant in their own demise.

This is another problem I have. Not just with this class, either, but it pertains more to this class than any other.

There’s simply no incentive in this game to kite melee enemies. Melee mobility in this game in general is very, very high. Typically, a player will simply swap to his melee set as soon as the enemy gets within melee range. In my eyes, this completely cuts out an entire playstyle, kiting the enemy and keeping a safe distance from him.

Allie Murdock.8152:

I realize that many classes have high burst right now, but our intent is to limit power creep as much as possible. Just because the Ranger’s damage is more spread out, doesn’t mean it does less damage than the burst of other classes. Does that make sense?

For example: One class could, in the span of 30 seconds, do 15k damage in say 5-10 seconds, but then their burst skills go on cooldown so they have to wait out the rest of the time before they can try again. A sustained class should be able to do that same amount of damage in that same amount of time, but the damage is more spread out (hence sustained). This can be better in certain situations, and allows for the sustained class to fill a hole in a team comp.

I’m not saying this is a perfect system or that it’s even fully functional in the game, I’m just trying to explain why doing burst shouldn’t necessarily be better than doing sustained damage. It depends on the situation.

We also know that some classes right now are better at burst than others, and those are things that we look to address in balance patches so there isn’t a surplus of any one class.

No, I don’t at all understand what you’re saying.

What you’re saying essentially means that a high-burst class can offload all of their damage at once, then back off, wait for essential skills to come off cooldown (meanwhile stalling with defensive abilities) and then go for another round of burst.

In the meantime, the Ranger does the exact same damage except slower, and because he can’t offload all his damage at once, he has to constantly doing damage just to keep up. While he’s doing this, if he stops to defend himself, he’ll already be behind the damage capability of other classes.

Also, in exactly in what situation is it preferable to do the same amount of damage, except slower? Either the wording here was poor or the justification is. The whole purpose of “sustained damage” isn’t to do the same as burst over a long period of time, it’s to do MORE over a long period of time. And, from personal experience and your own admission, this currently doesn’t happen in the game.

Atherakhia.4086:

Allie Murdock.8152:

The Ranger isn’t expected to do burst damage. By sustained, we mean that the Ranger should excel at surviving (resilient) through burst while still doing enough damage over time to take the opponent down.

Then we have a very serious problem here because your vision of the class will never allow it to function at anything outside of a condi playstyle. This is the design decision we need to address in this CDI and the pet can now sit on the back burner until we get this resolved.

The joke is that the Ranger’s survivability isn’t that great outside of specific outlier builds like regen condi bunker, so he gets low damage and not that much survivability to make up for it.

Because vigor is already so easy to get for our class, and because it takes up an extremely valuable slot where you could be putting another kit in, and because the toolbelt skill is generally underwhelming.

My dream for the engineer was always to go p/p direct damage, like the thief’s set, so I did try to make a build around the toolbelt skill, but the recharge is too long to justify such low damage. It’s barely higher dps than autoattacks from the rifle in the same timeframe.

How far are you / the game devs willing to go, regarding a pet rework?

In a recent stream, it was announced that higher-level pet control would be too demanding for the average player. Is that a major concern, or would you guys be willing to introduce complex mechanics that would not necessarily be as easy to “master” as the current pet?

Turrets being immobile has always been their greatest weakness, but there were occasionally some perks to it, since you could put down a turret and go leave to do other things. In PvP especially, this meant you could leave a turret behind on a point to help defend.

Then they completely removed this unique functionality by giving the turrets a self-destruct timer.

I thought they might have finally eased up on this obviously PvE-directed nerf with the leaked patch notes, but after being declaimed as fake I honestly have no hope for the next patch.

I was excited for these mainly because they were significant changes. Nerfs or buffs, change is always interesting.

I dunno, “We nerfed healing signet by 8% and reduced armor of earth cooldown” isn’t very interesting to me. They didn’t make any new builds viable, didn’t rework garbage traits like Siphoned Power, they just…tweaked stuff that’s already seeing a ton of use.

I tried doing super signet burst recently and my numbers weren’t very high either. Wondering if the signets no longer stack.

If you make your conditions too long, they’ll just get cleansed before hitting their full duration anyways, meaning you wasted stat points into something that could have gone into condition damage or toughness or something.

Condition duration beyond 50% is typically only for abusing specific abilities.

Just a tooltip bug. They’ve never been considered elixirs as far as proccing traits.

Tools and Alchemy are your friends. The Alchemy traitline is probably one of our best traitlines. It provides tons of defensive abilities that are extremely strong in all builds, from glass cannon to tanky condition damage to bunker build.

Tools is quite strong for all builds due to the traits it provides. 10 deep can grant you permanent swiftness while using a kit, 15 deep provides a last-chance toolbelt reset and 20 deep allows you to trait Tool Kit for cooldown reduction, which is a kit that’s great for almost any spec.

I’d probably go 20-30 in alchemy, 10-20 in tools, and spread the rest out between the final traitlines depending on what specs you typically play. Hair trigger in the precision traitline is great if you run rifle. I’d personally only go into toughness if you’re playing PvP, since those traits are designed for fighting players.

On an off note, you mentioned stacking might to increase damage. That usually doesn’t work very well unless you’re using a mixed damage kit such as bombs or grenades, where most of your attacks benefit from both the condition damage and the direct damage increase from might. In comparison, Juggernaut (which requires staying in flamethrower to proc) is typically for the added tankiness, not the damage, since Flamethrower doesn’t scale very well with might. If you were looking for the best damage for your trait spec, that was the wrong way to go, but the Flamethrower does have a few perks over grenades.

Would have been nice to see Ranger sword buff and Kit Refinement and Guardian torch actually being useful. Guess not.

OP is just getting mad at anyone who doesn’t support him.

This problem would easily be solved if we had more specific condition removal. Skills that remove poison, skills that remove bleeding, etc.

Right now we have way too many generic “removes a condition” abilities.

There’s already been a dev response to a thread on the Profession Balance forums. It called for a nerf, but based dev says they won’t play whack-a-mole and they think the build actually isn’t very good right now. They also said that hopefully March 18 patch would change things for everyone, which might indirectly address the problem.

Definitely wouldn’t want it to just be removed.

Reserve mines has always just been one of the most garbage traits ever though. I mean, if it at least had a lower cooldown like 10-20 seconds, I know I’d be crazy enough to try a build that tried to stay around 25% health just spewing mines everywhere.

I remember when the devs said they’d buff the necro blood traitline and they instead nerfed it into the ground then said it was balanced since they gave it a +0.005 healing power coefficient.

Because winning in a duel means class balance.

jcbroe.4329:

For the pets, I see that people are citing examples which all are examples of either:

• reliability
• damage output
• survivability

Truthfully, for the purposes of balance, a pet AI can’t have an equal output of these three things combined, because in PvP and WvW, it would make the pet an autopilot damage option which could be much too powerful.

Then I’d like it if we could pick what we wanted when we were choosing from a pet. Right now it’s really rare to have any of those.

Signets for ranger are pretty similar to Grenades for Engineer – both are pretty much useless and garbage without going 30 points in power just to pick up a trait for them. This cripples build variety, and essentially locks out those skills unless you’re willing to build specifically around those skills.

For class flavor, I’d love if the skill-development team could take a look at some GW1 Ranger playstyles that were really interesting to play. There was interrupter, condition spam, beastmaster and ranged spike.

Beastmaster is hard to utilize because pets are garbage, even if they can potentially do a lot of damage when specced for.

Ranged spike doesn’t exist because we have no spike to speak of.

Interrupter doesn’t work because we have so few interrupts. I truly, truly want to make a build centered around the “Moment of Clarity” trait, but it only benefits one skill on the greatsword and one skill on the shortbow. The trait is grandmaster and yet it only really brings up the daze/stun durations of those skills up to baseline level of other classes. You could compare it to Magic Bullet on the mesmer, which provides a baseline 2 second stun, without needing to be behind your opponent. And it also bounces and hits other targets too. That’s just one example.

Condition spam builds are pretty much centered solely around our traps. We just don’t have enough condition application without them.

Finally, I’d just like to posit that mobility in this game is too strong. Ranger has a ton of outdated skills like Barrage, which in theory should function as a powerful area denial ability…In reality, a warrior will just whirlwind strike through it, an engineer with his perma swift can just run around it, and even just regularly dodging through it avoids a huge chunk of the damage (which isn’t much to begin with), and this seems ridiculously counter intuitive. While you’re casting you’re also very vulnerable to counterattacks. If cripple were as powerful as it was in GW1, then it’d be a very powerful skill. As it is now, it does laughable damage, takes a huge amount of time to stationary channel it, and doesn’t provide much control or area denial. My idea would be to lessen the damage and cast time but provide an RNG interrupt like on Chaos Storm for the mesmer.

Yeah, most minor traits can definitely hurt you in some way. The ability to actually choose from several would be interesting. But just being able to disable them would work too.

Can’t tell you how many times I’ve stealthed as an engineer and need to get away but I know I can’t dodge or else I’ll reveal myself due to that trait.