Guild Wars 2

JonathanSharp.7094:

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

Jonathan, don’t you think Warriors are just a little over the top at the moment? Such as the amount of sustain available even when playing glassy? The mobility/escapes from the gap closers in sword/GS where most classes require targeting for those skills to work? How short the cooldown is on some of the cc? Zerker stance stopping all condi’s instead of negative duration (isn’t this a bug, if so why isn’t it fixed?)

I know you guys like to look at the metrics and let things settle… but seriously, it’s been months… Surely you guys are aware of how much this has also affected wvw with increased stats…

Thanks for the thoughts!

Yes, Warrior is pretty beefy right now, and can dish out strong aoe CC with some specs. We’ll have to watch to see if any counters crop up to deal with it in the next few weeks. I do think the build is strong, and we’re watching it very closely.

If you’ll recall, Berserk’s stance was brought in at a 6s duration (and very few people ran it), and then went to an 8s duration. This was enough to get people to start trying to make a build around it, and this lead to the current sustain/cc Warrior that’s so powerful right now.

That duration may need to come down, now that their traits align and give them VERY strong sustain due to multiple sources or regen. It’s working as it’s intended right now, but the duration is longer than it was previously.

TL:DR – We’re watching Warriors very closely right now and waiting to see how the meta adjusts.

Thank you for the response Jonathan! Glad to know you are atleast monitoring the situation. From both a pvp and wvw perspective, I have seen this become more and more dominant, to the point you really have to outplay some warriors with lower skill levels, simply due to their build carrying them and it having room for mistakes. I have had some great fights with warriors, being careful with timing and ensuring you make no mistakes can be challenging, but it doesn’t feel like focus to keep that defense up is equal to the benefit of having so many numerical benefits/passive buffs warriors have at the moment.

Regarding zerker stance, I am a little confused. I was under the impression this is meant to reduce condi duration by 100% (so a necro applying a 10s bleed with +50% duration would apply a fifteen second bleed during this period), but is currently bugged and makes you immune to condi’s during this time. I admit I haven’t tested this over the last few days or since patch, but can you confirm if this is a bug/intentional etc?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Berserker_Stance

Edit: word filters changed this post to kitten bleeds… o.o

JonathanSharp.7094:

Just wanted to say that you guys are having a similar discussion to what we’re having internally.

Yes, the Warriors are pushing some of the condition builds out of the meta, but with our sigil of para fix, those same warriors will now be losing a little damage and a little control.

We need to give it a little while to see how the meta settles. Then we’ll be putting in trait improvement and skill improvements.

We felt the Warrior would eventually rise up to become the class it is now (it took a while for people to catch on), but once you guys figured it out, they did what we expected them to do.

Now we need to see where you guys (and the meta) go next.

Jonathan, don’t you think Warriors are just a little over the top at the moment? Such as the amount of sustain available even when playing glassy? The mobility/escapes from the gap closers in sword/GS where most classes require targeting for those skills to work? How short the cooldown is on some of the cc? Zerker stance stopping all condi’s instead of negative duration (isn’t this a bug, if so why isn’t it fixed?)

I know you guys like to look at the metrics and let things settle… but seriously, it’s been months… Surely you guys are aware of how much this has also affected wvw with increased stats…

Quick question, does a character need to be level 80 for ascended crafting?

I don’t have any characters with level 400 artificer but was considering rolling a necro and it would make sense to level them up via the level gain instead of doing this on a level 80 char. Just needed to make sure it’s not like some recipes and the recipes require level 80. Checked the wiki but couldn’t see any details.

Cheers.

I really don’t think the mantra change will help much. 240 radius is tiny, while it certainly help’s Null Field is still better and taking a mantra for stability is a loss of another utility skill already. In PVE for dungeons, taking a guardian is still a good idea. In WVW, the radius is too small for just 2s of stability and standing that close for removing 2 condi’s is impractical (especially with the aoe of necro’s and condi engines)

Glad about the scepter changes, one annoyance I had with the weapon was how you had a bad auto attack and two situational skills with long cool downs – this helps the second quite a bit. Until the auto attack is fixed up (reduce cast time of third part of chain, increase projectile speed, add an additional effect to the third hit) it will remain behind our other weapons. It isn’t cool having an auto attack overwrite more useful clones.

Regardless, overall this looks promising. Anet haven’t really mentioned what nerfs are coming other than thief sword 3 and rangers water field heal… so will have to wait and see what they tone down. Hopefully warriors sustain/mobility a little and necro’s condi spam…

Hi Chris and Josh,

It feels odd seeing my name appear in the dev tracker so much. Glad to be able to help out, if only a little. A couple of suggestions on things you asked feedback on:

1) Creating a thread every two days may be too quick – you could burn out and have people loose interest if it’s so fast. Changing it to three days – effectively twice a week, may be a little easier to gather feedback.

2) Asking people to ‘submit one idea they want to see discussed’ is a little tedious. Do I post about ascended gear? Condi cap? Content variety? Living world? It may be easier to ask people for a list of points and just store that as a reference point, as it is difficult to decide on just one thing to bring up. I know the process can easily be repeated but this may save time and confusion.

3) Moderators – let’s be honest, some of the moderators on this forum are extremely trigger happy. Moving forward, this really needs to be toned down. I had a thread deleted and was infracted recently for reporting gold sellers in my servers LA – after they were reported countless times they were still there after a few hours. This sort of thing is demoralizing and makes it feel like the community mods are out to get anyone who disagrees with their agenda.

Sure, this is a game forum and there will be a lot of disrespectful and not-so-mature posting, but the amount of times the mods jump on something, simply because they can, needs to be reconsidered if you guys want to build a better relationship with the community.

Have a great weekend guys!

Thank you for the update Devon.

Are you going to add a pond/lake somewhere in the JP so we can have ‘large scale underwater battles’ as well? :P

ColinJohanson.2394:

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

I would like to know how balancing will occur moving forward. We have had to wait 3 months for a balance patch due to esports… yet the details that have been revealed show little indication of toning down condi/cc spam or the state of some classes in general.

I hope you have a better plan than to release a balance patch every 3 months in the future… why were small changes not made every second week in line with pve balence…

We’ll absolutely still keep doing smaller balance updates and patches when we have a major bug/balance thing we want to address.

Though I think we likely would want to sit on really huge balance updates to occur between major seasons competition wise for PvP/WvW along the lines of every 3 months or so in the future. We made this mistake once in Gw1 and did a huge balance update in the middle of one of our major competitions and set the entire PvP community into an uproar, and we promised we wouldn’t do that again.

That’s our thinking currently, though as we continue to grow PvP and establish our process for Gw2, it’s open to change based on player feedback and suggestions.

Thank you for your response Colin, I’m happy to hear there will be smaller balance patches and hope these will be more in focus in the future (such as the para sigil bug which could have been fixed months ago). As I’m sure you understand, going for so long without any changes, when the meta was so focused on condi/cc spam and passive effects, brought a lot of negativity in the community, and worse resentment of PAX as people felt this was the reason balance was delayed.

Though I am curious as to what classes/builds you think are over the top? :P

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

Good Morning Chris,

It may be worth creating a separate thread (for each game mode) for people simply to list (no discussion) what they think are the issues atm or the aspects of the game they would appreciate develper feedback on. This one is all over the place.

I think that’s a good idea. Should we close this thread? And then i will create a new one in each forum area asking for folks to list the area they would most like to discuss?

I can then open a new thread about Polls on Monday on the main forum?

Chris

There’s no harm in leaving this open through right? The thread is meant to be about open communication, which went a little off topic, but still serves a purpose.

I would like to know how balancing will occur moving forward. We have had to wait 3 months for a balance patch due to esports… yet the details that have been revealed show little indication of toning down condi/cc spam or the state of some classes in general.

I hope you have a better plan than to release a balance patch every 3 months in the future… why were small changes not made every second week in line with pve balence…

Good Morning Chris,

It may be worth creating a separate thread (for each game mode) for people simply to list (no discussion) what they think are the issues atm or the aspects of the game they would appreciate develper feedback on. This one is all over the place.

Maybe if said thief team’s existed, the dev’s would have to have to realistically evaluate how strong stealth and undetected burst is…

Though spending an hour in WVW would help with that…

JonathanSharp.7094:

Just to confirm, we are working on new maps. I can’t give too many details, but a few things:

1) We’re trying maps with no cap points.
2) We’re trying mechanics that focus on high risk/reward mechanics that can win to sudden wins/sudden losses.
3) We’re trying maps that focus on “big play” moments that permanently impact the map flow/map status.
4) I can’t give an ETA on when you’d see one live, because we’re trying different maps, and each of them takes time to prototype, etc.

I think that conquest is easy for new players to get into, and it’s allowed for some amazing high-level games so far! But we’d like to try some new things that get away from conquest.

Also, as many of us have said, we want to give players enough variety such that they can change what they play from time to time, while also being sure that we don’t fracture the player-base by spreading players out to too many different game types.

I know this isn’t a super exhaustive answer, but just wanted to give you guys a quick update.

Nice update Jonathan. Though it would be awesome to see some of these on a ‘test server’ which anyone can access to test.

Don’t forget the Gauntlet and Tequatl situations with PVE. Anet thought it would take forever for these to be completed yet people got through them easily, then in the case of the first worked out how to do it with such efficiency, it become the biggest gold farm in game. You have a lot of players who want to help you test these things, who can immediately point out issues that could be missed by a small test group.

Go home Chris or you’ll be here all night… we’re a demanding bunch remember.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Reesha.7901:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

1 thread at a time in each main forum that runs for a few days. Then we move onto the next topic and rinse and repeat?

Not perfect but hey it’s a start! (-:

Chris

I personally think this would be a good start, but I am curious on how you would decide on the topics?
(Maybe we should make a poll regarding that lol).

That’s the next question we have to resolve is folks like the basic idea.

Chris

Just go back to your first idea of making a thread for ‘What top 3 do you think need to be worked on/looked into by the development team’.

Thanks for the replies. I tested Liadri and Teq and Teq seemed slower. Maybe it’s just his movement animation that make it look that way.

Oh well, when I command in WVW I always have Teq at my side. Atleast it makes my mesmer feel he isn’t the slowest thing in the zerg.

PsyOnic.3108:

Asuka, he’s just demotivated of being killed by TTS all the time.

<3 you guys are great.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

Long post.

Hi Asuka,

So how about 1 topic at a time in each forum with a dev or devs on each? Over a series of say 3 days then we move on and repeat?

By the way i am starting to run out of steam a bit and need to drive home soon. When i get home i will carry on discussing with everyone but at some point i NEED to get in game and have me some WvW action!

Chris

Hi Chris,

Pretty much – the problem with threads like this is you get 1000 different issues raised, and what was discussed on page 2 may not exist on page 10, so it easily to a different topic. Having a different thread, for each ‘major’ issue, would help to sort things out.

It may seem like a lot more work for you guys, but may give a better appraisal of the communities stance, and there are some things which really need to be looked into – like the bloodlust buff in wvw or condi cap in pve. Also the morale on the forums would really go up. Even if it is just one topic a week, maybe split (so one pve topic, one pvp topic, one wvw topic etc).

Also, nice job on this thread and the real effort to improve communication. With the number of points which always seemed ignored and how long it has taken for a balence patch I was starting to loose faith, but between the communication surge recently and being able to discuss WVW tactics with a developer in game, it has been a great change. Keep it up!

Thanks Asuka i really appreciate YOUR communication to. How about this then:

1 thread at a time in each main forum that runs for a few days. Then we move onto the next topic and rinse and repeat?

Not perfect but hey it’s a start! (-:

Chris

<3

Try it out and see how it goes! Then you can have a poll to determine if your way of polling the community is working (yo dawg, getting meta here :P). I think you’ll be surprised how much effort people will put into explaining problems and solutions instead of complaining, if they are given a real chance to do so.

Btw, when game was released there were constant AMA’s on reddit or general Q&A sessions with Dev’s. Now these seem restricted to external sites and not the main forums or even reddit anymore. An occasional AMA or Q&A session, even once a month, would be great.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

Long post.

Hi Asuka,

So how about 1 topic at a time in each forum with a dev or devs on each? Over a series of say 3 days then we move on and repeat?

By the way i am starting to run out of steam a bit and need to drive home soon. When i get home i will carry on discussing with everyone but at some point i NEED to get in game and have me some WvW action!

Chris

Hi Chris,

Pretty much – the problem with threads like this is you get 1000 different issues raised, and what was discussed on page 2 may not exist on page 10, so it easily to a different topic. Having a different thread, for each ‘major’ issue, would help to sort things out.

It may seem like a lot more work for you guys, but may give a better appraisal of the communities stance, and there are some things which really need to be looked into – like the bloodlust buff in wvw or condi cap in pve. Also the morale on the forums would really go up. Even if it is just one topic a week, maybe split (so one pve topic, one pvp topic, one wvw topic etc).

Also, nice job on this thread and the real effort to improve communication. With the number of points which always seemed ignored and how long it has taken for a balence patch I was starting to loose faith, but between the communication surge recently and being able to discuss WVW tactics with a developer in game, it has been a great change. Keep it up!

Josh Davis.6015:

Perplexity Runes are definitely on our radar. I talked with our designers about this and you can expect some changes to this rune-set in the near future. I don’t have specific details on what changes we’ll be making, but I figured I’d let you guys know that we are looking at it.

Thanks guys!

Josh, I’m sure this post just made a lot of people happy. The torment runes were nerfed immediately but these remained when they are so abusable.

I made a bug thread about this, but just to check – are you guys aware the runes do not apply any confusion duration bonus (should be +30% with all 6 runes). Also, if someone is using perplexity runes, and a theif uses basi to interrupt something the perplexity runes user is using, somehow they get 5 stacks of confusion. A strange bug but it does occur.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

nethykins.7986:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

minbariguy.7504:

I want to echo the people who have recently been requesting in-game polls. Since currently there has been no real acknowledgement or response to player dissatisfaction with the pace of Living Story releases, I have chosen to simply not log in at all to avoid being counted as a “satisfied customer” in your concurrency metrics.

An in-game poll where I would have the chance to have my opinions actually be counted would be something worth logging in for.

I think this is an idea worth discussion for sure. But i have a question:

Would in game polls affect the immersion for the player?

Chris

But what constitutes as “Immersion”?

…you guys had said you didn’t want to do things like fight with town clothes because it “broke immersion”, but, like…can we say that the LFG tool breaks immersion? Not too sure we can if you were keen to add it

Good point. So for me immersion breaking would be a pop up appearing after an event completes or following beating a dungeon. But you raise an interesting point with LFG. Perhaps (and i am just brainstorming here) it could be a tab that you can open up to give feedback.

I will think about it some more. Keep the ideas coming.

Chris

- Seiging a T3 keep
- Just broke through outer
- Attacker stacks, fire fields, drops veils
- ‘Hi, how do you feel about guild wars 2 today?’ popup appears
- Guild stop fighting, keep lord takes a tea break while everyone fills in survey. Warriors clean their banners, guardians polish the golems.
- War resumes.

I can see that happening.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

minbariguy.7504:

I want to echo the people who have recently been requesting in-game polls. Since currently there has been no real acknowledgement or response to player dissatisfaction with the pace of Living Story releases, I have chosen to simply not log in at all to avoid being counted as a “satisfied customer” in your concurrency metrics.

An in-game poll where I would have the chance to have my opinions actually be counted would be something worth logging in for.

I think this is an idea worth discussion for sure. But i have a question:

Would in game polls affect the immersion for the player?

Chris

Why not just email polls to players like you do with the high level updates for each month? Add an ‘unsubscribe from polls function’ and occasionally post the results or atleast a high level analysis on the forums.

Pure ‘in game polls’ would be easy to miss, especially if people read the release notes and did not want to sign in to repeat more temporary content. Also we get enough spam mail in game as it is. :P

Hi Chris,

I still attest this is an odd thread, maybe just the tone of the first post is confusing. Since you guys seem serious about it, I’ll make a constructive suggestion.

It’s definitely true that many issues have been resolved. An example is magic find – the previous implementation was generic and caused a lot of animosity; the newer iteration is well designed, a lot more open to the community and resolves the previous issues. There are a few things however, which are raised time and time again but there is little dev response on these. Even if you guys are working on solutions, how about just creating high level threads acknowledging the problem, what the community thinks about it and peoples ideas for solutions. Even if said ideas raised are not considered, having a place on the forums which shows the developers acknowledge the issue and are showing they want to resolve it, will solve so many conspiracy threads and help resolve so much of the negative feedback on these forums. Examples of higher level topics which are raised over and over again:

Ascended Gear
- Weapons based on crafting or unlikely RNG drops. No skill based achievement patterns.
- Trinkets based on repeating content multiple times which is not ideal for all players due to requirements of content, such as being in a large guild. No crafting or skill based individual content.
- No ascended backpieces or accessories in wvw (accessories have same cost as PVE, no badge cost)

WVW
- Accound bound ranks
- Server imbalance
- T1 > Tarnished Coast > T2 > coverage = main factor in deciding matchups
- Class balance focused around pvp where perma stealth and banner revving not a problem, yet is ignored in terms of wvw balance.
- Bloodlust buff creating unfair and artificial advantages
- Power creep in passive buffs (bloodlust, guard stacks, world health bonus etc)

PVP
- Lack of game modes
- Community dropping off
- Balance issues (Jonathan did a good job highlighting coming changes, but little is discussed to do with toning down over the top elements which are ruining the current meta)
- No rewards or incentive for high level play with current meta/lack of teams

Fractals:
- Fractal level being character bound instead of account bound
- Unable to salvage fractal weapons
- Lower general rewards than open world pve yet higher difficulity
- Artifical scaling in terms of mob health
- Best rewards (unique skins) being RNG based

General PVE
- Too much temporary content
- Bleed cap/generally bad to use condi builds for team play
- Imbalanced rewards/risk/effort. For example, fire ele vs shatterer
- Precursor system totally based on rng

Devon used to do a great job in posting in the WVW forums, usually once a week he would go through and address a number of points. I don’t blame him for stopping this with the animosity caused by Bloodlust, but it was an example and people respected him for it. It’s simply a case okittennowledging there may be a potential issue and putting it out there to see how people respond. Even just creating a single thread, for discussion, once a week, with a dev post every 2 days, would do SO MUCH to help some of the anger on these forums – which again does not come from all users, but is noticeable in pockets of users which then grows larger with more and more negative feedback cycles. Also splitting the suggestion forum into a pvp suggestion forum, wvw suggestion forum, general suggestion etc will make that less of a mess.

By the way, the balance devs have stated multiple times before they only read the sPVP forum section and do not read the class forums – yet a lot to do will balance will show in the class forums as the game isn’t just pvp. The only time we see posts in the class forum seems to be regarding bugs. A ‘State of the Mesmer’ etc thread once a month by a balance dev would be nice… you never know, we may teach them a thing or two about the class in the progress. There is only 8 classes, creating 8 threads explaining the current state of the class, what is too strong/needs work shouldn’t be too much work…

Osi.3504:

That or some moron hoarded 1000’s and panic dumped lol.

It would have to be closer to 10 000, atleast, with the numbers which have been on there

This is really really messed up. Brought some for commanding at 30s or so a few hours back, and they keep coming in. At one point they were at 12s each… half the price of alphas…

Someone has figured something out which they shouldn’t have. Thankfully it won’t affect any other aspect of the ingame ecomomy…

oZii.2864:

Pegaasus.3280:

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

People are angry for a reason.
People hate temporary content for a reason.
People hate ascended gear for a reason.
People hate class imbalance for a reason.
People hate server imbalance for a reason.
People hate constant buggy content for a reason.
People hate watching you making the same mistakes over and over for a reason.

Why don’t you understand that?

Not everything there is true.

I am not angry at all

I don’t mind the temporary content because I realize not everything will appeal to me

I don’t hate ascended gear because I know the stat increase isn’t significant for the modes I play and I read every thread that comes out that does the math on the subject.

There is more but basically there is nothing to learn from that post because it doesn’t really say anything but generalities but not specifics and it states it in a way that makes it sound like the majority agree.

tl;dr “I like Anet as my main classes are OP atm and I can kill all the noobs in wvw”

Read my second post.

The new mini Teq is awesome, definitely one of the best mini’s in the game. But he seems a lot slower than the rest… most follow behind your character when moving but Teq seems to drag behind quite a bit.

Is this intentional?

Nage.1520:

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

People are angry for a reason.
People hate temporary content for a reason.
People hate ascended gear for a reason.
People hate class imbalance for a reason.
People hate server imbalance for a reason.
People hate constant buggy content for a reason.
People hate watching you making the same mistakes over and over for a reason.

Why don’t you understand that?

You make it sound like no one at all likes the changes. People don’t hate these things, some people do, at least in regards to temporary content and ascended gear. Some things you call mistakes, other people quite like. The balance stuff, well yeah, that needs a whole lot of work…but if you keep using the world people as if everyone things the same, you completely lose any kind of credibility.

Agreed, some people do like them. Also some people like exploiting and some people like hacking. When we refer to large groups of people their is always going to be variation about opinions on a subject, particularly if it involves change. My post did not state that every player or forum reader shared a collective opinion or my own. I did use plural terms, however given the nature of these terms and the amount of evidence that these points are shared by a considerable number of people on the forums, I believe said usage is justified.

The points I am referring to are the ones which are constantly brought up in the forums and attract a lot of negative feedback – again for a reason. If people like said content, I am also sure they have a reason for liking it. If people are angry, and are angry for a reason, maybe that reason should be considered instead of just making condescending threads about how you want people to agree with your approach.

If there were polls on these subjects, on the forums, I think we would find an overwhelming majority of people don’t like many of these points. We could say that this is only representative of the people posting in the forums not the game altogether, however this thread is only targeted towards the people in this forum.

tldr; Semantics aside, people are angry for a reason. Said changes have affected a lot of people in negative ways and they respond with negativity. If Anet doesn’t expect that or think it’s warranted giving the nature of some of these changes, they need to spend more time trying to understand their forum community and less time enforcing group think. This tldr is far too long.

What groundbreaking content?

If we look at PVE, most of the content is repetitive achievements that are rendered differently when in reality they are the same as half the content in the starting zones. We also get a constant temporary content and constant bugs with anything released while existing bugs take months for Anet to admit exist, let along fix. Some content has been great- though most of said content disappears after a couple of weeks so what difference does it make.

You know, you could have skipped this living story entirely and added new permanent content, every month that was meaningful and required skill. You know, like completing some chain to get a rare skin. Or working on world bosses after it was initially obvious the old system didn’t work. Or you know, precusor quests? Since the precusor system is obviously the epitome of your groundbreaking content.

For PVP, you released a major balance patch which messed up the meta totally creating a number of completely over the top builds. Not only do you not admit it, even when you admit the meta is bad, but it has taken nearly 4 months for a balence patch… which from the look of it, won’t help with the current situation. The entire concept of balance is based around which classes are require pointless spamming and passive functions to be casual friendly. Who needs a skill cap right.

Let’s not even talk about your amazing game mode and after a year how the competitive scene is flourishing with talent and has so many fans.

As for WVW, you have done nearly the opposite of what people have been requesting since the game mode was released. Instead of making things more balenced, you add more and more passive bonuses which benefit the winning side more. Then you add leagues, which will fracture the server balence and populations even more. You still haven’t fixed the exploits, and didn’t even admit to some of them until people had video recordings of your own developers exploiting into towers. Class balence doesn’t exist, server balence doesn’t exist outside of T1, worse you treat your ‘vision’ of how things are meant to be perfect, regardless if things are not that way nor will be with the decisions you make.

I won’t even get started on ascended gear.

So I welcome you to continue to praise your efforts and how well you think you are doing. You have delivered a good platform with a lot of potential. But the constant group think and obsession with living story and esports is showing in the way you progress.

People are angry for a reason.
People hate temporary content for a reason.
People hate ascended gear for a reason.
People hate class imbalance for a reason.
People hate server imbalance for a reason.
People hate constant buggy content for a reason.
People hate watching you making the same mistakes over and over for a reason.

Why don’t you understand that?

Move the scepter cooldown trait for mesmers from the inspiration line to the illusions line. This trait has nothing to do with the inspiration line, does not benefit phantasm or support builds.

Make the mesmer scepter auto attack apply a condi on the third hit, just a 1s poison or 2s torment would be fine. And speed up the chain, the is one of the worst auto attacks in the game on a medicore weapon.

Make the mesmer torch phantasm better – it’s just horrible outside of neiche confusion builds. There is no reason to use this weapon in pve. In pvp/wvw it’s ok for the invis/burn on the forth skill. Make the phantasm apply a short burn or chill and lower the cooldown to bring it in line with the other, far better phantasms.

Remove the cooldown on blinding befuddlement. Mesmers cannot spam blinds in the first place and 1 stack of confusion per blind is medicore, especially with kitten cd.

Move Illusionary Celarity so it’s either a 10 point trait in illusions or a the 15 point minor trait. This is overkill at 25 points and should be reconsidered.

Perplexity runes need to be changed so the 6th rune has an ICD. Many classes can spam interupts, being able to stack confusion along side that is over the top. The 6th skill on these runes is more powerful than most grandmaster traits in the game – that should tell you something is wrong. Also the runes are bugged – they do not provide an additional 30% confusion buff and if a theif interrupts you using basi, somehow they make you confused instead. I don’t think this affects other classes interrupts, something about thieves basi sets them off incorrectly.

Also, you may want to look a changing heartseeker to not be a leap finisher, this is half the problem with stealth spam thieves in wvw and trivializes the stealth mechanic. Improve pistol as a weapon and offhand dagger, but tone down HS – being able to spam that many finishers in a row is over the top, especially with a smoke combo field so easily accessible on pistol offhand.

There hasn’t been a major balance patch for months. There have been posts on here from Anet staff themself admitting they are not happy with the current balence, yet we are still waiting for a balence patch, which has been pushed back for another few weeks.

Checking the balence update preview which Jonathan Sharp made, there is very little actually talking about balance. The only thing there is a reference to toning down is Flanking Strike, and that is just reducing the boon steal efficiency.

So Anet, are you really actually happy with the current meta? Condi spam is fine? War regen is fine? CC spam is fine (We know the stun duration bug is being fixed, but that isn’t the only problem). How about the amount of low skill builds which can carry low skilled players? Traits and skills which are far too strong or offer little counterplay? Stealth as a mechanic (well this is more in wvw than pvp, due to balancing difference, but it is still a strong mechanic with little counterplay. lol sick em).

Can you please give us some sort of indication that you don’t want mindless builds to continue to be so strong and that you actually plan to tone down some of these things? At the moment you seem to be making changes which encourage little risk and worse, low reward for high risk. I am not talking about RIP Ele sort of nerfs, just actual balance to lower the ongoing powercreep from the pre-pax patches…

Oh btw Jonathan, Ele’s have 5 conjured weapons. ^_^

JonathanSharp.7094:

Just so you guys know:

We’re not entirely opposed to toning down auto attack damage in PvP (we could split some of the skills and leave PvE/WvW where they are, for instance). I think it’d be a great way to add more importance to the main bar skills, and, in fact, is something we used to have before ship.

There was a time in balance when #1 skills across the board were said to be “too ineffective” by many players to be used. So we made an effort to bump them up and make them more impact-full on the game, so that they didn’t feel like a waste of the #1 slot. There was also a time when most skills had higher recharges, and longer activation times/aftercasts.

From much player feedback, we found that by lowering recharges and cast times, the game FELT better for the person using skills. But, as you guys have said, sometimes it feels like you aren’t punishing by making someone waste a long-cooldown skill, or you aren’t rewarded for interrupting a powerful skill because it comes back too quickly.

Just wanted to say that we agree with you guys, but we have to balance the risk/rewards vs. how good the game feels to pay.

Thanks for all the great ideas! We’re definitely listening.

Could you please not unbalance WVW any further - it is a pvp game mode and should be a more balanced than it currently is… do you guys realize how insane warrior regen is with the new runes, food and sentinel gear. Sorry don’t mean to get off topic, just getting more and more frustrated by how you seek to balance pvp yet completely ignore wvw balance and let things toned down in pvp exist in wvw in their unbalanced state… (please don’t try to deny that… perplexity runes and 3s revealed are more than enough proof…).

On topic, this sort of brings up a problem with thieves. Most of the complains about thieves such as black power-HS spam, sword 2/3 spam, CnD spam, unload spam (ok maybe now that one :P) is due to the lack of CD’s and how easy it can be to migrate risk when you have a ‘resource’ cost associated with skills instead of balancing each individually. I don’t think that can be fixed with the current init system… but does need to be considered…

Another point is how you changed mesmers to increase most CD’s by 20% outside of full shatter builds – as a result the class feels a lot more ‘sluggish’ in terms of mobility and movement than it used to… though if you use a shatter built it has no effect, which is really imbalanced…

Regarding the first point… isn’t a lot of this due to the nature of the meta over the last few months… though I really question how much anet is actually going to tone down based on the details they have provided. The idea of risk vs reward really seems to have been lost as the game progressed.

I really miss seeing high level play where you could distinguish that high skill, not just people being carried by over the top mechanics and builds.

Awesome job mate, I’ll defintly advise new mesmers asking abiout the class to check this out. A couple of things to note:

- Master of Manipulation description seems incorrect
- Check formatting for greatsword details
- Might want to mention glarmor tooltips is incorrect
- Mirror of anguish doesn’t affect Thieves Basilisk Venom
- Medic’s feedback has a short feedback duration, not the full skill. Supposibly fixed soon.
- Pistoler 100% finisher when traited is supposibly a bug
- Domination 25 point trait is supposibly bugged and lowers your damage to active targets
- The sword 3 first part of the chain does do a little damage which can break stealth, careful with your wording

May want to add something about summoning phantasms in stealth… not sure if your going to add a section for tips and less known tricks.

Lordrosicky.5813:

1, Berserker stance – Nothing should give immunity to entire types of classes. no counter play. Very lame. Just make it 90% reduction in condition duration then at least necros can interrupt them

2, Automated response – see above. Losing to someone who is just 100x worse than you just because of a trait they take it total BS. How is this still in the game?

3, Warrior stuns – insane. You literally get knocked around like a ping pong ball by the warrior then die. Interrupt them you say! No you cant. Because they are immune to anything I do (lol)

4, Sword thief evades – way too many evades, teleports, etc on this weapon set

5, Thief feline grace trait – seriously wtf. They get to dodge for less. Anet need to realise dodging and evades = invulnerable. Invulnerable is good in pvp. Seriously.

6, Vigor – most op boon ever. Way more dodges = more invuln = never die = lame. You need to balance this boon. By reducing the amount of vigor gained by certain classes.

7 , Runes of lyssa – seriously wtf is this. Its so OP. Why do you think 50% of people in any game run these. People use elites purely for this rune set. Shows how insane it is.

8, Sigil of energy – dodging is OP. Anet really need to get this or this game will fail.

9, Nature of renewal. So broken and frustrating. Gives you massive advantage in team fight. No counter play as killing it resses anyway. Massive HP. Massive healing. Full condi cleanses. It is just way too good.

10, Ele burst – too high, should be brought down. Promotes macroing and even more cheese. Solution to making ele viable isnt to give it cheese.

11, Signet of spite – why make something so lame as this? it takes no skill to just random land a signet of spite then fear someone = death. I lose to so many bad necros who run this or signet or plague. Enough. Nerf signet of spite durations or increase the cooldown.

12, healing spring – too strong

13, Elixr R – people shouldnt be able to res themselves – come on.

14, Lag – fixing lag matters. Lag is Op in this game. Most the games I lose is because I get dced for 2 mins start of every match. Winning from 3 cap and 100-0 down isnt easy.

15, Emphatic bond – passive condi removal is lame. End of.

16, Healing turret – cast time too short. Cant be interrupted.

17, Healing signet – cant be interrupted so where is the counter play?

18, Shadows refuge – cooldown too short.

19, Stand your ground – get too much for this. Increase the cd.

20, Burning – burning is OP. Nerf it by 25%

21, Asuras – too small. Cant see them for kitten. Lame and should be nerfed/banned

There are 21 things to fix. Get to work on these and people will be happy.

Balance devs, do us all a favour and print this off and put the “To-do list” at the top and then stick it on your wall

1) Is this intentional though? I thought the skill was supposed to reduce condi duration by 100% not proc immunity. Bug? But yeah 90% would be better.

2) Should be closer to Berserker stance and lower condi duration, not total immunity. Total immunity should not exist at all, other than short duration invuls.

3) Stun meta is silly, why was this buffed to much in the first place…

4/5) Agreed, no comment.

6) Vigor is fine.

7) Isn’t that more a counter to the condi meta though? Also isn’t the problem more with classes who have such low cooldown elites like war and thief? Add a longer CD to these (also fix the condi duration bug).

10) Burst shouldn’t be untelegraphed, though the same could almost apply for theif backstab… we are just so used to it people know how to counter it.

15) What is up with this ‘lets make our pets take punishment for us’ concept. They are supposed to be your friends you care for, yet it’s “I don’t feel like burning and being poisoned today, here you do it”. Aside from that, 3 condi’s is pretty high, maybe less…

17) This is crazy. It has far higher base numbers than any of the other healing signets (Restoration, Malice etc) without needing any thought. It heals higher than most active heals. Poison offers little counterplay unless you can keep up perma poison. Can’t be interupted. Wtf mate. Reduce to 300-320 a second, and don’t make this PVP only – this thing is crazy op in wvw, sentinal gear + exumberance runes + ice cream = outank multiple arrow carts. gg balance team.

18) Potentially tone down the duration of the stealth, this is huge atm for such a short CD, plus the healing it offers.

20) Burning damage is ok, the random procs from crits are not. Make this more for controlled and timed burst, not just additional random dps.

On a side note, please stop with this ‘pvp only’ changes you guys keep making. Make some of this stuff pvp and wvw, going from pvp to wvw then realising the things that were toned down in one player vs player environment are suddenly op in another player vs player environment is frustrating.

Jonathan, in your preview post the only thing you hint at getting a nerf (that is used a lot in the current meta) is thief sword 3, by reducing the boon stealing. Is this the only thing which will be toned down? No changes to condi spam, stun spam, warrior regen etc?

Can you give us some insight on what you guys think is too strong in the current meta?

A combination of stealth being a poorly designed mechanic and thieves initiative allowing the same skill to be chained when it would not be possible with other classes. Sadly this likely won’t change as Anet only balances around PVP (100b warriors in PVE and perplexity runes in wvw are proof of this) -Revealed is 4s in pvp and stealth doesn’t cap points so they don’t seem to care further about the mechanic.

I think theives need more interesting aspects to the class – shadow steps and evades are both strong mechanics, but I can’t help but look at their trait line and think how lazy the design seems… Stealth needs to be toned down a bit and other aspects brought up – though the burst should remain as it is or atleast rely on more skill instead of just landing one large hit when you can’t be seen.

1) Blocking an attack procs a 1s revealed. Make timing blocks and ageis actually useful and introduce more counter play in timing.

2) Ending stealth (normally, as in runs out) procs a 1s revaled. This is to tone down CnD spam on ambient mobs, ranger pets, mesmer clones, ele/necro minions etc, as this has limited counterplay and give the illusion of perma stealth in combat. 1s isn’t gamebreaking and will enforce more focused play for both sides.

3) HS is no longer a leap finisher. This is a little too much – Anet said they don’t want people to be able to lay a field and combo it in the same weapon set. Isis knows why they allow players to spam this. It trivializes stealth and encourages bad play, which seems to explefiy half the thieves running around in wvw nowadays. Add more interesting traits relating to creating stealth and prevent spam with minimal effort.

Not a QQ post about thieves, I play the class and many of my friends play thief at high level pvp/wvw roaming. As it is, stealth is far too strong a mechanic and needs to be reconsidered, but in a way to encourage more counter play on both sides – to encourage more skilled thief play not just 521 spam. Regrettably the same could be said about many classes in the current meta (warriors I’m looking at you…), but stealth as a mechanic is far too rewarding at a low skill cap compared to other class mechanics.

Add a 15 or 20 second ICD on the 6th effect like other runes have. No other set is so build defining or allows so much abuse. If these were available in pvp they would have been changed immediately…

Anet can you fix the confusion duration buff as well please, it doesn’t give any additional confusion when it’s supposed to give 30%…

Because the metrics told him so.

Runes of perplexity are supposed to give a 15% bonus from two parts – so a full superior set will give +30%. They currently do not give any additional duration to either the confusion applied by these runes or confusion from other skills (Mesmer scepter 3 for example).

Please resolve as having a rune set lack two of the bonuses it’s supposed to give should have been picked up during testing… especially knowing these were originally bugged and gave you confusion. (On a side note the 6th rune is totally OP and needs an ICD…)

Everyone is too busy playing PVP and has left WVW behind. The esports glory is just to great to pass up, leave WVW to the casuals.

Said no one ever. Oh wait.

They will be measuring numbers at reset as indication.

If you want to have some impact, ask larger guilds to take the reset off, or just not to care about ppt for the reset. If this buff is universally hated as it seems, it shouldn’t be hard to arrange a protest for a single night.

There are plenty of suggestions on these forums. People go to great length to explain problems and solutions in detail, often the same way a technical document would be written and presented to a developer. They are respectful, curious yet are totally ignored, or even worse, responded to in condescending ways by said developers. When this happens time and time again, how do you think people will react?

Look at all the treads discussing bloodlust and suggestions to fix it. Lots of fair and valid feedback. Devon replies to one post – one saying how great the patch was, that’s it. No thread created by a developer to discuss the situation. Talk about an us-them relationship. I can’t help but wonder if the developers simply have an agenda which doesn’t involve the rest of us. God knows who would want to play their game if this continues…

Bloodlust is not going to help the game or community. If that isn’t clear by now, no amount of ‘constructive’ feedback will help. We may as well stroke the dev’s ego in hope they may actually come and try to rationalize this situation with us….

Please buff mesmer scepter auto attack, reduce the initial cast on scepter 3 as its really awkward and relook at the torch phantasm, its mediocre in it’s current state and the cooldown is higher than the other phantasms…

Myself and a roaming friend on Ebay last night (oceanic time) decided to try to capture our orb buff when Sos was pushing our garri, it didn’t go so well with so many Mag and Sos in our map, so we went to Sos BL and managed to capture their orb buff and hold it for around half an hour.

After that we started getting zerged (by both Mag and Sos) so went to flipping camps – though SOS didn’t try to defend the camps or even take them back within 10 minutes, The focus was in camping these orb buffs… which is ironically quite tedious to do with the timeout period. Interesting development in what are perceived as priorities, potentially just the current awe factor….

I really fear what will happen to our ‘mid tier’ population servers if the leagues start with this horrid buff in place. Fighting 2v5+ in the first place requires a lot of concentration, suddenly having your opponent have an extra 150 to all stats plus a crazy health buff simply due to your server have no oceanic presence… isn’t exactly good for morale or getting more people active… There are enough builds that can carry low skill players as it is, add skill buffs, guard stacks and numbers… well Devon was atleast right about WVW not being designed with balance in mind.

Even worse when a SOS thief challenged us to a couple of 1v1’s while having triple buff up. Not his fault in any way, but still detracts from the value of being able to have somewhat fair fights in WVW.

WXP boost as well…

I thought most ele’s just used fire attunement for the big numbers and switch to water for healing? :o

Walnut.8420:

Done with WvW. Thinking about quiting now.

Loosing more of our commanders due to this patch is horrible… especially with your sig. Oh well, the rest of the guild quit anyway…

Buff needs to be removed before the league starts. Imagine the top league in NA – tier 1/2 servers fighting T4/5 servers with this buff available. This will throw balance out the window even more…

Like the new map changes, adds variety to roaming. Like the idea of additional objectives.

Utterly hate the buff. Remove it, make it a decent MF and WXP bonus for people in WVW only. This further unbalances fights – which is something Anet said they wanted to avoid.

Remove it Anet before it’s too late. I don’t think you guys realise the impact you have had on most servers outside T1-2….

WXP Bonus
Gold/Magic Find Bonus
Extra health/defense to guards or fortifications
Bonus PPT

There are so many options that would give a decent incentive without messing with stats. This current system is bad and needs to go; my server is constantly outmanned but atleast we can fight numbers with skill. Adding such a huge stat bonus which individuals do not earn or need, does not balance or make the game more interesting.

Spent all night roaming, outmanned the entire time as my server has no oceanic presence. Having an enemy server not only totally outman you, but have +150 everything makes roaming tedious. Even the dueling we had with a theif from the dominating server was biased by his buff- which was not his fault but he has no way to disable it.

Having these buffs give stats is just wrong. Make it buffs to seige/structures or something, but leave actually fair fights alone. If I die, I want to die due to being outplayed (or often outnumbered, but the second is easier to deal with). There is enough dumbing down the game with the current meta, anet do you really need to make this worse…

Since 500 crafting is available for some lines and tier 7 mats exist, will this ever be available for jeweler for crafting ascended rings/accessories/amulets?

This would make it easier to get ascended trinkets for alts without locking these to particular content that isn’t accessible to all (guild missions… and 40 laurels for a single accessory isn’t exactly a fair trade off…). Also would make it easier for WVW players if these mats become a little more accessible in WVW.