Guild Wars 2

Having players serve as class advocates has been successful in several games.
The issue is that as a class advocate, you still don’t know the business, design, hardware or coding side of the game.
Too often you get “in school” computer jockeys going beyond just being the “voice of the elementalist” etc. or not realizing the scope of their role.

A lot of that is maturity. The best advocates tend to be employed for 10+ years, in consumer facing industries, play the game casually and have just enough technical skill to understand the issues without so much as to think their job is to solve them.

In short, advocates tend to relate to the customer but not be the core customer. Core customers in gaming tend not to work well (or in fairness know how to work well) with professional developers.

This lesson was painfully learned by the Fortune 500 years ago tied to strategic and technology transformations. Great advocates tend not to be directly the folks who are impacted.

Warriors need a nerf to their defense. As for your taking a lot of damage, that is pretty much what a warrior does. Your job should be to ensure they don’t get the chance.

The problem ANet has is that warriors had so little defense they melted due to conditions (there natural counter). In response, they gave warriors a lot of healing and cleansing on a class with a lot of armor, toughness and attack. That was too much. Warriors should be heavy offense and weak defense.

Right now they have the best of both Worlds and that is the problem versus the damage they did to you.

Immobilize punishes melee classes and this game is too weighted towards melee currently. The last thing you want to do is nerf it.

Chill is similarly hurts the guardian/warrior and is necessary in the current meta.

There should be more CC to stop melee, not less.

It is almost impossible to fix an abuse and not harm some justified use of a skill etc.
Not to mention it would take so much longer to make those kind of adjustments.

The net lost is minimal. The net gained from stopping the silliness is significant.

Please proceed ANet (says the engineer).

I would have them spend more time on simple fixes. Remember, there are 8 classes and 3-4 game modes to balance. Quick and dirty beats slow and tedious.

Theives are pretty much supposed to take you on and kill you if you are a straggler in WvW. And they do.

On the other hand, they are more or less useless in a large group and at best modestly useful in a small group fight.

The way to avoid thieves is to simply never travel alone in WvW.

Seems balanced to me.

Allie:

Please consider changing your job description to Genie. Please ask for a raise and ensure the team having a resident Genie would help valuations.

All:

There is a common perception (right or wrong) that PvP is less of a focus because it is difficult to monetize or incentivize micro transactions in the gem store around. If this is a misperception (and if in fact PvP does monetize), it sure would be helpful to comment!

Secondly, while the consumerologist in me agrees that you can’t just straw poll on a forum and get anything but an obvious answer of a narrow band of microclusters, the issue that everyone wants to know is what do you do with that limitation to get accurate and timely customer insight on what to fix, how, when, why? How big do you see your blind spot as being?

And most importantly, how can customers help?

Necromancers are tough but it really helps to take something like bomb kit and nail them with non-condition damage. Like fighting when you to only use one arm.

Warriors are just so dang annoying to any class. OP but they really do a number with engies depending on their build given we tend to be low on stun breakers and stability.

Mesmers are not a unique engie problem, but a good Mesmer is always tough because of the ’Where’s Waldo" effect. Even if it only takes a couple seconds, it matters.

The rest are even fights or better.

A dead ranger does no damage.
A living ranger does some even if his pet is dead.
A ranger that loses his pet loses a lot of his damage.

Good arguments for and against empathic bond.

Oh ANet, you must really hate rangers to make our best condition removal impact the survivorability of a third of our damage that is at best “wonky”.

Perplexity gives you extra condition stacks and is clearly the best of the bunch imho.
Scavanger typically won’t increase your damage more than getting extra confusion ticks.

I main an engineer and play a few other classes. Most groups and guilds in WvW don’t know what an engineer can do and are even more familiar (if less impressed) with a ranger. That is how rare we tend to be in WvW at least on my server.

Of course, when they learn. . . they often appreciate it.

(P.S. Don’t run away from my fumigation).

Great quality of life idea. It would help both extremely skilled players and casuals alike.

No reason to think skill is about keeping people in the dark or not having easily accessible data.

No but there SHOULD be a ranger playstyle of an assassin sniper.

That is my point oZii. The OP suggests essentially that condition damage needs nerfed.
My point is that this is a far more nuanced issue. There are definitely times that condition damage can be taken to an extreme and other times it just is subpar. If anything, you would rebalance.

Can we start with the following question, what are the options that could happen?

1. My fields are priority.
2. First field is priority
3. Last field is priority
4. Class based priority system (thieves blast smoke first, guardians blast light first)
5. You select based on a menu or priority setting system

Missing anything? We need the options first to discuss pros and cons.

In general, I think SIMPLE works better as combinations are quite difficult to learn for a new player in general, imagine the learning curve of selecting priorities!

Self Priority

PROS: Predictability. If I plan combinations, I need to predictably have them go off.
Control. I control my effects
Benefits casual and PUG play a LOT.

CONS: Penalizes Coordinated Play where you can really synergize your blasts with others.

The problem with revives is classic.

On the one hand, it just is boring to die and have to run back again and again. It breaks up the flow of a fight and group too.

On the other hand, typically, the fact you have to port when you die is the absolute best thing for allowing small groups to take out large groups. Beat them by attrition.

I agree Silhouette, rally is wonky and revival speed should increase with healing power.
Still, you have to think about the underlying issue of the pros and cons of reviving.

Upon reflection, I think you may be right unleashed.

The issue is small fights vs large fights.
Condition damage is excellent at an attrition based small fight.
It is subpar as the fight gets large or in PvE.

Maybe, damage is such a hard thing to dissect without all the battle logs and data.

Upon reflection, it seems conditions are too powerful in small fights and too weak in larger ones.

The issue tends to be that in a small fight I can wear you down with conditions (fine) but have more defense because of how the points get allocated.

In large fights, my conditions don’t stack like direct damage does (I lose output once the target is “lit up”) and cleansing which is balanced for small fights becomes silly.

I have no idea how you would fix this without breaking 5 more things along the way.

I tend to understand but politely disagree Carighan.
I would wholly agree if as a condition damage player I was essentially forced into some small fights and some large fights (with limited ability to control the flow).

The problem is that you really can pick whether you want to be in small skirmishes or a blob (just take wvw for a minute).
1. In small, conditions are OP (largely because you can damage and take damage)
2. In zerg, you will hate conditions (because you don’t really get the benefit of the damage given the mechanics of condition stacking and cleansing at blob scale).

In an ideal World, as you played there would be times that you loved and hated having a particular damage source. But you really can pick your playstyle here.

So on a really big T1 server, I would hate playing conditions.
On a smaller server, conditions would be so deliciously OP in WvW.

That to me is a lack of balance. But it isn’t a call to nerf all condition damage. Rather, there should be more ability to damage in larger fights and perhaps less ability to bunker and take damage (which is why they are soooo effective in smaller fights).

So far the arguments have been about the damage output (which is fine). The real issues with conditions are:

1. In small fights, the ability to add so much defense in your spec (because you have one damage trait) makes conditions OP.

On the other hand. . . .

2. In large fights, or in PvE fights where there is a finite amount of conditions that can be on a person/mob and (in wvw zergs) a much greater number of players who can remove them, conditions are very underpowered.

In short, conditions are Pappa and Momma bear (too hard, too soft) without ever having a Baby Bear moment (just right).

Maybe that is a form of balance. But it seems if you want to lower condition damage on small fights, there needs to be some significant improvement on condition damage in large fights or PvE fights.

In smaller fights, condition damage rules the roost.
In larger fights and PvE fights, you will wish you were power damage based.

Instead of saying it is balanced given that dichotomy, I would suggest it is unbalanced and too extreme (good or bad) in each of those situations.

The fix would be quite complex.

The trouble is NOT the damage in a condition damage build (it should be higher because it is over time and cleansable), but the defense a condition caster can have because they have so many “left over” points after achieving maximum damage in the skill lines.

Couple of fixes could help:

1. Conditions from a caster should cease upon the downing of the caster.

2. Condition duration should be lowered across the board. In return, the amount of condition duration you get from putting points in the condition duration skill line should be increased. For example, you could reduce condition duration by 30% across the board. You could then have each skill pt provide 2% condition duration vs 1%. If you went glass cannon, you would do enough damage to be able to go glass cannon. But, you would need 15 pts in the line just to “break even”. That would reduce the bunkering effect.

Condition damage is really not a problem in the game.
It is damage over time and able to be cleaned.
If each condition damage strike were converted to a similar physical damage strike, likely we would be talking about physical damage being too high.
Condition damage should be higher in total because it is OVER TIME.

A few thoughts on the problem:
1. The counter to condition damage should be the death of the caster. I propose that if the caster goes down, the condition damage ceases immediately.
(That might be a huge strain on servers though).

2. Condition DEFENSE is too high because you have so many left over points to bunker with. You could fix this in any number of ways:
a. The lower your toughness the higher your condition damage (and visa versa).
b. High armor reduces condition damage output.
c. Reduce the base condition duration by say 30%. Increase the amount of condition duration awarded by each skill point in the condition duration trait line from 1% to 1.5% or 2%. The key is you would need 15 pts in the condition duration line just to break even. (Traits would need to be moved around to not kill builds or to provide viable options for condition specs in those lines).

As I say, it is not condition damage that is your problem, it is condition bunkering.

The problem with condition damage is the same problem that warriors have which is why they need nerfed so badly.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with condition damage per se.
It is the combined ability to have the best damage of a type (condition) with extremely high defense (the condition bunker) and not have to trade a bit of one for the other.

In short, condition damage is too high when a condition caster has greater ability to take damage than if they used a different damage source. It isn’t the offense but the defense which is the problem!

If all high condition damage builds were a bit more glass cannonish (like berserker) I doubt we would have this conversation. You just take out the condition spammer first.

The issue is there is only one stat to acquire for all condition damage. That leaves A LOT of points left for almost pure defense.

Solution: Reduce the normal duration of conditions dramatically (33%). Now -increase- the impact of putting points into condition duration. Instead of giving you 30% for 30 pts it should be 60%. You need 15 pts in the secondary line just to “break even”. At 30 pts, you have half the benefit of a food buff (but are going to be very glass cannon).

Issues: That would require a LOT of tweaking of the trait lines but isn’t that what ANET is doing next?

Is the new weapon essentially ascended quality so we don’t ever have to craft if we don’t want to? (Praying it is).

Then connect the Asura brains to do greater meteor showers or make Sylvari better rangers since they ARE nature?

Nope.

Polish doesn’t really increase gem sales.
New content tends to.

No with power creep we are now exotic.
Hambows remain ascended though.

I proposed that you prioritize the condition causing the most actual damage (calculating total damage left and all ticks). You remove that which is damaging first.

In return, the CC side of conditions gets a minor and needed boost.

This would encourage a wider variety of conditions being applied and better timing of building up stacks around when the enemy has blown their cleanses.

It needs to be fast or there would be no reviving.
But, it is exceptionally frustrating when someone who is being attacked can revive an ally so quickly.

Proposed: The speed at which you revive an ally decreases if you are currently taking damage OR the speed at which you revive an ally decreases based on your current health above 90-75-50 etc.

Proposed: Change WHICH conditions get cleansed first.

How? Conditions are removed in order of the amount of damage they have left to do (total over all ticks).

Why? This makes condition removal more effective against BIG damage while focusing condition damage around applying multiple conditions and reapplying. It also acts as a slight buff to crowd control conditions which need a bit of love in the stability and melee centric warrior/guardian meta.

In short, the problem with condition damage is that a cleanse is just as likely to remove the LAST condition you want removed as the one that is really hurting you.

I disagree with the solutions the OP has because I think there is a simpler answer.

The key problem is how you really have no control over what condition gets cleansed.

The solution should be a new scoring of conditions and the removal of the one that is doing the most damage. CC would be boosted slightly (and needs it with the crazy melee centric nature of the game). Big damage conditions would go away first. There would be greater value on applying a range of condition damage as it should be.

Only in Goldilocks and the Three Bears do you find an option that is “just right”.
Knowing that balance is an art and science hard to master, would you prefer:

1. ANet make MORE changes which may be “too fast” and need correction later or

2. ANet make FEWER changes but be extremely “calculated and considerate”?

Please state if your primary mode of play is WvW/PvP or PvE as that definitely could impact the vote.

This comes from other CP industries that often have vocal “opposition”.

1. Set the forums to allow anyone to read a post.
2. All new posts go into a queue for review.
3. The review occurs “by designated player volunteers (e.g. your consumers of the game)”. You might give them gems etc for their service. The team of 2-6 depending on server size ensures that posts hit the forums (if appropriate) within say 24 hours. You can reduce that time after working out the initial rotation, volume etc. It is pretty easy to scan for violations or appropriateness.
4. ANet’s Community Coordinators meet with the team virtually once a month and as needed.
5. If successful (leading to greater WvW participation and monetization), these player forum moderators would meet once a year with ANet. Part meeting. Part event.
6. Minimum age required.
7. Application based (short and simple to review).

This tends to work well in about 2/3rds of cases.

Oh yes, while I love the game as my guilty pleasure, I am not volunteering. If I were 20 years younger, I might have the time

Agreed. You want incendiary powder unless your crit chance is just horrible (in which case you need to think about not being a condition engineer the way our traits setup).

But, you can have incendiary powder and create a fairly high bleed stack build without sacrificing too much (mostly bomb radius and forcing yourself to a different kit swap rotation and with a good sigil). To keep high stacks you almost need a shrapnel trait because with lower durations, you basically need everything that hits to bleed. You won’t do 25 stacks consistently, but you can go from about 1/2 of burning or confusion to slightly over what each of those conditions can do.

It stacks up (pardon the intentional pun).

Burning is certainly a top condition for the engineer.
Confusion is likely the second (pistol, bomb, toolkit).

Those simply hit hard and tend to reapply for an engineer very quickly given how our traits work and the cooldowns on the skills.

Bleeding CAN be extremely effective as an engineer, but unless specifically designed for it tends to be modest (important but not overwhelming).

The key to the engineer is that we stack so many types of damage (both lots of conditions and even with a condition build your physical damage doesn’t have to be bad at all).

I tend to have the following damage conditions up almost all the time on an enemy:
1. Burning
2. Confusion
3. Bleeding (modest)
4. Poison
5. Torment (sigil on shield)
6. Vulnerability (doesn’t tech do damage, but it makes them take more damage)

On top of that, you lay down a lot of utility based conditions (bomb, grenade, e-gun build):
1. Chill
2. Blinds
3. Weakness (which can more or less be perma if you stay in e-gun)
4. Cripple
5. Immobilize

Outside weakness, you won’t have these utility conditions up permanently but you can reapply them relatively easily as you have several sources in 3 kit builds.

Hard thing playing against an engineer is trying to remove the condition that matters.
As an engineer, almost all you "stacks’ intensity conditions are going to not get to full unless that is how you build. Why? You have too many to rotate. This is why typically, more damage comes from “stacks duration” conditions.

But you can build for “stacks intensity” play too.

Bleeding can go from modest to modestly high. You just need to build for it. Typically this comes from 2 of 3 sources.

1. Obviously, the e-gun auto attack bleeds and is a fast hit. Bad damage but it can help build bleed stacks when your other conditions are still ticking.

2. Shrapnel with grenades is great DPS because it lacks an internal cool down. It tends to be slow damage vs the very quick damage of burning though. Only works with bombs and grenades.

3. If you combine shrapnel with 5 pts in firearms for bleeds on crit ability, you really do well with the whole grenade spec. Remember, you have 3 nades 3 times to crit and 3×15% to apply shrapnel.

The issue with shrapnel is almost always tied to what trait do you give up. You WANT incendiary powder and you almost need grenadier for nades (50% more damage and extra range). The key is whether you play bombs in which case most people like that extra radius. But shrapnel WITH incidinary powder can be quite nice!

If I want the enemy to bleed out, it is almost always using grenades for shrapnel and throwing as many shrapnel grenades as I can then moving to e-gun when the bloke starts running or kiting.

Here is the problem. Assume you are an engineer. While all the skills may be balanced on whole, chances are there will be one or two that just synergize well with a particular class. Whenever that happens, you tend to see all competitive builds have a race/class combo. Every edge matters which is why there is such a fuss over ascended gear being so silly to craft.

I guarantee you will get a lot of classes and characters wishing they had picked a different race and that resentment isn’t worth the small value for PvE players of having better racial skills.

Can’t be done fairly. It would lead to too many cries that you picked the wrong race/class combination and too many unfair advantages in PvP and WvW.

You would almost need to allow a race respect which would pose so many more problems with gear etc.

Specific Game Mode
WvW (though it would apply broadly too)

Proposal Overview
Provide ranger bows with three default timings of attacks (slow, normal, and fast). This would impact cast times AND skill refresh times. It would apply to both the longbow and short bow.

Goal of Proposal
1. Increase the differentiation of the bows styles between condition (fast hits and refreshes of skills for lots of conditions at miserable base strength) or (slow hits and long refreshes of skills but you do the highest single target ranged damage in the game).
2. To move the ranger to more of a viable shoot first-finish in melee class.

Proposal Functionality
Each class of pet would be defined as “slow” (bear) “normal” (drakes) and “fast” (felines and birds).
While a pet is alive, you get the bonus of the adjusted speed. When it dies, you default to normal.

Slow (Power Based) = 33% longer cast time, 30% longer ICDs and 60% more damage.
Fast (Condition Based) = 33% shorter cast times, 30% shorter ICDs and 60% less base damage. Condition damage remains unchanged. You do less physical and much more condition because you shoot faster.

Only applies to skills 1-4. Does not apply to barrage (longbow) or concussion shot (short bow).

Associated Risks
1. Are the numbers sufficient without being too much?
2. Would this change how concerned you are about keeping your pet alive?
3. Is changing on pet swap too much (cool dynamic but could be OP)? Balanced by having to keep it alive?
4. Would that make the ranger’s single target damage the highest ranged damage in both condition and power?

How do you block something you don’t see?

In all seriousness, it seems bizarre to me that you could even block a stealth attack.
Given the glass cannon nature of thief, I would have thought this would be an auto hit.

If I were to have an issue with the class, this isn’kitten
You very much are supposed to lose a LOT of your HP on the thief opening attack.

Mind you, that may just put you even with the very low HP pool of the thief.

Well, rather than say other people simply need to love your warrior. . . .

The general consensus is that the warrior became OP when ANET tried to quickly move them from being useless to useful.

The main disadvantage of the warrior was supposed to be (if you look at the original builds) condition damage. Now, the warrior is frankly far too able to remove conditions and avoid being locked down. Add passive healing, high toughness and high armor and you simply have too many benefits and not enough weaknesses.

Cleansing Ire and Dogged March are the biggest problems. Warriors should get locked down more and should take more condition damage with fewer cleanses. But God help another class that winds up toe to toe with you.

You need a pretty big claw back (nerf) of the abilities ANET put in after launch (cleansing ire, dogged march and healing signet) in that order.

AE is one of the most important skills in ANY MMO. Otherwise, you have Melee Wars 2 and Zerg Wars 2. The whole point of AE is to bust up zergs and provide characters with less defensive capability the ability to do serious damage at range.

If anything, this game needs far more AE. I would up the AE cap from 5-7 as a start.

I lobe the look of hobo sacks. It is true. I like them.
Your experience may vary.

We have kits.
Engineer as a melee fighter just seems odd as could be.
You have the tool kit which is very melee focused.
But seriously, what would you have that fits? The hammer is 2hander not one so that seems silly. Sword would be odd.

I think we have the right weapons frankly to fit the whole engineering theme.

Amen to the idea of holding down the button and having it repeatedly nuke the same spot.

Few thoughts:

1. Rangers are in a bad spot. . . but being actively looked at as the first class to redesign.

2. If you like ranged, this ranger may disappoint and I would tend to create something else. The ranger is far more melee oriented than bows. Range just isn’t as important as it should be. And the weapons don’t perform to par.

3. If you like roaming in WvW, this is a heck of a good surprise and counter class. The only real issue is the relative lack of swiftness without a gimmicky combination.

4. If you like PvE AND enjoy ranged, this is a frustrating experience in that the dynamic is to share buffs in a short range. Choose something different.

5. If you like PvE in general, your build is going to be “strange” and “disjointed” to add value (a spirit, spotter, melee etc). It won’t “feel” like what you expected a ranger to be.

6. If you like wvw large scale, the ranger just lacks AE and the pet just melts. You are basically on the low end of any sort of real effectiveness.

I love my ranger, but I play her only in very limited roles.

Thank you for all the help so far.

1) Is the item purely random that you get or do different mobs/classes tend to proc some more frequently? Are some rare and some common to get? If so, what do I need to know?

2) Debating only going 20 in critical strikes to add 10 to trickery for improvements to steal. Seems a 1500 steal opener would be quite exceptional.

3) How important do you find mug to be with shadow arts already regening you? What do you “give up” on a classic backstab 0/30/30/0/10 build for it?

4) Do you typically open with steal?

5) How often do you actually use the bundle? How easy is it for you to identify that small icon (takes time, you scroll over it, etc.)?

6) If you have a 1500 teleport steal, can you steal against someone on a keep wall and “ninja” get in?

7) What other clever uses do you have for stealing?

I agree with Despo. The issue is far too often the crit rate, which should be harder to get. That allows you to adjust far more for some classes than others (which should rely more on crits).

If d/p, which of the skills get the bonus of pistol mastery? 3-5 or all?
If s/p, does 3 pistol whip count?

A dual skill is only the 3 skill right?

Isn’t Executioner more reliable and better damage than hidden killer if you have about 50% crit chance anyway?

How do you deal with last refuge revealing you? It is great sometimes if I want to finish the fight and have lots of blinds, but if I want to get out of town, I curse it.

My understanding is that we only know the change which is a nerf versus what they have promised is the replacement.

I’d be hesitant right now to think we are or are not more or less impacted than others.