Guild Wars 2

You also should be very careful of being chain immobilized with a single stun breaker (assuming you mean a traditional grenade/bomb/e-gun) build.

I used to believe in Santa Claus. It was even snowing today.
But all I got were broken toys.

Sniff.

I wanted to believe but no EOTM.
Maybe Santa will be make up for it with new ranger skills.

I agree. The more armor you have, the less damage you should be able to do.

Whether the spec is worth playing (it is probably not) or it is a gimmick, the ability to one shot enemy’s is never a good design idea.

In many other MMOs, there was always a build where the bow class or thief class could essentially assassinate a weak foe. That lasted all of about a couple of months before getting nerfed as being about as much fun as sitting frozen in crowd control for an entire fight.

No class should one shot. No ability should one shot.

Perma stowing of ranger has all but occurred on most servers. It is only a manner of time and stubbornness for the rest.

Typically when you think of a robed caster, you think of:

1. High AE damage (if not the highest in the game) and
2. Horrible ability to survive given such high damage.

Does the ele really fit either billing? (I tried every class on spvp for a couple of laurels each but this one is hard to really get initially).

I think that one could equally say that you are blinded in the idea that there should be a class that is popular. In an sPvP environment, FOTM makes it not matter much. But in WvW, the issue is quite important.

I don’t think it is unrealistic to say that traditionally a game relies upon having a mix of all classes roughly in balance. This is why you often see the popular class being the one that is at best average. Imagine what SWTOR would look like if Jedis were actually the most powerful (It was a significant design discussion).

In all aspects of the game, you tend to seek balance (population, economy, etc). Class balance is no different. If you have too many warriors, you nerf warriors. If you can’t get enough people to play a certain class you buff it.

You don’t obliterate it because then you will have the problem of too few. But, you do indeed tone the class down. You never ever want to see a zerg where 2 classes represent 50ish percent of the toons.

I believe the greatest mistake was when ANEt went too far in giving warriors the ability to deal with conditions. (Initially, conditions just chewed thru a warrior).

I would significantly nerf their ability to avoid condition damage. That would be a fair weakness.

Warriors are significantly over powered at the moment. The key would be to make them, once again, extremely subject to condition damage with few ways to cleanse.

Pretty much the intention is to be simple as could be.
Pick the class ANet should tone down.
Pick the class ANet should improve.
Simple.

Why? Because typically patches that “take a pass” at 8 classes worth of balance just can’t get enough done versus focusing.

Here is the trouble. Outside of immobilize, there really is no way to effectively kite heavy armor melee. Range damage physical particularly) is woefully weak in comparison to melee and there just isn’t enough time at range to whittle them down.

At this point, it is hard to imagine a good solution that will not offend everyone.

Warrior (Nerf)
Ranger (Buff)

Other thoughts?

I simply have but a couple of questions for the developers on this issue.

1) Was the hotfix to bring kits back to exotic levels the result of ascended weapons being less prevalent (not the norm yet)?

2) Will you be returning kits to ascended levels of stats when there is more penetration of ascended weapons in the player base?

3) Are we close? When would you project that to be?

You have as many engineers taking less than full kits as full kits. Then there is diversity on what kits. You have 3-4 builds with kits alone. You have kits that are different for pistols and for the rifle.
You can more easily than almost any class swap out a utility (without changing a spec) for whatever you face (rocket boots, an elixir etc).

There really is no question about engineers having huge build diversity. We ooze it.
Lots of things you can say about engineers having numb fingers given all the skills we have.

Sure we have a broken mechanic (turrets) but I dare say in WvW try to figure out what an engineer is running before running into them. It is tough typically.

Seen several posts asking if their build was ok given how fast they die.
We all were there as new engineers.

So, how about a post talking about our tricks and tactics for staying alive?

I run a 30/5/0/20/15 build. 3 kits (grenades, bombs, e-gun). A classic condy engie.

A few things:

1. 15 in toolkit really helps with surviving versus 10 in firearms. The key is getting all your toolbelt skills to refresh which includes two reasonable fast heals.

2. Timing. You do very well in healing with HT IF you learn to blast thru the water field. BUT, it simply takes practice to get the timing right and you have to know that it takes time to setup. It is NOT a fast heal. Lots of engineer survivorability is tied to combinations and a bit of a longer setup. So when you see the enemy coming or start taking a lot of pressure, act don’t react.

3. Backpack regenerator is great for finding a spot to heal up with a low level heal to stabilize and cleanse you (e.g. e-gun or toolbelt).

4. Blinding. Spike damage is what really hurts engineers because our healing is slow and we have fewer stun breaks. Our defense is blinding. You have blinds on pistol (boucing AE), grenades and bombs. 3 blinds plus your dodges are how you deal with spike. Your Pistol and Your Flash Grenade are on very short cooldowns so blind becomes a key way to get repositioned when melee lunges at you.

5. CC is critical (which is why stability is such a problem for us). We can knockback, immobilize, cripple etc with the best. But, we really can struggle when a class has stability given we have very limited access to stability and very few stun breakers.

6. You can always slot an escape or defensive utility if you have problems for the night. Rocket boots will let you disengage most 1v1s. Toolkit gives a 3 second block that will help in zerg fights.

7. Don’r forget the supply crate. If you are getting really high pressure and heals are in cooldown drop the supply crate and pickup the bandages. This has saved my bacon plenty of times.

8. Stealth for ranged. In a big fight, just having the enemy lose you as a target for a second or two often removes a lot of pressure. Use smoke bomb well. This is a key missed opportunity.

9. Move. To stay alive, be hard to target. Especially, given we have stealth, moving around will make it harder for you to be focused.

10. Be careful of. . . . condition transfers and retaliation. Anything that throws your damage back to you is a real problem.

Can we sell dolphin meat then on TP then?

When you even have to ask the question is points to:

1) Rangers are in a bad spot
2) Warriors are in a ridiculous spot.

Buff the ranger. Nerf the warrior.

Absolutely. Without question.

Warriors traditional anti-nerf response is “make other classes like us” but that misses some huge problems of power creep. Or they will argue that build diversity will suffer but look at the engineer, they are very average but that has led to an enormous number of quality builds.

Warriors are OP and the most obvious way of seeing it is looking at how many there are, how many are wanted in dungeon runs, how many do well in WvW.

The greatest precursor of balance is population of a class. Warriors need to be toned down dramatically.

Stop having overly powerful builds.
Then there will be real build diversity like you see with an engineer where there are dozens of decent builds because no build is “tricked out” with silly skills.

In short, if you want the warrior or necromancer to have build diversity, you need to whack their out of whack abilities.

Simple.

You will never get change with this idea. The fact of the matter is that balance would take way too long to do this way.

I would much prefer they simply acknowledge where players actually spend their time and balance accordingly.

sPvP is to be balanced by equipment.
WvW is to be balanced on abilities.

You can’t train a dolphin because you are not Sea World.
Duh.

Seriously, a dolphin? That is about the last thing this class needs.

War banners are another crazy thing on a class filled with one too many crazy things. They need to be severely toned down. DPS classes shouldn’t have such toys.

Hit warrior health and healing. Their offense I can live with but it should come at the expense of defense.

What a dumb point to simply say “you must be a noob if you can’t kill a warrior”. Please don’t tell me that the new warrior reasoning for avoiding nerfs is “we kill noobs” easily. Every class does. That is hardly shows balance or imbalance. Plenty of extremely good players in other classes agreeing that the warrior is OP. Probably a lot of non good players saying the same thing.

I think it is fair to say, that no other MMO gives warriors access to as many traits, weapons and defensive abilities for good reason. It is fair to say that no other MMO would allow one class to have such high population relative to other classes without hitting it on that reason alone (to encourage class diversity)!

At this point, I think ANet has heard plenty from both sides. I was hoping the community would be more forthcoming and suggest where they thought the source of their being a unbalanced came from is and what they would suggest wouldn’t break the class to change. Many did take up that call. Not unsurprisingly, there were plenty who want to keep all their shiny baubles.

So be it. This thread has served its purpose whether you are for warriors being brought to par or think they are closer. That being said, I don’t know what more can be said. Some will agree. Others won’t.

Getting into stealth is too easy across the board.
Getting out of a fight even when there are huge numbers looking for you is too easy.

Stealth, in general, doesn’t need to be nerfed just the ability to go too far with it. Shorten timers for mesmers. Limit Veil to 5. Make a thief have more situations where they can’t stealth mid-fight to escape (to attack is fine). Generally, create a bit more balance where stealth assists in combat but not as much in avoiding large numbers of people hunting.

I have very missed views on this content.

On one hand, it is wonderful and some of the most creative content I have seen patched in the game yet. It is a lot of fun. . . but some things about the execution are just not fun.

1) You have to wait around a long time or you get thrown into overflow. Typically, overflow loses more than it wins, so you show up too early and wait too long. I don’t think you meant to have people waiting for the event as long as you wait to ride Dumbo at Disney World. That needs to be corrected in the future.

2) Stretch goals are great, but at what point does a stretch goal become a “break me” goal? Ask me the first time we fail versus the last time we do the event in 2 weeks and you will get different answers. How do you know? Difficulty is subjective. What is the feedback loop for getting how we felt about the difficulty versus how we did objectively in winning or losing?

3) The trouble with this stretch goal is that the price of a single failure is a 2 hour wait. If you fail a couple of times, that is functionally a night. So you are magnifying the frustration. You also reduce the “fun upfront” of figuring it out as you really don’t get many shots to get it right.

4) It would be ideal if you could tone down the difficulty of LS content about a week in if it appears that people are losing too often.

5) It would be great for you to have a cross section permanent focus group to bounce these ideas off of. Too often as forum posters and developers, we tend to be outliers in terms of expectations or sentiment. I’m guessing our evaluation of “stretching skills” is far different than the those segments that are in the middle of the bell curve.

I wouldn’t wanthem to weaken individual immob skills (critical for squishy classes to keep heavies at range). Instead, they should have a maximum duration one can be immobilized for.

I Agree with Demandsynz the fundamental problem is warriors have things that a warrior should not have. They should not be great at range. They should not have heavy armor and be very mobile. (They should be the slowest to get into combat really but then hit hard and be able to take damage).

There is a reason in terms of game balance why other games split abilities that you find on a warrior. No other game would put so many toys on one toon. Why would GW2 be designed to be an exception?

My gut tells me the #1 reason is it is simply harder to play.
Other top reasons, lack of familiarity and lack of aesthetics.

But, to fix the #1 reason, wouldn’t simple quality of life issues help? Make grenades target as they do underwater etc?

As an engineer, it isn’t that I am ever not welcome. Misunderstood? A lot (many don’t know we have a water field even and less that we can help stealth).

It isn’t people saying the class has no value, it is something where people are saying I don’t want to play the class.

It makes me happy. People should have easy access to things in a game.
What if you just started playing?

Rarity of items is a waste in GW2.

They followed the customer. The customer decided that WvW was more what they wanted than the developers imagined. Same holds true for PvE.

Frankly, PvP never got the following. That being said, it has the longest tail (meaning you will be playing PvP a bit longer than someone will stick around in PvE).

On the other hand, how do you monetize it? WvW leads to far more gem purchases.
After you buy a game, you need to be a consistent source of revenue too.

Overall, it makes all the sense in the World UNTIL they start to tie PvP into WvW which would make it quite focused. In other words, PvP results should matter to WvW players and that would immediately increase focus.

Ok there are zergs that are not mindless but the game isn’t very smart about how certain things do or do not scale in mass combat.

Conditions
Viel
AE
Wells
Plague
AI (any pet or minion)

Some classes just are not designed for 50 v 50 combat. Others have insane defense that can do well (warrior, guardian).

You can easily get that when a ranger is actually quite good in small roam and is the pits in zerg.

Just make it a commander “channel” that I can turn on or off easily.

:)

Never understood this build in one respect.

Why would you not take a couple of spirits and change the traits to the two main spirit ones?

You would get protection which makes up for the regen loss.
Your regens are not scaling off the +duration trait save Nature’s Voice. Would be quite different with healing sprint.

Or why not just summon a protection spirit and not worry about it running around with you? Then all you have to do is swap one utility (small regen) for one spirit and one trait (evasive purity) for one trait (Vigorous spirits).

Ok, then how about a trait that allows you a percentage chance to clean 1 condition to yourself on a critical bow (short or long) strike?

Hiddenflames:

That is the common fallacy argument every class makes when refuting the need for a nerf. It goes like “but I can’t have everything you are talking about at the same time”.

But that is true of even the most balanced class. I know engineer. It is balanced well.

The balance isn’t that I can only take so many of the best in game skills and abilities at one time, it is that I have very limited access to the best in game abilities and skills. I have a couple but the rest are average and a few things are very weak no matter what build I run.

The problem with the warrior is that they are picking from the best inventory of best skills. That is a balance problem.

I agree play style has something to do with it, but it can’t be all that.
Wouldn’t there be a segment of people who look for the quirky new class that is a bit different? In other MMOs, often the unique class has a bit more of a following.

I would surmise it has a lot to do with just how freaking active this class has to play. It is more a mechanic based unfamiliarity (20 skills????) issue than not getting enough folks who would be interested in something new.

My answer would be to do a set of quality of life improvements. With as many skills as we have, couldn’t grenades (as an example) target like they do underwater where it isn’t so clunky? Couldn’t our fields have 1 or 2 more seconds of up time given how many kits we have to go into and out of to blast?

Those sort of quality of life changes I believe would change the engineer’s numbers as my working theory.

Do all fractals use the same stats (really do not know)? I do know that in WvW you will often want to change your stats out and I do the same with the LS content depending on what it is.

Do you just acquire materials and gold so quickly as to make creating 2-4 sets of ascended gear not a problem? If so, that would confirm the perception that getting ascended is very unbalanced to those who enjoy WvW or simple PvE more than hardcore PvE mode.

Engineer stealth seems to work a lot better offensively to get me into a fight than to protect me outside of one.

The trouble is the engineer has no real blasts that don’t do damage so it is always an either/or. The magnetic shield has a knockback (so that won’t help not reveal where you are or help with a stealth stomp).

If it is intended that engineers can’t use stealth to escape well, then ok, but I suspect that was not the design case.

So what has happened is I now can get this weird 12+ second group stealth by blowing lots of skills on the smoke bomb to get a group in a fight, but can’t effectively use stealth to get myself out of a fight. That just seems odd to me!

The longer you wait for changes, the greater of changes you expect at one time.
Just saying, if you want to be incremental, you start those changes to rangers now.
Otherwise, you are building enormous pent up demand/frustration that can only be sated with some rather dramatic changes.

Fellyn:

How do you propose having “facts”?
If I see a sunset 100 times, can’t I claim it is beautiful without a model on how to define the beauty of a sunset?

The data that would be required for moving to a numeric model is almost impossible to obtain for GW2 and gets so situational.

But, just like I can say a sunset is beautiful based on my common experience and perception, I can say a warrior is over powered based on my common experience.

In a game, the only thing that matters is the player’s perception of fairness. In fact, the numeric models hardly even matter if the vast majority of players THINK warriors are over powered, they simply are. This is a game not reality. Perception is defining not spreadsheets.

Profession balance is in no small part tied to the ability to spec and respec quickly to meet the challenges of a play mode or even encounter (PvE or WvW).

Ascended gear being so costly and time consumptive to create artificially limits build diversity and tweaking on the fly. You create a single set with single set stats.

The likelihood is you have 3+ sets of exotic gear and MOST players will not match that for ascended gear.

Unintentionally, you wind up with players “sticking to builds” they have the greatest gear for. That hurts fun and it hurts balance.

Ascended gear needs to come down in costs dramatically!!!!

The fundamental flaw with the difficulty in getting ascended armor (or weapons for that matter) is that too often it is much better to have several sets of exotic and swap for the specific situation than to have ONE set of ascended.

So, while Celestial certainly has more stats and Ascended certainly has more stats than exotic, does Celestial Ascended have more stats for a particular style of play than just swapping out exotic sets?

That is why outside of main weapons, you will probably not see me crafting ascended armor yet. There ARE classes where switching specs isn’t so compelling. The more static (and boring) your class is, the more ascended gear makes sense.

Engineers are generally better off ignoring ascended armor IMHO because too often that leads to fewer tweaks per situation.

I can see punishment now being a huge disaster.
“Hey noob, can you help us protect our tower. We need you to build siege here.”
Noob just trying to help out. GM comes. . . .

Then there would be all the judgment calls. Yikes.

I would just prefer they allow you to dismantle siege weapons for a percentage of supply back. Would be interesting if both sides could dismantle.

Traps transferring conditions would be a lot of fun and makes sense theme wise.

That would give PvDoor a whole new meaning

I find it perplexing that people say no one needs a nerfing. The mere fact that other classes get buffed EFFECTIVELY nerfs those classes that did not get nerfed.

The difference is power creep. The game also has a non-comparative set of modes (PvE for example). If everyone is “good” by warrior standards, you then have to readjust all other aspects of the game.

Nerfing is fair, fast and simple. Power creep adds layers and layers of problems.
Both nerfing a class and boosting other classes has the same impact. Please nerf!

No one expects that a warrior can do all things in all builds anymore than anyone expects any other class to have a build that can take all its strengths. Doesn’t change the simple fact that a warrior has more and can take more to battle than any other class.

As for incremental nerfs, I think ANet made a huge mistake not overnerfing the warrior’s healing signet and then bringing it up. You nerf small when things are close to aligned and nerf hard when there is a large deviation away from balance. Warrior is quite a ways from being balanced. Hit hard. Hit now.

You could put a light field on more than just a healing spirit after all.
Point is the ranger would be very interesting if he removed more conditions based on his ranged attacks and there is a mechanism (light field/projectile finisher combo for it already).

@Leviathan I disagree but read and re-read your comment.

E-Gun can do quite decent damage with a power build. Even with a power build it does some condition damage. It is the net of the two that is fine.
Grenades and bombs are just fine as power weapons or condition weapons.

Flamethrower has all sorts of problems that really have nothing to do with it being too focused on condition or power. It is just poorly built.

Elixir based builds work just fine in power or condition as might provides both.

Rifle is fine damage (power). Tool kit lets you pull and smash (fine damage). Grenades do fine damage at long range.

If you are condition oriented, you still get good damage (which is why we don’t get as many bleed stacks for example). If you are power oriented, you will still have quite a bit of condition damage.

PvE results may vary. I simply avoid as much of that mode as possible.

Not sure what the concern is, really. I run 4 engineer builds and one is definitely power based.

Indeed, in large groups with multiple people throwing out conditions, there can be some drop in damage. On the other hand, in small groups where you are the source of condition it is higher. Conditions come and go and get cleaned so it isn’t as dramatic as it might look.