Guild Wars 2

Chun.5827:

Its interesting how you equate a “challenge” with group content.

Considering the genre of the game we’re talking about (A Massive-Multiplayer Online RPG), I sure hope that the difficult content is group content. Otherwise, someone screwed up somewhere very early in the design process.

The whole point of these games is to play in a more social manner. Because let’s be frank (or bob, if you prefer), if not for the social aspect I could play a few dozen much better games. :P

vesica tempestas.1563:

pros do not outweigh the cons in a game like GW2 where there is a power ceiling imo.

That’s why ANet hasn’t made one. Point taken I suppose. But why would they be against modding the client, a feature absolutely positive in other MMORPGs which sadly is quite undersupported in GW2?

Being able to do something about the UI in general would be amazing. And since nothing the DPS meter does is actually some kind of magic (it checks the combat log for you), there’s no real magic there either. In the end, it’s a different view of the combat log, and little else.

But importantly, much of the current UI are elements I’d like to change. The raid frames, the HP bar, the cooldown wipers, everything like that. The UI is functional, but needlessly difficult to pay attention to.

Modding is good. Everyone can set things up as they want. Importantly though, DPS meters are ultimately just a visual UI mod.

Uzunari.1964:

Well my point is that giving someone advantage that is directly connected to usage of something (especially 3rd party tool) over someone who does not use it is actually violation of the original policy that was stated to us (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Policy-3rd-Party-Programs-Multi-Boxing-Macros/first#post6142609) and from some point of view it forces others to use that tool as well for the sake of “keeping up”.

Yeah but by that logic, Ascended gear is against the ToS. :P

OniGiri.9461:

The fuss i believe is caused by the one showing your dps without you giving your consent.

Which is nonsene imo.

Yeah I mean, ofc it is. That information is publicly broadcast in a way, combat log and all.

LouWolfskin.3492:

What i read here for the most part sounds like people want an entirely different game then what we have…

On a class level, yes. I feel the game world / design / lore is amazing. But the classes seem like they were hastily put together, and originally not even intended for the way the combat system worked out.

Plus, like many things in GW2, they were probably designed using accretion, throwing in things until some stick.

But, 4,5 years down the line, I feel this is finally bursting at the seams. Many many MMORPGs (and non MMOs) have eventually done massive reworks, either class-by-class, or all in one batch. For a reason. This is sometimes necessary. The game evolves, and some elements such as underlying class design cannot be adapted in small increments, rather the game design moves away from them and then eventually you do the “rough” break of redesigning them one after the other.

Now as for specific ideas for class themes I’d have, hrm… not all come to mind easily:

• Warrior: Unstoppable, Defiant, Strong. Only class with easy access to Stability, not a single ranged option beyond 600 range (throwing axes maybe?), lots of skills which charge towards a specific target, but none which allow you to disengage. Can be set up to bring strong Stun/Disorient/Daze CC.
• Mesmer: Impossible to nail down, but frail. While illusions are up, cannot be damaged. Virtually defenseless and dies quickly when exposed. Illusions do nothing but only die to specifically targeted attack and from the perspective of the target they were cast upon, dodge and use skills and all (to everyone else they’re blindingly obvious). Cannot be replaced in a spammable manner. Strong as a tank as a result of this.

Will add more later, work and all.

I agree with this.

I’ll try to keep this post brief (I posted some walls on the Mesmer forum before) but I think overall too many classes are broken at a conceptual or design stage by now. Some because their underlying ideas never came to live, some because the game evolved in a way which didn’t agree with the base idea.

And in many cases it feels as if plenty classes only have a set of traits or skills because pre-release, someone sat down to “pad them”.

So what I’d propose is:

1. Take all classes back to the drawing board. We can see some underlying designs, Revenants as a role-swapper, Elementalists as a jack-of-all-trades, Mesmers as an interrupter. These are still around, buried somewhere in the class. Go back to the conceptual stage, and give each class a clear, underlying, theme.
2. Go over the classes at an underlying level, adapt class mechanics, weapon selection and maybe even the combat system as a whole to fit the new theme. If Warriors are to be designed to barrel into melee combat but not even have a ranged weapon, it can be made to work (plenty games did!), but it’d need commitment at this stage.
3. Then, go to the traits and skills. Scrap everything which doesn’t fit the theme, realign remaining elements to fit the theme. If this creates too many gaps, scrap something bigger, like trait picks as a whole, maybe lines don’t all need the exact same setup.
4. Afterwards, take the theme and “fill out”, since so much was scrapped. Give new skills and maybe entire skill types. But this time, align them with the theme from the first point, if Thieves are entirely around hit&run, don’t even give them a single sustain skill.
5. Finally, take a hard look at items. Ideally, these also have a clear theme, e.g. 1H Mace always has 1 or more line-AE skills, while 2H Hammers always have 1 or more skills which make you jump and hit in an area.

OriOri.8724:

While this is true, all that it screams to me is that mesmer needs to redesigned at a fundamental level. The class needs more help than changing a skill to a signet and changing some numbers, it needs a proper redesign, and at this point its not the only class that does.

Exactly this.

The number 1 priority for the devs should be take ~all classes back all the way to the concept stage, then scrap a good 50%-75% of each of them, skill/trait/utility wise. Not to say that most won’t be kept around in some way or another, but first of all, there needs to be tabula rasa.

I mean even classes with in-theory modern and refined class goals (Revenants as a role-swapper which re-implements the idea of the Elementalist stances) don’t work, because their design doesn’t work against the underlying design of the game (trait picks and item stats make role swapping impossible, nevermind that we don’t really have hard and defined roles other than healer and DPS).

Obtena.7952:

The concept must be preserved; that’s the thing that people buy into when they choose the class.

That’s why I think they need to go back to the design stage: Most classes don’t have an underlying concept. They’re just skills and ideas thrown against a wall until some stuck, with 90% useless and no rhyme or reason to anything.

OriOri.8724:

I mean I know more than a few people who would be absolutely fine with stealth access in this game being lowered dramatically, even to the point of removing it completely from a few classes.

My problem is that it doesn’t work like in most other MMOs.

Where stealth is permanent, but cannot be activated once engaged in combat. You’ve been found, that’s it.

In other words you get to freely pick when you join the fight, but not how you leave the fight or break target lock.

Two things I’d like to add:

• As others have posted, “kicking someone over low DPS” is not behavior which specifically requires a DPS meter, paradoxical as that seems. It can also be done for LIs, for pinged gear, for achievement points. 2-3 years ago, the last option was the preferred way, if you didn’t have enough AP, you were “scrub trash”. I think by and large, I quite prefer something actually related to what I do in a fight to be used as an external metric to judge me by, instead of something as unrelated as achievement points. The key element however is that someone who wants to be an kitten will find a metric to be one with. No matter what you do. GW2 was a good example of that, not having DPS meters. People were just as toxic here, at least in the small subset of “I want to be as exclusive as possible in my groups”.
• arcdps doesn’t do anything magical to show you others DPS. The information is already there. In theory, if our brains were up to it, we could probably do it ourselves. That’s however also why it is inaccurate, because it relies on information present in the game client and cannot know whether it is missing some. Which is in turn why the author of BGDM opted to discard the info and only show anything related to oneself, doing the rest via a sync mechanics. But in either case both these DPS meters know or could know what someone next to you is doing. One just happens not to display it.

Ashen.2907:

People choosing to do higher tier fractals for the challenge or the reward are not facing content gated by difficult to acquire gear as you claimed. Its the same Fractals, just, essentially, a different difficulty setting.

I think he or she meant requiring more ascended gear to fit enough infusions.

JTGuevara.9018:

However, I always thought raids were a bad idea. There’s just no way anyone can expect to keep players if you make content for 1% of the playerbase. I’m not against group content, I’m against group content being accessible to the majority.

That’s the thing, raids have two key problems:

• The combat mechanics and design aren’t intended to work for 10 players tight-balanced content.
• GW2, on the PvE-side, is all about a rather casual way of playing a MMO. Not necessarily an easygoing one, but the HoT maps showed amiably well that you don’t need weak enemies to make something friendly to casual play. Raids are totally not the same type of gameplay, and just muddle the strengths of GW2 in this “please like your game”-desperate motion to appeal to everyone.
• Bonus! The combat balance is quite bad in GW2, which is mostly due to the slow speed at which balance updates happen. And when they happen they do very little, moving a few CDs around, merging and effect here or there, never doing any “big” reworks. This makes it very difficult to design tensely balanced content in the first place.

Overall, raids could work.

They just need to be designed for GW2. The ones we got feel more like something taken as directly from other MMOs as possible.

Akeno.4962:

Second, i think you’ve missed the point why you don’t see ventari healers (at least in raid environment). The class needs some kind of unique group support to start competing with a druid.

Actually, doesn’t that still miss the point?

If your healers are only competing with each other in their non-healing support, then isn’t the requirement for healing too low to even require much external support in the first place?

That is to say, isn’t the encounter/combat design the first big problem to worry about here, not actually demanding proper, targeted, focused and designed healing taking place, just “spew some heals to top people up”?

IMO it’s at the core a very fun class let down by a game around it which is absolutely not compatible with any of its more modern or more advanced design.

Among other things, GW2 has no proper support for combat roles (even with the Druid, Ventari and the Aura Ele around), has no support for multi-role setups and can’t even support someone wanting to tank on purpose.

And that’s PvE. PvP just makes you realize why MOBAs have become successful. Not having PvP combat like GW2 does.

I think that if not for the game it is placed in, the concept and elements of the Revenant are good. It could work amazingly well in WoW for example, being something akin to a Druid used to be when they were leaning more towards hopping into other roles.

Honestly Scarlet Briar could work, if it’s a pet-combat class. You’d summon various robot fighters to do things for you, and in turn have to protect them because they only produce value in the long haul.

OriOri.8724:

Perma stealth is definitely a unique mechanic. But ghost thief needs to be nerfed yesterday as it breaks fundamental game mechanics. It should not be allowed to damage you without breaking stealth.

Yeah this is one unfortunate side effect of the devs never planning ahead for stealth stacking. They only have mechanics in place to deal with momentary but rarely applied stealth.

Other MMORPGs and many non-multiplayer RPGs allow permanent stealth but once caught in a fight you cannot restealth, or only in very limited circumstances which don’t allow free escape. This fixes the issue outright and codifies “true” stealth into a game, instead of having it happen as a byproduct of other mechanics and then not being able to cope with it.

To be fair, “happened as a byproduct” seems to be the MO of the Dev Team as far as gameplay elements go. I mean our whole perma-Alacrity/-Quickness seems to not be a purposeful design, it came up as a byproduct of various individual elements initially. Then they noticed “Ha! Omg! We did it! Can’t believe it! A non-DPS role!”, and quickly went with it. But you can notice how the game wasn’t built around the idea of a “buffer”, so we run into a host of quirky designs all the time.

In short, if anyone from the dev team is reading this: I know you’re probably criminally understaffed (if I had to guess >.<), but try to take some time to go back to the drawing board with each class, doesn’t have to be all at the same time. Design a full theme for the class, a role, a purpose, and then one-by-one, retool the class around that. If need be, rip out entire skill types and traitlines.

Honestly, being “different” isn’t a bad thing. In fact I’d argue it’s great. Classes should be differ more at very underlying levels, not be close enough together to be interchangeable.

And a teleporting AE is fine, perfectly so. It gives the skill specialization, better against lone targets. Countered by having lots of pets or other players around, removing the burst.

Only problem is ofc, ANet never balances a skill to be actually strong anywhere. In other words, for this design to work the skill needs to be very strong if used on a lonesome target without pets. But the devs seem morbidly afraid of having any skill be “strong”. Everything is a wet noodle and only becomes strong as a component in the constant spam of things we throw at each other.

That is the truly damaging part of ability-design, and which by proxy makes skills such as this so annoying to use.

atlashugged.7642:

I would like to see a return to the GW1 roots of the mesmer class. There were lots of interesting debuffs you could put on your enemies, and it was quite fun. I would like there to be more interesting interrupt abilities, that can be used more often.

Yeah, basically this. But it sadly has two preconditions which I think are highly unlikely to happen:

• Classes cannot be “created equal”. You’d not have an answer to some attacks. That’s fine, someone else has. Group up. But it’s not how the devs designed GW2, and while the current devs do sort of “get it” (from recent changes), the whole “equality at any cost” is baked too deeply into the system at this point, IMO.
• Currently, abilities are weak individually and strong in concert. Look how single abilities have to provide 5-10 stacks of Might, or 5-15 stacks of a condition. Everything is weak by itself. For something like the old “pure Debuffer” Mesmer to work, they’re need to make individual abilities strong again. Don’t see that happening, we’re moving the opposite direction if anything.

Question: If you are doing bleed ticks while supporting, how do you do your traits? Inspiration, Dueling, Chrono?

InsaneQR.7412:

The problem.with ventari does not have a stunbreak is that it enforces to use invocation and limits build diversity further.

The problem with everyone needing a stunbreak at any given time in any spec just shows how much the underlying PVP system needs an update, instead of specific specs. IMO.

Axl.8924:

Ok how would you improve a revenant?

In PvE, their issues run deep. Talking just the big issues, as the smaller ones depend on the big ones:

• Cannot be an actual rolechanger due to how item stats work. At the very least each legend would need to transform your primary stat. E.g. wear Berserker but go into Ventari, you’re effectively wearing Healing / Precision / Ferocity gear now.
• Trait lines further promote a lack of legend-swapping.
• Glint. Everything about it.
• Double-limitations with CD and energy cost on weapon skills. Should be energy on weapons, CD on legend skills. Or vice-versa.

Xaylin.1860:

This might be true… but while Mesmers might be stuck with a very specific rotation they do provide more to the group while doing so than a Revenant. Revenants can only spam one utility skill and AA. A majority of the healing coming out of this will be vasted.

As far as boons go, yes. If the game had actually high incoming damage in some fights, their raw healing (after all the primary reason to bring a Ventari Rev) would be the alpha and omega. Their non-trivial uptime on Alacrity coupled with a small but consistent intake of might stacks is just a cherry on top.

And that’s what grates a bit. But I put it largely up to ANet frankly having no idea what to do with their classes. A main buffer class would be fine. Plenty games handled that before, look at Nurture Druids in DAoC. Raid buffs are fine, heck WoW is full of them, they share them among classes, too.
The devs just need to get together and actually do something about their class balance.

Legendary Helseth Presence.

Gets you into your eSports groove, which in turn just logs you out because you really shouldn’t be in GW2 if you want to do that.

Absolutely loved it. The scavenger hunt, the story, the final mission’s ending and the way we select the item, wow. :o

I think Ori’s point was that as a Mesmer, I sink everything into that Quickness/Alacrity support. That’s it. I don’t do anything else really.

As far as comparing the healers go, their high Alacrity uptime is a passive byproduct of the highest raw HPS output. Which to be fair is fine, don’t get me wrong. Absolutely not. More than happy the game finally has an actually strong healer (Druid is just damage buffs + some healing, tbh), and I like how mechanics shackle them to a clumsy mechanic rather than making the healing as weak as most skills are in GW2.

But looking at the Mesmer then, why is our design so broken? Yes it’s much older, but come on devs, something is entirely wrong here. Even if we decide that “raid buffs” is a thing now, codify them properly. If Quickness is supposed to be a passive buff, give us an elite signet of quickness, which gives 10 people quickness (dunno about the active).

OTOH, if Quickness was originally meant as a burst thing, then re-do Time Warp and remove all other sources: 10 targets, 20 seconds duration, 200% Quickness. Not affected by Concentration, not actually a boon.

Am I missing something, or is Ventari’s Will easily outscaled by Natural Harmony?

Considering the base healing and coefficients, once you have >713 healing power, Natural Harmony should be more healing per energy spent, assuming you don’t need the ability of VW to heal everyone in a line. So yeah sure, solo-healing a raid you’d mostly use VW, but even then at 2x the targets, that’s only 1426 HP to win out with NH.

Or is there something else about it?

On the plusside, your Revenant would provider higher raw healing. The heal scales much better, hits harder, and the tablet – something frequently underrated – clearly tells everyone where to be to receive healing.

Your Druid, by comparison, will miss a lot of heals due to people running out of them or dodging out. However, the Druid is the better supporter, despite lower healing output. Superior buffs in the form of Grace of the Land and the spirits and glyphs, coupled with a lot of versatility, can even apply a semi-reliable poison if needed for fights against healing targets.

That tablet mechanic is both their unique weakness (an important concept in class-based balancing, so removing it would be terrible), and actually sometimes a benefit. People can openly see where to stand if they want to get healed, a benefit my GF on her Druid wishes she had. People just keep dodging her heals.

What’s functionally bad about conditions, if you don’t mind me asking?

You still press a button to do X damage, only the X is done over 3/4/5/Y seconds instead of instantly, and in turn ignores Toughness. But gameplay-wise, it’s all the same, hammer damage dealing abilities to inflict maximum pew pew.

As such, the defense against them is actually much the same: Evade/Block/Dodge. If you avoid the attack, you avoid the conditions just the same you’d avoid the instant damage.

Should you fail to avoid them, instead of using passive Toughness to mitigate the damage, you now cleanse. It’s a more binary thing, you either remove 100% or 0% of the damage instead of X% according to Toughness. Granted. But functionally it’s comparable, taking up skillbar slots instead of item stat slots.

Also, please don’t call effective “cheesy”. If you want to run an inferior build despite knowing better that’s fine, but then the correct term is “You’re gimping yourself purposely” (which might be fine, again!), not “They are all running cheesy WTFANetsuxx”.

If you however just want to say that you think the game is a) too spammy and b) too bursty, then full ack and we already know the balance team (Assuming there is one, I doubt it) is absolutely understaffed or only works 2 weeks in the entire year. We’d need patches like the one we just got every single month. Because there’s a ton of work to do!

And in fact they need to be bigger in scope, ripping out entire skills, traitlines, skill types, item types, everything. Replacing them. Maybe even just flat out removing them.

No, as always the problem is that ANet is ignoring their own design goals.

Back when the Chronomancer was announced, it was an effect which made the Chrono cycle CDs faster, a core element of selecting the spec, together with very rarely providing it to allies in a limited manner.

And then what happened? AWTEW, Shield Phantasms and WoR.

Solid work, team! /s

InsaneQR.7412:

If you have another class that has a trait that would give a group 10% dmg it wouldnt be a GotL ripoff it would just be a dmg buff trait.Of course it would have some inpact and would rival GotL but it will not lead to the downfall of druids because of this. Basically if the tablet would shorten the CD on skills similar like Alacrity would do it but it wouldnt have the same name and effect it would have the same function.
It it still bound to an altruistic trait and changes the usefullness of ventari, but chronos still have better alacrity uptime and ventari tablet revs are now basically the backup of chronos in raids.

Fully agreed.

Although, independent of what I as a Chronomancer main might or might not think about Alacrity on the tablet, it’s just a bad fit for the Rev. Extra effect? Cool! Alacrity specifically? Utter rubbish in 3 seconds and on a class which has ~0 personal benefit from it.

OriOri.8724:

Every other exclusive effect is still exclusive though, your comment doesn’t make sense. Warrior banners are exclusive. Ranger’s spotter, spirits and gotl is still exclusive. Engi got a new exclusive effect. Rev has assassin’s presence. Thief gets partywide unblockable attacks via basiliks venom. etc etc

Necromancer’s “unique” condition of Torment from Shroud (3 stacks) wants to have a chat with you.

A better general implementation would be that a Phantasm-skill takes an existing Clone and empowers it to do attack X, once, then it dissolves.

In turn, the attacks would be much stronger and there’s a warning for the target in that you can see the energy change a clone to the see-through purple shape of the phantasm.

I’ve always wondered which type overall balance is the best in this game, and I feel that “one aspect per traitline” works best.

That is to say, we’d have a specific traitline for, say, dealing damage. And one for CC. Being Mesmers we might have two for that. One for conditions and dealing with them. And so on.

In other words there’s be a traitline which is all about removing or disabling conditions. You want to be durable against conditions, take it. You don’t want it, don’t take it.

The game could then easily show your spec to outsides too, because all they’d need to know is something like “Domination/Dueling/Inspiration”, translating to “Nukes, DoTs and Heals” or something like that. Give the traitlines icons and it’s even easier to represent. This’d remove issues like this thread has because the traits only need to be balanced in the context of the traitline, not in a vacuum.

Well, as a hybrid solution it’s ok. Honestly Phantasms should not be weapon skills to begin with (either F-bar or utility/elite/healing only), but meh this works.

What annoys me is that they entirely forgot about Mariner/Whaler. Not that underwater content exists in this game, I know…

Gibon.1705:

Im fine with rev getting alacrity in future when next wave of elite specs hits. Just make it properly, give him Legendary Chronomancer Countess Anise Stance and we are fine.

Yeah exactly, that’s sort of what I meant. Sorry.

I mean, they have the following presence-roles already:

• DD
• DoT
• Tank
• Heal
• Buff

Only, the game doesn’t actually support the idea of a role-switching class. At all. Nothing. I mean in theory they’d need to add a buff like Alacrity to Glint, but then that whole concept doesn’t work in the first place, plus it’s dreadfully boring (but even that could be ok, so long as it’s designed well, a role to relax a bit in before swapping back to something more stressful).

But as you said, there’s more to this. A Chronomancer-aspect in the future could make sense, focusing on Debuffing (Alacrity as their one big buff maybe), giving them yet another role. Ofc, no multi-role support like stats being added to other stats in stances, so it’s all for naught anyhow.

Levetty.1279:

Honestly with how perma group alacrity has become such an important part of raids I think spreading alacrity about a bit is good for the health of Mesmer and future Mesmer elite specs. The same can be said about Quickness too.

Well yes, it makes sense to a degree.
We know from other MMOs that the concept of raid-buffs/-debuffs is rather important to facilitating class balance in raids.

As such, the concept of a “main” provider of a given element or buff and one or more “secondary” providers is important. It just hurts because ANet seems to be unwilling to properly re-build classes based on this shift in design.

Menaka.5092:

and just like that, 1 year down the line, our CLASS SPECIFIC buff is not class specific anymore

To be fair, with how weak Alacrity is right now, and how badly it is implemented between AWTEW and Alacrity-on-shatter, does it matter? It’s just another spammable minor effect now, just like everything else in the game.

Fay.2357:

The only things consistent about the balance team is that they have no vision for balance and that they will always break any promise they make. Anyone who thought it would actually be chrono-specific was simply naiive.

Remember, Torment is “The Necromancer Unique Condition”.

Burtnik.5218:

Conditions should be nothing but debuffs (like boons are buffs), not a source of damage by any means. Once they realize it this game will become 10000x better.

Why?
Ever played any other game, basically? Plenty have damage-over-time effects and they work fine. Only… their devs don’t try to make them glorified DD-skills.

That is, in other games a DoT skill might cast 1 second, and last 21 seconds, dealing slow damage. However, for the time spent casting it, it deals superior damage. But given the 21 seconds fulfillment time, DPS is very low in the end.

That’s how DoTs are supposed to work. And then scale them from the same stats, so the amount of DoTs vs DDs you use is a class/trait/traitline element for balance and lore reasons.

For example, Necros could have a lot of DoTs on all their weapons, meaning they generally do higher total damage per time spent attacking, but over a lengthy amount of time. On the flipside, Warriors could be DD-only, meaning full control and full on-demand burst, but need more time spent attacking for the same overall damage.

This works perfectly fine in other games, but like I said, it requires devs to want to see DoTs as first-order damage abilities on-par with DDs, instead of wanting to artifically force this separation with different mechanics. There’s already an inherent difference in them (trade on-demand damage for better total damage), so there’s virtually no need to do anything else with them.

In other words: Just because everyone else does it some way doesn’t mean it’s inferior. Sometimes there’s a good reason everyone does it, it has proven to be the best solution. :P

Meh, mounts are a double-edged sword. The open world is already mostly without danger to the character, as a result of the HoT power creep.

Even the HoT mobs and areas are largely toothless by now, much an improvement as they were. The problem is that the world loses atmosphere and sense of exploration if the mobs might as well not be there, it feels “lifeless”.

If we get mounts which are faster than we are right now ,that’d get worse.

OTOH, there is a good way to implement this:

• Mounts at 35% speedboost (basically what Swiftness is right now).
• Don’t stack.
• Swiftness access more or less removed from the game.
• Swiftness takes the place of current superspeed, stays at 35% but isn’t a boon. Access is very rare and very limited, powerful because it can be used during combat. Otherwise mounts are the way to get runspeed out of combat.
• Mounting up takes 1 second and cannot be done in combat. Means you cannot trivially run away from groups of mobs.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

Conditions are a viable source of damage, Orpheal. The sooner you and everyone else accept this truth, the happier you’ll be.

The problem is that condi damage is separate from power damage. Which of the two you use could be a valid part of class design. If done properly instead of randomly thrown at the game like we have it right now.

In fact, conditions as a whole are by far the weirdest of any MMO I’ve played, and I started with early EQ1. There’s nothing done well about them. Sorry to be that harsh devs.

GLaDOS.5897:

Goodness gracious, no ! Not another boonshare specialization !
Give us some damage already !

Honestly weaving songs sounds far better than the garbage gameplay of sharing boons we have right now, which is even just a random result of devs not considering the interactions on abilities.

If anything, do that, and make Chronomancer something else, a pure debuffer for example.

At this point very little. I mean they gave us a PvE role (finally they’re starting to do at least some sensible PvE design, even if it is by accident), though it’s designed in the worst possible way. Probably because, as I said, I don’t think it was quite intended this way. They just never considered the combinations of skills, and since their design is based on stacking and spamming dozens of individually tiny effects instead of just having powerful and meaningful skills used in a smarter but less spammy fashion to begin with, it happens a lot.

Anyhow, rebalancing patch in two days! Expect massive nerfs across the board, especially to things no one used to begin with!

Also in the same patch where they made Necro wells work underwater! >.<

OriOri.8724:

I’m also expecting a small patch

“Expecting”?

After the glorious four balance patches we had in over four years, each as large/tiny as hotfix-patches a week after a content release are in other MMOs, isn’kitten“know”?

TorsoReaper.8530:

That’s a really interesting line of thought I didn’t even consider; that is more plausible than “incompetence”…

But: Never attribute to malice that which can be reasonably explained by stupidity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

latinkuro.7304:

As such, balance for this mode should’ve been separate from the get go.
nerfing any X game mode skill for the sake of any other game mode is moronic, PERIOD !

Not only that, it’s design should have been part of the classes.
That is to say, in a well-designed class setup, some skills would clearly be intended for PvE, WvW or sPvP use. But not for the other two. Maybe actually restricted, maybe just rather useless outside of their designed mode.

Example: A thief skill to hook a rope to an enemy cannon on a wall and scale the wall. Lacking cannons on top of walls, this skill is naturally not useful to equip in sPvP or PvE, though for lore reasons the odd openworld situation might even exist.

Another example: A chronomancer elite signet which passively applies Quickness to 9 other players around you, but slows yourself and makes you move slower on top. Important raid buff, but as you yourself work slower (can be balanced for in PvE balance!) it’s a deathtrap in PvP and WvW. Might have the odd defensive use case, but overall problematic.

And so on. Design skills which implement a designed “role” in a mode. Then hyper-specialize them. But the devs seem so scared to actually design classes, instead preferring this hodgepodge of messy and muddy design with no clear goal or direction. Meh.

Well the PvP in GW2 is pretty small time, too.

apharma.3741:

Classes with poor stab should instead get a decent assortment of stunbreaks, it won’t protect you from CC like stab will but patient and careful use of them will be almost as good.

True, and it needs bigger solutions. Needs an underlying design which defines “themes”. So that say, you have an aspect of class design, “Defense against crowd control”.

You deem it powerful and necessary enough that everyone should have access to it.

Next you then need to find a handful of “themes” for this. Say you have very sturdy classes which would fit having a pre-emptive way to shrug off CC entirely (Stability). Others are reactive, wiggling out of CC after it has already hit them (stunbreaks). Yet others are controllers, they will actively throw your own CC back at you or become stronger as you CC them, because you’re playing into their strengths. Someone else might have a strongly specialized version of the pre-emptive defense, creating a zone which shrugs off CC but obviously shackling themselves to an area as a result.

Once you have these, assign them to classes, then balance each individual implementation.

Net result: everyone can do it, everyone has different areas where they’ll be the best due to the slight variations in the implementation, everyone has their own theme to the same underlying design aspect.