Guild Wars 2

I still think the one big step which is scary but should be done before anything else is to swap Shatter (a context-requiring mechanic) off the class bar and clone/phantasm generation (a context-free mechanic) onto it.

As in, our class mechanic would be clones and phantasms, fully, instead of being it while the bar shows something else.

Then from there, a lot of things can be done. Balancing Shatter becomes much easier because now it’s weapon- and utility-skills, so it’s depending on what we have equipped + there can be healing or elite shatters.
Clone/Phantasm generation is no longer bound to weapons, meaning that it can be fully balanced as the main class mechanic. Phantasms specifically can be rebalanced according to desired output.

Fay.2357:

This is really just another way of saying ‘I submit to the fact that engineers are simply being handed utilities that are literally mesmer utilities with buffs’.

Maybe it is, but then, classes aren’t comparable. One class could have a set of utilities (all of them!) which is completely, one for one, superior to another’s set of utilities, and still be overall inferior.

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

To be fair, these mesmers apparently often really think they are something awesome and that it is their superior skills that made you flee… It doesn’t help that it’s a troll wet dream come to life.

To be fair, most of the complainers also really think the spec has that much of an impact in who wins or loses the fight, and not just 40/60 impact.

But then, that’s much easier than having to admit you played badly. It’s the same with weak specs, easier to class your own spec as underdog and rationalize it that way.

As an example, the strongest way-OP-out-through-the-roof heroes in MOBAs often swim at 55%-60% winrate. Considering 50% as balanced, wow, that’s surely rocking everyone’ socks off, like, up to 10% of losses could have been avoided by balance. Totally only the spec’s fault someone lost. :P

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

It was merely a rant about an added layer of difficulty resulting of solo roaming being next to extinct.

Well good, considering that 1v1 isn’t a dev-supported combat format. The more it is discouraged, the better.

However, again, as plenty people have said, The Pledge is bugged and providing a lot more CD reduction than it should.

And if you thought off-stealth finishing was bad, look at autonomous finishing via the drone. :P

johnpoc.8732:

Full of players trying to defend a completely broken build. It will get fixed eventualy, but like everything ANet does will take a loong time to do so

Well, we’re full of players blaming their deaths in this game onto their opponents spec instead of their own shortcomings. Sadly, I think the universe doesn’t have a fix coming up any time soon.

(1) is by far the most-needed change in the game right now simply because with Silverwastes et al, the raw amount of clicks needed is really bad for people’s wrists and hands.

Come on ANet? RSI is a real thing, please take it serious? Yes I could as well not play, but one MMO shouldn’t be that much worse than the other ones.

Fay.2357:

Anet doesn’t balance around WvW roaming, sorry.

It’s always surprising that people bring it up as if it should be a balancing point, no?
Completely ignoring that the logistics of balanced soon-to-be-9 classes with a myriad spec and gear combinations each for 1v1 situations would be unmanageable.

tobascodagama.2961:

The Rift was always intended to be targetable and damageable, from the very beginning, as a necessary counterbalance to the power of being able to reset cooldowns and damage.

The uproar about this is a bit baffling, yes. I mean sure, maybe the mechanic is too weak with this. Could be. Could not be. Dunno, give me a beta weekend to judge that.

Still, independent of that and given the serious buffs to most elements of the Chronomancer, there needs to be a balance between “with-Chrono” and “without-Chrono”. As in, Mesmer-without-Chronomancer-line needs to be viable, just via having that replacement line.
Now this is going to be tricky, but maybe this destroyable rift works? I don’t know, need to test it.

I mean sure, later on, once we have 6+ elite specs, maybe using a single one will become a necessity as the base class is weaker, but I wouldn’t want that right now.

Not really, but then I never understood how the steady stream of slightly more purple-named pixels can motivate people to play a game they – clearly , looking at this thread – don’t enjoy when that is taken away.

Just doesn’t work that way for me.

I play MMOs for two reasons:

• Socialize
• Expand the social gaming circle (which feeds into the first)

For everything else, including raw clicky-clicky-grind-grind, I know better games off top of my head, and I would never ever pick up a MMORPG, a game in a genre built upon a ton of concessions to make the MMO-part work, to fulfill this part of the gameplay I desire.

MMOs are social games and social games only for me. Whether I do PvE, PvP or WvW, although granted, I don’t “get” sPvP.

Well is it 2 minutes or permanent?

Wow, this is awesome.

The shield is getting some really powerful buffs, and I like the new wells. Sound very good. The new Well of Eternity also solves the condi problem on Chronomancers.

Kreejaffa.3682:

The only reason we have GW2 is because they were unable to do what they wanted with the game engine from the original, so that had to start over with GW2.

… by reusing the GW1 engine? That makes little sense.

I’d rather say that they wanted to get away from the game-systems of GW1 which while good could not appeal to a mass audience (GW1 was made for the back-then-tiny gamer audience, GW2 is made for the modern-everyone-is-in-it gamer audience).

Gravity Well
Creates an area of warped gravity. For 3 seconds gravity steadily increases for enemies in a very large radius, causing stacking runspeed bonuses if heading towards the well, and stacking runspeed penalties when moving away from it. At the end gravity collapses, briefly being negated entirely.
Duration: 3s
Interval: 1s
Effect: Move 100% faster towards the well, 25% slower away from it. Stacks up to 3 times. Moving in other directions is affected depending on angle. Enemies already in the actual well take high damage instead.
Radius: 900 units.
End effect: Floats enemies for 2 seconds, dealing falling damage due to how high they float.
End radius: 240 units.

Essentially it’d make it difficult to not get towards the center, which is where the bad stuff™ happens.

Teej.9241:

The 21 day long sale was worse than Amazon’s Prime Day. Anet what are you thinking? How about some old school skins back from the first few months of the game? Instead of all this stuff that’s been released within the last 6 months, I mean c’mon. Is that really too much to ask? I have no doubts that if you were to throw the Wide Rim Glasses back up, or the ANET Ball Cap or even the Bunny Ears… You’d probably find yourself with enough money to fund your entire expansion extravaganza.

While I agree, one has to give them credit for listening to player feedback, which went up and down the forums:

• Less skins in gem store.
• More skins obtainable ingame.

We didn’t like the specific way they were added back ingame, but they’re listening to the general idea.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Anet defined grind so that nothing in their game could ever be defined as a grind, while in reality you would need to grind much more than any other game in existence.

And people will actually defend this like you were trying to murder their child.

Hrm, I disagree, though I suspect you already made up your mind.

That is, I disagree about the “more than in any other game”. Coming from EQ1, DAoC and WoW, GW2 is the least grindy of the games. By a fair margin. There’s still a lot of grind in it ofc, but then, I’m playing a MMORPG. If I didn’t like grinding, I wouldn’t be playing this genre in the first place. :P

Daniel Handler.4816:

I am interested where you get your numbers. Because the public face of guild wars 2 is very much about the pvp side. The attempt to make this esports is very real. Look at the amount of publicity that goes into one mode or the other.

The public face displayed by ANet frequently is, yes. Most of us are baffled as to why, because the publicity is very much on the PvE side. Any time other sites report on GW2 it’s for PvE stuff

Anyhow, going offtopic, back onto topic:

I somewhat agree that shield’s main issue is more in the current PvE encounter design. In that, I’d prefer to fix the root issue, not the symptoms. Many abilities are currently at best useless due to PvE enemies being little more than punching bags. I long for the mobs which used to run out of AEs, basically.

JVJD.4912:

I agree, all i want is the 10 points .Some dailies don’t belong with each other
How can you compare harvest 5 lumbers to doing a set of fractals, the time gap is huge between them or
Spend 25 honor or capture a keep , Dafaq?
And they all contribute +1 to the set no matter how absurdly different they are -_-.

And?
It’s 10 AP. Pointless as it can be, what does it matter? I mean I’m not saying they shouldn’t remove AP from dailies, I agree, but it’s a problem for later once more pressing issues are resolved.

Honestly, thinking about it, I am tempted to agree. And there’s a lot of good about it, but the way a single comparatively small but core mistake (the way loot is handled, both in those seeds and the lack of anything else) drags everything about it so far down makes it win out versus even the first living story patch.

At least that patch had two things going for it:

• We were hyped for what came after.
• It was shortly after game release, ANet could viably do the “We had no idea”-thing.

Daendur.2357:

what’s the point of pve balance ? Mobs can’t come here to complain about a profession or another. wtf, be serious plz

Balance between classes? Classes being of equal importance to parties and of equal viability in content?

Daendur.2357:

Mesmers are OP.
That’s why there are tons of mesmers everywhere (and noone gives a kitten about pve).

True, despite the majority of players spending the majority of time there. Which is a bit at odds with balance being considered by PvP mechanics (limits of 5, etc).

ronpierce.2760:

They do it because damage is absolutely insane, and PU is safe and still highly effective. Same reason everyone runs vamp runes. Any way to cheese a death and burst (or burn) down a guy is basically the current meta.

So basically damage is too high on burst specs and across the board, and hence specs which are defensive enough to mitigate that and punish and counter them are the bad ones.

PvP logic in MMOs baffles me ever since WoW added arenas. “Hey, this balancing model is self-balancing, that’s broken! Fix it!”.

I’m ofc not sure whether a dev will read it, but I figured that since most of the commentary so far is focused on the negative, I’ll try to gather some ideas instead.

I really think that with just minimal changes the event could be a lot of fun, and given that, I really hope there’ll be some changes before the event is over. It’d also leave a good impression with newcomers, showing how willing to react to customer feedback you as the devs are. Considering that the effect this has on the new players is one of my key criticisms.

Anyhow, what do I think works well about the event:

• Scope. The events are everywhere in the affected maps, really shows off the size of the mordrem army.
• Individual event mechanics. They’re not trivial. Seeing the poison AE around the bomb-vulnerable plant actually kill someone is refreshing, it means the event needs people do stop and read and consider instead of just hammering #1 at the biggest target.
• (estimated) Duration. Longer than 4 days and this’d get very boring very fast. But at 4 days only, it’s a nice little interim event, assuming something else follows before the xpack, say these invasions affect more and more zones slowly.

What I think doesn’t work:

• Participation: This is the biggest issue, and it affects everything else. Rewards are given by personal stack count, encouraging very bad behavior by players, ignoring events and jumping from point to point, tagging them to get more stacks.
• Reward cost in general: Income is low even if you farm the events like above and ignore other players and completion.
• Community feel: Given (1) coupled with (2), this really brings out the worst in players. They’re flat out kittens to each other, encouraged by event mechanics that reward them for being this way.
• Scaling: Too few elites/champions once we’re at 30+ players, instead large groups of normal mobs which are dead the moment they spawn.

Now, to be fair, most of my issues center in some way around the way rewards are given out, as does the criticism of most players. And in turn, I believe just a small change to this could easily alleviate most issues with the events. Not all, but enough to make it a positive memory for people.

My proposal:

• Main reward-counter is the map counter. For every 10 events completed, players in the map get 5 seeds. This encourages working together instead of working against each other.
• If an individual player’s personal stack is below 5, they’ll get 20% less rewards per stack missing, down to 0% at 0 stacks. This makes sure players cannot just idle in the map entirely.
• In addition, each personal stack rewards a bonus item of which 20 can be combined to create a once-per-day bonus chest with 20 more seeds.

Examples:

I’m doing my first map a day. We finish 46 events, and I participated in 8 of them. I get 20 seeds for the map having 40+ events, I get 8 of the bonus item for the bonus chest.
I’m doing another map, later. We only get 38 total and I idled much of it, having 3 personal stacks. I get 9 seeds (15 for the map, -40% for low personal participation). However, I get 3 more of the bonus-chest items, and I now have >20, so I get my bonus chest with 20 more seeds.

And so on.

I feel this would be a much more balanced approach, and rewards players for actually partaking in the community fight against the mordrem. At the same time income is slightly higher, which means more players feel like they can viably get something (this’d come not sooner than the weekend, so there’s only 1-2 days left in the event).

Thanks for reading.

If we understood it correct you need more than 15 stacks to get rewards.

Jana.6831:

I’m playing wvw for now 1,5 years – condi is easier applied than removed – condi removal has got a cooldown as well, you know? And condi builds do physical damage on top of that.

Point of note: Power damage is more easily applied than removed, too.
And more importantly, it doesn’t need any time post-application to actually deal damage.

I mean if I had to guess why power vs condition is such a big issue in GW2, I would have 4 points which work together:

• Most MMORPGs treat DoTs as second-class damage abilities. That is to say, you apply DoTs, and then “fill in” between that with some nuke or other spammable ability. DoTs are never your “main” damage skill, though they might deal the bigger part of your damage. GW2 uses DoTs as a main attack type, a spammed skill, just like direct damage. Weird.
• DoTs are traditionally long in duration though very very superior to DD in damage. But the long duration (18+ seconds or so) means it’s never a surprise to die from a DoT. You got plenty time to process the DoTs on you and react. GW2 doesn’t have this, DoTs are very short comparing other games, dealing their damage only marginally slower than direct damage attacks.
• GW2 has a downed state. In other games, your DoTs killing the enemy after you died is of comparatively little benefit to you, you’re still dead. In GW2, you get back up if they do that, which is … weird, from the perspective of DoT-balance.
• DoTs traditionally scale mostly with the exact same stat as power damage, as a result the relative comparison is completely pointless and instead class-vs-class comparisons are made. In GW2 we got separate scaling and hence while I can choose to spec into either they are too similar to avoid having to directly compare them.

If I were to “try again”, I’d do this:

• Make DoTs much slower.
• Make DoTs much stronger.
• Re-instate some of the more complex differences. Burning only 1 stack per player for example, extending in duration, in turn the damage is by far higher than other DoTs.
• Remove most cleanse in its current form.
• Cleanses are self-only, or if they can be applied to other players and/or are AE, they target a specific DoT type. Say Water AE cleansing extinguishes Burning.

That way DoTs would be supplementary damage. Taking 20+ seconds to tick per stack of bleeding means it’s of no direct danger to a target, though that bleed deals the damage of a single direct hit, is rapidly applied, and since cleanses are rare they better worry about it.

Would be too big a change to do in a live game , though.

Manasa Devi.7958:

My favorites were daily (and monthly) puzzle jumper and kill variety when it was still 15 different types of enemy (original dailies).

That last one really did make you travel all over the place. If that’s the point of the dailies, why did they get rid of it?

True enough, these two are sorely missed. Especially because they were mode-transcendent.

Manasa Devi.7958:

That is a bold-faced lie.

You should read up. That was the reason dailies were introduced. To encourage players to spread around over the world (for the purpose of doing dailies) if they so desire, gently encouraging some to do more than hump one zone or mode.

Then they later agreed that binding a required currency to it was meh, so they moved that stuff to log-in rewards.

Hence most of the point of dailies is now gone. It really doesn’t matter whether they’re 4 for each mode, 12 for PvE or 150 for WvW. They don’t give you much except some minor bonuses from the chests. Still, they seem to somewhat work to encourage players to spread out a bit more, try other stuff. The intention.

I would lean slightly towards power simply because with the removal of the Dueling on-crit-procs for bleed and confusion, the ability to apply conditions via wells is gone. But that’s not a far lean, since you don’t need to use the wells at all.

Traced.3495:

To me the PvP modes do not exist. And I hate events, especially when everyone is now made to go on one map to do them. This daily system looks really limited and bad. It asks too much.

So you dislike both PvP modes, and of the one remaining mode you dislike the crucial component which sets it apart from other games.

You… may want to play another game.

Matt Stacey.7415:

It seems that where we used to be able to get a daily strictly by PVE activites, we are now extremely limited in our options. It is clear the focus is now largely on PVP and WvW.

How can the focus be on PvP or WvW when each mode has the exact same number of dailies? One might argue it was quite unfair before, having more PvE dailies?

Also, the former rewards have been moved into the log-in bonuses, allowing you to spend your time ingame however you want instead of having to tick off the daily list.

AlphatheWhite.9351:

You’ve not given me or anyone else a good reason why it should be this way. What is wrong with a world in which the majority of weapons are equally viable in all major content? Since we’re just talking advocacy here, what precisely is it that makes your vision worth more valuable from a design perspective?

That one is really the sticking point: Because it doesn’t work.

It’s not possible to do what you desire. It goes against basic elements of how games in general, CRPGs in particular and MMO players in general work. You cannot have “all balanced”, unless you sacrifice the distinction.

That is to say, yes, you can have two weapons which are both balanced in all given situations. Automatically at this point, all distinction between them has been eliminated and they are entirely the same weapon. Otherwise there will be a situation in which one weapon is demonstrably (sp?) superior to the other, and by nature of MMO gamership it is the “X-mode weapon” and the other is “rubbish in mode X”.

Now, you can balance that ofc, if you’re think that it could have a trade-off. You could make the other weapon between in mode Y. But then, you’re exactly where we are right now, with weapons being of different value in different situations.

So in short, the reason the current system is superior is because it allows for multiple weapons to exist (mechanically). Without it, it’d be effectively just skins and animations, as the need for balance eliminates the ability of weapons to be different from one another.

Now ofc, plenty players are going to prefer that. WoW is massively popular for a reason. But if you take it too far (it creeps into class design sooner than later, and would even faster in GW2 where weapon choice is an integral part of class identity), and you wash out the ability of players to do anything but what is required of them, making things feel robotic. You eliminate the ability to “mess up”, basically.

As for the other stuff, I think one problem is that english isn’t my mother tongue. I think the way I said “most PvE” means something else to me than it does to you, which could very well be.
I meant to indicate that I am fine with a weapon which excels, say, at group interruption for mass-enemy events and on-demand power so long as I have another choice which provides, say, single-target interruption on a lower CD and steady power. Every weapon needs their niche, and one not having one is a problem, but I want weapons to have that niche.
Because as I said above, eliminating it essentially removes the multiple weapon choices, beyond skins/animations. And while that can work, it doesn’t sound at all fun to me. :s

Envy.1679:

Ya ok. Because people cant genuinely be curious why the let engis stack 4 minutes of swiftness on themselves

And you genuinely meant this as a question usually brought forth at the game developer conference, not as an underhand comment about how you think it’s too much, right? Right? :P

funassistant.6589:

Conditions are easy.

Why?

Don’t need 2 offensive stats to make it super powerful.

That’s actually not true. Power outscales Malice per point assuming both other stats are sunk into defensive stats. I think excluding burning, which yes, was messed up in the condi change.

Tongku.5326:

If you follow tech news, and I dont mean PR crap from Apple or MS or Google, or the stuff you find on CNN but actual tech news, you will understand that using these at certain times (for example right now) with certain hardware that your SMS and/or authenticator works on, when there are new unpatched vulnreabilities announced, puts you and your account at much higher risk of getting hacked then not using them.

Ah, you’re the snakeoil-security person I hadn’t found yet. What alternative medicine security do you recommend then? Feng Shui compatible passwords?

Did you really not understand how additional independent layers of security work? As in, security cannot decrease assuming the layers are independent, because no existent layer is impacted? If you can read all my SMS (not that difficult if you’re on the same tower + got my IMEI), then you are no further to getting access to my account than if I didn’t have SMS auth in the first place. Both are pure password-auths in that case, so no security was lost.

Ithilwen.1529:

The fact that my account was clearly hacked ( changed skill bar and traits + a different client logging in to my account while I was online ) shows that the two factor authentication failed.

You really think it’s that difficult to circumvent 2-factor auth once I got malware on your PC? Heh.
Most likely case is that you got keylogged, modern keyloggers are used to needing to defeat 2-factor-auth, usually by doing a pseudo-MITM attack in that they present you with a fake GW2 launcher. They get your pw, get your sms code, then do log you in but meanwhile already decoupled the auth from your account. That’s how it worked for WoW at least, haven’t seen the attack in GW2 yet but it ought to be the same.

Point is: Your machine was compromised. Chances are, it still is. Or there was an actual MITM attack, but that’s very very rare.

AlphatheWhite.9351:

“Shield not being optimal for most PvE purposes is simply not an issue” = “Making shield useful for PvE is not important” = “screw people who like PvE”

Ok, now you’re just being annoying. Sorry.

• The first does not connect to the second. There’s a big difference between most PvE purposes, as in, Shield works for everything ,regardless of context, is always optimal; and Shield is never ever useful in PvE, regardless of context. You do a typical False Dilemma in that you assume these are the only two situations, “Always optimal” vs “Never optimal”. Given how PvE has more than one enemy in one specific situation, and in fact has a lot of facets, this is not at all true.
• Will you be the one to post the same thread about Torch and Pistol and Sword and Focus once Shield is optimal for everything and there’s no point using anything else, btw? Just food for thought.)
• Even given the issues with arriving at the second part of your “equation” (in the loosest sense of the word, you used equal-signs and that’s all), how do you arrive at the third? Oh wait, I do kinda know, it’s a second false dilemma, people either support your call, or they hate you, right? :P

Really, is this the best argument people can muster on the internet? It’s no wonder devs never really listen if this type of reaction is all they see.

Food for thought:

Torch means the devs hate PvE, right? It’s clearly not optimal, has been unoptimal for a long time, and hey, that clearly means devs said screw PvEers, right. Do you see how silly that string of thought looks? It’s ignoring basically everything about weapon choices in GW2, no class has remotely all of their weapons optimal for most situations.

In fact, I’d say existent game only supports the opposite conclusion. Pick your target game mode. “PvE, dungeons, max-speed”. Then, from that, you know which weapons to pick. You don’t first pick your weapon then arbitrarily decide where you want to take it, what traits to shotgun-fire your points into and then expect to be optimal.

I like the current version. I do think a channeled block would be stronger ofc, but I imagine given the plethora of complaints, it’d come with significant nerfs to other things. And if the 5-skill gets nerfed, I’m not going to be quiet. -.-

Ross Biddle.2367:

While you might have a point, there’s simply so little comparable balance you’re effectively wasting your breath -_-u

This is obvious in the build choices people make and build around.

Oh I don’t disagree.
But having played 4 MMORPGs into their declining phase now, I don’t think devs “going the easy route” on things like these is ever helpful. It just leads to player loss.

Rather make a strong bouncing-attacks build. Support the effects, offer a GM trait which increases bouncing effects in power the later in the chain a target is (both for beneficial and for offence effects ,and not by a little). Offer a utility “beacon” skill which forces all your bouncing skills to hit that target, friendly or enemy, temporarily being able to do once 1200 range jump to get there, allowing to somewhat control the chain.
Maybe offer a GM trait which flat out buffs the bounce range of all bouncing attacks to 750~900. That’d mess with pulling big time in PvE, but it’d be part of the charm plus it’s easily specced out of.

I know, I know, devs are seriously overworked as is. But meh, cutting off gameplay elements for simpler balance always seems to only help in the very short term, instead of investing the time to actually fix them.
At best, and maybe as a hybrid solution, use line-AEs with a limited number of targets counted from the front. This means you’re not actually guaranteed to hit the main targeted enemy, but you can fully rely on where the attack will happen (compare Revenant street skill).

Silverkey.2078:

I’m not a hard-core gamer, so maybe I just missed what cheesy means. I thought cheesy meant: “disgustingly efficient without even needing to be skilled”.

You’re close.

In the context of gaming discussions, “cheese build” means “Killed me in PvP”.
That’s about all there is to it.

Chris McSwag.4683:

The main issue I have with using condi builds myself is that it requires very little skill, very little thought and generally very few button presses to pull off and in return you deal massive damage unless its instantly cleared.

Oh, really?

Because it seems to me that this makes flat out 0 difference. In both cases you use skill X, with cast time Y, to apply damage Z.

The big difference is that for a condi player, Z is the same damage but lower DPS (as it takes a certain amount of seconds to deal damage), but in return ignores toughness.

That’s… mostly it. That’s all the difference there is to it.

AlphatheWhite.9351:

What you just said, in essence, is “screw people who play Heart of Thorns, they’re not important. The new weapon for the new elite mesmer specialization is a pvp-only weapon and should stay that way”.

No, that’s not what I said. Not really, it’s easy to misinterpret that way, though.

What I mean is, not every weapon should be balanced by damage output. For a variety of reasons, PvP-variety being in fact one of them, yes. One of them. The much bigger one is:

• Feel / identity. For me the most important aspect actually, coming from RPGs of old and still playing MMOs mostly for the social interaction and the feel of RPG, less for the numbers game and the PvP brawling. A shield shouldn’t feel similar to a pistol, part of that is not having them be equally viable in any given situation. Period. I should have a reason for carrying weapons around and swapping accordingly.

There’s also simplicity of PvE balance (easier if each class uses round about one, reliable, weapon set and the devs just have to balance those), simplicity of enemy design, lower complexity for newcomers (weapons clearly identify themselves, “me for CC”, “me for raw damage”, etc), and probably a fair few more.

Anyhow, the point is, I think a MMORPG feels lame if things are balanced by the books. Things need to be meaningfully imbalanced, although the term is difficult to explain.
By that I mean, if you have two weapons, instead of both having balanced damage and balanced boon output, have one be really good for damage and one be really all about spreading boons. In a situation where either is required, that weapon is clearly stronger, and the other clearly weaker, providing a character with meaningful upsides and downsides.

And those upsides (and downsides) are to me the core element of class identity. Now, lacking class roles, the next best thing is weapon choice and trait choice.

IMO the abolishment was good in the sense that on-death traits force a bit of a weird gameplay in regards to our class mechanic, Shatter.

Phantasms do, too. And IMO they are a problem for the same reason. Though with Chronomancer, at least there’s some upside to wanting to shatter phantasm, namely that it’s possible. :P

Ross Biddle.2367:

There’s no point in having effects that are never applied, whether to enemy or allie.

Enough said.

But they are frequently applied, just not the way people would like them to. That is to say, bouncing attacks don’t automatically hit the enemy bounces/2 times if it’s a single enemy despite this being the optimal case in 1v1 situations, and friendly effects won’t reliable apply to bounces/2 friendlies in the party just because they’re in 1200 radius.

And?

Yes that’s inconvenient compared to a 1200 radius PBAE effect, but then, so is a melee attack. I’d prefer those to be 1200 radius, too. They’re not. :P

By itself, that’s really not a good point against bouncing attacks simply because as I said the limitations of each type of move are what gives them identity (because we by-nature perceive the comparatively less-limited elements as their strengths as the baseline includes some limitations). Could we make a game in which there are no “downsides”?
Unlikely. As it is with human interaction, you can’t have any joy without another one suffering for it somewhere. You can’t have strong elements without weak elements. You need mechanical convoluted design to even have a way to know mechanical ease of use.

Exciton.8942:

Continuum shift:
I think it gets a bit boring in that its best use is to cast elite skill twice.
Why not disable elite use during its duration but increase its overall duration a bit.
It should have some more strategic use rather than trying to spam every cool down within its duration

That is indeed a problem, although at the same it’s what makes it so awesome.

My way-preferred solution which is probably impossible would be to make the gravity well simply make people walk ~50-60% slower when trying to move away from it (including dodged distance) and 100%+ faster when moving towards it.

Then float at the end. That way escaping it in time takes effect in the sense that you need to walk 2,5 or so seconds to get out before it floats, or use a teleport (any movement ability should be affected, like leaps etc, and effectively not be able to get you out of the well on their own).

One other way to change attacks which wouldn’t just force everything onto the same mechanic (I hate that personally, MMOs IMO go down the drain once “unification” starts because you end up with a balanced but soulless game) would be to introduce a few more rather reliable attack types to Phantasms:

• Exploding Projectile, line + ranged AE. The pMage could for example cast a pink fireball which travels to the target, hitting it or the first target in the line, applying effects to everyone it travels to and around the target.
• Line AE. This could be good for the Avenger, essentially casting a wall like we do with the shield. Very easy to understand, too.
• Cone AE. Already used a ton in GW2, so there’d be an easy understanding with this. This could for example fit the pMage, too. Channel a forward cone which applies retaliation respectively burning. Everyone can easily see what area the phantasm is firing into.

Downside of all of these? They’re actual AEs. It’s a mechanical change from a projectile, although the first one is sort of a hybrid. I’m not sure that ANet is willing to change the underlying mechanic.

Ross Biddle.2367:

If the pulse has a 5 target limit, there’s really no reason not to increase the radius. So what if it’s 900-1200 range if the spread of effect is capped anyway.

But see, you enter far into the “unification” territory with such a change, entering a slippery slope to more passive power and less class identity.

To think that path through:

1. The phantasm casts a bouncing projectile, applying burning to enemies and retaliation to friendlies.
2. Hey, that’s really bleh for applying friendly effects, shouldn’t we change it to be PBAE around the Phantasm? It’s a small change, and it would help people stay in range of all friendly effects at once.
3. Hey, now that it’s PBAE, why not increase the radius to relieve people from having to stick to the phantasm (the logical chain breaks here btw, as this clashes with one of the main reasonings for the previous step, aligning this and the phantasm-regen). It makes it much easier to get the benefits.
4. Now that people are nearly always in range, shouldn’t the phantasm just flat out keep up Retaliation instead of providing it on attack? It’s hardly a big change, and it’d make it less spammy for people (on the boon bar), plus less visual clutter from the explosions of retaliation going off respectively random retal with no obvious source.
5. Say, now that we got that, that’s a wee bit very passive, why even use Retaliation? That’s a bit of a roundabout way to add damage, why not remove it outright since it adds no gameplay elements, and instead bake the damage into the Mesmer’s and other people’s base moves?

The individual steps are all sensible from a game design perspective (2 → 3 is a bit of a weird thing, because people cited the regen range as a reason for a far-radius PBAE design above, but ignoring that the step would make sense), yet compare the final state (no retal, buff to damage values) with the first one (bouncing projectile applying retaliation).
It’s a huge difference, but more importantly it removed something which others did not have before.

Now, in many cases these “unique aspects” are downsides. You can find classes which don’t have to jump through these hoops to provide an effect or get a benefit, so we argue that this ought to be the target state for everyone.
Thing is though, these “downsides” are actually what creates the class. That is to say, the elements which are overly complicated comparing classes which provide them in passive or automatic fashion are the cornerstones upon which classes provide an identity, having to do X, Y or Z gameplay wise to get reward A, compared to someone else who just has A flat out (but has other things which are complicated for them).
This is the essence of MMO balance: Everyone can provide something, only it’s different levels of complicated for them to do.

This is a state of imbalance, yes.
An important one.

Now, ofc, specifically, this might still need a change but it shouldn’t become a passive or nearly-automatic effect. It should still be some special hybrid mechanic like a slow-traveling exploding projectile or anything like that (could in fact also be used for the Warlock to provide AE damage).

Envy.1679:

Read the OP post and youll learn my views as to why

That post explains why you personally cannot handle non-finished products (which, honestly, makes it a bit surprising that you play MMOs as they are never once in a “stable”-state), but not really what is so bad about this.

There’s a lot of benefits to testing like this:

• More hype. Players see the new specs and the new class running around next to them ,gets them interested in the xpack.
• Better testing base. Even if the number of testing players is the same, having all the other players to “provide” the other players in their teams and realms is a huge boon, as it means somewhat production-comparable situations happen.
• More combinations. On a test realm, I bet 99%+ of Mesmers would be Chrono. Here, you will have Chronomancers and Mesmers mingling, providing balance input about the chrono line in comparison to the other lines.

Envy.1679:

But they are putting BETA content on LIVE servers, rather than testing BETA content on BETA servers (such as opting into the beta test by a simple checkbox in the pvp window)

This is not OK.

I find the conclusion interesting. You are correctly describing what they’re doing, but then you draw the conclusion that that is a bad thing, as in, there’s something wrong with the system used, instead of your rather narrow perspective of it.

How come?

AlphatheWhite.9351:

There are any number of things they might do, but do remember that since this thread is about the viability of Shield in pve, and iAvenger is terrible in pve, it’s not NOT an issue.

Yes and my point would be that shield not being optimal for most PvE purposes is simply not an issue. That’s because the game is a wee bit larger than just PvE, and there’s a lot of weapons each class can use. There’s no point to – and in fact it would be detrimental to – making each of them be equally viable in every situation.

Firelysm.4967:

Sorry to sound ignorant, but isn’t mesmer standerd BS of spamming and hiding 90% with post-trait-changes? Sorry in advance, those builds just have no value in 1v1 or XvX fights.

Eh? You mean you got killed by a PU Mesmer? :P

My main issues are:

All is Well that ends Well
Ok change, but, not we once again rely 99% on speccing Inspiration to have any sensible amount of condition cleanse. None of our inbuilt condi cleansing options are all that good (and Arcane Thievery is downright terrible), so being Chrono really limits here. I mean I get the balance idea, granted, we’re vulnerable to condis. Still, not really happy with this change.

Well of Recall
This one is pretty straightforward: Now that the trait gives 2s on every well, 3s alacrity on such a long CD is very, very lackluster. It either needs to give more alacrity, or be much stronger on the end-effect.

Well of Precognition
Fairly strong, but the annoying part here is how difficult the ticking effect is to utilize. Maybe change it so that it gives charges but with a very long duration?