Guild Wars 2

Loboling.5293:

Please consider these two changes for global implementation.

Because the class with the highest DPS in pve obviously needs more dps buffs.

Gaile Gray.6029:

• New PvP Amulet: Deadshot Amulet: 1050 Precision, 1050 Condition Damage, 560 Vitality, 560 Expertise

It’s going to be nothing but d/d permaevade condi thieves everywhere

I’m disappointed that one of the reward boxes is named “Byzantium” despite the fact that Byzantine Empire does not and has never existed in Tyria.

thijsken.5031:

So my biggest concern with nerfing rev is the following:

So first of all let’s be honest ele is pretty dam strong atm, not taking an ele in your team is basically not even considered. An ele had to choose between different traits according to matchups making it weak against some things and strong against other things. But if you nerf rev thus letting ele just take diamond skin, what will kill ele?

Revs having less offense means that there will be less pressure on Necros, and Necros are a very strong bunker breaker.

Amiron.1067:

like Mace 2 not working on the slightest slant of terrain, Unrelenting Assault randomly not working or stopping mid animation, Jalis hammers disabling themselves when they touch a wall, and the list goes on.

The terrain issues are shared by a lot of skills, which makes me think that it’s problem rooted somewhere deep in the engine. Problems like that are difficult fixes and are what leave programmers awake at night.

Although yeah it will be a good day when those bugs are fixed. (and necro GS 5 too plz)

Condi Warrior and Condi Mesmer are the only meta condi builds. (Unless you’re talking about proleague where condi Mesmer and necro are the only condi builds)

It’s not surprising that they gave condi some more rune and amulet options, especially since condi builds have significantly less amulet options than power builds.

WvW’s condi problems are caused by Dire/trailblazer stats and perplexity runes. If WvW was on the sPvP stat system WvW wouldn’t have those issues.

Sorem.9157:

Why not implement the changes RIGHT AFTER one season and then do another balance patch RIGHT BEFORE the next one, taking in consideration the feedback of off-season changes?

I doubt you haven’t thought of that, yet i cant figure out why it isnt done

You mean like how Anet dropped a balance patch on Oct 18th RIGHT AFTER the end of season 4? Which is followed by a balance patch on December 13th RIGHT BEFORE season 5 starts?

Surge of the Mists should have died ages ago.

SotM is literally 100blades but with pulsing CC and evade frames.

Ragion.2831:

We got some reasoning behind why Rev gets nerfed so much. Anet says Rev is hard to play but once mastered it causes a lot of damage on the battlefield. This is true. I know they are heavily against rewarding high level play, but isnt this the way it should be? you master a class, you do very well with it.

The problem was that rev when mastered outperformed other classes even when those classes where mastered.

We literally just had 4 seasons of rev having a near 100% pickrate amoung tourney and proleague teams. Power rev is basically a upgrade power warrior, while also infringing on thief’s role as a roamer.

Also surge of the mists is/was a dumb gimmick of a move and it’s about time it got fixed.

kdaddy.5431:

Im not a fan of this but balance has been thrown out the door.

Before necros were the best 1 vs 1 classes in the game and there weakness was they were slow.

Bunker/support guardians were the best in the game. Team fights were impossible against them and there weakness was they were slow.

Dps warrior was it need help to sustain in 1 vs 1 and team fights especially against eles and necros.

This rune shows they dont know what to do but to make everything OP.

Except then you realize that the new rune only affects condi builds. (power guardian and bunker guardian unaffected, and condi guard is unpowered currently) and necro and other condi builds won’t take the rune because it requires dropping better runes.

You can still use it as a escape.

Previously rifle 5 is “either damage or mobility” the split damage nature meant that it couldn’t be used for both, as bursting someone with it required casting it on yourself in melee range.

At least now we can jump at people and give them a decent whack on landing, and it use as a escape ability is unchanged.

Sure the change is not going to be making rifle meta anytime soon, but it’s not a nerf.

The new amulet will be a big buff to all burn guardian builds.

vesica tempestas.1563:

no the key is fast tiny changes, e.g increases the dps of one item by a couple, then a couple more etc. tiny gradual increments, its the way most smart dev houses are going- the alternative is big changes, and big changes generate constant flux, small changes dont.

For e.g, lets say the community made it clear that spec/build x has an issue, so now with quick incremental releases Anet can gradually change the offending build and watch the impact on the data. If it doesn’t work, tomorrow they reverse it and try something else. It was such a small change there was no major impact, there’s never major impact as everything is drip fed in constantly and player live testing drives out the best design.

A class is either strong enough to be in-meta, or it isn’t and is out-of-meta. Those are the only two states. There is no grey area. You’re in or you’re out.
A balance patch only matters if it causes a class to cross the threshold between in-meta, and out-of-meta.

This is why incremental changes don’t work. You’re assuming that incremental changes will cause incremental shifts in meta. This is false. Incremental changes will cause zero changes in the meta up until the threshold is crossed at which point the meta will dramatically swing.

Just look at the aftermath the necro GS changes last balance patch. Look at the aftermath of all the incremental shatterstone buffs. Nothing changed. Why? Because the changes didn’t push the threshold and as such they where meaningless.

Also “watching the impact on the data” requires actually having data. And gathering good data requires time.

DeceiverX.8361:

That said, rapid iteration of the evolution of game mechanics (changes once every few weeks) is the way to go and is consistently being done by the best and most successful game companies.

If by “best and successful” you mean MOBA’s and MOBA’s only then sure.

Also MOBA use rapid changes because it’s good for their monetization. MOBA make money selling champions, so they want to change the meta frequently as doing so makes them more money. MOBA balance passes aren’t even trying to balance the game, they are just trying to change the meta for no other reason than to change the meta.

Moreover rapid changes would be extremely risky given how intricate the meta is in gw2.
Revs are a good example of this. A single change to Mesmer’s signet of inspiration caused revenants to be pushed completely out of the raid meta. Rapid changes would mean classes would be screwed one week, amazing the next then screwed again. That’s not more balance that’s just trolling the players.

Gaile Gray.6029:

• New PvP-only Rune: Rune of the Lynx: +175 power, +100 Condition Damage, +25% Movement Speed
  • We’re looking to add a viable damage-oriented movement speed rune to help professions with minimal access to in-combat movement speed or swiftness. This may impact match pacing, so we’re going to keep a close eye on it.

The wording on this makes me think that Rune of Lynx is Anet’s idea of solving current necro issues.

kdaddy.5431:

LOL you cant post that.

Everyone on this forum page complains about how weak necro and showing this is gonna show that the majority of the players are average at best.

Also some of the posts on this forum talk about how the ESL players are not as good but they are simply on teams with coordinated builds and talk in ts.

Thanks for posting but you have probably upset everyone fighting for #necrolivesmatter

So we can now say classes are fine as long as someone can post a frag video full of mediocre pugs.

Well under that logic all classes are perfectly balanced and all balance complaints are just l2p issues.

Patrick.2987:

Boon corruption is done by signets and well mainly and staff auto for lf? idk if this is worth.

Scepter has been the go to weapon for corrupts since they put boon corrupt on the scepter auto chain.

Also signetmancer has been depreciated for awhile now by newer curses-based corruption builds. Even then the old spite-bloodmagic corruption build still favored scepter because scepter stacks bleed way better than staff which is important for proc’ing the vamp siggy trait in blood magic.

No just no.

SW:TOR pulled this exact same stunt and it was horrible. Troopers in skirts. Bikini Jedi ugh.

I like enforced aesthetic divisions between weights. Dress wearing zweihandler welders is just wrong. Oh and thieves in cumbersome noisy plate armor makes no sense either.

Patrick.2987:

We should just give it invulns, stealth and bloccks on top of all the corrupt and dmg output which is mainly aoe thanks to well, staff and reapershroud.

Staff isn’t high dps, or even mediocre dps. Staff is a utility weapon used for fear access, condi transfer, and LF gen.

Reaper Shroud does apply notable damage, but it doesn’t apply any more than any other AoE profession.

Boon corruption on necro is done in scepter not staff and is primarily single target with the except of a few skills.

Excelvior.8520:

Every freaking skill has 0.5+ sec casting time, I am sick and tired getting constantly interrupted!

Well necros have been running around with 1sec+ casts since the dawn of the game. Long casts are totally manageable. (unless you’re fighting a PI thief.)

Wargameur.6950:

Crinn.7864:

RNGesus comeith.

It’s a big reduction of damages but still invite people to pay attention to what is going on on both sides. It’s different than full invulnerability in a huge way : it forces the blocking guy to have a relative safety whithout going gung ho.

A more sensible approach would be to change it to %damage reductions.

Straight RNG is bad QoL for everyone involved.

Lobstertail.1075:

Crinn.7864:

Lobstertail.1075:

How does that make any sense? Is he afraid of complaints of long queue times? Does he think there will be less complaints when the queue times are then made infinite?

Because long queue times have a habit of becoming infinite regardless.

Long queue times put off players, which causes them to leave, thus increasing queue times even more. Which results in more players leaving, thus lengthening the queue times more. This repeats until there are not enough players left to sustain the queue and it dies completely.

This is a well documented problem too. For example SW:TOR did a solo queue and team queue split when they overhauled it’s ranked system in 2.4. What happened as that the team ranked had a ~20min queue when it started, but that queue time increased to several hours by mid season 1, and by the time I quit the game team ranked was dead and the only matches where done by prearrangement between guilds.

So they think players might abandon the game because they can’t play as a team? So basically they have just guaranteed their own worst scenario then by doing it for themselves by not allowing queue in the first place. The logic behind what you state does not make any sense.

Because having a dead queue opens up other issues. If the queue dies to the point that nobody is queueing, then you open up the possibilities of unscrupulous players using the empty queue to win-trade. (another issue SW:TOR had with it’s team queue)

Exploits aside there is no logical reason to spend development resources on a system that you know is going to fail.

Wargameur.6950:

Hey guys,

I just wanted to make a nerf list thatcrossed my mind but will most likely never happen .

General nerf:

• Tone down all damages by 10 % ( power and condi )
• All invulnerabilities are replaced by a 75% chance to evade an attack
• All blocks with a duration of more than 2s have a 75% chance to block an attack
• All traits that procs at 25% hp are removed from all traitlines

RNGesus comeith.

Lobstertail.1075:

How does that make any sense? Is he afraid of complaints of long queue times? Does he think there will be less complaints when the queue times are then made infinite?

Because long queue times have a habit of becoming infinite regardless.

Long queue times put off players, which causes them to leave, thus increasing queue times even more. Which results in more players leaving, thus lengthening the queue times more. This repeats until there are not enough players left to sustain the queue and it dies completely.

This is a well documented problem too. For example SW:TOR did a solo queue and team queue split when they overhauled it’s ranked system in 2.4. What happened as that the team ranked had a ~20min queue when it started, but that queue time increased to several hours by mid season 1, and by the time I quit the game team ranked was dead and the only matches where done by prearrangement between guilds.

vesica tempestas.1563:

The answer to the problem of balance and diversity is actually fast releases (im taking hourly/daily/weekly) therefore you can make extremely small tweaks constantly and react near instantly to game breaking balance issues. Job done. It takes a mature development model with great automated testing to do this however.

No, fast releases make problems worse.

Metas don’t resolve instantly, and they take time settle. Moreover balance changes themselves are made after careful observation and prolonged metric -gathering.

Making rapid changes is making changes without knowing the full extent of the meta. It’s like trying to shoot targets with a gun that has no sights. It’s random guessing that could make balance worse much faster than it will make it better.

Moreover there are other problems with rapid changes. Constant changes leaves the meta in a perpetual state of flux, which has negative consequences to the players. Why bother buildcrafting when your work is null and void after a week? It will also put off casual players who aren’t as interested in the meta as much as they are in just enjoying their class.

Huskyboy.1053:

DH enjoys high performance against a number of professions but condi necro is their weakness. CPC is best used when they’re on LB since it destroys projectiles.

While CPC and WoC are definitely punishing to camping DH. I wouldn’t call necros a weakness. Necros are simply too vulnerable to DH F1 pulling us into oblivion.

Also as you get into higher tiers the DH stop camping and start getting aggressive.

Yannir.4132:

HotM needs a bit of rehauling anyway. It’s a bit broken. You did it with FotM lobby, can you do it with HotM lobby too now?

Honestly I think they are. Seems like every patch the area around Obrin (sp?) gets changed.

Something is clearly afoot.

I’m more concerned as to why they called it “Ship of the Line” when the ship in question clearly isn’t a ship of the line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_the_line

I like the grove the least. It doesn’t feel like a city or any kind of inhabited place. The design is excessively repetitive and visually monotonous.

I prefer Rata Sum or Divinity’s Reach

Silv.9207:

If you compare the Core class and the Reaper, the reaper will win without mercy. That because the Elite Specializzations are stronger than the Core class and WE ALL KNOW THAT.

I don’t think that holds true.

The only inherent advantage reaper has over core is Reaper’s shroud, but in a necro v necro duel RS isn’t all that exciting. The stability it has is a liability in a necro duel and it’s extremely easy to kite. And then Shouts are unilaterally unpowered in a 1v1 to begin with.

Anecdotally as someone who mains necro and tends to swap around between reaper and core, I find that I win my necro 1v1s easier with core than with reaper, simply because of core having a fuller toolkit when it comes to dueling condi classes.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Crinn.7864:

Shaogin.2679:

Also concerning the practice dummies, who dropped a giant boulder and killed the Thief and Warrior practice targets?

Probably the same dev that left a wall floating in the air.

Go new guy!

So HoTM is the new dev training area as well as the new pvp training area? O_O

Shaogin.2679:

Also concerning the practice dummies, who dropped a giant boulder and killed the Thief and Warrior practice targets?

Probably the same dev that left a wall floating in the air.

Phineas Poe.3018:

People around here like to complain that Heart of Thorns doubled-down on passives

What’s really funny is when you realize that all the passives people complain about are all core traits that existed long before HoT.

heck if it wasn’t for the new profession mechanic on each elite spec, I’m not even sure classes would use their elite specs. The traits on elite specs are so mediocre most of the time.

Flumek.9043:

Crinn.7864:

The problem with procmancer is that the shroud proc corrupts occur at the necro’s location, which means to use it you have to brawl. And brawling with that glassy of a necro build is not a good idea without tempest support.

The main thing is the meh feeling of staff poeple have been having. First it was power hipsters who said at this point theyd take axe over it (thats all pre axe buff), and now im even looking at taking the axe on a carrion build.

-theres no more 5k dmg on staff#3 to abuse hide and seek style
-so we cant safely 1320 range, were forced into 900-600 anyway
- a/f gives enough lifeforce, which ties with droping soulreaping and shifting away from good but unreliable 1-spam in shroud
-staff is just slow and too much % of its kit gets eaten by random blinds or interupts
-power dmg matters currently, most builds are zero toughness you usually end up 2:1 for power dmg on carrion, even on the precision amulets its a 1:1 ratio

Im not saying you dont instadie even with 30k hp, its just the survivability is same if not best among the necro choices we get and it has lots of instant counterpressure.
The playstyle is also flexible and feels fresh having 2 “viable” weaponsets.

Stop projecting.
Staff is not what is causing people to dislike procmancer. Pmancer doesn’t even use staff as the main weapon.

And really no build uses staff as the main weapon. Staff has always been and will always be, a utility weapon. It’s used for area poison, condi transfer, and on-demand AoE fear access.

law of mmos: The older the game gets, the saltier the playerbase gets

The problem with procmancer is that the shroud proc corrupts occur at the necro’s location, which means to use it you have to brawl. And brawling with that glassy of a necro build is not a good idea without tempest support.

Come at me bro
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNArYWjc0QlN2ZD20A/NOwFK4AEALQcrngPYO2NRVA-TZRFABJfCAA4RAgwRAQp9HOvMAA

OriOri.8724:

That said, if you aren’t a huge lore person, start LWS3 story (from the story journal) before the HoT story. The LWS3 maps are much more friendly to getting around without a glider than verdant brink is.

Bloodstone fen is literally impossible to navigate without gliding, unless you just want to stand on the airship

Sometimes I wonder how amazing WvW would be if players would just play it as intended, and stop trying to metagame and exploit every little thing.

Seriously all the tonic exploiting, market manipulating, server population rigging, spy/sabotage accouts, etc. are whats killing this gamemode more than anything anet ever did.
Why can’t we just beat each other up like normal civilized people?

Erzian.5218:

He actually only added up the numbers of the best available weapon combination and just listed the other weapons. Numbers might still be off because of other factors such as weapon swap, blocks ending prematurely (e.g. ranger gs) or simple miscalculation.
For instance ranger s/d should be below 15sec: 6*1.5 (dagger4) + 4*0.75 (sword 3) + 6*0.5 (sword2) = 15 <- This is without taking the casting time of the skills itself into account so the actual numbers is below that. Adding weapon swap (as his calculations are for multiple sets) further decreases the evade up time.
Cant be bothered to check other weapon sets though.

It’s also worth noting that nobody uses dodges and blocks on cooldown. You’d be a fool to do so.

Blaeys.3102:

I think a better use of this thread might be to come up with creative ways they could implement that might provide personal improvement/performance measurement or metric tools they might be able to add into the game that wouldn’t cause that stress.

You mean like dumping a text log file?

It’s literally the lowest development cost, and lowest performance cost thing that they could possibly do.

Silverkey.2078:

You can then reduce the condi output to make it match power damage output.

There is no correlation between condis and higher dps.

Some condi builds have high dps, others have terrible dps. It all depends on the class.

Seriously I can never understand why people are always trying to lump every condi build in the game together, as if they are all the same.

Supreme.3164:

If you’re so bloody expert why don’t you play a power spec against condi spammers?

I do use power specs. I play power warrior (condi warrior doesn’t have enough mobility for my tastes) and hammer scrapper on a regular basis.

Condi necro is literally the only condi class I play.

Patrick.2987:

The only viable role now is broken af. Damage is way over the top. And i don t see deathshroud as an issue, it worked quite well. The stab problem was alrdy pointed out although without reaper u can go for foot in the grave which i rly liked on core necro.

The damage is actually mid-level. Condi-Mesmer, condi warrior, power warrior, power rev, and guard all have notably better pressure than us.

Our viability is pinned on poison cleave (for stopping those rezzes and cutting down on healing) and boon removal.

The only skill on core deathshroud worth the time it takes to cast it, is the #3. The rest of the kit is crap even before HoT.

Yeah so basically you want to take away what makes us viable at higher levels?

I’d rather stay a tissue paper class than be subjected to having my only viable role taken away.

kappa.2036:

@ Crinn
You’re definitely one of those who plays condicancer. You are defending your playstyle and I can understand very well your point of view since I play condi with certain classes aswell.
But let’s say it like it is: look at WvW roaming for example.Trailbrazer chrono, with Perplexity Runes maybe, and condi duration food. Many people just avoid them because they are the most annoying broken cancer in the game. 15+ stacks of confusion + random condis for 10+ seconds oneshotting you if you try to press 2-3 skills. Loads of blocks, invulns, teleport and evades since this is not enough.

PvP? Warrior pressing the elite skill with Kraith Runes: AoE torment, bleeding and poison AoE for 8 seconds, regardless if it hits the enemy or not. Then f2 with mace, other 4 condis, then weapon swap, longbow burning,immobilize,bleeding, and more burning, weapon swap again and repeat.
That’s just an example, we have necros and mesmers that can apply an insane quantity of different conditions just pressing 1 skill. Most of the time those skills are AoE. Spam and more spam. Like you on this post, basically.

The fact that the meta right now is mostly power-type damage means nothing, the devs can change to a condi-meta even tomorrow if they want, and the current condi cleanse system that gw2 has is not efficent since we can’t cleanse the conditions that we want in a certain situation. Cleanses are just "random"in this game, this is why in my opinion we need a more active-logical condi cleanse system. Obviously many things would be modified to obtain the right-balance beetween damaging, non-damaging and movement-impeding condi cleanses since, as i have already mentioned, I don’t want to delete the condi-type damage from the game. Just less condi spam s***t.

All of WvW’s problems with condi would be solved by simply removing trailblazer, dire, and perplexity runes. But the devs have some weird obsession with putting WvW on a PvE gearing system, and as such WvW is doomed to being perpetually broken.

Condi warrior does do lots of damage. And so does power warrior. And power DH, and power rev, and hammer engi.

For every condi bomb capable build in the game there are power builds that can do just as much or more damage upfront and instantly.

How to handle condi bombs:
- Dodge the appropriate skills.
-block the appropriate skills.
- use resistance
- use condi duration reducing traits and runes.
- use condi clears.
- whirl in light combo field
If you failed at all of the above, you got outplayed and deserve to die.

I don’t want to delete the condi-type damage from the game.

Then stop making suggestions that would exactly that.

There are 9 classes in this game. Only 3 of them have viable condi builds period. And of those 3 only 2 them are solo-queue viable. (condi necro is only viable when it has a pet healer to carry it.)

Supreme.3164:

Crinn.7864:

Compared to things like power LB ranger where you just spam 4>2 on cd. Or Vault thief where you spam vault, or PI thief where you spam headshot.

Don’t even get me started on power rev.

So basically everything against which, your F1-5-4-3-spam doesn’t work,

I can’t figure out what class dies to shroud 5-4-3 combo.

Actually I can’t figure out how someone manages to even get his by that. Shroud 5 has a bigger telegraph than gravedigger does.

Tornupto.2304:

Crinn.7864:

(why on earth would you store log data in memory?)

Writing to the harddisk is very slow.
If the combatlog would write everything to a log even things from other players (which i’m not sure if the client has even access to…) and you have big groups fighting it would be incredibly slow to call the harddisk on every entry in the log. It takes very little time to write in RAM but it takes ~10,000 times longer to write on the harddisk. There is a reason why operating systems try to buffer data in different locations which are faster to access while a process is running.
But if you store the logs in RAM first and then write it to the harddisk in a bigger bulk it would be much more efficient because there is much less overhead.
Maybe you understand why things get stored in RAM first after reading this…

But gw2 has historically had trouble with excessive RAM usage, I doubt Anet wants to be pushing that even for something as trivial as text. Writing straight to disk only consumes disk bandwidth, which isn’t a issue.

Also I don’t understand why people seem to assume that combat log implies logging everyone else’s stuff. Logging a entire zerg would be asinine. (Why would you even want to do that?)

I advocate the SW:TOR style combat log that logs everything that occurs to you and just you. All your buffs, boons, healing taken, healing done, damage taken, damage done, condi’s received and applied, etc. By not writing everyone elses stuff, the write speed is a non-issue. Raid groups wanting to see the entire raid would just create parsers that would connect to a parsing server, thus making group logging a “opt in” rather than a “everyone can see your kitten without your consent”

I wish they’d change half the shadowsteps in this game into leaps.

Kiting is basically impossible with all the instant teleports, and most maps don’t have jumping puzzles in convenient locations.

Emdrix.6124:

At least these builds are squishy. A tank condi war does insane condi dmg while having 10 sec of endure pain, passive healing and short CD blocks that also reflect. It cant get more braindead than that.

Condi warrior is squishier than power warrior.

Mesmer is the only class in the game where the condi spec is tankier than the power spec.

Compared to things like power LB ranger where you just spam 4>2 on cd. Or Vault thief where you spam vault, or PI thief where you spam headshot.

Don’t even get me started on power rev.

ukuni.8745:

i also said “to much burst not enough damage over time.” take away that burst and make conditions legitimate damage over time like they used to be then all of a sudden cover conditions is a skillful thing.

The only condi builds with any kind of burst are condi chrono, p/p engi, and burn guard.

And 2 of those builds aren’t even remotely viable.