Guild Wars 2

What is the difference between evasion and invulnerability? Is one stronger or weaker than the other, mechanically?

Endure Pain makes warriors immune to attacks, but they can still be cc’d or take conditions, I believe. Invulnerability makes you immune to everything, which is a bit different.

Signets need a stun breaker and good condition removal. In theory, if our focus was any good, s/ f could cover our defense and condition clearing. But it is not.

- Improved water signet’s condition removal;
- Add a stun break to one of the signets (signet of air?);
- Revamp focus’ fire and improve Focus’ water so that focus can be any good;

The thing about glyphs, is that they offer generic improvements instead of specialized effects. That means that, for a glyph build to be any good, an elementalist needs to have their utility already covered outside of their utility skills. Condition removal they can somewhat get with weapons, or with water’s grandmaster trait combined with the glyph’s inscription trait, although that was heavily nerfed in today’s patch. S/F can also offer them that. But they need stunbreaking from somewhere, be it a weapon skill, a trait or something.

- Improve air’s shocking aura trait and add any trait somewhere that can stunbreak;
- Improve air’s incription trait so that glyphs in fire give 3 stacks of might instead of 1;
- With the nerf to cleansing water’s trait, the inscriptions + healing glyph combo can no longer remove two conditions at once. It would be nice if this synergy came back somehow;
- Improve glyph of elemental power, because it’s underpowered;

Minion of Vey.4398:

I miss hotjoins already

Then do it. It’s still there.

The comet’s blast finisher now works the same as with dragon’s tooth. From practise, this is a good change, but DT also has the advantage that you can cast it before ring of fire, or cast flamewall after casting DT, to make sure the might stacking is activate, so I don’t know if it’ll work as well with comet. Still, it’ll allow focus users to create blast finishers from range, which is important.

The new patch states that all four storms from this skill have had their durations increased. However, ice storm’s duration seems unchanged. Could I get a confirmation if this is a bug or not?

As a side note, conjure’s storms weren’t affected, but I suppose that was on purpose.

Glyph’s Fire storm also hits 11 times, like earth. For some reason, ice storm seems to last for a less amount of time than the three other storms, and about as much as the conjure’s version. It’s probably bugged.

Wow, I just used air’s storm with the glyph, and the duration was quite high. Very satisfying. Pity that lightning hammer’s version was left at its sucky state. :P

Earth Storm lasted for about 10s, and did 11 hits, if I’m not wrong.

I’ve told Jon Peters in-game that elementalists’ stunbreakers shouldn’t all be cantrips, and he agreed. That’s good pvp news to eles for a future patch.

I’ve told Jon Peters in-game that elementalists’ stunbreakers shouldn’t all be cantrips, and he agreed. That might be good pvp news for a future patch.

Signet of Earth is potentially a good utility now. The 3s immobilize is good for scepter’s burst, but now the toughness increase is relevant, which is important for bursty glass cannons.

Glyph of Storms might be nice for pve now.

In an hour or two, some people will start playing the new dungeon, others will experiment with custom arenas and spectator mode, and some others are going to take the forums by storm because their favourite profession was “forever ruined”. :P

Damage per movement would be cool, but could be OP in pvp, as movement is a crucial part of the game. It would maybe need a low duration (or low damage) there.

Disease could be an excellent anti-zerg tool for wvw or pve’s events, and is worth considering. For pvp, it would punish team playing, which is weird, but maybe also worth considering, for, say, a bunker necro that needs to fight versus 2 players. It would make a bunker necro build be unique versus other profession’s bunkers.

I think that adding stuff like reversed-protection (the vulnerability suggestion I posted above), reversed-quickness (slow, numb, whatever you may want to call it), and stuff like that is a good way to add more conditions without overwhelming the player with memory issues.

Why? Because the player won’t have to memorize two effects for each condition/ boon pair. Instead, they’ll memorize a single effect, and understand that there’s a positive version (a boon) and a negative version (a condition) for that effect. This already kinda happens, but sometimes the difference is too big (for example, vulnerability is mostly pointless except in zergs, protection is awesome, so it’s ahrd to associate one with the other).

And with this mind of thinking, we could very well get a reversed-stability as well. Have it work like GW1’s daze, where you are easily interrupted and/ or your casting time is increased (I guess the later one would be too similar to a reversed-quickness version).

In the past,

“Oh GW1 is dying!”

Lasted for 8 years and the servers are still open.

In the present,

“Oh GW2 is dying. GW1 was so much better”.

Still very active, and with official claims that the core fanbase is increasing.

In the future,

“Oh, GW3 is dying. GW2 was so much better”.

But let’s be patient, as that won’t happen anytime soon. :P

P.S. People need to understand that all MMORPGs are front-loaded; that not everyone who experiments with the newest, shiny mmo sticks to it after one month or two; and what truly matters is the more dedicated fanbase that likes it, sticks to it, sees the game grow, and grows with it.

As long as GW2 keeps growing, which it does each month, the dedicated fanbase will stick to it. This is a large contrast to, say, SW:TOR when it had a monthly fee, because in that game, nearly everyone left due to it being a less polished WoW reskin. It had an extremely small dedicated fanbase, because most of the people who would be willing to dedicate to that kind of gameplay, could just play the superior version (WoW) instead.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Keep in mind that we are trying to find a condition that can be used by multiple classes (doesn’t have to be all classes, but we like to keep the condies/boons low in the game so that it’s easy for players to learn) and something that has cool play for the caster, as well as the target.

So, with that in mind, keep the ideas flowing!

~J

Something slightly unrelated, but it’s about conditions too, and it kinda bothers me.

Are you guys happy with how vulnerability works and how it scales? Personally, I find it to be nearly useless/ unsatisfying most of the times when playing solo, yet it puts an entire zerg dealing +25% damage against any opponent. The condition scales twice for each extra player: 1) because the more players there are, the more people are inflicting it, which is the norm for any condition; but also 2) because it benefits every single player as long as an zerg is attacking the same target. This makes it nearly pointless when playing solo and inflicting 1 stack of vuln. here and there, and extremely strong when a zerg can maintain 25 stacks infinitely. It scales incredibly high.

In my opinion, vulnerability would be more interesting if it was a reversed protection. Fixed armor penalty, low duration, duration stacking. This would become more relevant to solo players who inflict 1 stack or 2 every once and then, all the while zergs would have a much more difficult time in maintaining it (plus, the fixed damage boost could be lower than 25%, like a 20% or 15% increase). This way, inflicting vulnerability with, say, an elementalist in water or a mesmer with mh sword, would actually lead to visible and satisfying results and skill combinations. Mesmer’s sword could inflict 1 second or 2 each hit, so that its auto-attack + clones could be comboed for a tight blurred frenzy damage increase; while something like scepter’s shatterstone (lasting some 4 seconds or so) would be a worthwhile skill to use before initiating the fire sequence.

This would feel like an almost new condition to me, and you could even have some anti-bunker side effect into it. Something like:

Vulnerability: Targets takes 10% more damage, and has a 25% chance to be hit regardless of blocking/ damage immunity.

Or something you deem fit for anti-bunker.

Aza.2105:

No, you had the CHOICE to run enchantments. Skills weren’t placed on your bar that FORCED you to do it! Its true that enchantments were probably a optimal choice for derv and ele but they weren’t forced on your hotbar. You choose how to build your character! Again, big difference.

A normal student also has the choice to get bad grades, but no one will want to do it unless they don’t know better. Having the choice between something bad and something good is usually not a good argument for this.

In GW1, the elementalists and the dervishes are balanced around enchantments. The devs intended for those professions to be that way. And players had no meaningful choice to go against that. Good players use enchantments with those professions, and enchantment (boon) hate is still fair in that game.

Flissy.4093:

I think the main issue with D/D bunkers is their damage potential was too strong for a bunker.

Look at bunker Guardians, they can really never kill. Can’t say the same about Ele’s.

One of the best things about ele bunker nerfs, is that their damage isn’t being nerfed. To be honest, I like the idea of bunkers with some damage. It fits the elementalist’s flavor of destruction, and makes them different from guardians. Besides, professions that can’t kill or be killed is boring to the game, imo.

Essence Snow.3194:

SotG should be SotPvPG as everything there directly relates to PvP. I have always wondered why they focus on PvP when the majority of players play PvE. I’m not saying they shouldn’t focus on PvP, it’s just shouldn’t be the premise for all game affairs specially when it doesn’t relate to your mass base.

Because the SOTG is not organized by the developers, but by pvp players who want to discuss the pvp meta. So yes, being a “SotPvPG” was pretty much its point since the beginning.

It’s silly to me because I feel boons are suppose to be helpful to me instead damaging.

And boons will remain to be helpful. Boon stealing, boon corruption and more damage per boon effects already exist in GW2. Heh, even when we take a look at other mechanics, we can see that using skills is damaging because of confusion, attacking somebody is damaging because of retaliation, and using projectiles is damaging because of reflection. But all those situations are occasional, sometimes timed, and do not affect the entire combat system.

If I have 8 boons up, it pretty much neglect over half my protection boon.

Wait, is this a problem at all? You’re pretty much stating that this boon hate mechanic will be pretty useless at that situation, if the only thing it can do is neglect only a portion of a single boon out of eight. Even a single boon stripping skill would be stronger than that.

In the end, that boon hate trait is not much different to protection than the existence of poison is against healing.

Aza.2105:

gw1 had a extreme variety of builds, gw2 doesn’t. In gw1 monks weren’t told they had to be enchantment oriented, they weren’t forced to do any of that. In gw2, guardians are basically forced to be boon oriented.

Big difference.

In GW1, dervishes and elementalists weren’t told they had to be enchantment oriented, they were forced into it too. And it worked perfectly fine. In GW2, guardians are the dervishes ( and paragons/ “monks”) of the game. And in GW2, boons are extremely strong.

I can understand that people who are used to overpowered professions, are afraid that there will exist more means to counter them. But that’s how the game should have been since the beginning. You have to understand that playing with an overpowered, hard to counter profession was not meant to be the norm, but is a side effect to lack of balancing in that department.

The warrior is the worst pvp profession at the moment, and several of the buffs mentioned are mostly for pvp builds.

No buff was mentioned to their overpowered hundred blades pve build.

Boon hate is not a silly concept. It worked perfectly fine in GW1, and it needed a boost in GW2.

People are saying they would prefer boon stripping over the “more damage per boon” trait. Why? It seems, to me, that boon stripping is stronger than +3% damage per boon. Because the new warrior’s trait won’t remove boons. It won’t remove aegis, it won’t remove protection, it won’t remove vigor, it won’t remove stability, etc. Boon professions will still be able to dodge more often, to protect against stuns (and thus against warrior’s bursts), and generally regenerate their health. Each boon is, generally, far more worth than a 3% damage reduction. So, ultimately, this new tait will give warriors a higher chance to burst down a boon profession, but said profession can still counter the warrior by… using the effects of the boons.

Also, giving everyone and their mommas boon removal would be annoying. It would be annoying, because each time you would add a boon to yourself, chances are, you would lose it from a random soccer mom. It’s good that devs are adding more ways to fight against boons, that do not solely rely on stripping their effects. It adds more diversity to the combat system. With this new trait, a boon profession is going to be boon-countered while still reaping the benefit from boons. It’s going to lead to different kinds of duels than boon stripping (which is also getting buffed).

Kaleban.9834:

The challenge will be to not switch to Thief in despair.

Thieves’ burst is getting equally nerfed, and their new buffs are intented to change their playstyle or offer them new playstyles. It might be a good patch to thieves who want to experiment a lot more stuff, but backstab muggers are getting nerfed.

Likewise, the new warrior’s buffs are meant to make them viable in pvp, or create new playstyles too. Doesn’t seems to affect them anywhere else (so far).

The only profession that seems like it’s going to be clearly buffed is the Ranger.

Some people are not aware of how strong boons are in this game. Boons make or break bunker guardians, make or break bunker eles, and are an extremely powerful tool for some other builds (might for hgh engineer, might for scepter ele, etc).

Being able to steal boons at anytime you need, for several times in a row, will surely drain your adrenaline fast, but you’ll reap 10-25 stacks of might from some professions, you’re rip protection, stability and high stacks of regeneration, vigor or fury from others. Don’t understimate the power of eating massive might + fury + something else from gcs, or vigor + regeneration + protection from bunkers. It’s not only your thief that is going to get much stronger long-term damage or gain massive survivability – it’s also your opponent that is going to no longer be able to burst you down, or fend itself against you.

Gorni.1764:

written in stone is for sure necessary if you want to play a signet build … otherwise the signets are just plain inferior to cantrips

The problem with written in stone is that the passives aren’t impressive, and the point of using signets is mostly for the aura’s boons. If cantrips are better than signets? Without a doubt. But signets have as many good traits for themselves as cantrips do. With meaningful passives, written in stone is going to be better.

@ ExZee,

Because 2-second bursts are ridiculous and unfun, especially when half the damage is done before you can even see the player. There’s no sense of pace, there’s no sense of conflict, it simplifies GW2’s combat system into a “let’s see if you dodge in one second or die” rock-paper-scissors game. It’s especially bad for any player with some latency issues, and more so in a game where the developers have built a combat system that relies less on interrupting, compared to the original game, exactly to make it more latency-friendly. So, for three reasons, leaving backstab as it is and buffing other stuff instead, is a bad thing.

But, it also happens that those extreme burst builds make alternative burst builds from other professions underpowered. To pick your example, a scepter ele with a burst build could never compete in the same environment as a build like the old backstab, because elementalists need time and room to breath so they can use twice the skills they have to survive AND to set up their burst. A scepter burst ele is more viable now, and will be even more so after the upcomming patch, exactly because they don’t die out of nowhere anymore from a random backstabber. And, like you have proved to my shortsighted, little mind, buffing a scepter ele is not a viable solution neither.

The nerfs have been crucial to set up a slower pace to this game’s combat system, which in turn allows many other builds to work. It’s exactly because of those nerfs to burst and quickness, that there are more “ways to counter-play besides just dodging or blocking, which in turns make combat much more interesting and fun”.

Solo queueing is currently unfair to leaderboard, so yeah…

That being said, the devs have plans to separate solo queue from premades in the future.

Archaon.6245:

Ok all clear now, you guys actually think that resetting fights and being able to refull on demand it’s ok…no reason to discuss any further i guess…

For a profession with light armor, 11k base HP, and without stealth nor clones, yes, perfectly.

Errant Venture.9371:

Except that it’s not considering that it’s on a 45s rehcarge and can be blocked (noticed the aegis + invuln spam that’s on EVERY bunker in the meta right now?)

Mug is overpowered as an adept trait. You’ll rarely find an adept trait this strong for other professions.

Archaon.6245:

You mean being broken and having an unfair advantage over every other class (Including thieves who are supposed to be the best roamers, and they still can’t get a running away ele) it’s now called playstyle?

Being able to run and heal back, yes, it is part of the playstyle, either you accept it or not. And about roaming, elementalists won’t be that great as roamers anymore once RTL’s cooldown gets doubled.

Errant Venture.9371:

Steal didn’t need a heal and it definitely didn’t need its damage cut in half.

Except that Mug is overpowered at its current state.

But that’s the playstyle of those kind of elementalists. They have a “second life” by fully healing themselves back and resetting the fight. It’s a fun playstyle, and it shouldn’t be removed from the game. The problem is that it is repeatable and too strong. With the nerf to both RTL and mist form for the upcomming patch, this playstyle is going to be far more restricted. Eles won’t be able to reset a fight twice, and not as easily too. It’s a fair nerf, because it keeps this playstyle viable and fun, but no longer broken.

Also, glass cannon elementalists desperately need this kind of stuff to survive. It works almost like the necromancer’s death shroud concept of an extra HP bar, which is extremely important to a profession where ALL the builds, be them bunker or not, rely on movement, healing and disruption to compensate for their extremely low amounts of HP and defense.

stale.9785:

An unblockable killshot that got MORE powerful because my profession mechanic automatically gives me regen and aegis? Fun, yeah.

And then your regen heals for a tick the next second, and compensates for that extra 3% damage? :P

And yes, it’s perfectly fair that an underpowered profession will finally get a chance to kill your profession.

It’s not “beyond a joke”. Warriors have a hard time hitting with their burst. The new signet will allow them to hit, at the cost of 180 passive power. You can still possibly dodge (evade) their attacks, be immune or invulnerable, move out of them or get protection. It’ll allow the warriors to pierce through some obstacles, but not all of them.

Archaon.6245:

40 secs cd imo is not the best option, i would just make rtl castable on target only…

I have a feeling that people who usually suggest RTL to be targettable don’t play an elementalist (much), and aren’t aware of the fun and tactical factor behind RTL. Making it targettable would take the charm out of it. 40s is much better exactly because you can still disengage with it. You’re paying for more diversity and, in my opinion, it’s much funnier a versatile skill that must be wisely used, than an one-dimensional skill that is always used and spammed for the same reason.

Luthan.5236:

They don’t need to disengage. They engage, kill and win(or die).

In other words, it affects them.

stale.9785:

Not the only one. I’ve said it before – the majority of warriors won’t be happy till we have a “Press this to win” button. Having the best HP, burst, and ranged damage isn’t enough.

Warriors in pvp have a difficult time bursting against good players, especially since quickness was nerfed, and HP isn’t much compared to active defenses in this game. That makes warriors on the weaker side in pvp, and even the devs think so.

Basically,

Your rating is determined by the quality of your wins, and not the quantity. Lose against bad teams, and you drop heavily. Win against good teams, and your rating is increased a lot.

pot.6805:

Only the bad players will let this nerf effect them.

So all the good players who knew how to engage and disengage with RTL over and over and over are going to remain unaffected?

Generally, you want strong mechanics to have counters. And, possibly, having a boon is still worth more than taking 3% more damage from a single source. So you can kinda say that this new trait, much like poison, weakens the effect of a mechanic, but that effect is still worth it.

What also happens is, the new trait and signet gives a profession the chance to spike the near-immortal guardian bunkers in pvp. It allows them to almost nullify a guardian’s defense for a few moments.

Generally, this new boon hate trait is only meaningful when you have a lot of boons up. Which, well, yes, it’s true, guardians do usually have many boons up. However, protect can pretty much “nullify” the purpose of anti-boon warriors, and guardians still have aegis/ blocks against big attacks.

What guardians should be truly aware, however, is the warrior’s new signet of might. 3 unblockable attacks is a big deal, and guardians DO rely a lot on blocking. :P

The thing I like the most about this kind of stuff is to get new info ahead of the patch’s time, and the devs came well prepared for this SotG. So it was well worth my hype.

MaXi.3642:

working as intended… you fall -> you take dmg -> you need some time to recover from injury to be ok (and run faster out of combat etc)… i think it sounds even logical

Sometimes, what’s the most logical in real life doesn’t translates do what is the most logical in videogame rules.

Honestly, running slower after taking fall damage seems, to me, like an unnecessary detail that has no meaningful purpose, and has been contributing nothing to the game but being annoying at times. I’m sure that if the devs removed it, GW2 wouldn’t be worse for it.

ExZee.8109:

Yes. Because Anet’s plan is to nerf everything until it takes an hour for someone to kill someone else. After this nerf patch let’s all complain about the next OP skill until everything is nerfed. All of these complaints could’ve been avoided if they decided to buff everything except the OP skills instead.

There’s two ways to achieve balance: nerf the build everyone is playing or buff the builds nobody is playing. There is only one right answer.

And the right answer is none of yours. If you keep buffing everything without nerfs, then everyone will be able to kill every other in 2 seconds.

The right answer, is that there’s buffs to be made for specific situations, and there’s nerfs to be made for other situations. The power of skills is not only determined by how they are compared to each other, but to how they make combat more or less fun.

And btw, buffing everything to the level of a backstab thief’s burst would NOT be fun. That’s why it has been and will get nerfed.

Shatter mesmers will be nerfed sooner or later. They suffer from several problems that the devs have said they wanted to prevent, like extreme bursting, newbies having a hard time understanding how to fight them, and generally being unfun to play against (especially due to targetting). There’s also some imbalances when it comes to shattering speed, because it’s instant against melee, but predictable against rangers. That, to me, seems a bit unfair.

Shatter mesmers, much like the soon-to-be-nerfed burst thieves, have too much defense and forgiveness for their burst. I would predict that, sooner or later, the devs will want players to choose between a specialized burst mesmer, and a versatile 4-shatter mesmer, instead of building for both. Design wise, their traits that generate clones on dodge and let the player count as a clone when shattering, are creative and interesting, but they cheapen the playstyle. Massive clone generating makes attempting to destroy clones pointless (which goes against what the devs intended, too), and being able to use all shatters (especially the last two) without worrying about clones takes away some of the level of difficulty that the devs have originally intended for the profession. So a zerker mesmer, while having a high-reward, does not have a high-risk compared to most other professions.

They do have, however, a big counter (conditions) but that also seems unintended, due to how they are forced to pick other utilities.

Toning down this build (perhaps dividing it in two like I mentioned) could also be enough to make other alternative builds viable, like phantasm mesmers, maybe condition mesmers, and who knows what else.

So, definitely, the mesmer will be touched upon sooner or later. Possibly nerfed, but maybe buffed at some other parts too.

A signet aura build only requires 20 in fire, 10 in air, and maybe 10 in earth. That’s 40 total. You can put the remaining 30 into water for aurashare, or 20 in earth for written in stone and 10 in, say, arcana. Or 20/ 20 water/ arcana, and scrap earth. Written in stone is not that good.

It’s not that they are toning down confusion by half out of nowhere. It’s that they have buffed confusion for twice of its power against pve monsters, and because wvw has been using pve balance until now, players had the opportunity to use pve’s confusion in wvw’s pvp combat.

Thieves are not getting buffed, at least not their for their best build. They are getting their playstyle changed. Unless you think that Mug no longer being able to critical (but heal them a bit instead) is a buff to extreme thief burst builds (note: it’s actually a nerf). Thieves are basically getting more viable playstyles here. Likewise, warriors are weak in pvp and are getting pvp changes. The devs have actually implied, somewhere in the forum, that their hundred blades’ damage might be nerfed for more utility, which will be a needed buff to their pvp counterpart, while a nerf to their OP pve build.

The only class that seems to get clear buffs this patch, is the Ranger.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

I really want to get shared auras in the mix, but unfortunately, you can’t exactly go 20 Fire, 30 Earth, 30 Water, now can you? Really wish Fire’s Embrace was Adept – it would open up a very good new offensive support build.

To be honest, in theory, that would be too strong. Elementalists have the option, here, to go for party support at the expense of their own defense. Keep in mind that, when it comes to supporting the party OR if you want to use the signet’s effects to kill quickly, written in stone is not that needed.

Something like 20 fire, 30 water, 10 air and 10 earth makes an excellent signet auramancer share for d/d. Losing signet of fire’s or earth’s passive won’t mean much when they give you fury and protection per active.

Written in stone is better for dueling/ solo. The extra precision and the extra toughness, and the ability to use the signet’s active healing, are going to be relevant enough; and it gives you a slot for the cantrip trait for extra stunbreaking/ protection/ stability. Even then, if a specialized burster (s/d) was good enough this way, I’m not even sure you would need it.