Guild Wars 2

I find the hate for conquest laughable. Most players who want other game modes overlook all the negative aspects of those modes while listing false or extremely overblow issues with conquest. The main problem with conquest is it’s hard for players to learn map awareness and rotation through gameplay.

I have no problem with shield being a supportive weapon more than a self-defense weapon. Using magic to protect a group instead of physically protect yourself is perfectly in-line with guardian. If the abilities were stronger, I wouldn’t see any complaints.

Obtena.7952:

I think Anet is doing this to dumb things down.
[…]
It almost makes it too easy to plan traits. You don’t need to think too hard to decide what points go anywhere. Just choose three lines.

So having to find some awkward combination of traits to get another 5% damage increase was deep and meaningful? Or just picking and choosing a combination that has the largest +% damage or best might-stacking traits as possible?

First, the specialization system is intended to give each specialization line an obvious goal or enhancement/alteration to gameplay. If you want condition damage, you pick the line with a lot of condition damage bonuses. If you like group support, you pick that line. It’s worth noting that the previewed guardian traits aren’t the best example of this philosophy.

Second, by locking major traits to a specific slot, it allows for meaningful choices between major traits. Right now, more than half the trait choices are pointless or extremely niche. With the revamp, the choices will typically all do something similar but in a slightly different fashion, such as in the second major slot in Radiance. Unfortunately the guardian preview had few other good examples.

Lastly, this new system makes balance easier and allows for expanding the specializations in the future. With the current system, each trait slot, minor or major, tries to balance not just with its direct peers, but also every other trait slot The deeper into any line you go, the more it needs strong traits along the way or an extremely strong grandmaster trait in order to compete with the shallow traits. What happens is that picking a lot of low-hanging fruit is often the best solution. The new system makes lines compete against other lines as a whole and each slot only compete with its direct peers. For example, ANet may decide that each damage trait lines must have a certain percent damage increase for the entire line. But they’re free to choose how to arrive at that increase. The “low-hanging fruit” problem goes away because placement of a trait within a line only matters for its two direct peers.

So while you’ll see less variation in which lines are chosen for a particular role (PvE will pick the damage ones), you should see greater variation in the choices within a line. Knowing which lines someone has chosen gives you a decent idea of what their role will be. And really, is it any less brainless than looking up a build on a website?

Bad idea. The biggest problem with matchmaking and what causes the long waiting time is putting players of similar skill levels together. Having players of similar skill level in a match is what makes it more competitive.

Ghotistyx.6942:

Retal in Radiance works due to the synergy with Radiance 3 (recharge VoJ on kill) and Virtues 3 (virtues apply retal on use)

That’s actually what I was talking about. The trait lines lack internal synergy; they should be more self-contained. If you don’t spec into virtues, the damage while under retaliation doesn’t make much sense. Any selection should stand on its own in a trait line, but may become a stronger option when paired with others.

Your concerns are partly describing how the system is supposed to work. If you want survivability, you give up some damage potential. If you want damage, you give up some survivability or utility. Guardian has quite a few good traits at the start of lines, so it’s impacted more by these changes. It’s better for balance in the long-run.

My concern is that a lot of trait choices still aren’t good or lack synergy with their trait line. For example, Fiery Wrath would work better in Radiance and the +10% damage while under retaliation trait from Radiance would fit better in Zeal.

A bunker build with Valor, Honor, and Virtues would have an incredible amount of healing as well.

Poison affects revive.

The revive skills heal a percent of health each tick, usually 100% over the course of their effect. If your ally is low on health and poisoned, they only get healed by 67%, which isn’t enough to rally them.

data.4093:

I don’t think they need to give different weights though

The use of different weights wasn’t arbitrary.

Typically you have a main role and that forms the bulk of your stat choice (e.g. zerker for DPS and cleric for physical dmg bunker). Then, what is a reasonable amount of additional vitality or toughness that one of those roles would need and which combos would yield it. That formed the basis for a ring. The second ring was a tweak slot for hybrid builds.

However, I worked out those ratios under the current system. With no stats from trait lines (especially the vitality line for defensive builds), the ratio needs re-evaluated.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

So what is causing this debate? People getting mad that they can’t easily dodge or avoid the DPS. Well let me once again point out that there is a lot of DPS in this game that isn’t very easily dodged rolled or avoided.

You’re right that sigil procs aren’t very random. The thread is poorly titled. The heart of the complaint is that the damage from sigil procs (and other on-crit or on-hit procs) is unavoidable yet contributes a significant amount of damage. It’s unavoidable in the sense that you can’t predict it and even if an enemy attack fails, the proc doesn’t go on a cooldown.

In a game where a measure of skill is avoiding the stronger attacks and eating weaker ones, you can’t have strong damage which will happen on the next successful hit/crit anyway. If there are other strong attacks (not just damage – CC is powerful too) which aren’t easily avoided or otherwise countered or have a trade-off for the user, they need to be examined as well.

A further problem with procs is that they make already strong burst attacks even stronger. The damage is all at once, so defenses which work over time are less effective. Players also have less time to react, giving the advantage to burst damage builds.

Sure, some players will still lose even if procs are nerfed. But at least it will be more clear what they lost to so that they can better counter or avoid it in the future. You can’t counter procs.

The current system is in dire need of more customization. If they just up the stats on the existing amulets and call it a day, it will be a disaster.

The best solution for players and developers is to split the amulets into multiple items. I recommend amulet, ring, ring at 50, 25, 25% of the total stats using the existing stat combinations. It’s enough customization to get close enough to any build you’d want to do while not being at the mercy of the patch cycle and watch developers decide to add.

The old MMR-based leaderboard mostly worked, but there were a few problems with it. All were fixable.

1. Initial rating could reach the top too quickly. We saw many 11 game players reach the top 100, which shouldn’t be happening. This is likely an issue with the initial rating deviation parameter in Glicko/Glicko2 being set too high for how it’s used in GW2.
2. Unclear rating gain/loss. It’s still not clear how rating increases and decreases are calculated for an individual on a team. Glicko/Glicko2 only describe calculations for fixed units (inviduals or fixed team rosters), so it’s unclear how players of disparate ratings on your team are affecting your rating. Is the clueless guy causing your rating to go down, or is the rating calculation accounting for that? Is it bad to play with your PvP-challenged friends from time-to-time?
3. Phantom decay didn’t work. The players at the top could sit on their rating and play one game at the end of the season to erase all phantom decay. That single game wasn’t enough for Glicko/Glicko2’s increase in rating deviation to kick in. When rewards are attached to a leaderboard, this becomes a relevant problem. For general use, the phantom decay caused the rating of players to fluctuate by hundreds of ranks over a couple days well into the season simply because other players were slipping off the boards or erasing their phantom decay. It seemed too volatile.

Leagues
Forum comments on leagues are often express them as a hard division of players. It should be thought of and is often implemented as a masked division of players based on percentile of a player’s rating. If you’re in the middle of a block, you’ll almost always be paired with or against people in the same block. If you’re near the start or end of a block, you’ll see a lot of mixing between the two bordering blocks. Because a league is a mask of rating percentile, changing one’s mask could have some kind of rating buffer. Having a league label, especially if it’s in-game, is a way for players to better compare against each other.

Decay
A major problem with Elo/Glicko/Glicko2 in video games is that there is no incentive to play constantly. Players can power to the top of a leaderboard in the first few weeks while ratings are less stable and then sit on their rating. Because a large amount of players above a certain rating threshold don’t play often (or at all), it becomes difficult for the rest of the player base to break into that upper echelon later in the season. Finding a balancing point between decay forcing players to play often, but not being overly burdensome is difficult.

The “beta” today is more of a stress test. They’re only checking out their new event mechanics. Anything else is basically the same as it is on live.

ANet’s goal: casual-friendly e-sports with little to no developer attention.

The game has e-sports potential at the core level. But it never had a chance to develop a strong player-base because of the snail’s pace of adding infrastructure (working matchmaking, good leaderboard, reward unification). At the same time, it’s dumbing down the gameplay systems to cater to people who are incapable of learning or thinking. Things like removal of jewels from amulets, forced queue from heart of the mists, “farmboards”, a “PvE race” game mode, etc.

Maybe if they roll back some of the dumbing down, Heart of Thorns will re-invigorate PvP. But it’s unlikely.

Details of this exploit were posted on this forum a while ago, so a ANet has to know about it.

Sneakier.9460’s analysis is spot-on, but I think the better solution is to divide the amulet into multiple items which use the current stat combos so that players can mix-and-match according to the needs of their build.

zinkz.7045:

Arken.3725:

Again Zinkz, not saying Celestial didn’t push them over just the main problem was the skills/traits involved with the top 3.

There is no problem, your assertion does not match the reality of what has happened over three years, if these professions and their amazing traits/skills were so strong, then they would of been strong regardless, yet for long periods they have been between mediocre and weak, to the point of being virtually non-existent for months in the case of eles pre-cele patch, whilst bunker guard was in every single team for virtually 2 years and now we have medi guards, thief has been in nearly every decent team for the entire game, etc.

This assertion ignores the buffs that happened at the same time asthe celestial amulet was buffed. Signet of Restoration for elementalist was un-nerfed. d/d ele was popular long ago until ANet nerfed that heal skill in PvP by 50%. Sigils no longer shared cooldowns, which benefits elementalist, engineer, and warrior most and the double-burst sigils benefit some damage builds.

Also, the celestial amulet wasn’t viable before it was buffed, so builds which could avoid the downside of low power with celestial (might stackers or power trait line) still had to stick with other amulet choices.

Good for personal defense, but that’s about it.

Mace doesn’t have a good way to keep people on its symbol and isn’t very offensive as a whole. And allies won’t be standing on symbols that long, so any support benefit is fleeting.

Lord Kuru.3685:

So which upgrades have priority? Sometimes we want a WP before full walls and gates, sometimes after. More choice is better.

Upgrades are in tiers. You get everything in a tier when the upgrade completes and it begins work on the next tier. You no longer have to choose.

For a tower, the first tier of upgrades gets you an oil pot and reinforced walls at the same time. The second tier would be cannon and reinforced gate. I think the guard upgrades are tied into that tier system as well.

The upgrade times aren’t final yet, but it looks like getting to tier3 is about the same time or number of yaks it would take to finish three tiers in one path of the current system.

I think the OP is overstating the cons.

First, it seems one of the goals of this system is to have forts upgrade faster. In the current system, it’s very rare to defend anything in enemy territory because it takes too long and requires too much manpower. It’s also difficult to get supplies to those forts. With the new system, you realize benefits in a shorter period of time. It’s actually worth it to defend things over just flipping it back when attackers take it.

Second, camps are still important defensively. They’re needed to (re)build defensive siege and repair structures. As for defending them? Nothing will change about that. The dolyak delivery is still extremely important toward speeding the upgrade pace of a fort. ANet could possibly tweak dolyak respawn rates and camp upgrade benefits to make holding a camp preferable to flipping it back and forth.

I don’t see it having a significant impact on turtling inside a keep without using dolyaks for upgrades. It still takes a while to upgrade a keep without dolyaks. The difference is that a few defenders can hold long enough against a few attackers and actually have it mean something more in the long run.

Guys, let’s make a powerful ability with a 1.25sec cast time an instant-cast proc with a 20sec cooldown. It’ll be fine!

Removed. Colin confirmed on Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/36qzdj/upgrading_world_vs_world_upgrades/crgccbp

Team Deathmatch doesn’t work well in most MMOs, and GW2 is no exception. The fewer players you have, the more balance comes under the microscope and certain compositions stand out. With more people, it turns into a cluster of particle effects, AoE, boon spam, and near unavoidable damage spikes.

Courtyard is a poor deathmatch map because 5v5 doesn’t work and it’s too large for smaller team sizes (you can kite all day).

All those problems with team deathmatch is why ANet went with conquest. It splits up players often, so you don’t have huge spam battles, but it filters out small imbalances by making map mobility and map strategy important.

The OP makes no sense.

The older generation gamers grew up with Half-Life voice comm, ventrilo, the old team speak, etc. If you wanted to be competitive in any team game after 2000, you used voice comm.

The only argument you could make is that older generation players are less likely to use public voice comm. But you’re not asking that. You’re making a straw-man for another silly request for solo queue.

GrandHaven.1052:

I agree with this, accept for grenadier, fine as is, its definitely not a 50% improvement.

2 grenades baseline and 3 traited, therefore it’s a 50% increase. You can argue that not all the grenades hit on every toss, but that’s true on the untraited version as well.

The issue is that when all the grenades hit, which isn’t hard when you’re at mid range or against a CC’ed opponent, the traited basic attack is doing more damage than a melee weapon. Traited Shrapnel and Frost grenades are better than a lot of melee and mid-range burst abilities.

Sneakier.9460:

And with that approach u have the meta being slighty nerf but still being meta because everything else just doesn’t hold its ground against the meta.
Nothing changes except the meta became “slighty more balanced”
clap

Most of the “meta” are the builds which are a little too good because they can do too many things well or do something better than everyone else with less drawbacks. When you tone down what’s a little too powerful, you’ll see a lot of other builds able to compete.

You’re viewing the “meta” as where everyone should be, and that’s your problem. You have to set a balance point, and IMO it’s below where the “meta” level builds are at.

The upcoming changes to the trait system are meant to last. It’s an attempt to reduce the balance possibilities and make trait choices interesting. It’s a big undertaking and when you’re going to be changing everything anyway, it doesn’t make sense to do a huge balance overhaul on the old system.

However, PvP balance before the reveal of HoT was still too infrequent. It seems ANet’s structure doesn’t have PvP developers interacting much with profession developers and that the profession developers are tasked with other things.

Say “no” to the MMO arms race. When you take the approach of buffing the weak stuff to compete with the strongest, some of it inevitably overshadows what was previously strong. In the next iteration, you buff the new weak things (which were previously the strong things) and the cycle continues. It leads to either frustrating one-shot mechanics or boring stalemates.

If something is too strong, it needs nerfed. Identifying which builds are too good isn’t hard; the difficulty is identifying what makes them too good and tuning it properly.

I’ll wait to make a decision on it being “worthless” until it’s actually released. However, the general concept isn’t looking promising.

The longbow traits all focus on keeping enemies away from you at range. But guardians even with DH don’t have a lot of other abilities which take advantage of that range. The longbow will be easily kited at longer ranges. Further, Spear of Justice and Wings of Resolve run counter to the idea of keeping people at range.

Traps have always been lackluster on ranger, and they won’t be any different on DH. If you know the DH is using traps, you can trigger then with a dodge and not be effected. If the effect is over time, you trigger it and immediate leave the circle. They do provide area denial for a decap in conquest and maybe some extra AoE damage against brain-dead mobs in PvE, but nothing spectacular. They don’t pair well with longbow’s idea of keeping enemies at range either.

The virtue changes hamper the use of the DH specialization in a group support build, so even though Shield of Courage seems great for support, the other two are lacking, and you’re really just trading benefits on Courage rather than gaining them.

Taking either of the three parts (longbow, traps, virtue changes) independently would make for interesting builds. But together they seem to work against each other.

Terrahero.9358:

Engineers received very little buffs in the past 12 months. But suddenly went from “garbage tier” where it was a very unpopular profession because of how poorly it performed, to “amagad please destroy! its so op!”

Engineers didnt actually change, the meta did. And when it changes again it could very likely kick them out again like the first 2 years.

Celestial Amulet was made viable + rune/sigil changes. Shortly after, cele rifle engineer is born. Cele rifle engi couldn’t have existed 2 years ago and been viable.

People asking for intelligent nerfs want the uncounterable passive damage toned down and select skills brought in line with their role. Most people just as for skills with obvious animations or effects to be nerfed, even though those are fine.

If you read the livestream notes, the stun break on “Suffer” is a left over on the tooltip, which hasn’t been cleaned up yet. The stun break was removed internally from the functionality.

Aenye.2390:

Transmute can screw all your stacks of bleeding because you applied one more, it is stupid as hell.

Nope. Transmute is about the only exception to condi clears; it acts on a single condi application, not a stack. If you apply 3 bleeds, transmute converts one and you still apply 2.

The problem with transmute is that it affects CC conditions like immobilize and fear and you have no idea when it’s up. The simple fix is to make it not affect CC conditions, possibly with a lower ICD. Lessening damaging conditions is still pretty good for a minor trait.

Dragonhunter works in PvE since it’s just piling on more damage and you don’t really lose much support-wise. For any PvE encounter where you need something from the virtues line, you just spec into Virtues for the fight and swap back afterwards.

In PvP, I don’t think Dragonhunter will work out so well. The changes DH imposes on virtues hamper the group support you would get from the Virtues trait line. The DH design is about being more offensive, but the traps are for area control, which favor staying put. Then you have traits which want you to keep enemies at range. But you don’t have a reliable ranged snare nor burst from range, so enemies can easily kite or just run away. If you use longbow and ignore traps, I don’t see it being any more useful than scepter. Traps are too easy to defeat by triggering them and backing away until the effect ends – the same way you deal with a trap ranger – except DH ones have much longer cooldowns.

The answer to a lot of your questions is that the trait preview is still under heavy development. In my opinion, it was probably done a month too soon. They’re still testing out ideas, relocating traits, tweaking numbers, etc.

The elite specialization heavily favors the specialization-specific weapons and skills. This is definitely true for Dragonhunter and Reaper. Chronomancer traits aren’t as biased, but still work better with the specialization’s skills. I would guess this is because Chronomancer only unlocks an off-hand, so they can’t devote too much to two weapon skills compared to five of a two-hander.

Weapon traits can give a powerful effect to the weapon and don’t reduce the cooldown. Reducing a weapon cooldown isn’t always that beneficial either.

Some skills, like Searing Flames, which didn’t really fit the profession’s themes, were dropped.

That’s the human tier3 heavy armor with some artistic license.

Shield looks like Krytan Shield with some artistic license.

Toss Elixir B grants stability, has a cast time, and does not break stuns. A lot of elite transformations are similar. So there’s precedent for skills which grant stability and don’t break stuns.

The abilities which break stuns and have stability had the stun break first. But because you got part of the skill immediately, it had to put the entire skill on full cooldown. Otherwise, you could cancel it and get a 5sec CD stunbreak. The 1 second stability was added so that the cast is able to finish after the stun is broken. Otherwise it would be somewhat pointless as a stun break if you could be immediately CC’ed without the skill finishing.

Another poster said that there are lot of small things which lead to celestial rifle engineer being too powerful. That’s accurate, but there are a few outliers. In my view, these are the major offenders and how the upcoming trait changes address them.

• Incendiary Powder Damage bonus is far too large for an unavoidable proc. It’s applied by anything, including ground-target abilities. This is 2000-2500 damage per proc for a cele rifle build. Most master level traits add only 10% damage and only under specific conditions.
  With the trait changes, burning is lower damage per application. Incendiary Powder is moving to a different trait line and will likely see further changes to smooth the damage and reign in its total damage.
• Grenade Kit + Grenadier Grenadier provides a 50% bonus to Grenade Kit skills #1-#5. In order to keep the untraited kit relevant, the traited kit ends up dealing more damage than melee weapons on top of spitting out multiple conditions and vulnerability stacks. The multitude of conditions make Incendiary Powder hard to remove, nearly guaranteeing it will deal its full damage.
  With the trait changes, the current Grenadier trait is baseline, allowing ANet to better tune the kit’s damage without having to worry about a lesser version of the kit being useless. Assuming the new grenade kit is dealing damage more comparable to a ranged weapon, it will significantly hinder cele rifle builds.
• Condition Duration from Explosives Trait Line Engineers get +30% condition duration from the explosives line, which makes Grenade Kit conditions more potent and makes movement impairing conditions stronger. For example, Net Shot’s immobilize goes up by 0.6 seconds, which allows another attack in the CC chain.
  With the trait changes, the condition duration increase is gone, which reduces the soft CC durations to their base values.

With the trait overhaul in a few months, engineer should be in a better spot. I wouldn’t get my hopes up for a balance patch before then, which does suck. It’s also somewhat counter-productive to propose changes knowing that the system will drastically change anyway.

Arken.3725:

<snip>

1. Gear Shield Cele Rifle engineer, which is the problem, runs Tool Kit and situationally Elixir S in place of Slick Shoes. Given that typical load-out and considering that engineers have limited access to stability and protection (Protection Injection isn’t good in practice) and are a mid-range profession, the defenses are not far out of line compared with other professions.

The problem most people run into with Gear Shield is the Power Wrench trait, which reduces the CD of Gear Shield to 16sec. Such a short cooldown for a 3sec block is too good. The proposal for a 30sec base CD still ends up at 24sec traited. It doesn’t really accomplish much and hinders the untraited kit. If you wanted to better tune Gear Shield, you’d reduce the block duration back to 2sec. Still good enough to stop a burst, especially during immob, but doesn’t deny a large quantity of attacks, and it arguably fits engineer better.

We could spend hours going back and forth on soft CC. However, if you play an engineer you’ll quickly see that if you can’t keep opponents hard CC’ed, especially ranged opponents, you risk being trained down in seconds.

Gear shield isn’t even that overwhelming. The offense power of cele rifle has always been the strong point.

2. Overcharged Shot The self-knockback being overpowered is purely your opinion from being on the receiving end. Look at it from both sides and you’ll see it’s not a problem.

The sum of control effects put the engineer at 800-900 range from their target, which is near the max range of most engineer skills. Unless the engineer uses a stun break, they can get off one attack at best while the target is still CC’ed. For that reason, Overcharged Shot is usually a lead-in to stronger CC in a chain. If you know the setup, you can stop the rest of the chain, even causing the engineer to whiff on some CC.

Further, Overcharged Shot is only 400 range. If you’re ranged, it’s pretty obvious when the engineer runs up to you that they’re either going to use Blunderbuss or Overcharged shot, both of which you want to avoid. If you’re melee, you can’t easily time a one-shot ability to stop it, but duration abilities (stability, etc) delay when the engineer can use Overcharged Shot. Part of Overcharged Shot’s functionality is to peel melee, which it does while not being too good.

If the engineer stun breaks the self-CC in order to get one extra attack in, then for almost all builds, they’ve used their only stun break and can be punished hard by CC. The receiving player should have a stun break too in this case.

Further, using overcharged shot in a group fight requires awareness of your surroundings and positioning. If you end up knocking yourself back into the middle of a fight, expect to be severely punished for it.

By the way, Overcharged Shot is unchanged since launch. People only complain about it now because the cele rifle build uses it. It never was a problem through various incarnations of burst engineer builds. And Updraft (Ele Air Dagger #5) is pretty much the same effect as Overcharged Shot (instant launch with self-CC), yet hardly anyone mentioned it despite how popular d/d ele was.

3. Incendiary Powder I didn’t argue in favor of passive damage; I said it should be reduced as much as possible. I’ve been saying Incendiary Powder needs a significant nerf for over a year.

I said “no” to your proposed solution because it’s bad. It turns IP into an even bigger mess of luck, which is frustrating for engineers and their opposition. If the proc comes off cooldown when an attack is airborne and about to hit, you still can’t react. If it comes off cooldown when the engineer is auto-attacking while waiting out an opponent’s defense, it gets wasted and frustrates the engineer. You’re not going to be able to predict the exact end of that 10 second window.

The necessary change is simple, really. The damage increase needs to be reasonable when compared with similar traits. The application either needs to be distributed over time with multiple small applications or a burst tied to some infrequent event under player control which the opponent can avoid.

Reuptake.5016:

1. How much, or does it at all, give me an advantage the fact that I was a high end pvp player on WoW?
2. I plaid Warr, Rogue, DK on WoW. Which class gameplay/style would be to these on gw2? Which classs has the most mobility for pvp?
3. What is the most broken thing in gw2 competitive pvp?
4. Are we toxic, team? Compare “toxicness” in wow community vs. gw, anyone?
5. Who wants to be my first friend in pvp and help a m8 get into gw pvp?)

1. Skills like communication and coordination carry over. Mechanical skills will help you over time as you learn the new system. Other than that, not really. The combat system is very different. The game type, conquest, is similar to Arathi Basin or Battle of Gilneas.
2. An offensive Warrior build is close to WoW warrior, but they aren’t in the “meta” right now; defensive warriors are. Thief is close to WoW rogue. Thief has the highest mobility.
3. Debatable. Celestial rifle engineer and Air+Fire sigil burst seems to be the most complained about thing currently.
4. Haven’t played WoW in years. Competitive teams get along. In PUG games, you still have the few people who think they’re amazing and everyone else is terrible and can’t help telling you how bad you are and how great they are.

naphack.9346:

There is no conceivable reason for there to be two passive proc sigils with massive physical damage, so why not give one of them a new purpose?

How about:
Currently:
Sigil of Air: 50% chance to deal 408(1.2) damage on critical hit. ICD of 3 seconds.
Proposed:
Sigil of Air: 66% chance on critical hit to deal 128(0.4) damage and apply weakness (3 seconds) to the target. ICD of 8 seconds.

Then players will use Fire + Blood for damage. Nerf that and players will move to the next thing. You eventually arrive at a solution which is to nerf the damage of all sigils.

Pot, meet kettle. I explained why your suggestions were poor. You just didn’t like it, so you’re attacking me.

And just because the mob thinks it doesn’t mean it’s good.

Arken.3725:

Just my opinion, only a few things need to be adjusted and it would help significantly.

1. Increase gearshield CD to 30 sec
2. 1/2 to 3/4 cast time to rifle KB
3. Icon to show when the next attack inflicts burning from IP so it can be avoided. And allow it to avoided on the next attack regardless if you hit or miss
4. Reduce slick shoe kd from 3 to 2

1. Too long. Gear shield is about the only defense engineers have. 25 sec maybe, but 30 sec is too high.
2. No. Overcharged shot balances itself by also disabling the engineer. Most rifle skills are only powerful at close range, so the follow-up typically isn’t high damage. Being instant also allows it to be used for defense. If the engineer is avoiding the knockback or stun-breaking it, then they used two skills – can’t you use one (a stun break) to counter it?
3. No. Passive bonus damage just needs to go away as much as possible. Waiting for the trait re-work and official details on burning changes to comment further. In the interim, just lower the duration to 2 seconds per proc.
4. The knockdown is 2 seconds. The puddle duration and skill duration are both 3 seconds. Most people are knocked down multiple by times by successive puddles, not the same puddle. You’d probably want to lower the skill duration.

choucs.4507:

i already have energy on sword why would i swap for another energy, so did tarcis hman and a lot of warriors, after the might nerf+sigil nerf, battle’s benefit is minimum compare to energy in terms of surivbility and damage.

So when something that’s too strong is brought down to a level where it’s balanced, players switch to something which else which is too strong. Interesting…

Jelzouki.4128:

I don’t know why this is an issue all of a sudden. If you remove the sigils from the current specs such as shoutbow, its not like the spec will become unviable, just weaker. The build itself is strong, and assuming that air/fire and swap sigils etc carry builds is so kitten incorrect!

Air+Fire and swap sigils being a problem is nothing new. They’ve been a problem since the sigil buffs over a year ago. It’s just been overshadowed by threads about celestial amulet, turret engineer, and matchmaking.

The OP was a little off the mark with stating that certain sigils make builds viable. It could be strongly argued for some sigils, particularly Sigil of Intelligence. But for the most part, sigils give the “top” builds too much of an advantage which they wouldn’t otherwise have over the vast pool of “almost top” builds.

Air+Fire is a problem because of the burst damage it provides, especially with builds which already have high burst damage. Throwing an extra 1300+1000 damage on top of profession skills can make a difference between life and death. And the sigil proc damage is unavoidable as long as the attack lands, isn’t consumed if the attack doesn’t land, and doesn’t pre-empt used of another skill. Further, these burst builds can often stall for the 5 seconds needed for the internal cooldown of the sigils and burst with them again. Losing over 10% of your HP to sigil procs every time the combo procs and not being able to stop it is not fun and not good for skillful play.

As a comparison, before the sigil changes, you could only benefit from one of the two, and it had a lower chance to proc, causing it to not reliably line up with burst. And due to the shared cooldown, it prevented use of other sigil benefits, such as energy.

The swap sigils are only problems on engineer and elementalist, because their constant swapping can trigger the sigils very close to the ICD, and on warriors with Fast Hands, who effectively have 4 sigils active at the same time. The swap sigils were balanced with the assumption that it’s unlikely to be swapping on cooldown all the time. As such, their effects are a little stronger. But when you take away that assumption, the sigils become a little too good. In particular, Sigil of Doom grants a powerful debuff (healing reduction) that is not native to elementalist and warrior.

Similar to Air+Fire, the shared cooldown before the sigil changes made swap sigils less prominent; all three of those professions could only benefit from one swap sigil.

Instead of people crying like little babies, may be you should propose changes!

I don’t know about that. Some developers don’t like overly detailed lists of changes. A general suggestion or concise explanation of the problem is arguably better.

Popular Sigils just do too much damage or have too big of a benefit (Sigil of Energy).

For sigils which are purely damage, if you use Sigil of Force (+5% damage) as a benchmark, you can balance other sigils around it. Sigils which do burst damage should either have their damage spread out more or be much lower than a 5% damage increase over time. Swap sigils should be slightly better than 5% damage if you swap on or close to the cooldown, but worse if you don’t swap often. Condition damage sigils should be balanced assuming a condition damage build and not a power build. By that metric, Sigil of Air should be dealing around half of the damage it currently does. (Note: change could be limited to PvP and WvW)

For sigils which have utility, it’s a bit more subjective and harder to address. The main ones I see as problems are Sigil of Doom (healing reduction) and Sigil of Energy (instantly have enough endurance to dodge is too strong).

Another suggestion is to make sigils of the same type (OnSwap, OnCrit, Stacking on Kill) be mutually exclusive or share cooldowns. Stacking on Kill sigils already act that way. This limits the extent to which elementalist, warrior, and engineer can take advantage of swap sigils and eliminates Air+Fire or Air+Blood.

Saiyan.1704:

Every trait/skill/rune is build defining. If you don’t like rng then you’re asking for the removal of something that’s been in rpgs since board games. Fire and Air isn’t based on chance. It’s based on expectation.

The random factor isn’t the problem; the sigil procs are pretty dependable when using a Berserker amulet. The damage is simply too high.

Top tier teams don’t lose ESL and make threads about air/fire sigils.

You’re right; they win and make threads about it. Tage (from Orange Logo) made one months ago.

Dinks.2478:

Yes, unfortunately. If you want a useful ranged weapon you need to trait for useless virtues, useless traps and unneeded longbow related things.

The design of elite specializations is that it’s a significant shift in how you play. At the same time, by limiting combinations with other traits, it allows for better balance and for future elite specializations to feel unique. So if you’re expecting to just add on to the base profession, you’re mistaken.

Dragonhunter’s intended playstyle seems to be oriented toward a solo player with more offensive abilities rather than support for a group. Most guardian players (or at least the more vocal ones) were looking for a support option with longbow. Just because it’s not what you wanted doesn’t mean that the Dragonhunter design is bad. However, you can argue about whether Dragonhunter fulfills its design or if that role is useful.

Elite specializations, when selected, unlock new utility skills, weapons, and modifications/additions to the profession mechanic only as long as that elite specialization is one of your three active specializations. You are not required to choose an elite specialization, but you can only have one elite specialization active at a time. Current trait lines are being re-worked into “normal” specializations.

So yes, if you want to use longbow, you have to choose the Dragonhunter specialization as one of your three.

Baseline means the skill without any modification from traits, specialization, etc. When you make something baseline, it means that the effect which one was a modification of the skill, usually via traits, is now part of the skill(s) before traits, specializations, etc are applied.

For example, when Illusionary Persona becomes baseline, it means that all shatter skills count the mesmer, even if you have no trait lines selected or unlocked.

Cynz.9437:

Specializations are not bringing any hope either.

FALSE. You have to read into it a bit, since the engineer specializations were still rough, but you can see where they’re going.

Incendiary Powder, quite possibly the biggest contributor to engi dominance will see changes. Remember that burning is being changed to stack intensity with lower damage per tick, so proc’ing burning for a short duration every few hits isn’t such a big deal anymore. It’s being moved to a different specialization, though it’s hard to gauge the impact of that. Right now, engineers will be locked into two specializations if they still want to get Speedy Kits + Invigorating Speed.

Gear Shield cooldown isn’t so bad at the base value. The use of the Power Wrench trait (reduced cooldown) is what makes it so frequent. Right now Power wrench is competing with damage traits, though it could be shifted to compete with utility/defense traits like Speedy Kits and Adrenal Implant. Power Wrench could also change to not affect Gear Shield.

Grenade Kit is being re-worked. It’s down to 900 range (from 1500). Poison grenades won’t be a field, so the applied condition will probably last for a shorter duration. The current Grenadier trait is gone, allowing the kit to be balanced properly. On live, Grenadier is effectively a 50% damage increase. You can’t conceivably keep the base kit useful without making the traited one too good. ANet can now better balance grenade kit.

Condition Duration is gone as a trait line bonus as far as we can tell, in favor of targeted trait increases where appropriate. That means cele rifle engi loses 30% condition duration. Grenade conditions won’t be as powerful, and immobilize from Net Shot will be back at the baseline 2 seconds (a loss of 0.6 seconds for cele rifle engis).

Touching on the others points:

• Kits do not need cooldowns. Kits are unique to engineers and the ability to swap between them as needed is part of the playstyle.
• Engineer CC is about right. It’s one of the engineer’s strengths. If certain abilities are a little too good, they can be examined.
• Cutting the duration of Slick Shoes (ability duration, not puddle duration) should be enough to prevent easy CC chains by encircling an opponent.

Yes, engineer is too good now. But we know things are going to change significantly with HoT and a lot of things will be broken for a while. It’s unlikely that anything will change before the specialization changes go live.

sendmark.4731:

Yeah both are fine in the current meta, can be countered by kiting

Rampage has strong CC, gap closers, reduced duration on movement impairing effects, and 3 stability every 3 seconds. It makes it really hard to kite. Blind spam works, but not everyone can do that.

The main problem people have Lich comes from the Chill of Death proc and Close to Death. If you’re under 50%, a single hit with procs will kill you or almost kill you.

Cogbyrn.7283:

Maybe Sigil of Energy needs to be looked at, but if so, you have to realize how dire the Necromancer straits are when it comes to active evasion.

Rather than rely on a sigil, necromancer needs its skills and traits improved for self-defense.

Weapon Skill Cooldown Change No. It would lessen skill spam a little, but only on weapon sets which have shorter cooldowns.

Reduce Dodges/Evades Agree that dodges and evades are too plentiful, but disagree with the proposed solution. Leave the base alone and adjust traits, skills, and Sigil of Energy. The specialization system is already doing some of this by preventing some combinations that allowed for extra dodges/evades while still providing high damage. Sigil of Energy is the main outlier and should at the very least be not adjust so that tit doesn’t instantly provide 50% endurance.

Skill Risk vs. Reward The power of a skill needs to be balanced with cast time, cooldown, and other drawbacks (e.g. rooted in place during skill). Doing this on a set of weapon skills also works (e.g. high burst but low sustain damage). For the most part, it’s pretty good, but there are some outliers such as a point blank shot.

Teutos.8620:

Not sure, if the playerbase is mature enough for that, or if they wouldn’t just always vote for their buddy.

Could make it so you can’t upvote people you queued with and you can only upvote people you’ve been in a game with.