Guild Wars 2

Meta-game builds are there because they’re generally more effective than any alternative or more effective for the amount of skill and effort put in. If you don’t play a meta build, you have to have an effective build which fulfills some kind of role in a team game. And you have to be good enough at it to compete with others of near equal skill who are using those meta builds.

I often run into “special flowers” who want to be unique, but can’t accomplish anything with their build. They can’t kill anything, they can’t take a node, they can’t defend a node and lend team support. When called out, they defend their “special flower” build, ignoring it’s uselessness and usually their lack of skill. So if the only defense you can offer is “I don’t want to be meta”, you should probably stop thinking that and adopt a meta build until you can improve. If you can show your build fills a role and you do it well, no one should complain.

I would say the only necessary things are:

1. d/d Elementalist
It just does too much well. It can bunker in a team fight, has the capability to pressure and win on side nodes, great team support, and the mobility to move between nodes for those roles.

2. Thief
Thief is far more mobile than any other profession. It forces teams to have guards for their side node stationed nearby or within reach of a portal. Just the threat of it is enough to diminish a team’s strength in a team fight. Thief also flat-out denies or severely hampers many glassy builds.

Nerfing is generally better than buffing, though you need to do both – nerf what’s too good and buff what’s too weak. If you don’t nerf things which are too good, they will always be dominate and overshadow alternatives. Buffing everything to match the top takes longer, is harder to get right, and is counter-productive because it dilutes everything and creates an “arms race”.

Celestial Amulet is fine; no need to change it. The only user of it which is so pervasive in high level PvP is d/d elementalist, which means the profession is what’s broken, not the amulet.

Sigil of Battle duration should be between 12 and 15 seconds. This makes it about equal to Sigil of Force for most users, but still makes it situationally better for builds with boon duration or who weapon swap often.

On top of that, elementalist needs some changes to d/d. Reducing the amount of burning it can put out in the 0/0/2/6/6 spec would go a long way toward keeping its 1v1 potential in check. The duration can be re-added through traits in a more offensive trait line (like fire). Consider a shave to some of the healing skills as well.

Engineer Incendiary Powder needs to be dramatically toned down. In conjunction, buff abilities which can be avoided and require more skill to use so that the profession can still be effective, but with less near-guaranteed damage.

Just remove Rune of the Nightmare from PvP until it can be addressed properly. Reaper’s Protection (fear nearby enemies when disabled) needs its fear duration reduced in the short-term. That way it still works as a defense to break CC chains, but the necro doesn’t have enough time to use as offense as well. Long term it should be completely reworked.

Mostly agree with the OP.

Having targeted duration increases – only increasing a specific condition or boon duration – is fine. What’s a problem for balance is the duration increase to all conditions or all boons. In particular, condition duration causes balance problems because both damaging and CC condition durations are increased simultaneously.

@zapv.8051
PvP build diversity about the same as it’s always been. While you can play a lot of stuff, very few is actually good at the highest level. WvW roaming in a joke with the condi duration increase food and PvE-only runes; you just don’t see it because it’s easy to avoid these unstoppable solo roamers without even trying.

Option 2 and 3.

Celestial is fine. Use it on other professions and builds and you’ll see is not that powerful. So it must be something else causing elementalists and engineers to be powerful when using this amulet.

And what is that? Sigil of Battle primarily, but also sigil of doom and class mechanics which are too strong. If you can’t stack might so quickly and for so long, the sustained damage drops dramatically. Sigil of Battle’s duration should be 12 to 15 seconds base, not 20 seconds. Sigil of Doom gives d/d ele access to poison which they normally don’t have, and that allows them to out-sustain in 1v1 and have cover conditions for burning. Engineer’s incendiary powder needs a nerf; it’s a huge contributor to their damage in both celestial and condition builds. For d/d ele, the duration of some of the burning is too long for taking so many defensive traits.

So if rewards are equal, people do enough to have non-zero scoreboard points and then AFK the entire game. There’s no incentive to try.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

How is a fear proc not any different then any other passive proc?
Just wondering because this trait, runeset and build has been ingame forever.

It is different than some other passive procs because it’s so powerful and its offensive nature. Having a longer cooldown doesn’t offset its power. The fear proc on Nightmare runes has been a problem for the last two years. The current necro condi build shows how broken it is, which draws more attention. Reaper’s Protection was bound to be one as well as soon as it started being used.

And I’m not saying that these are the only passive procs which need addressed. Incendiary Powder needs toned down as well.

When you have passive procs, you have to very careful about their strength. In general, they should:

• Be Predictable or dependable by yourself and an opponent i.e. occurs at 50% health, when CC’ed, etc. and not just once a minute.
• Have reasonable damage compared to the effort and time required to cause it and the possible counter-play.
• Not change the course of a battle.

coglin.1867:

Exedore.6320:

Celestial Amulet is fine – it’s the might stacking and easy condi spam which is the problem with those builds.

Explain to us how condition damage is “spammed” any more or less then direct damage. Because that appears to be what your implying,

Poor choice of words. I meant excessive condition application, mostly from procs or on attacks which seem to be designed as power attacks with some condition component. Incendiary Powder is the biggest offender, but you also see D/D eles and warriors applying lots of burning while using many defensive traits.

Outside of the passive fear procs, I don’t mind condition damage necromancers at all.

Chaith.8256:

Uh.. I think Spirit Watch, competitively, is much closer than Skyhammer. At least people still run builds for conquest, and not builds for ping pong.

Skyhammer > Spirit Watch. In Spirit Watch, you have orb running builds (defensive warrior with main hand sword is the biggest example) and not conquest builds. It needs multiple people to even keep it slowed down, which gives the rest of the team an advantage on the nodes. If you don’t have one, you lose.

On Skyhammer, other than stealth pulls, all that CC is avoidable by playing well.

If you want more boon strip, buff Axe #3 to strip two boons instead of one.

Outside of that, Axe could use a little bit more damage or life force generation.

Necro main-hand dagger is fine. It’s very high damage and good life force generation, but the trade-off is that being in melee puts in you more danger than at range.

If you want to fix power necro, address staff being not so great for power builds, but almost required for defense, and the axe being overall weak in damage and utility, especially when it comes to life force generation. Also, make focus cast times shorter.

Elitist.8701:

This November balance patch shows basically nothing. They didn’t nerf cele ammy and autofear necro. They buffed random stuff. Only good thing is nerf to bearbow ranger.

Celestial Amulet is fine – it’s the might stacking and easy condi spam which is the problem with those builds.

Necro fear procs are a problem and need fixed, but they may be waiting until after ToG finals for that.

It could use a few tweaks, but mostly fine. Here are some areas that you could adjust:
- Air + Fire sigil allows for large bursts of damage (applies to many builds)
- Energy sigil allows extra clones and more survival (applies to many builds)
- Halting Strike (deal damage when you interrupt) really adds up and can crit pretty hard.
- Mirror Blade (GS #2) is unblockable for seemingly no reason.
- Spatial Surge (GS #1) sheath bug where it can deal all its damage up front (as explained to me – might be wrong on this)

Jayce.5632:

This would be the most elegant solution to Reaper’s Protection. An aura-like visual of skulls circling the necro when the trait is active.

It’s not a solution at all. It’s just adding a sign that says “if you CC me, you’re screwed”.

Arguably Reaper’s Protection is fine by itself, since all it does is negate the CC. But Master of Terror makes it longer than the CC it’s negating and Terror makes it deal significant damage. Changing the effect on Reaper’s Protection, as opposed to Terror or Master of Terror, is the best way to address this powerful combination of traits.

With regards to weakening the turret build, I think the best answer is:

• Significantly reduce the damage potential of incendiary powder and make it an Adept trait again. Tweak other skills to make up for the damage loss from IP but make sure there is more counter-play than there currently is.
• Accelerant-Packed Turrets moves back to a Master level trait. That way you can’t have damage and knockback on turret death, increased turret damage or shields, and boons from turrets all in the same build. Then the toxic turret build loses either the ability to push people off points easily, a chunk of its passive damage or defense against ranged, or sustain for the engineer himself.

Jayce.5632:

If you take away Reapers Protection, what will you give the necro in return? None of the most vocal oppositionists ever include compensation with their arguments. Remember: blocks, invul, and more stability, healing are all off the table.

Pointing out problems is relatively easier than fixing them. If we point out problems, they’re more likely to fixed by developers. But when it comes to solutions, most players don’t have as much time to invest into that process as developers have – it’s their job after all. Further, when players start suggesting changes, it often dilutes threads since ideas are typically rough at best or fall into the category of “nerf my enemies, make me unstoppable”.

So here’s my two minutes of thinking on it: To make it less broken, you want to reduce the effect and reduce the cooldown. I would cut the fear duration to 1 second – enough to interrupt someone, negate a chunk of their CC, and build a little room, but not enough to turn around and drop conditions on people, even with Master of Terror. It also cuts down damage from Terror. Further, I would put some kind of condition on it like being below a health threshold or being in deathshroud. Then you could drop the cooldown a to something like 20 or 30 seconds.

Arken.3725:

Just re posting what I had in another thread that got closed. Simple fix for now: Remove Celestial amulet and Might runes.

Lol, no. Celestial isn’t a problem and might stacking runes aren’t that out of proportion compared to others. Sigil of Battle and profession skills like Incendiary Powder are the problem.

coglin.1867:

You cannot reasonably take out the passive proc trait for the necromancer or single it out, and lobby against it. Every profession has an equally defensive and equally passive proc. You must lobby removal of them all, or none. To single one out over the others, in my opinion, is a sign of bias behavior that no one should condon. Why is it okay to target those whose effects you dislike dealing with, yet intentionally not mention those of your main, or preferred professions?

Just because they weren’t mentioned doesn’t mean they aren’t broken. Yes, engineer’s Transmute trait needs changed; watching it convert fear to stability show’s how broken it can be, especially if the necro is using fear as a defense.

But just flat removing all these procs isn’t an answer. Engineer Protection Injection is a good trait because it doesn’t completely shut someone down or waste a key ability, and is predictable (it will will activate most of the time). Developers need to examine all on a case-by-case basis. Obviously that will take some time. The ones which radically alter the course of a fight and are used frequently, like Reaper’s Protection and Nightmare Runes, should be first to be fixed.

Arken.3725:

I still want to bring up the topic of defensive traits. Protective shield/Injection are also poorly designed traits. The whole purpose of CCing someone is to setup burst, why reward someone who was unable to avoid it with damage reduction? Maybe attaching some of these to skills or maybe gain protection when successfully stun-breaking out of a skill?

These traits are fine. They lessen incoming damage, but don’t completely negate it and are mostly predictable. Your burst wasn’t completely negated – most of it got through. You just can’t rely on one CC and burst to explode an engi.

In comparison, abilities which comletely negate the CC are problematic. Compare Protection Injection to necromancer’s Reaper’s Protection (chance to fear when hit) and you’ll see that the engi version is decently balanced.

Having professions that aren’t as susceptible to burst damage adds variety to the game. You have elementalists which are good against sustain but weak to burst. What’s wrong with something that’s weak to CC and sustain, but not as weak against burst?

If you take away the two passive fear procs (Reaper’s Protection and Nightmare Rune 6 piece), Terror isn’t nearly as bad.

The passive procs buy a window for more damage, build distance against melee professions, and prevent incoming damage, and allow active fears to be saved for offense and condi stacking.

Here’s my list of the key underlying problems with current WvW mechanics:

1. Dominance of an entire map without much incursion is extremely valuable and easy to achieve during off-hours.
2. Score is unaffected by difficulty in taking or holding a structure.
3. Rewards in WvW are greatest for quickly flipping undefended structures (karma train) compared with defending or capturing defended structures.
4. Increased numbers in battle is far more influential than increased skill.
5. No incentive to fight the strongest server. Instead the weaker two fight each other and the strongest reaps the benefits.

Here’s what I would change to address those:

• Bloodlust affects all kills, not just kills with a finisher. Outmanned players are worth less (or nothing) and obviously include a timer before you can get points from the same enemy again to prevent abuse. Doing this would make prime time more valuable (larger population) and would make organized groups more important. Tying it to bloodlust allows for some counter-play.
• Max 2 or 3 people rally from one enemy death I think the current cap is 5. Lowering the number that can rally off any one death allows more skilled groups to take on larger groups and not suddenly lose because one of their players died. It decreases the power of sheer numbers in battle.
• Dolyaks no longer award points for completed deliveries They will still award points if killed while on a route. When a server is dominating, especially in off-hours, the yaks are running routes largely unhindered. That adds up to almost 300 points per hour for a borderland (for reference, the points from ticks for a BL add up to 580 per hour). This would cut a significant chunk of the coverage advantage.
• Capturing a fort awards bonus score and WXP for each structural upgrade This would be walls, gates, oil, cannon, mortar, waypoint. Personnel upgrades (guards, merchants) don’t count. The bonus could scale with the tier of the upgrade. This encourages assaults on upgraded structures instead of just constantly flipping un-upgraded structures.
• Players and Objectives of the first place server are worth bonus WXP or loot If the first place server’s score is larger than a certain percentage of the combined second and third place servers, then their players and objectives award significant bonus WXP or bonus champion bags. They won’t be worth bonus WvW score. This encourages fighting the strongest server, but doesn’t make being the strongest server a liability.
• Increase WvW rewards in general Compared to sPvP or PvE, WvW rewards are relatively lackluster. Consider something like every 10th WvW rank chest has a guaranteed rare or better item (like a world boss chest) in addition to the current loot.
• Change WvW bonuses to be worthwhile and non-combat You know those small bonuses like gathering effectiveness, gold, increased HP, etc. Get rid of the combat ones (increased health, energy regeneration, healing), since they only make the strongest server stronger. Change and increase the non-combat ones (extra gold, experience, karma, gathering, and add a WXP one). Give them double effect in WvW (but no double bonus in EotM). This entices players to participate in WvW later in the week.

The scoring block system makes the coverage problem worse, not better!

First, it tells players that if their server doesn’t come close to winning during a block, to not even bother because their effort doesn’t matter. That directs more people to edge of the mists or other parts of the game. The goal is to make WvW more enticing.

Second, it doesn’t fix the coverage problem. Outside of tier1, the problem with coverage gaps isn’t because one server caps the map; coverage is a problem because the other servers have no one to recover their losses quickly. The forts sit there, owned by the dominant server for hours on end until the next surge in coverage or the server’s primetime. If a server loses primetime but wins the block following primetime, then they’ll most likely win the third block too from residual PPT. It potentially makes their coverage advantage even stronger. Breaking it into shorter blocks doesn’t address this.

Arachnid.4062:

On a side note. Here I am, still waiting for SOMEONE TO TELL ME HOW ANY OF THE THINGS IN MY OP ARE WELL DESIGNED OR HAVE DECENT COUNTERPLAY

• The main culprit with turrets is the knockback and damage when they die or are exploded. It makes melee AoE counter-productive and easy for the engi to keep control of the node. The nerf on the range wasn’t enough.

• You don’t even need Balthazar runes to make this overly powerful. It’s 5sec in most builds because of the +30% duration from the Explosives trait line. Needs nerfed so that it’s only minimal extra damage. Most maser level traits are +10% damage.

• In non-turret builds, Supply Crate is very powerful 1v1, but so are many other longer cooldown elites. In a group fight, the turrets go down very fast if you drop it in the group. Could use a small nerf. In a turret build, it’s pretty ridiculous, but that’s more of a turret build problem.

• Elixir gun auto-attack damage isn’t that spectacular, so I don’t see it being that broken.

• I don’t see how you get anywhere close to 1k HP per second, unless you’re counting supply crate med kits. Yes, the HP/sec on healing turret is one of the highest for a heal, but engineers don’t have much access to protection (except turret builds), condition removal, or stability.

Powerful, unavoidable condition damage in conjunction with poor defense doesn’t make for healthy balance. Both need addressed. But you have to reign in the former before you improve upon the latter.

Suggestion: Significantly tone down IP and make it an adept level trait again. Accelerant-Packed Turrets goes back to master level, which prevents turret engis from getting the knockback, boons, and increased turret damage all in one build.

robertul.3679:

Everybody says it’s not the amulet it’s the might stacking blabla.
Well what can you do? Change the way classes stack might? Change skill functions? It’s crazy!

Tone down sigil of battle for starters. It’s part of the huge power creep we got after the April 15th patch which still hasn’t been adequately addressed.

If ANet would put in better stat customization, you’d see that celestial isn’t all that good. But compared to the “too glass” or “too tanky” options, which are the only other ones we’re allowed to have, it offers a good balance between the extremes if you can make up for the lack of power.

Builds which are too good with celestial would still be too good with any more optimal stat combination. And that points out a balance problem with the profession.

I fully agree that ranger isn’t viable in high end team play. But that’s not what annoys people.

What annoys people is the same problem with 100blades just after launch. It’s very simple to pull off, and even if you only get some of it off, it’s still a huge chunk of damage. But what makes Rapid Fire even worse is that rangers can do it from 1500 range; If you’re already engaged in a fight, you often don’t see it coming until the first few arrows land. Yes, thief can sneak up and burst too, but the downside for them is that they’re susceptible to melee cleave and AoE when using their burst. And with such a low cooldown with decent survival, they can get it off again from long range.

Basically, the effort and risk doesn’t balance with the reward when it does happen to land.

And because it’s not really played at high end, of course it’s fine there. But you can’t just balance at the top; you need to have reasonable balance at mid and low tiers of play.

I like bluberblasen.9684. Celestial only seems really good because of numerous other things which need fixed first.

GoogleBrandon.5073:

On topic now; what is actually the biggest culprit for Celestial?
I see many here pointing out mightstacks, but is this really true in reality? Or is it a mix between the stacking of might and having enough self-sustain to run it?

Might stacking is what’s breaking the balance. Normally power and condition damage levels with the celestial amulet are too low to do significant damage. When you can maintain 15+ stacks of might easily, you now have close to the same power as someone with a beserker amulet and almost as much condition damage as someone with rabid.

Elementalist, Engineer, and Warrior are the main offenders for a number of reasons:
1. These professions also weapon swap (or equivalent) often, so they cant take the most advantage of Sigil of Battle. Other professions tend toward weapon swapping based on situation, not on cooldown, so Sigil of Battle has less effect.
2. These professions have decent access to the Fury boon to make up for less precision when compared to Berserker. Warriors get it from their elite signet, elementalists on attunement swap, and engineers get it from a minor trait in Alchemy when they hit 75% HP.
3. The defensive stats on celestial also extend the already strong defenses of elementalist and warrior. For elementalist in particular with its low base HP, celestial is the only amulet that address that issue sufficiently while still giving them toughness, but not overdoing it.
4. These professions all apply burning often for significant durations. Sigil of Doom, which goes great with their weapon swapping, gives them poison (Engineer has it through grenades and elixir gun). Axebow warrior has torment and engineer has bleeding and often confusion. So they benefit significantly from having high condition damage from celestial + might stacking.

Play any of these without sigil of battle and you’ll see a big difference in damage output.

Celestial is fine. Might stacking, particularly from Sigil of Battle, is the problem. Drop Sigil of Battle to 2 stacks or reduce its duration and you’ve cut out at least 100 power and condition damage from these builds.

Further, the inability to customize stats properly hurts professions that can’t do the might stacking + celestial combo. They either explode when touched or can’t put out enough damage.

I like that ANet is asking for feedback. Unfortunately, no matter what system you pick and how you tweak the numbers, it will end up hurting legitimate play and the trolls will find a way around it. And trolls innovate much faster than ANet can add additional changes to address the new method of trolling.

Exhaustion System
(From original post). This implementation really hurts commanders of larger groups. Against a heavily upgraded and defended keep, a leader or commander is dropping multiple rams at each gate, in addition to arrow carts or other siege to destroy enemy siege. I would estimate you’d want a cap of 15 build sites in 3 minutes to prevent it from infringing on legitimate play. But with that high of a cap, it won’t affect trolls at all.

Voting System
Allow players to report someone as a troll and when a player has x troll reports, they’re locked out of building siege and ordering upgrades for y duration and the account is flagged for future GM review. However, this can be abused if you get multiple troll accounts reporting a commander. Or even legitimate guilds griefing another guild that they don’t like.

Problems with Using Commanders and Squads to Tweak Systems
Trolls that want to troll hard enough will buy a commander tag. Or use an old account with a tag (players that quit, etc). I mean, they paid money or gold to transfer an account or buy a new game copy and load it up with siege…

Not everyone uses squads due to various issues with them. In particular, not being able to see other commanders is bad and there’s a size limit to them. Forcing people into a system to avoid another problem is bad design.

Supply Count System
Get x stacks of exhaustion for creating a build site and lose y stacks for each supply that someone else uses on your build site. A stack expires after z duration. If you have more than w stacks, you can’t drop blueprints or take supply from a tower/keep/castle (supply depot is okay). Because legitimate siege has many contributors, it doesn’t hurt them much. Only lone defenders may take a hit. However, they tend to build siege which uses more supply per site than cheaper troll siege and they build it further from depots, lessening the impact. The down-side is that a group of trolls can overcome this system by building each others’ sites. Possibly adjust it to count only for unique supply, but that’s more computing resource intensive.

What Would Work?
I think a combination of the supply count system and some leniency on it if you have a commander tag on your account would work best. It would rarely infringe on legitimate use, and makes a troll’s task more costly. Also, still add a more clear report choice for hacker/saboteur to the “report” choices.

Hexalot.8194:

Dumbest idea ever. Unlike warriors, Medi-Guards have no way of leaving the fight if things go south… they are “in it to win it” in every sense of the phrase. And when you factor in one of the lowest base healths of all classes, you can understand why Guards need every bit of sustain they can get.

Yet you want to nerf one of the most vital things keeping Guards in the fight… their healing ?

I repeat… dumbest idea EVER ! (and I don’t even main a guard and normally don’t see medi’s as that much of a threat). Which means we can probably look for this recommendation to implemented next patch !

QQ, don’t nerf me, I like ez mode!

I play a guardian, I’ve played medi in the past, I’ve played against medi guards as other professions. I laugh every time I see one and then sigh in frustration as they continually try to hurt me, fail miserably, yet never die. You simply avoid their burst and they can’t do crap to hurt you. But they live forever in smaller fights and that healing has next to no counter-play. The change to renewed focus makes that zero-skill aspect of medi guard even worse.

Again, nerf the healing on Monk’s Focus to get rid of the zero counter-play sustain and then add options for offense which require more thought and execution. Then they can actually be a threat and be more than that fly you can’t shoo away. It makes for a much better build and a much more enjoyable game (unless you like your ez mode builds).

I hate to agree with angry posts, but this patch is beyond ridiculous. Balance is far worse than before, and it seems like lot of time was spent on the leveling system that NO ONE likes.

Tested in HotM by looking at the combat log. Deadly Mixture does increase the damage of Flamethrower by the advertised 15%. However, the tooltip with Deadly Mixture is wrong.

Medi guard was buffed where it didn’t need it. People are complaining because it’s extremely annoying to fight, even when played by mediocre people, just like d/d ele.

It still can’t kill anyone reasonably smart because the burst is too easy to avoid. But now it lasts even longer with the extra heal and faster virtue reset so eventually it will win through attrition, even with a damage-oriented amulet.

Instead, they should reduce the healing on Monk’s Focus so they can make it better at well-executed offense.

Dahkeus.8243:

Hooray for kneejerk balance rages on patch day!

Seriously though…it’s a bit early to start the rage.

No it’s not. Spend an hour in sPvP and you can clearly see how blatantly overpowered and game-breaking ranger longbow and greatsword are.

My friend and I played for a few hours last night. It feels like a third person shooter with all the rangers. If you can’t avoid the Rapid Fire for whatever reason (like if their pet CC’ed you), you’re dead. It’s not some well-executed skill chain; it’s one button at 1200 range. If you aren’t dead from Rapid Fire, it’s okay, they’ll just auto-attack a couple times and finish you off. Or better yet, if you’re anywhere near melee, you’ll be hit with Maul for thousands of damage.

The only saving grace is that most rangers are people who never played the profession before and have no clue what to do when you avoid Rapid Fire and attack back.

Try to defend it; you can’t. Rapid Fire is more damage than 100blades ever was, in less time, at 1200 range. Sure, skilled players can avoid it 1v1, but the average player is going to be completely frustrated by it. And even skilled players will fall victim to it in group fights.

You’re not going to be using Flame Jet constantly in a zerg fight. If you are, you’re doing it wrong. Just like guardians get punished for using Whirling Wrath at bad times, Engineers get punished for using Flame Jet at bad times. Flamethrower still works fine otherwise.

I could see maybe dropping it to 8 attacks instead of 10 to cut down on the retaliation damage a little bit. But remember that the high number of attacks also has a benefit for proc’ing some traits. It’s also good at getting rid of shields which block a certain number of attacks.

WoW had a bug for years where using the warrior Charge skill over uneven terrain would sometimes instantly kill you.

The best way to help developers fix a bug is to find a way to reliably reproduce it. Pictures and video help.

Agree with OP. The trait is too weak in its current form, has zero personal benefit, and unless you’re in a large group, has little benefit to the group. The ICD would prevent any abuse with giving yourself another block immediately after.

I would nerf Sigil of Battle (3 stacks of might for 20sec on weapon swap) by reducing number of stacks or duration and leave combo fields alone. Combo fields usually require some effort to pull off, so there should be a bit more reward there.

Mostly agree with CMF.5461

Medi guard will get more healing and the potential for more group support. Also, Mercriful Intervention is usable. It doesn’t raise the skill ceiling much, nor does it give medi guard a clear role in tPvP. It just makes it unnecessarily stronger in hot join.

DB tanking to stay in silver league has nothing to do with rewards and everything to do with fun.

Deny it all you want, but WvW is about population and coverage. When you have a lot less of it than all the opponents you’ll face, WvW is not fun. Ya, you’ll lose the matchup, but even day to day you’re constantly up against 3:1 odds or worse. And it’s not like it’s even close. Even if everyone on the server worked their butts off, they’d still lose by a lot.

A close, competitive matchup, like the ones in tier3 and tier4, are fun. They keep people interested in WvW and GW2 and it keeps them motivated. Being slaughtered for four weeks straight is miserable. If it wasn’t for seasons, moving up for a week wouldn’t be so bad because you’d move back down for another couple weeks. But with the impending season lock, no one in t3 wants to get stuck in that slot in their current state.

So basically, not having fun for two weeks to have good competition for four weeks after that is much better than having good competition for two weeks and not even wanting to go near WvW for the following four.

Bunker and Zerker ckittenually fight to a stalemate. The zerker has to not over-commit. What tends to happen is that help for the bunker arrives before long.

Right now there are a few builds, notably from warrior and elementalist, which can put out decent damage while being very survivable and will win long fights.

Putting high up-time retaliation on everything in PvE to counter one ability is nowhere close to a good solution. Now you have to re-balance everything because different professions are affected to varying degrees by retaliation.

Yes, the boss mechanics do need to be improved. But FGS#4 works against better boss mechanics too. The bosses just have to be next to a wall or other impassible object. Ya, you could add dodges or evades to bosses, but you can’t have bosses spamming those constantly. So players would just have to bait those out and then do what they do now.

It doesn’t seem extremely difficult to address.

You still want to keep spectator mode in hot join because it’s useful for learning (see what beat you, how someone better plays, etc). So the simplest solution is to put a cooldown on joining a team. If you swap to spectator mode, you can’t join any team again for 2 minutes (configurable in custom arenas down to 0 seconds) or the map changes.

Though for technical reasons it may not be able to stop people from leaving the room and rejoining to get on the winning team. But that’s a lot more effort.

No thanks. The time it would take to implement and the number of bugs and balance this issues this would introduce is not worth any added gameplay benefit.

Carighan.6758:

Why would an entire tradeskill be declared meaningless for an entire game mode?

Why not… you know… balance the food instead?

Removing it completely is much easier. That’s the main reason to favor removal over balance. Also, removing food reduces about 170 stat points from power creep in WvW.

Celestial Amulet is fine. It’s the might stacking that’s killing you. If they couldn’t stack all that might so easily, they’d hit like a wet noodle.

The main reason you’re seeing so much might stacking is the removal of the shared cooldown on sigils. Before the April 15 patch, you could get the 3 might stacks OR an extra dodge OR poison on weapon swap OR damage procs. Now you can get whatever you want. Sigil of Battle was usually not the best choice if you could only pick one.

I wouldn’t be opposed. It also reduces power creep from extra stats.

The problem with celestial is that its power and condition damage are too low to make a big impact. Professions that stack a lot of might offset that a bit, but still weak on damage. The amulet system needs more customization.

TwoBit.5903:

Cooldowns are a terrible way of balancing skills as it often promotes a very front-loaded playstyle. An energy mechanism could help mitigate hit and run shenanigans of professions like thieves and D/D eles, and force them to work together professions.

That’s a weak rebuttal. Thieves’ initiative system is very close to the GW1 energy system.