Guild Wars 2

This is yet another incarnation of “I want it because I don’t have it”.

Arathi Basin (AB) in WoW is pretty much the same as conquest in GW2. The scaled down version, Battle of Gilneas is even closer.

Alterac Vally (AV) in WoW is hated by most competitive players and is usually just PvE. It has a lot of similarities with WvW, though you encounter players in WvW far more than in AV.

Warsong Gulch (WSG) in WoW is the quintessential capture the flag (CTF) map. A lot of people like CTF and clamor for it in MMORPGs, but it doesn’t make for healthy competitive play. CTF lends itself to balling up and using a single tanky yet mobile player as a flag carrier. CTF in GW2 would make warrior required. You can counter that by disabling abilities while carrying the flag, but players don’t like not playing their character (which is why vehicles, event weapons, and transformations are often frowned upon).

Other common PvP formats have similar issues, which is why ArenaNet decided on conquest. The GvG of GuildWars1 tends to ball up in one location, making it hard to notice individual action (this is a bit of a moot point given spell effect spam), but it also often leads to stale gameplay. Everyone is in the center and they move back and forth a bit. There’s little variation from game to game.

Martyr (one object in the map that is held by a player for points) has the same problems as CTF, but instead of balling up in two places (two flag carriers), it’s one spot.

If ANet did add these additional formats, then people would complain about them just as much as they complain about not having them.

Eric.1672:

putting no in bold doesnt make your case any stronger. Sure i can see a single 3 second cc coming. but the cold hard fact is i can only roll twice at once, where sometimes i get sat on for like 10 sec with cc’s from a single person.

First, CC doesn’t add up to 10 seconds from a single person unless you’re dumb enough to run into a line of warding over and over. Further, if you dodge/block/blind/evade the CC and not just spam willy nilly, then CC from a single person doesn’t last long at all. Sounds like a “learn to play” problem.

Eric.1672:

Why does everyone hate sky hammer? Im not trolling. I mean there were BGs in wow that I couldn’t stand….but there is a large amount of hate in-game against hammer

A vocal minority full of irrational hatred and blind followers. Skyhammer forces you to care a lot about positioning. People don’t like to adapt; instead, they blame the map.

There are some issues with skyhammer. The breakable glass could be cut down a bit more, specifically those half-panels at A and C. The skyhammer control room is too easy to AoE spam. The areas for points A and C and the control room are a little too small for ranged classes to play effectively.

GW2 sPvP is far from a “massive fail”. GW2 being as popular as Starcraft and LoL within months of release was wishful thinking.

1. They do care. A few things factor into perception though. First, fixing wider issues in the game and getting organized for the “sustain” phase of an MMO took priority for the first ~8 months. And that’s not abnormal for a large MMORPG. Second, their initial ideas for sPvP progression and organized competition didn’t work out the way they had planned. Now that things have settled down, I think they’re working on a good path.

2. This is blatantly wrong and shows you don’t understand balance. When a game is new with new mechanics (active defense), everyone sucks at the game, no matter how good they seem at the time. Players of all skill levels are still learning mechanics, what works, what doesn’t, and that’s constantly evolving. Trying to finely balance in such an environment is difficult and often counter-productive. You can only effectively stop the very broken mechanics. I will agree that not having a PvP-focused balance team last summer was a huge mistake, but that seems to have been corrected. I’d say they’re only about 6 months behind where they could have realistically been on balance.

3. The community in this game is no worse than others and a lot better than some. Posts like this don’t help. The problem with feedback from the community and from top players is that it’s often biased by vocal players about what they lose to. Not necessarily what is wrong. Forum posts also tend toward “make this change” rather than a more open “this class in this scenario seems too good. here’s why”. The former would often end up gutting an entire professions than fixing a problem where a different tweak would be a better remedy.

4. Yet again, uneducated posting. PvP and PvE are different models. To maintain business in PvE, you need content, and lots of it. A lot of the ANet employees are developing PvE content. These are totally different people from those that work on game mechanics, balance, etc. Since PvP doesn’t need much content development, it doesn’t cost as much. People that play sPvP a lot still buy custom arenas, gem shop skins, etc, so they do earn income from PvP.

5. I disagree with the need for a Public Test Realm. The PTR is generally used for bug testing, and not balance. We just need information ahead of time so that we can influence balance. What they did on the Friday webcast was very good. It informs the community about what is being changed and why. And they’ve already received feedback and may undo or tweak some changes as a result (mesmer dodge clones). I would like to see a more comprehensive list of changes about a month before they’re live.

Eric.1672:

There is no diminishing return on CC. it should be blatantly obvious that pvp needs it.

No. Diminishing returns on CC doesn’t solve anything. It just makes the system confusing and annoying and causes certain professions to be favored while creating new problems.

This is a game of active defense. Unlike most other MMOs, you can avoid spells and abilities at your discretion. If you can’t avoid a CC chain, most of that is on you. Where balance needs to come in is between length of the CC, cast time/animation of the CC, damage of the CC, and cooldown on the CC. If you’re going to be stunned for 3 seconds, you should see it coming.

Also, there’s a good chance that Sigil of Energy is going to be nerfed when they un-link sigil cooldowns. That would further reduce dodges. Source: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Lord-Helseth-Opinion-on-the-Ready-up/first#post3512363

Guardian bunkers aren’t really strong from just dodge spam. Other professions can do that too. Guardians are the premier bunkers because they have other things that are unique like a wealth of stability and protection, good condition cleanse, and many of their abilities affect allies.

And keeping the current implementation or removing the split isn’t the only way. They could keep it split and make PvP have a 0.75 coefficient for example.

With the upcoming change to Vigorous Precision (5sec ICD up to 10sec ICD), guardians will dodge a little less. Is the PvP slpit and nerf to Selfless Daring (15pt Honor: heal allies on dodge) going to be re-examined?

Right now it’s healing power * 1.0 in PvE/WvW and healing power * 0.5 in PvP.

It reduces vigor up time by approximately 50%. But remember that you also regain endurance normally – vigor just doubles that rate. So the Vigorous Precision change is not cutting dodges in half – it’s reducing dodges by approximately 25%. This is assuming no other source of endurance gain like Sigil of Energy.

If you previously had 100% uptime on Vigor (looking at a PvE scenario) and never sat at full endurance, you got 12 dodges per minute, not counting the initial two. With the Vigorous Precision change, you get 9 dodges per minute. Is 3 less dodges per minute going to make that big of a difference?

And remember that in PvP, other professions are receiving or have already received similar endurance regeneration nerfs.

Note: Support guardians with low crit chances will see a bit more adverse effect because of higher chances for the ICD and your crits to not align nicely.

nicknamenick.2437:

So where’s the -10% because this is 17,33% less damage… that’s HUGE!!

It’s approximately -10% damage for full zerker builds.

Bear in mind that they’re doing a balance pass on sigils too, so they may tone down the damage on some sigils once you can stack them. Also, I doubt the boost to overall damage will be that much higher with fire + air over fire + force.

OP missed the change to thief Choking Gas – each poison application is now 3 sec (down from 5 sec)

Ascended celestial 2h + exotic celestial armor + ascended celestial amulet, rings, accessories = 48% crit damage. They will have 356 Ferocity with the change.

Ascended berserker 2h + exotic berserker armor + ascended berserker amulet, rings, accessories = 55% crit damage. They will have 565 Ferocity with the change.

Using a 15 Ferocity → 1% crit damage conversion, that yields
Celestial: 24.33% crit damage
Berserker: 37.67 % crit damage

The ratio of celestial to beserker went from 0.87 to 0.65.

*Note: Back was omitted because there is no celestial back item.

WvW will never be balanced, nor was it intended to be. If you want balance, play sPvP where food, power creep, etc don’t exist.

I’m concerned about Celestial too. Hopefully ANet addresses it. My guess would be that they up the value on each stat slightly to compensate.

They were from the livestream earlier today.

Guardian Specific
- Vigorous Precision is now a 10sec ICD (up from 5sec). Similar traits in other classes have or will be getting the same nerf.
- Litany of Wrath will have it’s cast time reduced. They’re experimenting with 0.5 and 0.75 seconds.
- Healing Breeze will have some of its healing front-loaded instead of distributed evenly. The very first tick will self heal 40-50% of the total amount (exact number still being worked out) and the following ticks heal the remainder to self and allies distributed evenly.

General Changes
- Two-handed weapons will now have two sigil slots
- Sigils of different names no longer share cooldowns. So you can use Battle and Energy and both will proc on weapon swap. The exception is that you can only have one type of stacking stats on kill sigil.
- Some on-crit sigils will now be on-hit. No specifics known.
- Rune sets are getting a complete review. The bonuses are being stacked more toward the 4, 5, and 6 piece. Boon and condition duration increases will generally be increased. Weak rune bonuses will be improved.
- Crit damage is being changed to Ferocity. Ferocity will convert to crit damage just like Precision converts to crit chance.
- With the ferocity change, PvE/WvW damage for full zerker builds should decrease by about 10%.

The reason you don’t see that many guardian changes is that guardians are in a pretty good state. They’re great for support, great PvE DPS, and found on most tPvP teams. At the same time, they’re not way too strong at anything. Other professions are in much worse shape and got more attention. Fixing everything in one patch is near impossible, and even then, it would disturb gameplay so much that it might end up breaking something that’s working well.

They were just joking about not wanting to present nerfs. In most game communities, “shoot the messenger” is standard practice. ANet has been super serious before and it’s pretty boring.

Also keep in mind that these are not all the changes. These were the major changes that are mostly finalized. Professions that had glaring balance problems, either being too strong or too weak had more time. There will be a lot of minor changes to improve various skills and traits. And specific to ranger, they stated there is another major change that they couldn’t discuss yet because it’s still in flux.

Orpheal.8263:

Could someone explain here briefly, what that new “Ferocity” Stat exactly does, sorry, couldn’t get early enough into the stream, to hear, what it will do soon.

Think of Ferocity as fractional critical damage or as a “critical damage rating”. Ferocity on all gear will be summed together and be divided by some hidden number to get Critical Damage. Ferocity will work for Crit Damage in the same manner that Precision works for Critical Chance (~21 precision = 1% Critical Chance). If I had to guess, the ratio would be between 12 and 15 ferocity = 1% Critical Damage.

This solves two issues for the developers, compared to using Critical Damage in whole numbers only.:
1. It’s hard to incrementally improve gear with whole number critical damage because it often needs to jump at least one whole number higher.
2. Whole number Crit Damage leads to certain gear being over budget on item stats and others being under budget. If you mix and match gear and stack the over budget items, you get more crit damage than intended.

In addition, jewelry (back, amulet, rings, accessories) is over-budget with critical damage, so when this is converted to Ferocity, you’ll see a net loss in Critical Damage.

Here’s an example. On live, here are some exotic armor stats:

Helm
45 Power
32 Precision
2% Crit Damage (16 stat points per 1% Crit Dmg)

Shoulders
34 Power
24 Precision
2% Crit Damage (12 stat points per 1% Crit Dmg)

Chest
101 Power
72 Precision
5% Crit Damage (14.4 stat points per 1% Crit Dmg)

Total = 9% Crit Damage

With Ferocity, they look like:

Helm
45 Power
32 Precision
32 Ferocity

Shoulders
34 Power
24 Precision
24 Ferocity

Chest
101 Power
72 Precision
72 Ferocity

Total = 128 Ferocity
The scaling factor ANet choices determines how much crit damage this would.
(15 Ferocity → 1% Crit Dmg): 128 Ferocity = 8.53% Crit Damage
(12 Ferocity → 1% Crit Dmg): 128 Ferocity = 10.67% Crit Damage

The catch is Jewelry, which has too much crit damage. Jewelry will lose quite a bit of crit damage.

Ascended Amulet
126 Power
85 Precision
85 Ferocity (formerly 9% Crit Damage)

(15 Ferocity → 1% Crit Dmg): 85 Ferocity = 5.67% Crit Damage
(12 Ferocity → 1% Crit Dmg): 85 Ferocity = 7.08% Crit Damage

Lack of base HP is warranted. Guardians have passive HP regeneration as a base ability, as well as Aegis baseline.

The problem with DPS guardians in tournament sPvP has nothing to do with base HP and everything to do with lack of CC and mobility.

In PvE/WvW, jewelry is way over-budget on critical damage. Maybe they’re just fixing that, which would knock off about half of the critical damage stat on jewelry – a loss of about 20% critical damage if all your jewelry had critical damage.

For Lyssa rune, an alternative suggestion was to have the 6pc convert conditions to boons, but that may make it too weak for general use. Just removing Stability from it would be almost enough.

Overall, I like the changes. But I’m concerned about the changes to endurance recovery. I agree that it’s a little too plentiful, but there are a lot of subtle implications to reducing it. Not only does it affect survivability, it also affects skills that trigger on dodges. Skills or traits may need buffed with other survivability bonuses (longer regeneration or protection, etc) and on-dodge traits may need adjusted or un-nerfed.

In the interviews of the Jan 21 patch, ANet said they’re changing the patch roll-outs a bit. Living story stays at the current pace, but “game mechanics” changes will come out on a much longer cycle. Currently those are set for Jan 21 and the next is March 4.

I expect at least a two week warning that will probably come in a blog post about the phase 2 PvP reward system.

Altruistic Healing has it’s place. It works best in small sPvP and WvW groups for a balanced damage and support build.

In dungeons, ideally you want to max out damage and rely on blocks, blinds, and dodges to live, with scattered small heals. Although AH is great at keeping yourself alive, the trait line is a huge investment for little return that isn’t often required in PvE when CC and high damage is used heavily for trash

Builds for large WvW groups and sPvP bunkers rely more on a mid to high healing power stat fueling regeneration, Selfless Daring, and in WvW water fields and blast finishers. These builds are for CC and group support. Because of the reliance on healing power and the trait selection, the damage is limited.

AH and the Valor trait line give you access to a wealth personal survivability without having to sacrifice too much damage. At the same time, AH caters to boon application, so you aren’t fully disadvantaged by running group support. AH works best with staff to run Empower (each might application procs AH) and shouts. You won’t have amazing burst, but you also won’t fall over when focused.

Vaught.5198:

with distracting strikes, how good is it? i cant see any interrupt with dual sword / longbow.

- shield #4
- mace #3, #5 #F1
- hammer #4, #5, #F1
- rifle #5
- Bull’s Charge, Kick, Stomp

It’s most commonly used with condition damage builds that employ main hand mace and shield (not always in the same combo) or hammer usually with an off-hand sword.

This is what I’ve been toying with in hot join. I’m still tweaking it:
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-so-Fw;0NKVO0e4gLVQ0;9;5JJ-T;128-18;229AL-V45;1CoF2CoF25kx

One big thing to remember is to never finish Flurry unless you have the freedom to be lazy. Break out after the immobilize by moving or using stow weapon. The auto-attack on sword is better than Flurry’s damage and you can move while using it.

I don’t see Sw/Sh + LB working as a condition build. You don’t have torment (off-hand sword) or confusion (Distracting Strikes trait), so removing just the bleed and burning isn’t difficult. If you do want to run it as a condition build, use Sigil of Doom to apply poison. It’s way better than Sigil of Earth due to the healing reduction mechanic.

Elemental Attunement reminds me of the guardian Inspired Virtue minor trait (activating a virtue grants a boon to party members). It’s extremely good, but since it’s only a 5pt minor talent, it doesn’t restrict builds too much. Maybe as an interim, Elemental Attunement could be the 5pt in Arcana and move the other minors around.

Though from playing around with Elementalist, it seems that Arcana is just so good because the other trait lines are just that bad.

For the “OP trait” argument:
Yes, it’s really good and everyone takes it. But that only means it’s too good compared to other trait choices. Mandatory “choices” suck but they don’t make the profession overpowered.

Unless this thread is specifically for dungeon PvE, about 1/3 of the list is wrong in claiming traits, skills, and weapons are useless. For adept and master major traits, that’s not all that bad, since you have a selection. For the rest, many could be good, but their trait lines are brought down by awful minor traits or overshadowed by traits that are far better. And a lot of guardian abilities are for utility and suffer from the “PvE zerker is best” problem. For example:
- Inner Fire is a very good PvP trait. Players use burning a lot more than mobs.
- Searing Flames is good for an adept-level trait. But it’s overshadowed by other choices.
- Radiant Fire is used in sPvP DPS builds mostly for the burning duration increase.
- Valorous Defense is the same cooldown as Virtue of Courage. For a 5pt minor, it’s fine.
- Resolute Healer is used by many bunker guardians in sPvP. They take it over any master level trait in that line.
- Permeating Wrath & Supreme Justice aren’t that bad. Someone did the math on them in the Guardian forums a while back and even in a power build, they’re a decent damage gain (aside from the condition issue in PvE). The problem is that the Virtues trait line is about support, not damage.
- Meditations have all seen play in PvP and WvW (roaming) and are actually very popular right now.
- Mace is great in PvP for DPS (if you’re good at using #3) and defense.
- Torch sees occasional play in sPvP for DPS, though is a bit weak.

“The didn’t lose because of me, I’m awesome. It lost because of <scapegoat>”.

That’s the mentality of the vocal trolls in any team PvP game. When top players do something, the trolls assume that is the only without understanding why or the alternatives. And it completely ignores the fact that a good player on a subpar build will still outperform a bad player using a “meta” build. With limited knowledge and skill and a touch of elitism, they blame anything and anyone but themselves.

This isn’t limited to PvP. In PvE you see groups demanding berserker stats, no rangers, etc. It’s just more prevalant in PvP because you can lose.

It’s impossible to fix the passive/active aspect of Healing Signet without significantly reducing the passive and boosting or changing the active.

Consider that players generally don’t need large healing bursts; the significant healing over time is sufficient when combined with kiting, LoS, and defensive cooldowns. That means the passive heal amount can be directly compared to the heal amount of a casted heal. There is no large buffer needed because it’s a heal over time. But because Healing Signet does have that buffer, it is generally way ahead in terms of total healing during the average combat period. The only time casted heals yield more total HP is when combat ends within seconds of casting them, which is unlikely.

As long as the active is significantly worse than the passive heal amount that is lost, there will never be a reason to use it, as detailed above. The active effect has do something different, or be almost no net loss.

It’s been pointed out that Healing Signet is much weaker to poison compared to a casted heal. I would disagree. Although any poison applied will affect the tick, the poison can be removed and doesn’t affect all ticks. In comparison, a well-timed poison application or interrupt affects all of a casted heal. So again, there’s no reason for Healing Signet to have higher total healing than a casted heal. The reason that it can’t be interrupted and doesn’t take cast time that could be used otherwise is a benefit.

Following that reasoning, I would do the following to healing signet:
Cooldown: 15 seconds.
Passive: 330 HP / second with a 0.05 coefficient.
Active: 4450 HP with a .75 coefficient

That makes the passive heal for 9900 over 30 seconds, a little more than what Healing Surge (30sec CD) heals for at max adrenaline. The active portion I’ve chosen is 90% of the passive healing over the cooldown period. In combination with the lower cooldown, this makes using the active have a penalty, but not completely pointless. The coefficients give the same HPS from +healing as stage3 Healing Surge. And this gives potential interesting mechanics with Signet Mastery on the active, which would actually increase the total healing.

A couple potential counter arguments:
- Yes, Healing Surge does give Adrenaline. But if you’re getting the stage 3 benefit, that bonus is irrelevant. In addition, Healing Signet for the same HP over time can’t be interrupted, and has no pre-requisite to get the full benefit.
- Yes, Healing Signet will lose some effectiveness to poison. Warriors are bound to be affected by it for at least a few ticks. Even if it’s on you for 50% of the time, my numbers still give you 8200 HP over 30 seconds completely passive. And that’s where a boosted active comes into play. You can use that during an interval where you don’t have poison. Again, it’s a trade-off for high healing over time with no prerequisite that can’t be interrupted.
- If this healing amount is too low, then all warrior healing is too low, even after it was buffed a few months ago.

Your suggestion introduces an overly complicated rule set that is different in PvE and PvP. It also will probably make condition damage way too good by allowing multiple instances of duration stacking conditions, specifically burning. Adding more condition slots for existing and new conditions is also a drain on the processing resources.

And I did mean that builds with damage from conditions being far and above the largest source of damage were probably not intended, at least for PvE. A few weapons seem to go against that (necro scepter, engineer pistol, etc), but many more have conditions that supplement the direct damage. And even necro scepter #3 favors a healthy combination of conditions and direct damage.

To address the issue, I would rather do a couple things:
- Increase power scaling on some weapons that scale poorly with power.
- Reduce the number of bleeds that players output while making bleed stronger. Increase the damage of a single bleed by 50% or 100%, but then cut the quantity or duration of the bleeds. The end result is that DPS is about the same, maybe a little higher, but each player puts out less bleeds and they don’t last as long.
- Burning is hard to address because it’s the most powerful damaging condition, but also very prevalent in dungeons and many sources are 1 second applications. But address the bleed issue and power scaling should be “good enough”.

ANet hasn’t announced details yet because they’re probably still figuring out how best to implement the change. That includes determining the rules for when PvE skins can be imported into PvP and vice versa. It also includes how you obtain skins through PvP in the future (do you need ladder rank, etc.).

Unfortunately, PvPers will probably get the short end of the stick, but It’s not as kittenome are making it seem.

For glory, there are still many things to spend it on:
- Buy giant Wintersday gifts, which can be sold on the trading post. ~9s for 100 glory.
- In the previous living story arc, you could buy toxic chests, which had toxic spores and a chance at other items that could be sold.
- Buy Mysterious coffers, which have a chance to contain previously unobtainable items and high rank weapons.
- Create dyes (not the best conversion rate for glory).
- Buy armor sets. I’m pretty sure they’re getting carried over after the conversion.

Vargamonth.2047:

A higher amount of threats, however, would not only make full DPS setups less optimal, but also the game overall harder and more coordination requiring, so high chances are on organized teams (currently running DPS specs for the most part) being the most interested and the largest part of the casual community raging against it even if a zerker meta nerf is achieved.

Definitely agree here. Fights with multiple mobs where CC matters, positioning isn’t as cut-and-dry, and target selection or swapping is important are more interesting, provide different experiences with different group compositions, and can usually be more challenging without adding in too many insta-gib attacks.

But you still need some single mob fights for variety.

What? It’s group content. Group coordination should be a factor in success or failure.

You’ll never fix the condition cap problem for world bosses. It’s best to concentrate on fixing it for dungeons and smaller groups.

But first, what is the intent of condition damage? Was it originally intended to be the overwhelming majority of damage, or was it intended to coexist with direct damage as an alternative to power, precision, etc? The answer determines the fix. Personally, I think the latter was intended. Someone using 3 offensive stats (power, precision, crit dmg) should do more damage than someone using 1 or 2 and the rest defensive stats (rabid or dire), right?

One of the big problems that PvE has is damage is almost always fully avoidable. Dodge the big attack and learn to stay out of circles and you’re home free.

Having the highly telegraphed heavy damage attack is fine. It promotes saving dodges/blocks/etc for the right moment. But it needs to be complemented by enough moderate damage attacks such that no player can avoid them all. When everyone has to take damage over time that will eventually kill them, defensive stats matter. A balanced character won’t kill as a fast as a berserker, but has a higher uptime, which balances out the time to kill.

Mobs could also use more defenses against CC or burst like the protection boon on a cooldown or just plain dodging out of 100blades spam. While these wouldn’t stop full berserker groups from being better, it would reduce the gap between berserkers and balanced characters.

And a comment on the MMO trinity: GW2 got rid of it, but they didn’t change the style of PvE encounters with it. It still plays like it should have a trinity. Almost every single PvE battle is still a group of trash mobs that get AoE’ed down or a boss that’s an HP punching bag with some easy gimmic. What if more content was like the dredge where they have group protection and daze/knockdown (preferably without the endless dredge clown cars)?

Ahlen.7591:

Are we still discussing this? Anyone who thinks that heal signet is OP is ignorant of it’s downsides.

-Inability to counter burst or sudden damage.
-Especially weak to poison (Other heals only require poison to be removed for one second before healing, poison is essentially 100% effective against heal signet)

This combined with Warriors general lack of Blind/Protection (1 blind, 1 protection if heavily traited) makes healing signet really not OP.

And people that don’t think it’s too good are looking at it in a vacuum.

Yes, Healing Signet is not the best against burst, but warriors have other abilities to avoid burst (Shield Stance, Endure Pain, Berserker Stance, greatsword whirlwind, etc) and also have the option of CC’ing their opponent in many builds.

Yes, it’s weak to poison. But not every class has access to poison or a good way to apply it. And not everyone is a condition build, so taking sigil of doom isn’t the best option. Balancing around the assumption that the opponent has a specific boon or condition is bad design. When it does, it cements certain builds of certain classes as being required in a team. You already see that with guardians because of their wealth of group stability.

If warriors are too weak if a specific ability or trait was not used, it doesn’t mean the ability should stay as-is; it’s further evidence that it’s too good. Instead, that specific ability should be toned down so that others can be boosted, allowing for more variety.

While we’re looking past the vacuum, another thing that gets overlooked is the adrenaline gain aspect of Cleansing Ire that shoots warriors to full adrenaline, giving them a constant full benefit of Adrenal Health. Since Cleansing Ire is so common in warrior builds, it’s hard to say if Healing Signet is fully to blame. Without that adrenaline gain from being hit, Adrenal Health wouldn’t be nearly as effective.

I will partly agree with Deimos Tel Arin.7391 that Healing Signet is not way too good, but probably just a little too good. Shaving some of the passive off along with a cooldown reduction or increase to the active heal would help balance it and add skill in deciding when to use it and when to save it.

Obtena.7952:

For me, it makes sense to balance around sPvP because honestly, PVE is easy and no changes to any traits, etc… will change that.

This.

No matter what, PvE will always be min/maxed and certain classes or builds just won’t be as good in certain situations. The content is largely static and the AI is still pretty stupid. PvE and WvW also have more balancing variables with food and weapon buffs and vertical gear scaling (rare vs. exotic vs. ascended).

And hey, PvPers also don’t like it when skills are changed, but they’re more accepting that it’s usually for the greater good.

Until PvE mobs can’t be pushed into a wall and are smart enough to move out of the Fiery Greatsword #4 attack, it’s not even worth trying to balance around PvE.

Runes/Sigils
Ideally everything from PvE, but I’d like to see some PvE-only ones balanced first. Perplexity runes would be a little too good in their current state.

Amulets
Something with toughness as a primary, like the PvE Knight combo. Also, buff the celestial jewel stats a bit, even if it means taking a little crit damage from it.

I’d rather see the amulet split into two rings instead or some other solution that allows for greater stat customization. Right now, It’s hard to get a little extra toughness, which helps survivability a ton when your armor is low. Also, if you want any decent amount of precision, you’re stuck with full glass cannon.

Silver.8023:

@Exedore, I understand what you mean but it added another level of micromanagement that shouldn’t be necessary, especially when other professions don’t have to worry so much about walking in and out of their own fields. Unless you’re taking wide turns in and out of the field, you’d be strafing on the spot anyway to maximise its potential condition removal which is essentially the same as standing in the middle of it, enemy AoE-wise. If you weren’t strafing on the spot, you’d be lucky to get three conditions removed from it anyway.
I still prefer my suggestion for it but each to their own.

Due to goofy mechanics, it often counted enter and exit as separate events and would often drop 2 conditions every time you crossed the edge of the ring.

Your suggestion is good as well. I was just saying the old one was better than the new one. Anything that promotes positional play is good. The new Purging Flames does a terrible job at that because the -20% condition duration effect is pitiful. And I much prefer the short period of constant cleanses to one up-front cleanse. We already have other abilities that have up-front cleansing.

Silver.8023:

I’m glad the enter/exit of Purging Flames got removed because I see that as a bug, it should, however, remove a condition every second for each ally in it. You know, how other professions work. I’m looking at you, Healing Spring, Well of Power and Healing Rain.

I can agree the old one could be considered a bug. But it wasn’t overly powerful and lead to some interesting options. Above all, there was at least a point to it having a duration. Now almost all the effect is up front and you as well ignore the -20% condition duration lasting effect. You’re better off leaving the ring to avoid the condition application than to sit in the ring, and have the condition be applied at 80% effectiveness.

Tamuraki.3851:

Hey guys,
Sorry if it’s mentioned and I haven’t logged in game yet, but does Purging Flames affect yourself as well?

Yes.

Christos de Soufre.3802:

Thanks for the responses so far. Here’s a link to the WIP build:

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7;4NF-40M33G-90;9;6TT9;454A18A1;0UVk6;2CqNYCqNY40kc0-35;3wVqW62zYH4M50kVAs170;4F2CoFYDo;9;9;9;9;7VR-6M

If you swap around stats, you can pick up about 4% crit damage for almost nothing:

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-7;4NF-40M33G-90;9;6TT9;454A18A1;0UVk6;2CqNYCqNYn-Fi0-k7;3wVqW62-ZH4M50kVAs1k;5F2CoFYDo;9;9;9;9;7VR-6B

You can’t get the stats exact, but close enough. And looking at ascended weapon stats is hard without having it in the calculator.

Also, why don’t you use Strength in Numbers instead of Retributive Armor and then swap some toughness on gear to precision? Strength in Numbers gives 150 toughness, whereas even at 2000 toughness, you only get 100 precision from Retributive Armor. Are you assuming you’ll get Strength in Numbers from other group members?

AgentChaos.4932:

^yes that effect is lost. and yes guardians got nerfed hard and people still saying ‘its perfectly fine’

Just tested and confirmed the effect is gone. Purging Flames is now worse than it was before. For the condi duration reduction to be of any use, it needs to be at least 50%. And the spell only lasts 5 seconds.

Please bring the old one back.

Does anyone know if Purging Flames lost the old effect where enter/exit removed a condition? If so, I’d say it’s worse than before.

I’m not sure I like the Purging Flames change. If they removed the condition cleanse on entering/exiting, I’d say it’s worse than before. 20% condition duration reduction is laughable compared to being able to drop all conditions by strafing back and forth.

Hallowed Ground change will be interesting, though I still think the cooldown is a bit too high.

As for warriors, as soon as Healing Signet is reduced to a reasonable value, they’ll flock to the next Flavor of the Month profession.

The celestial amulet is under-budget compared to its PvE equivalents. Each stat on celestial should be about 60% of a secondary stat from a three-stat combo. The amulet is about 52%. It would need an additional +46 to each stat (for a total of +341 each) to bring it up to par using the formulas from PvE.

I want to watch this, but I gave up after the first 15 minutes. The pacing was way too slow. For what I did watch, it kept going in circles about Altruistic Healing, repeating the same three points: it’s okay for solo, scales great with group play, and really caters to staff.

KrisHQ.4719:

Problem is that with GW2, there is basically no difference between spamming your skills and/or using them intelligently.

There most certainly is a substantial difference. It’s not as big as it could or should be, but it’s there.

Here’s a few examples:
- Necro saves putrid mark (staff #4) for until he has a lot of longer duration damaging conditions on himself and positions it to hit only one enemy.
- Guardian saves his heal skill and uses passive healing instead.
- Anyone counting enemy dodges before unloading CC or heavy damage.
- Saving dodges for CC, high damage abilities, or to break an attack chain.
- Thieves that skirmish and re-stealth waiting for their opponents to use up stun breaks, heals, and other defensive cooldowns.
- Saving stability or other cooldowns for difficult stomps or revives.
- Using blind to counter high damage attacks or CC or delay your opponent from using it.

Notice that any CC, burst, or movement skill (or counters to those) can be influenced by proper timing. But there are many weapon skills that are basically auto-attack damage in a different form or with a mostly inconsequential boon or condition.

Merendel.7128:

Well I’ll be happy about this if dragonbrand does not sandbag the next few matches and toss SOS up into the gold league. our (sos) coverage isnt nearly up to par to put up a decent showing vs any of the top 5 in any timeblock outside our oceanic’s primetime.

Not looking too good on that front however. DB shouldnt be doing that poorly vs Mag and EB on reset night.

A lot of Dragonbrand’s WvW-oriented players left the server over the past two weeks. It’s also lost a lot of its SEA coverage since the server’s peak. It’s not an organized effort to tank the server’s rating. Sorry SoS, but it looks like you’re stuck in gold league. I’m wagering that SBI will stall out in 7th or 8th place.

And that’s not really that bad. That will mean almost all of gold league has decent coverage for at least some period outside of NA primetime. And the silver league servers will all be primarily NA coverage. Also, with the league change, you may see some of the top 3 servers de-stack a little to the rank 4-6 servers if the queues are too long.

KrisHQ.4719:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Gw2-PVP-Community-Improvement-Ideas/page/2#post2924517

I’ll agree that the game needs more than numbers changes to add depth to the gameplay. But it can also take a large step forward toward that goal with only numbers changes. It still needs some skills or traits re-designed or moved, but I disagree that re-building much of the established gameplay is required.

Most skills have balanced risk/reward. It’s just moderate risk with moderate reward. What you’re asking for is high risk/high reward. And it’s great to have some of that, but you can also have too much of it. If too many abilities become like Churning Earth, Dragon’s Tooth, etc. then the gameplay becomes slow and dull. Situational abilities that are powerful but only when used at the right time are another tenant of competitive depth.

I don’t find balancing primarily based on watching someone play the game to be the best approach. If you can play the game and if you understand it enough to tell when someone used their skills at the best times or didn’t waste them for little benefit, it’s accomplished depth. The same is true for team coordination. And that leads into the entertainment factor.

Rozbuska.5263:

I hope not Dire make engineers and necros unkillable killing machine.

Condition necros and engineers rely on critical chance for bleeding and burning procs. I wouldn’t really mind it if they used Dire stats over Rabid.

A lot of Adian.8756 said is an over-reaction. Some of the assessments are way off or take a few outliers and apply it as the whole. Numbers changes can address a great deal of issues quickly.

- For the most part, auto-attack damage is fine, and melee does more damage than ranged. There are problem areas like mesmer greatsword auto-attack and AoE damage spam from ranged that do need addressed. What needs fixed is the situational use of skills instead of most players spamming 2-5 and being almost as effective. Area damage skills from ranged should either be delayed, spread over time, or less total damage. Melee is a bit harder to address because of any area attack has to be better than the cone on auto-attack.

- Risk vs Reward is there for a lot of abilities, but needs tweaked a little. Skull Crack is so powerful partly because of a bugged sigil and other influences. Remember that at 1 second less, few people used it. The risk is that it has to connect and it’s only a single target. The ability is adrenline-based so not immediately available on a cooldown. Blame Cleansing Ire for absurd amounts of adrenaline generation. Compare that to say Earthshaker which has a very obvious animation, but stuns an area.

- Agree with the change to certain passive traits, in particular burning. Ideally these should be included with other actions or be of less impact. Passive condition removal isn’t nearly as bad, as most are 1 condition every 10 seconds. You may not get it when you need it, so changing it isn’t as imperative.

- The problem with powerful elites, which ANet explained during development, is that the battles then come down to who has their elite off cooldown. Elites as a concept were designed so that counter-play is possible without using your own elite. The problem is that we mostly got transformation elites that mostly suck. Tornado is actually a good elite as-is, and Plague Form to a lesser extent. The solution to not using passive or transformation elites is to provide good short-duration activated elites like Basilisk Venom as new skills. High-level PvPers much prefer activated abilities.

- Conditions and condition damage are fine for the most part. A handful of builds are making conditions too powerful not because of the condition mechanics or condition damage, but the volume, rate, and variety of their condition application. As designers, ANet needs to make a decision as to whether condition damage alone should be competitive damage, or if conditions should supplement power as an alternative to critical chance and critical damage.

- Endurance regeneration bonuses are a sticky spot. I used to think it was too powerful, but that’s not the case. What’s too good is extra endurance regeneration combined with other defenses like block, evade and CC’ing an enemy. Even with all that extra dodging, people still die a lot, and good players know when to use their dodges. And active avoidance is good compared to passive defense. I would just change Sigil of Energy to grant Vigor on weapon swap instead of instant endurance. That way it won’t provide additional benefit when combined with skills and traits which grant Vigor. Address the rest on a profession level through trait and skill tweaks.

I mostly like the suggestions. I have a few comments and additions:

1. In general, focus on changes that are relatively easy to make, or if they are difficult to make, they have a useful benefit for a lot of players. For example, it’s pretty simple to make an ability act more like another existing ability. Inverting mesmer greatsword #1 damage is a good example of an easy change with great benefit. However, something like the scepter block was over-complicated, at least when there are more prominent issues.

2. For camera mode, they said free mode is hard because like many games, they take short-cuts with terrain and video processing that players can’t normally see. Maybe a middle ground would be a free player camera – basically you control a “ghost” player, maybe with some extra height. It’s already been done in Southsun Survival.

3. Please no clone of WoW’s Alterac Valley. We have WvW for that. Alterac Valley and its younger cousin, Isle of Conquest, were terrible and had similar issues to WvW. Everyone blobs up and goes for the big reward objective. No worthwhile reward for defending or fighting players meant no one did it. In the case of Alterac Valley, most players ignored each other and focused on the PvE to complete the map as fast as possible. There was endless moaning to “let them win” when the fight stagnated because it was no longer good reward per time spent.

4. The reward system needs an overhaul. If GW2 sPvP is going to get anywhere, it needs to grow the playerbase. The easiest way is to add rewards that work outside of sPvP and favor tournaments. Another thread suggested giving ascended crafting materials in tournament chests. You would also want something to drag in players on a recurring basis like “play 5 tournament games in a week and get gold/karma/luck”.

5. You touched on it with mesmer and “needing” to use focus, but in general any profession that aims to be offensive needs mobility – usually swiftness. The best approach for a source (weapon, utility skill, or trait) varies by profession.

6. Personal pet peeve: change the amulet into two rings. Having to put all your eggs in one basket makes some potential builds that exist in PvE/WvW impossible or much weaker in sPvP. The stat rigidity is also cited as a deterrent by casual players. At the same time, the PvP Celestial combo needs boosted to match the proportions in PvE/WvW and change PvP Knight to toughness/power/precision.

The first thing they need to do is facilitate an increase to the general sPvP population. Fixing rewards would be a great start.