Guild Wars 2

• I feel that Chicago Jack’s post is important because it summarises why Thief is outcompeting Mesmer and Elementalist
• At the same time, it is clear that Thief has few other roles to fill. Arenanet’s philosophy of “play how you want” as seemingly fallen to the wayside.
• Certainly, Mesmer and Elementalist can be brought up to compete with Thief, but I feel that this is a dangerous precedent that could lead to power creep. As an Elementalist, I feel that the class is alright as it is, it’s just that trait lines outside of Water need some condition management, some utility CDs could be lower, but overall without Thieves being so dominant in the matchup, Elementalist could have a role. Same for Mesmer.

Now, as for making Stealth a Boon:

• This would change the Thief vs Mesmer matchup significantly. Mesmer has many Boon rips, and Thieves do not frequently run with many boons, so it is very likely that Thief becomes visible if Mesmer can land its rips.

• Making Stealth a Boon would also have a lot of flow-on effects with Boon Hate skills and utilities on other classes. In particular, HGH Engineer with Acidic Elixirs and/or Throw Mine and Well Necromancer.

• Other professions like Elementalist would also have to receive some form of Boon Hate that fits into a roaming DPS build.

• The point is to make interactions of other classes with Stealth a lot more accessible; thus, by making Stealth a Boon, more skills can interact with Stealth without introducing a Hard Counter that inflicts Revealed like Sic’em for Ranger. At the same time, Boons would also have more interaction rather than simply playing around them as many classes have to do so right now.

• Obviously, Thief dependance on Stealth for both survivability and damage should have to be decreased as a result in the face of more direct counterplay against Stealth.

• By making Thieves more visible, backloaded damage and survivability have to be increased while retaining the flavour of Thief’s clutch Blinds and Evades.

• With increased backloaded damage, Thieves are more viable against Bunkers when their initial burst cannot delete a target. This gives them a new, no less vital role.

Chicago Jack.5647:

Thief currently has one role on a team right now: Roamer. As a roamer, you are relegated to certain tasks. In the case of the thief, they have 3 big ones.

1) They are in charge of creating uneven numbers in a fight. As an example, with their burst potential (D/P) they can easily support home node, and the home defender, from being invaded by 2 opponents. They jump on one target, spike him down or sit on him if you’re an S/D thief (props if your home defender brought him down to 50% health), and you can easily force one of the opponents to or close to downed state. Making the fight a lot easier to deal with. The good opponents will realize that something like this is the role of the thief and will be better prepared for it (keeping their eyes peeled while pushing far, and good communication with the team). If a thief can’t land that initial burst (at least for D/P), things have a potential to go downhill real fast, for reasons I will explain later.

2) They are also relegated to guarding other team members from any hard counters they might run into. One example is necro vs engi. Necro will always win against an engie if the necro knows what they are doing. A thief can show up, however, and ruin their day to save the life of the engie. Another example is another thief: i.e. thief vs. thief. One of the best ways of stopping a thief from forcing uneven numbers is to send your own thief at him.

3) They also decap far node quickly. This is the key factor to matches in order to generate a snowballing effect. You can’t just sit on two nodes and hope to win in this game – it’s just not possible. You could get 19 kills in the game and hold two nodes, and the match will still be a pretty close game by maybe 50 to 100 pts. This also can be very risky, however as you don’t want your team to die on mid because of your antics at far node – more so if your journey to far node is impeded by a home defender because you will be wasting your time fighting that thing. Regardless, smart quick decapping (i’m not even talking about full capping here) is critical to establishing a solid lead over the other team.

The biggest drawbacks to thieves are their lack of sustain (less so for S/P or S/D) and lack of being able to actually contest points because of stealth (only for the case of D/P, but S/D and S/P aren’t a class to just sit on a node like warrior). Contrary to popular belief, thieves are pretty terrible in 1v1’ing things. Many matches are lost in soloque because a thief thinks its their role to solo push far all match, only to ether sit on his kitten doing nothing because he is constantly disengaging, or dieing on node trying to contest it. If a thief blows all his utility skills (shadow refuge being the critical one) and you’re still in control of the fight, then you almost guaranteed your win. Thieves have absolutely no sustain (to a lesser extent regarding S/D and S/P). So much so that there are certain matchups that they will, or rather should, not touch without some type of team support (1 other guy will do, most of the time) simply because it’s ether just too risky or you’ll be serving your team better doing something else. So Thieves, as other classes designed for burstyness like mesmers or eles, are not really OP. Thieves are just simply outshining all other burst classes right now as they have the best mobility and a bit better survivability than the other two. Burst damage is pretty much equal across all boards.

As it stands, the only reason you really want to take mesmer is for portal. snip for length But access to portal is the only reason why you would want to bring mesmer.

The reason why mesmer has a harder time is more likely because the overall meta has hit them harder than the thief class. Their build options are pretty limited, if they wish to spec for providing the most for the team, in comparison to thieves probably because they are forced to bring certain skills in order to just survive. For example, you can’t really run anything but Mass Invis on a mesmer because you need lyssa runes and the shortest cooldown (90 secs) is mass invis. Condi nukes arn’t the only problem, they also don’t have as easy of a time dealing with things like warriors or S/D thieves. In short, mesmers have to yell “help me!” more than a thief does.

Eles are just in a terrible spot altogether right now because anything can deal with an ele very easily, though originally you would take them because of the added team support that they offered. AoE boons and heals in their hay-day were very valuable to the team. Now we have spirit rangers who heal for 420 each second.

I’ll be digging through other threads to see if I can find people bringing up consequences of my proposed changes.

MonMalthias.4763:

The problem with Thief is that it’s a little too good against other Glass cannons, hence pushing them out of the meta (Elementalist, Mesmer), whilst being only middling or outright inferior against tougher builds like Condi-bunkers or just Bunkers in general.

• Part, but not _all of the problem can be traced back to Critical Damage. Most GC builds run little to no toughness, so getting hit by a Thief hurts. A lot. You can easily start a fight at 50% HP as a GC against a Thief, and then you’ve got small windows of opportunity to turn the fight around. Against D/P, you have to interrupt/CC the re-Stealth. Against S/D, you have to hit a clutch CC, or wait for when they try to burst, then counter.

• Outside of these windows of vulnerability; there is little opportunity for other Glass Cannons to counter-engage. Stealth remains difficult to counterplay for some classes, laughably easy for others. The solution is to build tanky DPS so you live longer to see more windows. But that leads to the original problem – other glass cannons are out-competed.

The solution is not going to be easy, but it’s going to involve the following:

• Moving some of the utility Thieves get from Stealth into other areas. Condition cleanse, Crit chance, that sort of thing.
• Making Stealth a Boon; thus giving skills with Boon Hate additional utility against Stealth. Mesmers in particular would have their matchups improved markedly by this one change.
  • Most importantly removing Stealth as a Boon should not inflict Revealed. With counterplay must come counter-counterplay – the Thief should be able to re-stealth after hitting Boon Hate. Obviously things like hitting people while Stealthed should still inflict Revealed.

• As for things like Backstab, the whole Stealth Opener thing should be revised to be just that: an Opener. Damage should not be frontloaded into Backstab. Instead, large (I’m talking 5, 10, 15 stacks) of Vulnerability should be inflicted. Snares like Cripple or Immobilise optional. (maybe through Traits)
  • Thief weapon sets should then be rebalanced to put more damage into the other skills. Overall damage output over time should be increased. Thief shouldn’t be a one-shot wonder, but something that hits harder and harder the more you can’t get them off your back.
  • This has the effect of making Thief less effective against other Glass Cannons as the window of counter-engagement has now increased. This also makes Thief more effective against Tanky DPS builds (assuming damage output over time is also increased)

Too many weapon sets rely on only 2-3 out of the 5 possible attacks because too much has been loaded into 1 skill whilst others are left weak because buffing them would make the weapon set OP.

• Underutilised skills should be reworked to provide Thief with more sustain i.e. Life Steal is an underlooked mechanic on Thief, but as a Protection/Toughness ignoring source of damage, Life Steal on Thief can be looked at as a way for Thief to counter bunkers.
• The aim is to enable Thief to stay engaged with an enemy for longer while being less dependant on, but no less assisted by, clutch Blinds/Dodges

TL:DR: The aim should be to:

• Make Thieves less time-starved, or “one shot wonders”. Thieves should be dealing damage, but it should not be all frontloaded from Stealth.
• Make Thieves less dependant on Stealth overall to deal their damage. Thieves should deal their damage just like everyone else – Revealed. They just require the tools to be able to do so like everyone else instead of using Stealth as a crutch.
• Clutch Blinds and Evades should still be an outstanding feature of the class, but must promote a skill floor like being conditional on dodging actual attacks, or actually hitting, or dealing bonus damage to target after target misses attack due to Blind.
• Squishy GCs should have their window of counter-engagement against Thieves extended, whilst Tanky DPS or Bunkers have theirs decreased i.e. through Vulnerability stacking or Toughness ignoring damage i.e. Life Steal.

To begin, let me say that I do not play Thief.
Any suggestions I offer will thus be necessarily vague. I am hoping to attract Thieves tired of being pigeonholed into Berserker’s stats and wanting more diversity in roles other than as a bursty, DPS roamer. At the same time, I would still like to see Thieves in the role, just with other glassy professions, like Elementalist and Mesmer, which are being pushed out of the meta right now because of Thief.

This is a thread pursuant to several other threads on the Balance forum right now, where many have already been created – and more, it seems, are being created by the day:

• Thieves driving away damage dealers
• Oh dang another Stealth thread
• Stealth Backstab no risk high reward
• Mug and CnD suggestions
• Revealed on Blocks
• Stealth Balancing

I would like to think that it is clear by now that Stealth and interactions of other classes with Stealth outside of Thief is a very underdeveloped mechanic. For some classes, Stealth can be easily countered due to AOE spam, autoattack chains, and so on. For others, it is nigh impossible. At the same time, Thief derives much of both its frontloaded damage from Stealth openers and its survivability from Stealth. The end result is that Thief is quite Stealth dependant (or, if S/x, Evade dependant), while being extremely good at shutting down other Glass cannon professions. In the mean time, tanky DPS (Bruiser) or Bunker builds have an extremely easy time against Thief.

The aim of this thread is therefore to brainstorm changes that let professions other than Thief into the DPS roamer role without obsoleting Thief, whilst also increasing Thief’s role in Bunker busting – by increasing backloaded damage, and decreasing frontloaded damage.

• To be succinct, make Stealth a Boon to increase play and counterplay with other classes than Thief.
• Give Thief a new role in Bunker busting
• At the same time, tone down Thief’s capabilities in shutting down Glass cannon roamers so that Thief can coexist with other professions in the same role

Now that the preamble is over, let’s begin. I’ll start with reposting my post from the other thread .

Sarrs.4831:

MonMalthias.4763:

Anyway, my idea of making Stealth a Boon seemed to be well received, but I don’t play a Thief myself, so I’ll make a new thread (amongst a million others calling for nerfs to Stealth) and hopefully there will be some Thieves that are sick of being pigeonholed into Berserker’s amulet and 1 role (DPS Roaming) to fully flesh out some buffs to Thief that would make it more of a bunker buster and less potent against other glass cannons.

One thing that I’d be worried about would be Signet of Inspiration becoming a pseudo-Mass Invis, but that’s really a minor concern. I don’t think SoI is particularly popular in the meta at the moment, anyway.

Well that’s the thing. There can be a lot of unforeseen consequences when making such a fundamental change, so hopefully the thread can further brainstorm the niggles out.

As for Signet of Inspiration, Sensotix did feature a build using SoI that is an interrupt/boon share based build for teamfights using GS/SwSw or GS/Staff. Not sure as to its prevalence in the meta right now, but you can bet that it might become more popular if Stealth could be shared in such a way.

insanemaniac.2456:

MonMalthias.4763:

It’s wierd, because Engineer could be less condispam focused and a lot “fairer” if only Arenanet worked on removing a lot of the RNG from Engineer and made more mechanics leverage off of the Toolbelt. Oh, and increasing the damage coefficients for Kits, or you know, actually make their damage scale with Weapon damage. Engineer mainhand weapons like Rifle should also have a minor buff in weapon coefficients so that Power builds are actually comparable to Condition builds.

eh, im gonna stand behind my opinion that it isnt power thats the issue between power vs condi… pizzas and dire are just OP in wvw and spvp doesnt have good power stat combos (knight/cavalier). i dont think buffing weapon coefficients or skill scaling is the right move. i think nerfing pizza is, and rounding out the stat combos with more of whats available in pve will do a lot for spvp.

but then again, the upcoming crit damage nerf will hit our power builds hard, since all the trinket/celestial crit damage is what really makes bruiser builds viable…

In WvW, the Dire/Perplexity/Sigil of Bursting condi-tank is the gold standard for Engineer with Condition duration food, I believe. In my view, balancing Engineer around the presence of Food/Boosts is completely off base.

I do like the idea of introducing Knights (Toughness/Power/Precision) and Cavalier’s (Toughness/Power/Critical Damage) to sPVP in order to allow Power engineer more options to be viable. Certainly Knights will go a long way, but the fact remains that Engineer gives up a lot of utility to go Power, whilst Condi engineer has the luxury of running off hand Shield, needs only a single reel of Grenades to put a lot of condition pressure on the enemy, and still retains a lot of down state control (With Bomb/Nade, in Bomb Kit, you can Stealth stomp/Blind stomp; and you retain a spare slot for Stunbreak).

If playing, say, Static Discharge, you’re locked to targeted Toolbelt skills like Rifle Turret Surprise Shot, Goggles Analyze, Tool Kit Throw Wrench – and you’ve just given up 2 clutch Blinds, 1 Block, and you can’t safely stomp due to no Stability uptime or Blinds or Stealth. Certainly Static Discharge could be better if it wasn’t bugged for non-targeted skills – it would open up a lot of utilities, but Bomb/Nade condi is so much more forgiving that it is markedly inferior. Missing even 1 skill of your spell reel can mean the difference between deleting someone off the face of the earth or being killed; whereas with Bomb/Nade you have significant redundancy to your Blinds/snares/Condition application, and you only need a few good hits to put good pressure on thanks to Incendiary Powder/Shrapnel.

There is also the issue that Engineer lacks a strong sustained Power DPS option in PVP outside of Grenades. In PVE, Bomb Kit can get a lot of damage down – against a stationary target. This is more an issue with Rifle being a burst damage oriented weapon than anything else. On this, I wouldn’t mind if either Overcharged Shot OR Blunderbuss became a Charge skill, dealing more damage for a longer cooldown, but having a shorter cooldown and less damage if used as a pressure tool. (Probably Blunderbuss)

Sarrs.4831:

Carighan.6758:

The nerf I would see would probably upset a lot of sPvPers:

• Remove most ability to re-stealth mid-combat.
• Increase burst potential and control.

If you’re alone, a thief can and will probably kill you. If he fumbles it and needs to run, he actually needs to leg it. :P

Yeah, it’d upset sPvPers because it’s a bad change.

Really, I don’t think thieves need to focus even more of their potential on the start of the fight- and that’s ultimately what this would do. They’re already (some would argue unhealthily) skewed to the first portion of the engagement, and doubling down on that would be pretty… Let’s be gentle and say “unappreciated”.

That…will probably make Thief even more frontloaded than it is right now, which only further entrenches Thief in the role of the DPS roamer, because with so much frontloaded damage, Glass cannons would have their window of counter-engagement so shortened that they may not even be able to be playable – aside from another Thief.

Anyway, my idea of making Stealth a Boon seemed to be well received, but I don’t play a Thief myself, so I’ll make a new thread (amongst a million others calling for nerfs to Stealth) and hopefully there will be some Thieves that are sick of being pigeonholed into Berserker’s amulet and 1 role (DPS Roaming) to fully flesh out some buffs to Thief that would make it more of a bunker buster and less potent against other glass cannons.

Maugetarr.6823:

insanemaniac.2456:

snip
i think nearly everything here is aimed at personal vendettas and only half of the obvious of issues have found their way into his head, and he isnt even identifying, imo, decent solutions.

Exactly how it seemed to me with the thief thread, especially if you read the ele thread where he referred to thieves as a stupid evasive blindspam class without a unique function or flavor.

Meh, some of the ideas presented can be off base, but I like the intention behind them. In my view, intention for change is good – the finer points of change can always be debated.

At the risk of going off topic, and as a non-Thief player, some of the changes he proposed didn’t address the core issues for Thief which has always been that it is quite time-starved, which makes encounters for it quite binary. A lot of Thief mechanics are also “unfriendly” to counterplay like Stealth which draws a lot of hate as a result. Of course, having faced Thieves before one learns the windows to exploit where Thief is vulnerable, but it is true what Swagg said that Thief does kind of break some of the established mechanics of GW2 combat – Stealth breaking reading animations, Teleports breaking the Range to Melee combat transition, and so on, Initiative breaking the Cast/Aftercast/Cooldown mechanic.

My point is that Thief is a profession and playstyle that attracts a different kind of player. Not different as in trolly, but different as in Resource managing. Initiative is the closest thing to Energy from GW1 present in GW2. My problem with Thief is that the balance trend of Thief has not addressed its one-dimensionality and its time-starvation.

Similarly with Engineer, my problem with that is that Balance has almost entirely revolved around meta-defined, keystone traits and utilities to the exclusion of everything else.

1 year in, Gadgets and Turrets remain largely unaddressed (Except for Rocket Boots, which is awesome now). Bugs plague Turrets, Gadgets aren’t worth sacrificing a Kit slot for the niche utility they bring due to no Trait support, and there are entirely way too many passive Trait procs – many of which do not alter playstyle or make new builds possible.

Heck, the only notable keystone trait introduced in recent memory was Modified Ammunition – and it’s a weaker version of Necromancer’s 25 point minor Target the Weak considering it requires a Major slot.

It’s wierd, because Engineer could be less condispam focused and a lot “fairer” if only Arenanet worked on removing a lot of the RNG from Engineer and made more mechanics leverage off of the Toolbelt. Oh, and increasing the damage coefficients for Kits, or you know, actually make their damage scale with Weapon damage. Engineer mainhand weapons like Rifle should also have a minor buff in weapon coefficients so that Power builds are actually comparable to Condition builds.

Also, speaking of Toolbelts, Static Discharge is still bugged on non-targeted skills. Many Toolbelts also remain poorly balanced for their cooldown, like the Turret toolbelts and Gadget toolbelts and provide little more than extra damage instead of useful utility.

Moving on to Pistol skills.

Swagg.9236:

Pistol main-hand skills
[Explosive Shot] (1)

• Damage increased from 118 (0.35) to 118 (0.4).
• Cast-time increased from ½ second to ¾ second.
• After-cast adjusted from (current?) to 0.20 second.

• Pistol 1 was already nerfed into the ground after Public Beta Weekend 2 when the Hair Trigger – Rifled Barrels – Coated Bullets build was used in conjunction with Fast Acting Elixirs – Cleaning Formula 409 – HGH to make a relatively mindless autoattack based build that did good damage with the double Pistol 1 explosion on Piercing.
  • Increasing the cast time from 0.5 seconds to 0.75 seconds when the actual cast time is closer to 0.8 seconds at present is an un-necessary nerf. Aftercast is around 0.4 seconds, FYI.
  • Total casting time at present is 0.8. Your changes would raise total casting time to 0.95
  • Overall this change does little to alter Explosive Shot’s mediocrity considering at 18.75% nerf to overall casting speed in return for a mere 5% buff in direct damage.

• Personally, I’m in favour of removing Pistol 1’s Bleed stacks in return for lowering the 0.4 aftercast to 0.25; then allowing Pistol 1 to leverage off of Explosion based traits like Shrapnel, Steel Packed Powder and Explosive Powder. This would allow Engineer to have a good sustained DPS weapon without having to resort to Grenades.
  • Of course, Coated Bullets would then have to be nerfed to Pierce only 1 target given that Explosive Shot already double-procs the damage. However, at such a low coefficient of 0.35, even stacking Critical Damage will not lead to runaway numbers – perhaps closer to a Grenade 1 double hit.

Swagg.9236:

[Poison Dart Volley] (2) – NAME CHANGED TO – [Poison Dart Bomb] (2)
snip

[Detonate Poison Dart Bomb] (2-2)

• Cast-time: 1 second
• Detonate your poison dart bomb in midair, raining down poisonous shrapnel onto the area below it.
  snip

I actually like this change as it removes the RNG from Dart Volley. It’s also extremely nice to have a Poison field given the meta we’re in with all those pesky Healing Signet Warriors running around.

• Overall one of the bright stars of your proposals – although I have my doubts as to the minimum range mechanic.
  • Increase the cast/aftercast total to 0.8-1.0 seconds and you won’t need a minimum range.
  • Either that, or reduce the radius to 150 units.
  • Minimum range really makes any skill or weapon extremely clunky. Look to Ranger Longbow for a case study. It doesn’t work in the context of GW2 and it hasn’t worked out for many other MMOs either.

Swagg.9236:

Pistol off-hand skills
[Blowtorch] (4)

• FUNCTIONALITY CHANGED
• Cast-time: 2¼ seconds
• Recharge: 15 seconds
• Channel a cone of flames from your pistol. The final burst of flame from this attack burns foes and deals more damage the closer you are to your targets.
• First 3 hits damage (3x): 495 (0.5)
• Final burst at 200-600 range: Damage: 165 (0.5); Burning: 2 seconds
• Final burst at 0-200 range: Damage: 510 (0.9); Burning: 5 seconds
• Range: 600
  • Hits up to 5 foes.
  • This skill uses an orange-colored Guardian [Cleansing Flame] cone.

I appreciate your intentions of making Burn application from Blowtorch “fairer” in the context of well cued combat. However, some of your proposal does require refinement.

• A cast time of 2.25 seconds has been a demonstrable failure in the context of mobile GW2 combat. Look to Flamethrower 1 Flame Jet as a case study. There are multiple threads throughout the Engineer forum history that bemoan its inaccuracy, and you wish to bring that over to offhand pistol, a weapon that is already outcompeted by offhand Shield?
  • Make Blowtorch’s channel be 1.5 seconds instead to apply its full effect. 3 pulses every 0.5 seconds is more than well cued enough, and will force a dodge, guaranteed.

• Making the Burn application occur only on the last pulse has again, been demonstrated to be a failure. Again, on Flamethrower 1’s Flame Jet. Missing 1 pulse already makes the Burning pulse miss for Flame Jet, so maximum damage output is hardly guaranteed except against immobile objects.
  • Instead, make Burning pulse 3 times throughout the channel, applying 1 second of Burning from range 300-600, and 2 seconds of Burning from range 0-300.

Flattening the skill on a relatively long channel is necessary if you don’t want it to be considered worthless. Pistol offhand is already severely outclassed given Shield offhand’s sheer utility – a Blast Finisher and Push (Projectile Reflection as well) as well as a defensive Stun or 100% Projectile Finisher.

Swagg.9236:

[Freeze Grenade]

• FUNCTIONALITY CHANGED
• Cast-time: 1 second (channel)
• Recharge: 25 seconds
• Place freeze grenades in your hand to throw. The longer you charge this skill, the more grenades that you throw upon release.
• ½-second channel: 1 grenade
• Full channel: 2 grenades
• Damage per grenade: 163 (0.5)
• Grenade explosion radius: 240
• Chill per grenade: 2 seconds
• Range: 1200
• Minimum range: 100
  • Equipping the Grenadier trait changes the skill into a 1¼-second channel skill with a third channel tier that throws 3 grenades.

• The charge mechanic is un-necessary as I have mentioned for the other Grenade skills if the spread is inverted.
• If you want to increase the skill floor of the skill, simply reduce the explosion radius from 240 to 180. This alone will make aiming Freeze Grenade an actual challenge. A cooldown increase or minimum range is not the way to go.

Swagg.9236:

[Poison Grenade]

• FUNCTIONALITY CHANGED
• Cast-time: 1 second (channel)
• Recharge: 25 seconds
• Place poison grenades in your hand to throw later. These grenades leave a poisonous cloud behind when they explode.. The longer you charge this skill, the more grenades that you throw upon release.
• ½-second channel: 1 grenade
• Full channel: 2 grenades
• Damage per grenade: 65 (0.2)
• Grenade explosion radius: 150
• Poison per grenade: 2 seconds
• Cloud duration: 4 seconds
• Cloud pulse: 1 second
• Cloud poison per pulse: 3 seconds
• Poison cloud radius: 150
• Combo field: Poison
• Range: 1200
• Minimum range: 100
  • Equipping the Grenadier trait changes the skill into a 1¼-second channel skill with a third channel tier that throws 3 grenades.

• With the upcoming proposed change to reduce the Poison application per pulse from 5 seconds to 3 seconds, this change is un-necessary. Implementing Minimum range or Charge skill mechanics should not be required to make Poison Grenade balanced.
  • As an Engineer yourself, you should have recognised that the application per pulse nerf from 5 seconds to 3 seconds was a bandaid fix that came about as a result of Poison Grenade shotgunning in melee.
  • Inverting the spread such that at melee range there is maximum random spread will ensure that shotgunning will never again exist.

I’d just like to touch on some of your proposed changes to Grenade Kit.

• Overall I can see the intent behind your changes, however, I feel that the majority of them cut into the Engineer’s capability at mid-range.
• Many of these changes are un-necessary. The only thing required to increase the skill floor of Grenade Kit is to alter the spread by inverting the formula used to calculate the random distribution:
  • At close range (0-400), Grenades have maximum random spread. This makes fighting in melee with Grenade kit difficult.
  • At mid-range (400-800), Grenades have moderate random spread. This allows Engineer to have enough spread to maximise possibility of hits, whilst still having close enough spacing to enable overlapping Grenade hits.
  • At long range (800-1200), Grenades have minimum random spread. This makes leading your target and prediction extremely important as you can no longer barrage a point and be sure of multiple hits; whilst making any hit extremely deadly. This also has the effect of minimising the impact Grenade Kit has on a point in PvP when freecasting at long range.

• Grenadier as the GM trait does not require a Charge skill mechanic. What is needed instead is for Grenades to have 3 grenades thrown as baseline with damage re-distributed such that overall damage is 25% higher than at present. Grenadier would then increase damage by 25% (an extremely handsome amount) to current Grenadier values – for no overall change to maximum values. Range would increase from 1200 to 1400 instead of to 1500 as it is right now. People will feel any change in maximum range, and 100 units is a not insignificant nerf, as it makes several plays on certain PVP maps like Grenading the Trebuchet on Khylo quite difficult.
  • This change would make Grenadier less necessary for Grenade Kit to function properly whilst being no less important. Grenadier would then be favoured more for Power builds; whilst Condition builds can be risker and sacrifice range without impeding Condition application.

Swagg.9236:

Grenade Kit skills
[Grenade]
snip

• An autoattack is un-necessary at present. A change like this would turn the Grenade kit from a sustained damage weapon kit that stacks Vulnerability from Steel Packed Powder into something that is only useful for spreading Conditions at range. Engineer is heavily condition based already – this change would be an un-necessary step further down that path. If anything, the only change necessary is to put a 1 second cooldown on the 2-3 grenades thrown, then increase the damage accordingly.
  • It should be noted that Cast + Aftercast on Grenade is approximately 1 second total. At present, Grenade deals 107 base with a 0.33 Coefficient; rising to a maximum possible of 1.00 coefficient if all 3 Grenades hit with Grenadier GM trait. Increasing the cast time to 1 second would introduce even more frames and again – this would be an overall nerf to Grenade Kit’s potential direct damage which is low enough as it is.
  • If you still want to nerf Grenade 1, you can increase the Aftercast frames such that total casting time is 1.5-2 seconds. This must, however, come with a buff to direct damage from 50-100% to keep overall DPS at its current level. Nerfing direct damage Grenades will turn it more and more into Necromancer Staff which is an unnecessary homogenisation.

Swagg.9236:

[Shrapnel Grenade]
snip

Again, the charge skill is un-necessary for this. Simply altering the spread as I detailed above will already force Engineers into 400-800 range. If anything, the duration of the Bleed stacks should be decreased and direct damage increased to compensate. Decreasing Bleed duration from 12 seconds to 6 seconds whilst increasing the coefficient will improve Engineer’s sustained direct damage and simultaneously halve the Bleed stacking capability. Engineer uses Bleeding largely as a cover condition for Burning in condition builds anyway – this will lower condi Engineer’s output and boost Power engineer’s sustained DPS.

Swagg.9236:

[Flash Grenade]

• FUNCTIONALITY CHANGED
  snip

Changes to Flash Grenade are un-necessary. It is an extremely well-cued skill and with travel time, it cannot be used as a clutch Blind against professions with Teleports like Thief. This is especially if the spread is inverted as I detailed above.

One would hope that Arenanet would have realised by now that actually, cutting Arcana doesn’t shift points. In fact the best response they received was when they enacted a reduction in the need for Arcana overall – reducing the CDR each point of Arcana provided whilst lowering the base CD of Attunements.

Right now Elementalist needs 20+ points in Arcana even still. Shifting Elemental Attunement to Master ensured that.

One could even make a case for shifting Elemental Attunement into Arcane Fury, then making Boons gained being shared to Allies a Master level trait. It would reduce Elementalist reliance on Arcana even more. 5 Points in Arcana? Why not? The Protection uptime and the Fury is all that is required.

Of course, the only other way to shift Elementalist away from Arcana is to make Stone Flesh provide Protection upon attuning to Earth instead of the 120 Toughness at cLvl 80.

Overall the issue remains that Elementalist remains quite dependant upon Boons to survive.

This is a problem that can only be tackled by making defensive conditions – Blind, Weakness – more available to Elementalist through traits and/or increasing the availability of Elementalist CC by reducing keystone cooldowns such as Updraft, Earthquake, Gust, Shockwave, Comet and Gale – both of which were possibilities I discussed in my prior post.

Past that would be buffs to healing. 20-40% buffs should be considered in a vacuum if absolutely nothing else is changed. In the event of changes that reduce Elementalist reliance on boons, some of the buffs to heals should not be implemented.

• Water Blast should also heal the Elementalist, OR become Ground Targeted
• Ice Spike should become a Blast Finisher
• Geyser and/or Healing Rain have their Water Field durations increased or their cooldown decreased
• Water Trident does not receive the proposed 3 seconds of Regeneration and instead has its base heal improved by 40% from 1448 to 2027 and keeping its 1.0 coefficient to Healing Power
• Cone of Cold receives a similar 40% buff to healing from 740 to 1036 if each tick hits the target. An increase of 20% from 740 to 888 without hitting a foe should also be considered, but the important thing is that you heal for more if you hit something.
• Cleansing Wave receives a 20% buff from 1302 to 1562 while keeping the 1.0 Coefficient.

The reality is that underneath the Boons, Elementalist survival is in its heals. There’s not that many Evade frames (Burning Speed should not receive Evade frames because down that path the Thief lies); skills need to be chained to have appreciable effectiveness, and Elementalist sustained DPS counterpressure is severely curtailed by ineffectual autoattacks outside of Air.

Weakness application is rare – which is good, because Weakness is a “junk” covering condition in many builds, yet there are a dearth of skills and traits that leverage Weakness unlike the Earth Elementalist of GW1 . I’m still waiting for Stoning to be replaced by Glowstone as an Autoattack, and for Stoning to actually knock down Weakened foes as it did in GW1.

Blinds – again, for Elementalist, they are a clutch tool – yet cooldown on them outside of Scepter can be punishing. Giving utility for Blinds through traits should be the next thing explored. Blind on Interrupt, or making Interrupts inflict Blind, or making Vulnerability proc when a Blinded foe misses a skill should be enough to make a CC/Shutdown oriented build viable when coupled to Earth – while increasing Elementalist survivability by enabling kiting and shutting down the opponent. The tools for Air Magic in GW2 are almost universally revolving around DPS – yet Air Magic in GW1 provided a vast breadth of Interrupts and other shutdown utility that is conspicuously absent.

Immobilise stacking pretty much negated long Stability durations, which is probably (I’m conjecturing here) why Arenanet implemented it in the first place as a way to keep Warrior in check.

Unfortunately they neglected to take into account the fact that many classes do not in fact have condition cleanse even approaching warrior with Cleansing Ire at 3 Conditions potentially every 7.5-10 seconds. So now we’re stuck with Immobilise stacking to 3 and durations in the double digits of seconds.

I can’t take the March patch seriously until they readdress this. If coding resources are being expended on fixing longstanding bugs, someone, somewhere should be tweaking that entry in the database for Immobilise maximum stacks from 3 to 1.

P Fun Daddy.1208:

Mbelch.9028:

snip

snip

If there is one thing missing from this overhaul it is that there is barely any mention of Elementalist Traits. Weapon skills area already pretty well designed for Elementalist – all that remains is the execution of them supported by traits.

Historically the most “optimal” way to play Elementalist is to “dance” through all Attunements as each individual attunement was not a complete enough kit. For maximum damage and utility, the skills are balanced such that all of them should be used.

This would be fine, if not for the fact that Attunement dancing is the only optimal way to play Elementalist.

In addition, Elementalist has historically been built quite defensively. 30 points in Arcana and Water were the “best” way to put one’s points, as they provided both defensive and offensive utility through Boons and Condition cleansing (Elementalist’s low Vitality means Conditions hurt it a lot more than many other classes)

Changes to Elementalist traits should follow the following:

• Water and Arcana traits should not be further nerfed. After all the nerfs, one would think that Elementalists would shift their points elsewhere – yet many still do not. This can only be indicative of one thing: the other Trait lines cannot at present provide the same defensive utility.
• Fire traits should receive defensive counterpressure – Cleansing while Burning enemies, for example. Gaining Blinds in Fire Combo Fields. Making Blast Finishers have additional utility like condition cleansing, or giving off Fire Aura.
• Air traits should receive Interrupts and bonus effects that proc off interrupts instead of being always about all damage, all the time. Vulnerability on interrupt or knockdown, Dazing on Blinds or Weakened foes, these are things that Air should reward a CC focus on Elementalist.
• Earth Traits should provide CC and counter-CC pressure. Being able to cleanse snares on Earth attunement, reflecting projectiles with walls, and so on, or allowing Weakness to be comboed into Knockdowns.
• Some of the above utility should be folded into the Alacrity traits to encourage specialisation; although care should be taken to put multiple traits i.e. those concerning Blast finishers in the same attunement – into the same Tier to force choices.
• The 15 point traits for Fire and Earth are really bad. Some utility should be worked into those also.

After this, the following Arcana traits should be moved and/or reworked:

• Make Lingering Elements receive the Elemental Attunement Boon functionality on top of the current Lingering Elements functionality (Soothing Mist, Zephyr’s Speed, Flame Barrier, Stone Flesh). However, make boons gained for the Elementalist only. For Lingering Elements, the 5 point Adept Minors are the only bonuses that it functions with and that is a little too weak.
• Elemental Attunement should then be reworked to: Boons you gain are shared to allies within 240 radius.
  • The point of this change is to free up a third slot in Arcana. We all know that Elemental Attunement, Evasive Arcana and Renewing Stamina are pretty much locked in at this point, and further nerfs will not increase build diversity because the other Arcana traits are simply not good enough.

• Blasting Staff: Make the Radius increase 30 units. Increase baseline Staff skills by 30 units of Radius.
  • No-one takes Staff without Blasting Staff. It’s unthinkable at present. You do not create build diversity by making traits _mandatory for acceptable performance.

• Arcane Precision is the most uninspired RNG proc trait and amongst the weakest at 10% of Critical Hits. (Except for Air, the Weakness is nice) Presuming a Berserker’s Amulet (PvP) and 30 points in Air magic – 10% of 49% crit chance (10% of 69% crit with Fury) is practically negligible.
  • The whole crit-proc mechanic should be scrapped and instead be made: Your next attack after swapping to an Attunement inflicts a condition associated with that Attunement. The duration and/or Intensity of Conditions applied should then be extended

• Elemental Surge should instead have its effects made baseline on the Arcane Skills. There is only 1 god in Grandmaster Arcana and it is Evasive Arcana.
  • The freed slot should then be redesigned to make a real competitor to Evasive Arcana’s sheer utility. Perhaps by making every Utility cast proc a Blast Finisher at the Elementalist’s position.

Marsuew.8216:

Maybe we can change AR to a stronger EG-related trait, like Juggernaut to FT, and for example:
1. Clean 2 condition every 10 secs while you equip EG, you also can swap to EG while you need clean conditions.
2. Use Super Elixir automatically while you suffer from 5 stacks bleeding, burning, confusion, or torment, 20 secs cooldown. It’s a healing circle, so you need to force engi leave the circle to counter. It matches the concept that engineers are good in take control of an area.
3. Use Toss Elixir R automatically you are downed, 60 secs cooldown, and you can clean a condition every 3 secs while standing in a light field. This trait is similar to Circle of Life(ranger), since rally also clean conditions. And with this trait, you can use EG to keep clean conditions, and live longer in a team fight with teammates’ support. (Or die easily from AoE spam when you try to stay in a light field.)
4. Fumigate affects you as well now.

The class already has way too many percentage HP and crit-proc based RNG effects. But making AR Elixir Gun specific merely makes Engineer want to run EG at the cost of other builds.

Any change to AR needs to be:

• Relatively build agnostic
• (Hopefully) promoting a skill floor
• Strong for its position – Automated Response is, after all, a Grandmaster trait
• Removing the problem at the source – that is, Condition Immunity

Your proposals merely make AR the next Grenadier for Engineer; whilst removing the potential for a strong counter-condition trait that works for more builds.

As for Automated Reponse being tied to Toolbelt skills and Surprise Shot interaction – that is what ICDs are there for. Even so, any ICD over 10 seconds will be unacceptable for AR as it would then make AR unacceptably weak for a Grandmaster trait. Transmute being left at 15 seconds would be fine. 1 converted condition every 15 seconds using cooldowns is hardly overpowering – it may even be too weak – as you are casting and using cooldowns. But going off on a tangent to turn AR into the Grenadier equivalent for Elixir Gun isn’t going to make the trait Good, but not Overpowered.

Swagg.9236:

Scepter main-hand skills
snip

[Ice Shards] (Water 1) – Name changed to: [Ice Spear] (Water 1)

• FUNCTIONALITY CHANGED
• Cast-time: ¾ second
• Launch a fast-moving spear of ice that pierces foes.
• Damage: 204 (0.55)
• Combo Finisher: Physical Projectile (20% chance)
• Range: 900
  • Piercing projectile.
  • This skill shares its projectile speed, behaviour and pathing with that of Engineer [Hip Shot].
  • After-cast adjusted to 0.35 second.

[Shatterstone] (Water 2-1)

• FUNCTIONALITY CHANGED
• Cast-time: ¾ second
• Recharge: 2 seconds
• Conjure a shatterstone at the target area that deals damage as it grows. After 2 seconds, the shatterstone explodes.
• Growth damage (2x): 408 (0.55)
• Explosion damage: 314 (1.0)
• Explosion vulnerability (5): 10 seconds
• Explosion torment (3): 5 seconds
• Radius: 180
• Range: 900
  • The first two bursts of damage occur at each “burst growth” animation of the Shatterstone.
  • This skill now chains into another skill upon cast-completion: [Icy Shackles].

snip

[Hurl] (Earth 2-2)

• Each stone now inflicts 1 second of crippled.

Just going through the Scepter changes again; noticed that the Ice Shards Coefficient has not been changed despite 3 projectiles being reduced to 1. If kept at 0.55, this would be a 3-fold nerf to Scepter Water 1’s autoattack and would indirectly discourage staying in Water for any longer than necessary – even more so than right now. Your Shatterstone changes may not even be enough.

I’ve also mentioned before the dangers of putting multiple conditions on a single weapon skill. For Shatterstone, you’ve made its recharge 2 seconds yet made it inflict 2 conditions that stack in Intensity. Yes, Condition Elementalist is a joke build right now, but this would be the Dhuumfire equivalent skill for Elementalist with all the negative repercussions it brings. 1 Signet of Earth and/or Glyph of Elemental Power coupled with Torment on Shatterstone would be the equivalent of Necromancer’s Signet of Spite.

Keep it simple – make Shatterstone first pulse inflict 2 stacks of Vulnerability, second pulse 1 second Chill, and if after that the opponent still has yet to move out of it – have it inflict the full 3 extra stacks of Vulnerability for maximum 5 stacks.

Remove Torment and – if you must add Torment, put it on Rock Barrier → Hurl over Cripple to keep Fire and Earth the thematic Attunements for Condition application, Water and Air for snares and CC. As it was in GW1, so it should be.

Also, no mention of Phoenix despite its overloaded utility and role in S/x Fresh air burst builds for the triple hit?

Swagg.9236:

FUNCTIONALITY CHANGE TO STEALTH FOR ALL CLASSES

• If a player attacks while in stealth, but “misses” an attack due to being out of range, blinded, blocked, evaded, obstructed, or if they struck an invulnerable target, that player gains the revealed debuff for 4 seconds.

THIEF BASE HP

• Thief base hp at level 80 increased from 10,805 to 15,082.
• The Thief’s hp now scales identically to Engineer, Ranger and Mesmer hp levels.

NEW CONDITION UNIQUE TO THE THIEF – STAGGERED

• Staggered foes cannot gain protection or stability. Staggering a foe removes up to 2 stacks of Defiant.
• Staggered does not stack in duration nor in intensity. If a staggered foe were to be staggered again, the second instance of staggered would simply overwrite the first instance.

Coming back to this thread, I’d just like to touch on your proposal to up Thief base HP and the new condition, Staggered.

Historically, survivability has never been tied to the size of one’s HP pool in GW2. Berzerker’s stats and Condition damage scaling have ensured that Toughness past a certain breakpoint is wasted stats, and that Vitality similarly has diminishing returns with respect to taking Burst damage because you can’t heal it back up afterward without sacrificing even more stats.

As a case study, Warrior has the highest HP pool and Armour in the game, yet prior to the Healing Signet, Cleansing Ire changes, Warrior was considered too fragile because it had very few Evade frames, little Boon based survivability (Protection at 33% damage reduction far outcompetes any amount of Toughness in a build), and could generally be snared and kited to death. Before that there was the Quickness burst meta because no-one knew what they were doing and happily ate 100blades to the face because that was “risk vs reward”. Lo and behold, you buff Warrior’s cleansing capability through the roof and augment Warrior’s sizable Effective HP (EHP) with Healing Signet and CC uptime inherent to the weapon sets, and you get a monster.

Similarly, Elementalist had the lowest HP pool and Armour in the game, yet the “roaming bunker DPS” was a thing before the sweeping nerfs. Extremely low EHP was offset by overwhelming healing and cleansing, while Protection uptime allowed Elementalist to survive damage that would otherwise be impossible with such an EHP level. Might stacks from Combo Fields and Sigil of Battle allowed highly defensive builds to deal damage.

These two examples alone should demonstrate that simply increasing Base HP does absolutely nothing except making a marginal difference in TTK – for the Thief, not the defending class.

Moving on to Staggered

• I see your intentions of making Staggered deny Protection and Stability as a way for Thieves to counter Bunker classes, yet your changes do not simply _make Thief deal “armour piercing” damage – i.e. through Protection and Toughness – or be able to CC enemy professions any better when Stability is denied.

Would it not be better instead to rework your Staggering skills to instead remove Protection and/or Stability instead of introducing yet another condition to the game?

• “Junk” covering conditions are already rife, and I see in your suggestions the potential for a Stagger-inflicting, condi-spam Thief – which isn’t a bad thing, but it does reinforce the “condispam” meta.
• Life Steal is an “Armour Piercing” damage type that ignores Protection and/or Toughness – yet Skelk Venom is essentially ignored. Why not incorporate Life Steal into some Thief attacks to make Thief stronger against Bunker type classes whilst simultaneously giving Thief the sustain to stay in a longer fight? Let’s ignore for a second the thematic breaks of giving Thief Lifesteal over Necromancers. Leeching Venoms seems to be a good place to put it here, yet I see that you’ve made the Coefficients extremely low to emphasise the DPS/CC side of the Venoms over their potential to “bunker bust”
• As a last point, have you considered giving Thieves Boon rip (not Boon steal) to counter Bunkers? Mesmers were the “bunker busters” of yore before the meta moved on thanks to extensive Boon removal making Boon based Bunkers like Guardian very vulnerable. Boon ripping skills that strip away a Bunker’s defenses over time along with Poison uptime should make Thief more effective against Bunkers, whilst the short encounter times in duels between other Glass Cannons makes such things significantly less useful.

RaZaC.1963:

Lupanic.6502:

AR should give us the possiblity to remove contions with F1-F4 toolbelt skills. This would open the door for turret and gadget builds. Nades/bombs does benefit as well but the toolbelt skills have long cooldown so this would not be overpowered but fair.

Good point, that would indeed greatly increase build variety within the class.

The more I think about it, the more I think Transmute should be reworked from:

• Incoming Conditions have a 100% chance to be converted to Boons (Cooldown 15 seconds)
  To:
• Every time you use a Toolbelt Skill, convert 1 Condition to a Boon (No cooldown, or 10 seconds maximum)

At 15 points in Alchemy, it is perfectly placed to not restrict build variety, requires active play, and is build agnostic; meaning that it could open up new Engineer builds that previously did not have sufficient Condition clear. It would give Engineers more control over which Condition is removed whilst making Engineer more legible to play against because there’s no hidden Trait that randomly cleanses something in the middle of a duel.

The problem still remains as to what to do with Automated Response, however. Personally, I’m favouring the “Transfer a condition to a foe on next attack after using Toolbelt Skill”, but in combination with Transmute, it could be too much condition clear and turn Engineers into the next Cleansing Ire / Healing Signet Warrior – a counter to conditions in all but name. Certainly it would make the Condition Necromancer vs Engineer matchup a lot more lopsided towards the Engineer.

What are everyone’s thoughts?

Deniara Devious.3948:

The decap engi is made for very specific purpose, like its name implies. It has very low damage. The decap engi build would not make any sense in pve or WvWvW and I doubt it will be that overpowered in top tournament play as well. So I really hope Arenanet doesn’t (once again) nerf engineers in all game modes, just based on such very niche type of build. Similarly the planned nerf for net turret doesn’t make any sense whatsoever outside spvp/tpvp. Since when was the net turret overpowered in WvWvW or pve?! The turret usually gets destroyed less than a second and hits the wrong target.

• Net Turret is being nerfed due to its presence in Supply Crate and its role in Immobilise stacking. That’s the reason Grouch gave, but I, and I’d like to think most of the Engineer community agree that it’s the wrong idea. If the Immobilise duration of Net turret in Supply Crate must be nerfed, the Net Turret in Supply crate should be forked from the Utility Supply Crate instead of doing a blanket nerf.

• This is all off topic though, as I have yet to see a decap Engineer run Net Turret.

Deniara Devious.3948:

The healing numbers Razac mentioned were calculated with about 1750 in healing power, which is quite a lot indeed. A bunker guardian with similar amount of healing power and the right build would heal more and have better access for condition cleansing and stability + very good access to protection. Of course the guardian won’t be as efficient in decapping though due not having that many knocking skills, but killing the guardian quickly in 1 vs 1 would also be difficult.

• The keystone skills of any Bunker build are 2 things: Overwhelming survivability (through Regeneration/Healing/Boons/Endurance Regeneration/Blocks) coupled with enough CC to keep a point Neutral or capping slowly when Knocks are landed.

• One way I could foresee Arenanet nerfing decap Engineer is by nerfing Overcharged Shot. A 300 range Launch with zero cast time is quite powerful considering other skills of similar power like Guardian Banish. Of course it would be entirely off base and indirectly nerf other builds but that is one way I could see Arenanet nerfing decap Engineer.

Deniara Devious.3948:

I fully agree that the Automated Response trait needs to be reworked. And same for all traits which offer completely immunity to conditions (this includes ele’s diamond skill). I do not like Malthias’ idea of AR reflecting back the conditions as this could make it potentially overpowered for those who play condition spammer engis. Engi needs now more variety and not more condition spammers. I think AR should be reworked as followed:

“When your health reaches 25% all conditions are cleansed. Cooldown 25 seconds”

Now this would be a complete condition cleanse which cannot be interrupted, fitting the name of the trait and spirit of the trait trait tree. And it would not be completely overpowered. I am not 100% sure if 25 s is the right cooldown, but of course it needs a rather long CD. Condition removal is currently probably the biggest weakness of engineer. Condi necro is a hard counter towards non-AR condi engis (assuming even remotely similar level of skill, I would say necro would win).

Not sure how AR “reflecting back the conditions” to the originator would make Engineer a more powerful Condition spammer. Reflection implies a defensive use. If you’re talking about this implementation:

• Every time you would suffer a Condition while under 25% health, the closest foe within 900 range suffers it also. (Cooldown: 60 seconds)
  • This removes the Immunity at 25% HP and now has the potential to allow builds running Elixir C to make a comeback play.
  • Unfortunately, this makes Automated Response extremely niche. It makes AR super strong with 1 particular Utility and its intransparent (unless you also had a visual cue or special buff in the Boon bar)

It was one that I had talked down because whilst it removed the immunity, it would make the trait excessively niche.

ManCaptain.3154:

runeblade.7514:

ManCaptain.3154:

MonMalthias.4763:

• Making Stealth a Boon; thus giving skills with Boon Hate additional utility against Stealth. Mesmers in particular would have their matchups improved markedly by this one change.
  • Most importantly removing Stealth as a Boon should not inflict Revealed. With counterplay must come counter-counterplay – the Thief should be able to re-stealth after hitting Boon Hate. Obviously things like hitting people while Stealthed should still inflict Revealed.

snip

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Throw_Mine

What is it with this forum and lack of reading comprehension? Is that a viable boon removal?
snip
Not to mention other classes with less than viable boon removal.

As an Engineer, I sympathise with you, but let’s keep this on topic. Yes, Throw Mine and Acidic Elixirs suck but hey, at least we’re not Elementalist with no Boon Hate to speak of. Moving on; I am interested to hear your thoughts on why making Stealth interact with more skills as a Boon would screw up Engineers – with no viable Boon hate to speak of, this would leave the Engineer vs Thief matchup virtually unchanged.

Previous posters have mentioned that Arenanet’s record for balancing Thief is very poor:

Dual.8953:

True facts. I was wanting this nerf too. Sadly Anet’s record for nerfing Thief is very poor. They nerf what stand out but in the wrong way. The 4 second revealed was another one. Could have gone with Revealed on all destealth, and made this bandaid fix instead that screwed up Thief’s rotations so much that the reverted the nerf in PvE/WvW. And with the cast time on Infiltrator’s Return, they shadow step near the end of the cast instead of the beginning.

I want to touch on this topic a bit because despite the OP Fortus calling for nerfs to Thief, the way Thieves have been typically build has been almost universally Glass Cannon, which is a worrying sign, because it signifies that the overall design direction for Thief is to keep it being a time-starved profession. For Stealth oriented builds, you have a limited window to kill or be killed once you come out of stealth. For Evasion oriented builds, you can burn your evade frames until you judge the opponent suitably overextended. Both builds utilise Berserker’s stats for maximum damage output in minimum time.

The arguments cut both ways, but the conclusion is circular: Thief needs to do damage to be viable. Thief needs its Stealths and Evades to be safe enough to do damage.

I will make it clear now that I do not play Thief.

Therefore I call upon Thief players to offer their opinions on how Thief’s duration of engagement can be extended against other Glass Cannons while bringing down tanky build survivability against Thief. There are many posts worrying about nerfs for Thief in the future and lashing out in response instead of offering a better solution. As an Elementalist and Engineer main, I will tell you now that negativity does nothing at all and losing several keystone traits to nerfs is all too common (RIP Cleansing Water, Kit Refinement). On the other hand, long constructive threads like the Ranger Thread have brought attention.

So as a Thief player seeing Elementalist and Mesmer being driven out of the PvP meta due to being outcompeted, how would you bring Thief down in such a way to let other Glass cannons have a place? How would you bring Thief up to let it stay in the fight longer and pose a threat to tanky DPS or Bunkers?

Swagg.9236:

MonMalthias.4763:

snip

The point of the cool-down was actually never necessarily to limit stealth skill availability, but rather to punish poor usage of stealth skills in general. As of right now, you can go into stealth and spam stealth skills with impunity until they hit a target because they lack both a cool-down and initiative cost. Perhaps 10 seconds was too much, though. Maybe 5 seconds across the board would be better. At least that way, it would be more in line with the base Revealed duration imposed on somebody that leaves stealth.

I do like the idea of adding a vulnerability stacking aspect to stealth skills, though (at least [Backstab] anyway). I’d better remove staggered from them, though. A 40% or 60% up-time on staggered just from stealth skills would be overpowered.

To be honest the problems with Stealth and Stealth openers doesn’t exist solely with Thief but Stealth in general. Yes, Thief gets the most benefit out of Stealth – stealth openers, condition cleanse and regeneration, initiative return – but the fact of the matter is that the Stealth-anti-Stealth metagame is woefully underdeveloped. The sole interaction players have upon encountering Stealth is to dodge predictively or spam AoE or put up Aegis and/or Blocks. It’s counterplay, sure, but it’s indirect counterplay. You’re playing defensively instead of trying to land skills to remove Stealth.

I mentioned in my earlier posts proposing to make Stealth a Boon, with all of the implications for Boon Hate that it entails. This is in order to increase the interaction of Stealth – with and against it – with more skills – without requiring extensive re-tooling and rebalancing like the Sic’em change for Ranger.

This would change the following matchups for Stealth (Thief in particular, also PU Mesmer):

• Mesmer against D/P or other Stealth oriented Thief builds through Null Field. Shatter Mesmers can sacrifice their shatter damage to proc Illusionary Persona/Shattered Concentration in order to counteract incoming Backstabs. Disenchanter may finally find a use.
• Engineer running Static Discharge and/or Throw Mine and/or Acidic Elixirs
• Necromancer – in particular Wellomancer running Well of Corruption.
• Elementalists need some form of Boon Hate, so they lose out for now, as do Rangers.
• Warrior and Guardian already have very good matchups against Thief so their interaction with Stealth should not need to be extended.

Further extensions of Boon hate towards other classes would then also increase their interaction against Stealth.

However overall the Stealth uptime or restealthing capability would be relatively unchanged for Thief.

• What remains now is to reduce Thief reliance on Stealth for survival and general utility as more skills will unstealth Thieves.
• Most importantly Boon Hate should not inflict Revealed on Thieves. Thieves are merely kicked out of Stealth, yet should retain the capability to re-stealth as it does cost Initiative and/or Cooldowns to do so. With counterplay there must come counter-counterplay

Xaylin.1860:

evilapprentice.6379:

Still doesn’t mess with the stealth/revealed timers, which is the big deal.

Again: I did not ask for changes to stealth or revealed timers. I literally said I did not want revealed to be changed. I just voiced my agreement for a suggestion regarding D/P. That’s totally unrelated to general stealth mechanics but an issue caused by a specific weapon set.

evilapprentice.6379:

The compensating changes would have to be big damage boosts, which is the opposite direction of Mon’s suggestions. His version keeps the pace of stealth/stealth attacks the same, upping sustained DPS and dropping burst. Your suggestion would have to up burst, because you’re imposing a second artificial limit on BS (since we already have revealed), and isn’t necessary.

I really don’t get how you can misread what I wrote in this way.

Yet again, I never said anything about changing revealed. The pace remains the same. While I didn’t name any compensations for the cooldown, I also never said that there should not be any. You just assumed I didn’t see the need for any.That doesn’t make it true.

The compensation in no way has to be done by increasing the Backstab damage. Again, that’s an assumpion you brought to the table. It’s quite easy to slightly increase the base damage of the other skills instead.

I dislike the idea of taking away all the burst a Thief can have and that is what would happen when his idea was established. Putting a cooldown on Backstab can make it a true opener while maintaining the ability to burst. Revealed would stay the same. The pace would stay the same. But going back into stealth will be less favourable. That’s it!

If you don’t like the idea, that’s fine. But please stop assuming stuff I just didn’t say.

evilapprentice.6379:

Ambush and thieves guild is the “Solo” version of this, and you won’t be running it in tPvP. As far as hotjoin…who cares? It’s hotjoin, a specs effectiveness in hotjoin means basically nothing.

If you don’t care for hotjoins, that’s fine. However, as I said earlier, discussing support builds for sPvP and tPvP has no purpose anyway. There are no true support builds in sPvP and tPvP for any class. Therefore, a Thief hardly has any disadvantage there.

As I mentioned in my original post, I did not state that I had the intention of taking away Thief burst, merely to take it away from Backstab.

I strongly believe that the coefficients for Backstab (1.2 for front, 2.4 for back/side) should be moved to other skills. Backstab is holding the mainhand dagger weapon set back and limits the damage for D/P and/or D/D in all other aspects. In no way do I intend to limit Thief Burst; merely to move it out of Backstab and into other areas.

Keeping Backstab as it is limits the window for counter-engagement for other Glass cannons because a successful Backstab can leave them at 50% HP or even less. On the other hand, tanky DPS like Warrior or Meditations Guardian have other mechanisms like Protection Aegis or simply a huge HP pool to absorb that damage and provide them with more windows, making any engagement that a Thief cannot win within the first few seconds or 10 initiative a lost one.

The whole process is self-reinforcing – frontloaded damage limits backloaded damage output which therefore pushes Thieves to be one-shot wonders. They are extremely time-starved in their burst output, yet cannot stay in the fight to contribute against tanky DPS.

The end result is a playstyle that is quite binary – either the Thief lands the Burst and kills the target, or fails and dies for it. (Or in more cases than not, disengages to try again with Shadow steps).

Swagg.9236:

Stealth Attack skills
[Surprise Shot] (1)

• Recharge increased from 0 to 10 seconds.
• Damage reduced from 202 (0.6) to 159 (0.5).

[Tactical Strike] (1)

• Recharge increased from 0 to 10 seconds.
• Damage reduced from 302 (0.75) to 244 (0.75).
• Now also staggers the target for 2 seconds when striking a foe from behind.

[Backstab] (1)

• Recharge increased from 0 to 10 seconds.
• Front damage reduced from 403 (1.2) to 302 (0.9).
• Back damage reduced from 806 (2.4) to 554 (2.4).
• Now also staggers the target for 3 seconds when striking a foe from behind.
• Now also inflicts 10 stacks of vulnerability for 10 seconds when striking a foe from behind.

[Sneak Attack] (1)

• Recharge increased from 0 to 5 seconds.

I don’t even play Thief myself and I would have to say that putting a cooldown on Backstab or other stealth openers is not the way to go. Yes, on the one hand you limit Backstab availability, but this simply pushes Thieves to want to frontload even more of their damage due to the nerfs to damage. Thieves playing, say, D/P should be able to execute multiple backstabs over the course of the fight – but the damage should never be frontloaded.

• Instead the concept of escalating threat should be applied here. As I said, I don’t play Thief, so I won’t comment on numbers. What I will say is that reducing the coefficients very little for Front damage and not at all for Back/Side damage will simply push Thieves more towards things like the 1 minute Venom Thief that stacks Venoms for Might in order to get inordinately high, frontloaded Backstab damage.
• With that in mind, the Recharge should be removed. Front stabs should grant 5 stacks of Vulnerability. Side and Backstabs 10 stacks of Vulnerability. Damage overall should be decreased and coefficients moved to skills 2-5.

hooma.9642:

dont focus to much on stealth.. s/d and s/p are very strong too.

MonMalthias.4763 got it right. the problem for other gc is the low window of vulnerability on the thief for a short fight. but i think that is less a problem of stealth or blinding. its more a problem of initiative and no cooldowns.

d/p has the problem u cant interrupt the restealth on most classes, cause blinding powder shots a blinding projectile. unless a warrior who has zerkerstance up or a engi with shield or googles its nearly not interruptable or u need to be lucky that the projectile got blocked trought someone else. d/p shadow shot is on some gc enough to prevent big hits and on the same deliever high dmg.
s/d has the high evade problem + teleport, and the s/p got the invul. during pw, teleport and blindingfield for defense.

i think feline grace is 1 part of the problem and another bountiful theft. problem is the both are needed for longer fights. maybe other gc needs a more reliable way to ignore blinding like utility googles or zerkerstance and at least some viable source of vigor for a certain frame of time.

the overall goal should be to higher the amount of time of vulnerability to other gc and on the same part give thief more sustain for longer fights. i think the first part can only be achieved on other classes or we get rid of initiative.. all in all its a balancing problem! if the cost for skills without dimishing return is to low it favours spamming and if they are to high it hurts longer fights.

i think it would be overall healthier for the game if a dimishing return would exist for initiave.

On Hooma’s points there didn’t seem to be much debate. Diminishing Returns is a proposal that could work, but it should not be implemented as it would make playing Thief excessively intransparent. Not sure about this one.

Xaylin.1860:

Well… everyone is entitled to their opinion I guess? I personally value it.

evilapprentice.6379:

I wasn’t disagreeing – Shadow refuge is basically a must in tPvP, because it’s ability to counter stability/invuln stomp is tremendous.

Xaylin.1860:

evilapprentice.6379:

Please stop saying “Perma-stealth” – it no longer exists in sPvP. The Dec 10th change rendered long-duration stealth impossible without the use of utilities, which Anet is fine with (and is fine from a balance standpoint) – thieves in sPvP can no longer stealth indefinitely.

Point taken. The word perma-stealth probably is inaccurate. The maximum duration of chained stealth might have decreased but stealth is still overused. Thieves might drop out of stealth more often. However, they instantly get back into it. Considering the mobility of Thieves the window of Revealed is a lousy joke for bursting them down. While I don’t think that the duration of Revealed should be increased I still think that Thieves should rely on stealth a lot less.

evilapprentice.6379:

This is an awful, awful suggestion that keeps cropping up on the forums in various forms. Backstab is already balanced around the current stealth timers – if you want a CD imposed on backstab, be prepared for a big damage increase (which is completely counter-productive). On top of all that, I don’t see how Mon advocated less stealth – his suggestion leaves stealth where it is for the most past.

From my point of view, Backstab is not sufficiently balanced by stealth timers. While I don’t think denying Thieves to go back into stealth is the right thing to do, I feel that the frequency of applying Backstabs is too high. Thus, damage is too stealth dependend. Lowering the frequency by introducing a cooldown doesn’t necessarily mean that the damage of Backstab has to increase. If needed, out of stealth weapon skills could be adjusted or it could apply Vulnerability as mentioned above. It advocates the same idea like Mon mentioned, making Backstab an opener.

Mon did also advocate less stealth through taking damage away from skills like Backstab. His rework of making stealth a boon results in a totally different stealth. Not sure how you assume this would leave stealth where it is.

evilapprentice.6379:

Venoms are awful – to be of any use, they the entirety of your spec dedicated to them (60 points and 5 traits), and even then they’re Meh – they’re a utility line with a long CD with no stunbreaker in the line, and their use is all PBAOE and instant, making coordination significantly harder for the benefits you receive than other classes support options.

I said they needed tweaking. But they far from useless. I personally enjoy using them in PvE. It’s also not true that you have to get all traits at once, only Venom Aura is mandatory. If their range was increased and a stunbreak was introduced to them they might make for a nice supportive low stealth build in WvW or hotjoin PvP. tPvP not so much but that doesn’t mean they suck in general.

However, that’s not the point of my post. I just said that there are support focussed skills on Thieves. I didn’t argue about their usefulness. But feel free to bash me.

evilapprentice.6379:

Shadow refuge has 1 real use – stomp prevention. Mind you, that’s a really good use.

Well… everyone is entitled to their opinion I guess? I personally value it.

Xaylin.1860:

MonMalthias.4763:

…

TL:DR: The aim should be to:

• Make Thieves less time-starved, or “one shot wonders”. Thieves should be dealing damage, but it should not be all frontloaded from Stealth.
• Make Thieves less dependant on Stealth overall to deal their damage. Thieves should deal their damage just like everyone else – Revealed. They just require the tools to be able to do so like everyone else instead of using Stealth as a crutch.
• Clutch Blinds and Evades should still be an outstanding feature of the class, but must promote a skill floor like being conditional on dodging actual attacks, or actually hitting, or dealing bonus damage to target after target misses attack due to Blind.
• Squishy GCs should have their window of counter-engagement against Thieves extended, whilst Tanky DPS or Bunkers have theirs decreased i.e. through Vulnerability stacking or Toughness ignoring damage i.e. Life Steal.

Great post!

Stealth
Stealth certainly has its issues in GW2. In DAoC, for example, going back into stealth after attacking was a lot harder or even impossible. However, implementing your changes would make Shadow Arts totally useless. I personally would make going into stealth less attractive in general. Or just more difficult.

One idea which has been posted several times is changing the combo field of Blinding Powder into a dark field. I really like this suggestion. Blinding Powder could still blind on hit but the pulsing Blind could be removed. Leap stealthing would be prohibited. The original poster also suggested making dark fields stealth on projectile finishers. I disagree with that part of the suggestion. It would just move the perma-stealth issue from D/P to P/P. It would also be hard to control due to 20% projectile finishers and probably just cause unintentend reveals.

One shot wonders
I partly disagree here. There should be a way of playing the Thief in an Assassin style way. However, there got to be a bigger risk like in DAoC where you can’t get back into stealth after you used your backstab. As said earlier, I don’t think limiting stealth is the right solution here. However, Backstab and the other weapon#1 stealth skills could get a cooldown and only become available after this cooldown is done. As a result, Thieves won’t be able to burst that frequently. It also makes hiding in stealth less appealing because you can’t reapply your Backstab that frequently. Conclusively, Thieves might actually stay out of stealth longer to deal damage and use stealth more defensively.

caveman.5840:

every class but the thief has team support skills!

Got to disagree. Thieves do have support skills but most Thief players just don’t like them because they favour a different play style. Venoms are pretty nice for your group while they indeed might need some more tweaking. Smoke Screen and Shadow Refuge on the other hand are just plain great. They also provide great combo fields which you state Thieves do not have.

evilapprentice.6379:

MonMalthias.4763:

snip

This is one of the best suggestions for thief I’ve heard in a long time – well thought out and articulated. What’s even more shocking, you’re talking about thief on the forums but not exaggerating or crying for nerfs,and it’s clear your familiar with how the class works! I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.

What’s ultimately depressing is that these suggestions aren’t easy to implement – If we ever see them (and I doubt it), it’ll be 6+ months at minimum into the future.

phaeris.7604:

I come from a thief, recently switched to ele as thief didn’t have much synergy with my friends toons and was getting boring.

I played burst d/d spec and certain classes (elementalist, ranger, most thieves), were a guaranteed kill in sub 5 seconds. I would kill eles in my first combo. so sub 2 seconds.

Mesmers took a little more work, but not bad if you caught them unaware.

From an ele standpoint, when you’re wearing light armour, and lowest hitpoint tier, in WvW it stops you traiting for damage entirely as any no skill chump can C+D + steal you then heartseeker for 2-3k you a few times afterwards. So you end up with very little capability to deal damage and speccing alot of defence….or more commonly in pvp just not playing an ele and rolling a warrior, who laughs at every class he meets. Which explains the current issue with pvp matches being full of warriors and the dissapearance of elementalists and mesmers.

If you spec damage you’ll die within seconds to thieves/zerk warriors..if you spec defence you’ll die a bit slower, but won’t kill anyone. So why bother putting yourself through that annoyance.

Also…everyone targets the elementalist first for this reason. It’s like being teemo in LoL, you’re first target because everyone is aware you’ll either fall over or the fight you’ll put up won’t really put them in any significant danger. My friend loves it though, now people target me instead of him, whereas they used to target him and not my thief.

I’m just going to repost my post from the other thread talking about Thieves driving other glass cannons out of the meta

MonMalthias.4763:

The problem with Thief is that it’s a little too good against other Glass cannons, hence pushing them out of the meta (Elementalist, Mesmer), whilst being only middling or outright inferior against tougher builds like Condi-bunkers or just Bunkers in general.

• Part, but not _all of the problem can be traced back to Critical Damage. Most GC builds run little to no toughness, so getting hit by a Thief hurts. A lot. You can easily start a fight at 50% HP as a GC against a Thief, and then you’ve got small windows of opportunity to turn the fight around. Against D/P, you have to interrupt/CC the re-Stealth. Against S/D, you have to hit a clutch CC, or wait for when they try to burst, then counter.

• Outside of these windows of vulnerability; there is little opportunity for other Glass Cannons to counter-engage. Stealth remains difficult to counterplay for some classes, laughably easy for others. The solution is to build tanky DPS so you live longer to see more windows. But that leads to the original problem – other glass cannons are out-competed.

The solution is not going to be easy, but it’s going to involve the following:

• Moving some of the utility Thieves get from Stealth into other areas. Condition cleanse, Crit chance, that sort of thing.
• Making Stealth a Boon; thus giving skills with Boon Hate additional utility against Stealth. Mesmers in particular would have their matchups improved markedly by this one change.
  • Most importantly removing Stealth as a Boon should not inflict Revealed. With counterplay must come counter-counterplay – the Thief should be able to re-stealth after hitting Boon Hate. Obviously things like hitting people while Stealthed should still inflict Revealed.

• As for things like Backstab, the whole Stealth Opener thing should be revised to be just that: an Opener. Damage should not be frontloaded into Backstab. Instead, large (I’m talking 5, 10, 15 stacks) of Vulnerability should be inflicted. Snares like Cripple or Immobilise optional. (maybe through Traits)
  • Thief weapon sets should then be rebalanced to put more damage into the other skills. Overall damage output over time should be increased. Thief shouldn’t be a one-shot wonder, but something that hits harder and harder the more you can’t get them off your back.
  • This has the effect of making Thief less effective against other Glass Cannons as the window of counter-engagement has now increased. This also makes Thief more effective against Tanky DPS builds (assuming damage output over time is also increased)

Too many weapon sets rely on only 2-3 out of the 5 possible attacks because too much has been loaded into 1 skill whilst others are left weak because buffing them would make the weapon set OP.

• Underutilised skills should be reworked to provide Thief with more sustain i.e. Life Steal is an underlooked mechanic on Thief, but as a Protection/Toughness ignoring source of damage, Life Steal on Thief can be looked at as a way for Thief to counter bunkers.
• The aim is to enable Thief to stay engaged with an enemy for longer while being less dependant on, but no less assisted by, clutch Blinds/Dodges

TL:DR: The aim should be to:

• Make Thieves less time-starved, or “one shot wonders”. Thieves should be dealing damage, but it should not be all frontloaded from Stealth.
• Make Thieves less dependant on Stealth overall to deal their damage. Thieves should deal their damage just like everyone else – Revealed. They just require the tools to be able to do so like everyone else instead of using Stealth as a crutch.
• Clutch Blinds and Evades should still be an outstanding feature of the class, but must promote a skill floor like being conditional on dodging actual attacks, or actually hitting, or dealing bonus damage to target after target misses attack due to Blind.
• Squishy GCs should have their window of counter-engagement against Thieves extended, whilst Tanky DPS or Bunkers have theirs decreased i.e. through Vulnerability stacking or Toughness ignoring damage i.e. Life Steal.

There’s also a mini-debate within a debate (debate-ception) going on revolving around such a thief overhaul. Hopefully some of that can filter through to here.

P Fun Daddy.1208:

Suggestion:
Instead of directly buffing flamewall or making it another version of unsteady ground, why not make it rip boons? That would add to versatility and improve the skill, while also giving eles something they normally don’t have. It would also make people really, really not want to walk through it.

That’s a pretty good idea, actually. /Focus really doesn’t have much going for it outside of Earth (Obsidian Skin, Magnetic Wave) and Air (Swirling Winds). It lacks damage overall, the CC setups are underwhelming, and it doesn’t have strong synergy with Dagger mainhand either. Boon rips would definitely be appreciated in both S/F (to rip Protection for burst) and D/F (to rip Stability and Vigor).

The problem remains that there isn’t a strong “ender” for /Focus. /Dagger has Fire Grab and Ride the Lightning; Staff has Shockwave + Eruption → Lava Font. Even S/F burst builds rely on the fact that Fresh Air exists and the huge damage of Dragon’s Tooth and Phoenix – they wouldn’t be viable otherwise.

Dagger Focus would become more viable if:

• Damage for Comet was increased; OR Magnetic Wave did burst damage. I’d favour more damage being loaded into Comet. As a delayed Daze it’s hardly a reliable interrupt – Updraft and Earthquake on /Dagger are just so superior it’s no contest.
• Fire Shield could be chained into something similar to Fire Grab with bonus damage against Burning Foes.

• Freezing Gust did more than a long duration chill. I like Swagg’s idea of channeling Freezing Gust like Meteor Shower – although I’d prefer simple escalating AOE Radius and a single whirlwind over multiple, small whirlwinds. How well you hit your foe with skills like this should not be left to random chance.
• Perhaps a stronger idea would be something like this:
  • Channel Freezing Gust over target designated area to inflict Chill and Vulnerability. Vulnerability inflicted and area radius increases with channel duration. (3.25 second cast). 3 Pulses of damage at all levels.
  • 0-0.75 seconds: Level 1: 120 Radius, No Vulnerability inflicted.
  • 0.75-1.5 seconds: Level 2: 180 Radius, 1 stack of Vulnerability inflicted (3 max) Power Coefficient: 0.6 (Doubled at level 2)
  • 1.5-2.5 seconds: 240 Radius, 2 stacks of Vulnerability inflicted (6 max) Power Coefficient: 0.9 (Lava Font level coefficient, most efficient level for cast time and damage)
  • 2.5-3.25 seconds: 240 Radius, 3 stacks of Vulnerability inflicted (9 max). Immobilise foes for 1 seconds on third pulse. Power Coefficient: 0.9 (No additional damage scaling in lieu of CC on third pulse as setup skill)

Actually, that gives me an idea for a Fire Grab style ender for /Focus:

• Comet: Deals bonus damage to Chilled foes. If foe is also Vulnerable, Stun the target for 1 second instead of inflicting Daze.
  • This makes Level 2 Freezing Gust a minimum requirement to burst out the target
    With these two changes, /Focus now has both area control through Freezing Gust and Flame Wall, whilst retaining the burst damage potential of /Dagger and /Staff.

The problem with Thief is that it’s a little too good against other Glass cannons, hence pushing them out of the meta (Elementalist, Mesmer), whilst being only middling or outright inferior against tougher builds like Condi-bunkers or just Bunkers in general.

• Part, but not _all of the problem can be traced back to Critical Damage. Most GC builds run little to no toughness, so getting hit by a Thief hurts. A lot. You can easily start a fight at 50% HP as a GC against a Thief, and then you’ve got small windows of opportunity to turn the fight around. Against D/P, you have to interrupt/CC the re-Stealth. Against S/D, you have to hit a clutch CC, or wait for when they try to burst, then counter.

• Outside of these windows of vulnerability; there is little opportunity for other Glass Cannons to counter-engage. Stealth remains difficult to counterplay for some classes, laughably easy for others. The solution is to build tanky DPS so you live longer to see more windows. But that leads to the original problem – other glass cannons are out-competed.

The solution is not going to be easy, but it’s going to involve the following:

• Moving some of the utility Thieves get from Stealth into other areas. Condition cleanse, Crit chance, that sort of thing.
• Making Stealth a Boon; thus giving skills with Boon Hate additional utility against Stealth. Mesmers in particular would have their matchups improved markedly by this one change.
  • Most importantly removing Stealth as a Boon should not inflict Revealed. With counterplay must come counter-counterplay – the Thief should be able to re-stealth after hitting Boon Hate. Obviously things like hitting people while Stealthed should still inflict Revealed.

• As for things like Backstab, the whole Stealth Opener thing should be revised to be just that: an Opener. Damage should not be frontloaded into Backstab. Instead, large (I’m talking 5, 10, 15 stacks) of Vulnerability should be inflicted. Snares like Cripple or Immobilise optional. (maybe through Traits)
  • Thief weapon sets should then be rebalanced to put more damage into the other skills. Overall damage output over time should be increased. Thief shouldn’t be a one-shot wonder, but something that hits harder and harder the more you can’t get them off your back.
  • This has the effect of making Thief less effective against other Glass Cannons as the window of counter-engagement has now increased. This also makes Thief more effective against Tanky DPS builds (assuming damage output over time is also increased)

Too many weapon sets rely on only 2-3 out of the 5 possible attacks because too much has been loaded into 1 skill whilst others are left weak because buffing them would make the weapon set OP.

• Underutilised skills should be reworked to provide Thief with more sustain i.e. Life Steal is an underlooked mechanic on Thief, but as a Protection/Toughness ignoring source of damage, Life Steal on Thief can be looked at as a way for Thief to counter bunkers.
• The aim is to enable Thief to stay engaged with an enemy for longer while being less dependant on, but no less assisted by, clutch Blinds/Dodges

TL:DR: The aim should be to:

• Make Thieves less time-starved, or “one shot wonders”. Thieves should be dealing damage, but it should not be all frontloaded from Stealth.
• Make Thieves less dependant on Stealth overall to deal their damage. Thieves should deal their damage just like everyone else – Revealed. They just require the tools to be able to do so like everyone else instead of using Stealth as a crutch.
• Clutch Blinds and Evades should still be an outstanding feature of the class, but must promote a skill floor like being conditional on dodging actual attacks, or actually hitting, or dealing bonus damage to target after target misses attack due to Blind.
• Squishy GCs should have their window of counter-engagement against Thieves extended, whilst Tanky DPS or Bunkers have theirs decreased i.e. through Vulnerability stacking or Toughness ignoring damage i.e. Life Steal.

chungiee.8764:

Edit: One thing you can’t complain about Decap Engies though… BUILD DIVERSITY. Literally there are at least 10 different decapper builds…

• This aspect of decap Engineer is absolutely true. There are tons of variations, from JinDaVikk’s variation that uses Med Kit, to Steamhawke’s version that bypasses Healing Bombs and instead uses Thumper Turret. There are so many CC skills in the Engineer kitten nal and both active and passive healing ticks that nerfing “Decap engi” in general could well mean nerfing several traits and utilities, not to mention Overcharged Shot, which seems to be the main tool for debunkering.[/quote]

Back on topic

To be honest the Condition Immunity traits and skills like Berserker’s stance, Diamond Skin and Automated Response could all do with some looking at. In the zero-sum arms race between condition application and cleansing, what is not needed is to throw one’s arms up into the air and introduce hard counters. They’re extraordinarily hard to balance and intransparent to play around (Except Berserker’s Stance)

• That being said, Automated Response can be countered by running a Carrion Amulet, for example. Or what seems to be increasingly popular is teams running a Thief to roam between Backpoint and Mid – an Engineer running Automated Response will likely still lose to a Thief (depends on build, but usually decap Engis don’t have enough DPS to counterpressure a Thief)

With Automated Response in particular, the main thing is to eliminate the Automated component and promote active play, whilst being a strong Condition management tool. With that in mind, there are a few ways Automated Response can be reworked into:

• Cleanse 1 Condition every time you use a Toolbelt Skill. At 25% health, you instead cleanse 2 conditions every time you use a Toolbelt Skill (No ICD)
  • This has the effect of Synergising with Inertial Converter and basically enables a full Condition clear at 25% HP – but you must cast your Toolbelts. Active play is required.
  • No internal Cooldown should be placed on this trait as it is Grandmaster in Alchemy, supplanting HGH.
  • Elixir Builds now have the choice of even more Condition clear in conjunction with CF409, or they could simply take Fast Acting Elixirs and Potent Elixirs and sacrifice damage.

• Every time you would suffer a Condition while under 25% health, the closest foe within 900 range suffers it also. (Cooldown: 60 seconds)
  • This removes the Immunity at 25% HP and now has the potential to allow builds running Elixir C to make a comeback play.
  • Unfortunately, this makes Automated Response extremely niche. It makes AR super strong with 1 particular Utility and its intransparent (unless you also had a visual cue or special buff in the Boon bar)

Combining the 2 ideas into a horrible Frankenstein:

• Upon using a Toolbelt Skill, your next attack transfers 1 condition to target foe. At 25% Health, instead transfer 2 conditions
  • This turns the Condi Necro vs Engineer matchup on its head and Engineers running this iteration of AR might just have a better chance.
  • You’ll definitely want utilities like Rifle Turret with this version of AR. SD Engineer with AR? Why not.
  • Increasing the skill cap of this trait could be done by requiring that the attack hits (Condi transfer dodged) ; or by introducing and tuning an ICD (preferably from 10-15 seconds, no more)

The key thing here is that every single change aims to take away the complete immunity at 25% HP. Condition classes (in particular those running Rabid) now have a way of playing with and around AR, and decap Engi is now weaker for it.

Swagg.9236:

Focus off-hand
[Fire Shield] (Fire 5)

• FUNCTIONALITY CHANGED
• Cast-time: 0
• Recharge: 35 seconds
• Envelop yourself in a shield of fire that burns foes and grants might each time you are struck (cool-down of 1 second per attacker). If you combo this skill with a fire field, you gain aegis and retaliation.
• Fire Aura duration: 5 seconds
• Burning: 1 second
• Might (1): 10 seconds
• Aegis: 3 seconds
• Retaliation: 4 seconds
• Combo Finisher: Whirl

Fire Shield is honestly the way it is right now due to the underwhelming effect for its long cooldown. Its ease of obtainability by leaping through Fire Fields also holds it back. Warriors, Rangers, even Engineers have easy and frequent access to Fire Aura. So keeping the cooldown at 35 seconds is hardly going to improve Fire Shield as a weapon skill. I am partial to DiogoSilva’s suggestion below:

DiogoSilva.7089:

But I’m going to put condition cleansing somewhere else. Guess what?

New Fire Aura/ Fire Shield

• Each time you get hit, you lose 1 condition and your opponent starts burning for 2 seconds.

Condition cleansing is usually found in fire and water attunements, with fire having most of the cleansing-burst options. This fits perfectly, and also makes this aura finally worthy of being the 5th fire focus skill and having a cooldown of 40 seconds. It can remove up to 5 seconds (the effect only procs each second) from a single source, and scales back. For 5 seconds, you can fight back as many condition builds as you want. But, of course, your opponents will only strike you if they want, the aura’s animation is pretty clear, and the cooldown is still high. It wouldn’t be too strong.

2 seconds of burning is needed so that you can increase its duration with “only” 50% condition/ burning duration.

• The Fire Shield skill as distinguished from Fire Aura effect could be given additional condition cleansing as DiogoSilva suggests.
  • This also presumes that some cleansing capability is removed from Magnetic Wave as part of DiogoSilva’s /Focus rework
  • Combo Finisher Whirl is one of the weaker Finishers available to most classes – Bolts generated in Fields are randomly scattered, and individual Bolt effects are weak.
  • That being said, granting conditional Boons like Retaliation and Aegis for Comboing into a Fire Field could be useful – I just feel that additional utility like this should be loaded into Traits rather than weapon skills.

Swagg.9236:

Focus off-hand
[Flamewall] (Fire 4-1)

• FUNCTIONALITY CHANGED
• Cast-time: ¼ second
• Recharge: 20 seconds
• Create a wall of flame at target area that damages and burns foes that cross it.
• Damage: 85 (0.3)
• Burning: 2 seconds
• Duration: 8 seconds
  • Now chains into another skill: [Breath of Fire].

[Breath of Fire] (Fire 4-2)

• Cast-time: 0
• Recharge: 30 seconds
• Cause your flamewall to rile up into a tall barrier of flames that foes cannot cross.
• Duration: 3 seconds
  • While this skill is active, the Flamewall riles into a tall wall of fire that acts similarly to the Guardian [Line of Warding].
  • This chain skill remains active for 8 seconds.
  • This chain skill’s recharge or usage does not affect the recharge of [Flamewall]. The two skills share separate recharges and each will immediately to into recharge upon respective use.

This change in particular could stand to take into account the usage scenarios of S/F or D/F.

• The damage is low. At 85 base and 0.3 coefficient, standing in Flamewall is still going to tickle. Contrast this with Lava Font which has a whopping 0.9 coefficient. People dodge when they see Lava Font come up for a reason. With such low damage and long cooldown, people will still laugh at Flamewall.
• With S/F, your attacks are ranged, and you lack strong PBAoE. Therefore, you are best staying at range. Breath of Fire gives you this zoning, which is fine.
• Now, with D/F, your attacks are melee, and you still lack strong PBAoE unlike /Dagger. You don’t need or want the Breath of Fire functionality, because you want the opponent to be standing in the Fire field.

For Flamewall to be equally appealing for both S/F and D/F usage scenarios, there should be two changes:

• Flamewall’s cooldown should be lower. At 8 seconds per 20 uptime, this is the hardest to hit with Fire Field for a sub-par uptime. Compare with Lava Font which is 4 per 6 (66%), Ring of Fire which is 6 per 15 (40%), Burning Retreat which is 6 per 20 (30%) and Burning Speed which is 4 per 15 (26%)
• Flamewall does more damage than it does now. It’s a line Fire Field, which is much harder to hit with than a circular AOE. DiogoSilva’s post has echoed my sentiments on this:
  [quote=3576133;DiogoSilva.7089:]
• Flamewall
  Casting time decreased from 3/4 to 1/4. Cooldown decreased from 20 seconds to 15 seconds. Burning ticks increased from 1 second to 2 seconds. Twice the direct damage power.
  This skill is insanely easy to avoid. For this reason, it should be more effective at what it already is “best” at: as an easily-accessible fire field that can punish foes who can’t move.[/quote]

As for Breath of Fire, I’m fine with it as it resolves one of the two outstanding issues with /Focus: Lack of Burst damage, and of ways to keep opponents off your back. So making it a mini-Line of Warding is fine.

Keeping this thread bumped due to its importance.

As for Immobilise, there is no cleansing order bug. Immobilise applies FIRST before other modifiers such as, say Sitting Duck from Engineer Firearms pile on extra conditions. The same also applies to Pin Down from Warrior. Immobilise is applied first before the Bleeds.

The end result is that Immobilise is cleansed last simply because there are covering conditions. To be perfectly honest, Immobilise is better this way because making it apply last would make cleansing Immobilise a little too trivial.

The problem is and has always been Immobilise stacking.

That said, there could be some improvements made to the whole system if Immobilise must be stacked. The main thing here is to refresh its order to the top of the queue if Immobilise is re-applied. In this way, refreshed durations are not buried underneath all the cover conditions.

• This would make Immobilise stacking capable of being combo broken since there is an opportunity for the player to cleanse Immobilise at the top of the queue when it is re-applied. It’s not ideal, because again, many attacks that apply Immobilise may also have other cover conditions attached to it, but it’s something.
  • Further iterating on that idea, code could be written to force Immobilise to the top of the queue if it is reapplied.
  • Obviously the ideal solution here is to forego any requirement for more coding and instead reduce maximum possible Immobilise stacks to 1 or 2; then do a balance pass across skills that pulse Immobilise or can reapply it repeatedly.

Morgash.3165:

Swagg.9236:

Staff skills

[Flame Burst] (Fire 3)
snip

• Conjure an orb of flame at target location. After 1 second, the orb explodes, damaging and burning nearby foes.

[Lightning Surge] (Air 2)

• A ring of electricity appears around the target during the casting period.
• Cast-time reduced from 1½ seconds to 1¼ seconds.

[Gust] (Air 3)

• FUNCTIONALITY CHANGED
• Cast-time: ½ second
• Recharge: 30 seconds
• Channel a gust of wind that strikes foes two times in rapid succession. The first gust strike rips up to 2 boons from foes that it hits. The second gust strike knocks back foes.
  snip

[Windborne Speed] (Air 4)

• Now also grants Super Speed for 2 seconds.

Morgash.3165:

Flame Burst:
I think your change would make it almost worthless in small scale pvp… sure you could catch people in a zerg but in 1 on 1 or small scale combat where there is not as much distraction you wouldn’t hit anyone with it.

My problem with Flame Burst is twofold:

1. It does no direct damage, which is not helpful for Power builds. As a single condition application it is powerful, but Fire attunement has no cover conditions. At most it is good for proccing the DPS boost on Burning Rage ; but people don’t put points into Fire for a reason (outside of PvE full berserker DPS builds running Persisting Flames)
2. Short cast time and short CD make it a “throwaway” skill that has little combo potential and interaction with other Fire attunement skills
3. Flame Burst is not very combat legible.

Flame burst would be stronger if it were one of the following:

• Dealing direct damage, with a secondary (3 second) Burning component
  • This gives Fire attunement somewhat stronger targeted damage. Meteor Storm and Fireball notwithstanding, it is surprisingly more difficult to burn your target down faster in Fire attunement than to do so in Air attunement
• A Blast finisher
  • Staff is Field heavy, but Finisher weak. This gives Elementalist Blast finishers in the 2 attunements associated with Blast finishers in other weapon sets for familiarity reasons (Scepter, /Dagger)

Morgash.3165:

Lighting Surge:
Not sure the point of this change other then to telegraph it even more?

• Lightning Surge should be made a Charge skill as it was back in the older iterations. Staff misses the clutch Blind capability of Scepter; whilst also lacking a strong single target bursting skill. Having a Charge skill gives the option of a low damage Blind to be used in clutch situations, while also having the option to “snipe out” opponents at full charge.

Morgash.3165:

Gust of Air:
I rather have knocks target back and down. Give some ability to try to get distance. So many melee have way to many gap closers on short cool downs while our escape ability’s have long cool down.

• Gust would be fine if it were better cued visually and had a better hitbox. The suggestion to make Gust a 600 range Cone AoE is pretty much all it requires. This would duplicate Illusionary Wave’s functionality, but as a class with few teleports, Gust is definitely going to be appreciated more on the defensive than as it is right now as a Piercing projectile.
• I’d actually argue that Swagg’s proposal of having a two-part skill that incorporates Boon rip is much stronger as it offers the potential to rip Stability before the knockback. In my opinion, this would make Gust too strong. The 600 range cone AoE is sufficient.

Morgash.3165:

Windborne speed:
I don’t mind this but I rather have:

Teleport to target area giving speed to allies after landing.

This would give staff some mobility that it lacks.

• Windborne Speed is fine as it stands. One often overlooked benefit of Windborne Speed aside from its Swiftness uptime is the fact that it is a targeted cleanse for Snares. Multiple snares, in fact. 2 seconds of Super Speed or Teleports are not required for Windborne Speed to be strong.
  • If additional mobility is still required for positional plays, have Windborne Speed chain into a 600 range Leap finisher with a 0.75 second cast time in the vein of Savage Leap . Only, not animation bugged to give 900 range. Staff already has Burning Retreat, Gust, Static Field, Shockwave and Unsteady ground to play keep-away.
  • A Leap Finisher also gives combo potential to inflict Dazing Strike through Static Field. With a dearth of reliable Interrupts on Staff, this may give Elementalist more tactical choices through clever use of Combo Fields.

Signet of Fire: Improves Precision by (2×10+cLvl, or 180 at Lvl80)

• Elementalists already have ample access to Fury across multiple trait lines in the form of Persisting Flames , Zephyr’s Boon , and Arcane Fury . This diminishes the role of Precision in a typical Elementalist’s build, which was why for the longest time, the ideal PvP Amulet for Elementalist was not Berserker, but Valkyrie as the Toughness and Healing Power over Precision and Vitality were a lot more efficient. Similarly, PvE and WvW gear setups favoured Cavalier’s and/or Celestial over Berserker’s pieces.
• Again, the presence of a Signet buff that has no counterplay interaction is not only lazy design but bad design.

The passive should therefore be reworked to ONE of:

• Signet of Fire: Gain 2 seconds of Fury when you Burn a foe. Cooldown: 10 seconds*
  • This increases the possible Fury uptime of a Signet Elementalist; whilst also opening the possibility of 0 Arcana Builds (as impossible as that may sound) due to negating even the minimum requirement of investment of 5 points into Arcana.

• Signet of Fire: Blasting a Combo Field Burns foes for 3 seconds within a 180 unit radius. Gain Fury for 3 seconds for each foe you Burn.
  • Elementalists should have more utility tied to Combo Fields and Finishers. This passive has some overlap with Persisting Flames ; however, this does encourage the Elementalist to place their Combo Fields close to the enemy instead of Allies. Strong for PbAoE Bruiser setups like D/x ; yet still usable for Staff; as it provides defensive counterpressure when the enemy closes; something that the Staff lacks.

Signet of Water: Cleanse a condition once every 10 seconds

• It’s strange to me that the only unique Signet Passive for Elementalist could be so overlooked. Even in a Condition meta where condition application is constant and overwhelming, I’ve seen very few Elementalists take it. There are a few reasons why:
  • Cleansing 1 condition where condition builds can regularly apply more than 1 condition even on autoattacks to cover Bleed or Burn can be considered insufficient. This is more a function of the zero sum Condition application vs cleansing arms race than a weakness of Signet of Water itself.
  • The Active is underwhelming. I do like your proposal on changing the Active and I would like to see that before changing the passive.

Swagg.9236:

[Signet of Water] (active)

• Cast-time: ½ second
• Recharge: 30 seconds
• Conjure a font of chilling water at target location that heals allies and chills foes.
• Healing (3x): 1110 (0.5)
• Chilled (3): 1 second
• Duration: 3 seconds
• Radius: 240
• Combo Field: Water
• Range: 1200
  • The [Signet of Water] field is a light-blue colored [Geyser].
  • Now produces a red circle.

That said, there are ways to make Signet of Water more attractive to Elementalists by altering the passive. The most important thing is to give Elementalist more control over what is cleansed.
The passive should therefore be reworked to the following:

• Signet of Water: Cleanse 1 condition and Chill a foe for 2 seconds within a 120 radius when you dodge (Cooldown: 10 seconds)
  • This gives Elementalist more control over which Condition is cleansed. In addition, the Chill snare gives the Elementalist some defensive counterpressure within Melee range. For counterplay reasons, the Chill application should be presaged by a ring of Frost similar to that which precedes Frozen Burst ; although in this case there should be somewhat more delay before the Chill application than Frozen Burst

The aim of the passive changes is twofold: rework passives towards providing Boons; and/or to load utility into dodges.

• Loading Signet passives into boons are such that they can be stripped or played around by enemy players; and for combat legibility. No-one wants to mouse over an enemy player’s nameplate to read all their Signet passives; therefore, making the Signets provide Boons instead is not only fitting to the Elementalist design, but also provides players a combat legible effect on the Elementalist instead of some unseen buff to Toughness or Power that is intransparent.

• A dodge is a universally recognised animation in GW2, which is why I’ve chosen to work some of the Signet passives into dodges. Evasive Arcana has been the du jour GM Trait for Elementalists in Arcana because of the sheer amount of utility it provides – yet Elementalists should not be required to put 30 points in Arcana . These Signet Passives can give back some of that Utility.

Let’s start on the Signets, because in my opinion, most of the Signet skills across most of the classes are amongst the worst designed skills in the game.

Swagg.9236:

Utility skills (Signets)
[Signet of Air] (active)
snip

[Signet of Fire] (active)
snip

[Signet of Earth] (active)
snip

[Signet of Water] (active)
snip

There are 2 issues I find questionable about Signets:

1. Some bonuses that Signets give have no counterplay. They are just there.
2. The design of some passives will never be easily balanced as a numbers game; they will always be overtuned or undertuned (Signet of Restoration for Ele, Signet of Healing for Warrior, so many more examples)

I do like some of your proposals for the Signet Actives; they are useful enough to justify having them on the bar, however, it is the passives that are most needed to be addressed. In my opinion, Signet passives should be designed more like Trait effects and grant effects in the form of Boons ; or mechanical utility.

Now, that being said, let’s move on to the Signet passives:
Signet of Air: Increases movement speed by 25%

• Elementalist already has IMS traits in the Air and Arcana line – both lines of which figure popularly in most Elementalist builds. Yet this IMS boost has little counterplay, and Permaswiftness remains out of reach of some Elementalist builds outside of spamming Glyph of Elemental Harmony on CD; and/or moderate swiftness uptime through Elemental Attunement.
  The passive should therefore be reworked to ONE of the following:
• Signet of Air: Every 10 seconds, gain 10 seconds of Swiftness.
  • This allows the IMS to be counterplayed through Boon removal or Corruption; or simple Cripple application
• Signet of Air: When you dodge an attack, gain 10 seconds of Swiftness (cooldown: 5 seconds)
  • This makes Elementalists have to work for their Swiftness uptime. “Permaswiftness” is possible, but only obtainable through combat. One of the chief complaints against Elementalists pre-nerf was that they gained Boons mindlessly: their access to Boons was extraordinarily high, did not require additional player input, and most importantly did not promote a high skill ceiling as Boons were gained regardless of whether a player did well or not.

Signet of Earth: Improves Toughness by (2×10+cLvl ; or 180 at Lvl 80)

• Elementalist already has Toughness boosts when in Earth Attunement and when Channeling ; which are arguably redundant. The Toughness also cannot be counterplayed; yet, Elementalist does not rely on Toughness to survive but Protection which is counterplayable in today’s Condition and Boon Hate meta.

The passive should therefore be reworked to ONE of the following:

• Signet of Earth: Cleanse one of: Chill, Cripple or Immobilise when you attune to Earth. Cooldown: 10 seconds
  • Elementalist is remarkably vulnerable to Immobilise and other snares, especially when playing bruiser builds like D/x ; yet lacks targeted cleansing in lieu of overwhelming amounts of cleansing (until the nerfs came)
• Signet of Earth: Gain 2 seconds of Protection when disabled (Stun, Daze, Knockdown, Knockback, Launch) . Cooldown: 15 seconds
  • Elementalist is easily downed; even through Protection, as the base Vitality is low. Effective HP of Elementalist pre-nerf with Protection uptime was still low, but was propped up by a lack of Boon hate and “sticky” condition application. Post nerf with Cleansing water nerf and removal of stunbreaks from Cantrips, getting disabled is extraordinarily dangerous as an Elementalist.
• Signet of Earth: Gain 2 seconds of Protection when you dodge an attack. Cooldown: 10 seconds
  • This again, is intended to make Elementalists “work” for their Boons. In today’s “spammy” meta, an Elementalist being pressured slotting this signet will most likely have something like 40+% uptime of Protection (assuming Elemental Attunement is also taken) ; which relieves some but not all of the incoming damage. It’s also somewhat more skillful than say, Companion’s Defense .

Rednik.3809:

Main problem with WoW ArP in pvp was not bunker-busting (bunkers will be pretty fine), but ability to explode low-armor targets. Low-armor target + ArP = crazy burst. It will promote bunkering even more.

To be honest the whole Crit Damage thing (and now the Condition Damage thing) has lead to a complete breakdown of the Damage, Support and Control “Trinity” that GW2’s original designers intended. Most meta builds nowadays are (a lot) of Damage, with just enough Support and Control mixed in. Meanwhile, Bunkers have emerged due to the Conquest gametype that are mostly selfish Support and Control.

With the proper implementation (Which WoW failed to do); armour penetration can be done right, which (in theory) should lead to the following ecosystem:

• Builds running High Armour penetration (Damage) fare well against Bunkers, but do not gain additional effectiveness against squishy targets. Ideally these builds lack strong Support and do not have strong Control outside of a few expensive (i.e. long CD or hard to land) “setup” skills. Ideally Damage setups themselves do not have much Toughness mitigation which leaves them vulnerable to other targets like Control setups

• Control/Support setups have builds that can support the Bunker with pressure against the enemy team, but do not run enough ArPen to easily down an enemy Bunker. They have greater Support than Damage setups and contribute more to fights with Control. Their CC makes them an even matchup against Damage and most Control builds should pose a significant threat to Damage builds as Damage builds should sacrifice more defense to achieve Bunker Busting ArPen.

• Bunkers (mostly Support with selfish Control) have high amounts of mitigation (CC, direct damage, conditions) but cannot contribute much to a fight outside of Down state control and holding a point. They are mostly selfish with Control with much of it directed towards self-survival. Their low damage pressure makes them vulnerable to High ArPen Damage setups; but they bring enough Support to contribute to Teamfights and help allies stay in the fight.

In terms of Down State Control:

• Bunkers should provide a little more Down State Control than Control/Support setups to let them have a role of keeping allies up in teamfights. Their Damage and CC mitigation also make them ideal for securing Stomps

• Control/Support setups have some Down State Control, but cannot easily secure a Stomp or stop an ally being focused from being Downed.

• Damage setups should have little-poor Down State Control, as their role is to bunker-bust or gank (with a Control Setup) and provide enough damage to Down people, yet have few methods of safely securing a Stomp

Swagg, have you seen DiogoSilva’s Staff and Scepter changes?
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Elementalist-Staff-Changes/

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Elementalist-Sensible-Scepter-Suggestions/

You’ll note some striking similarities in lines of thought, but there is one thing that I do disagree on with both you and DiogoSilva and that is Shatterstone

Swagg.9236:

[Shatterstone] (Water 2)

• Added tool-tip: Delay: 2 seconds
• Damage increased from 252 (?) to 336 (1.0).

DiogoSilva.7089:

• Shatterstone
  This skill is underwhelming. Because vulnerability was already added to the AA, let’s take this into a new direction.
  Proposal: Each 0.75 seconds applies torment for 1-2 seconds. On shattering, applies 2 seconds of chill.
  Why? To punish or to cripple movement… to set up future bursts with Dragon’s Tooth, of course!

I feel that Shatterstone should be applying 1 second of Chill on placement – with EITHER Torment OR Vulnerability if opponent stays in AOE after detonation. Without Chill; or leaving Chill at detonation, Scepter Ele loses a method to soft-snare a target and/or force dodges.

Counterplay against Shatterstone is still just to walk out of it at the moment – adding Torment on placement or leaving it to not snare will leave Shatterstone ignored outside of cleaving downed bodies – which Phoenix does many times more effectively.

EDIT:
I agree with most of your proposals in general; however, the majority of Elementalist’s issues stem not from Weapon Skills, but from Utilities and Traits. That said, I have identified a few issues:

• Many of your skillshots incorporate post-cast delay, yet there are very few, long CD snares or lockdowns to ensure they land. The current “setups” for /Dagger are Earthquake, Updraft – and you’re essentially removing 1 setup in the form of Updraft making it a 1.5 second channel. More in my next post.

Karl McLain.5604:

Profession Changes

Elementalist: snip

Engineer: snip

Guardian: snip

Mesmer: snip

Necromancer:
One of our goals with the past few balance updates has been to add counterplay to various skills that lacked telegraphs. With necromancer, we’re changing the way that Dhuumfire is activated – allowing players the opportunity to react. This will also allow the necromancer to carefully plan their burning application. We’ve also adjusted some values for Minion Master builds based on player feedback.

• Putrid Explosion: This ability is no longer unblockable.
• Training of the Master: Reduced the damage increase to minions from 30% to 25%.
• Dhuumfire: This trait has been changed so that it will make Life Blast inflict 3 seconds of burning with a 10 second recharge.
• Vampiric Master: Reduced the effectiveness of this trait by 10%. The healing portion of this trait will now scale with the necromancer’s healing power stat.

Ranger:
We’re going to be fixing a bug with Spirit of Nature that caused it to have an incorrect healing power value. We’re also looking at adding combo fields to existing abilities to allow for more play through different combo finishers.

• Spirit of Nature: Reduced the healing per second while summoned from 480 to 320.
• Viper’s Nest: This ability is now a poison combo field.
• (Added) Keen Edge: This trait is now classified as a Survival Skill.

Thief: snip

Warrior:
Our changes for warrior focus on providing telegraphs to stronger skills and to reduce the passive benefit gained from Healing Signet.

• Healing Signet: Reduced the passive heal by 8%.
  • We’re looking for ways to incentivize using Healing Signet’s active without increasing overall sustain. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
• Pin Down: Added a telegraph animation to the skill. Increased the cast time from 1/4 second to 3/4 second.

If these are the entirety of the changes to go in the Feature patch then simply put, these balance changes should be decoupled entirely from the Feature Patch. The Engineer and Elementalist changes in particular are hardly meta-changing in any strong aspect – roll them into a Living Story release.

Three particular changes can be meta-influencing, and they are the Dhuumfire changes, Warrior 8% Healing Signet HPS nerf, and the Spirit of Nature bugfix.

• These are meta shifting changes ; yet you have chosen to incorporate them into a patch months away despite a stultifying PVP community and into a huge balance shakeup of rebalancing nearly every single Rune and Sigil.
• In case the above sentence did not make it clear as to why this is a bad idea, let me be more clear: Your profession changes will have their effects lost in the Rune/Sigil shakeup. Without a clear indication of what your changes have wrought, you make it harder on yourself and harder on your players to judge the state of the game.

In short, decouple balance and bugfix changes from Feature patches.

Aetherblade/Dhuumfire was your first mistake; Post PAX was your next one. 3 in a row may well be a strike out to deal the death knell to a stultified PVP community.

Honestly I’m puzzled as to why Arenanet insisted on something with the potential for so much abuse as Increased Critical Damage% in the first place when Armour Penetration was obviously the least likely to lead to stupidly crazy high damage and accelerate Time to Kill to the point where non-specialised builds could do nothing against proper Bunkers due to the DPS vs Mitigation arms race.

It’s partially RNG as well, which worsens the problem, because you can, say, try for a Backstab, crit and take off a full third to half a health bar in one attack; or not crit at all and hit like a wet noodle. If the Condition Meta ever dies down, you can bet that this problem will come back to bite Arenanet in the kitten in the future.

%Increased Critical Damage with its multiplicative scaling has also led to Power Builds almost exclusively favouring Berzerker’s Amulet, because anything else doesn’t have anywhere near a comparable TTK. (Except perhaps for pre-nerf D/D Elementalist with Valkyrie’s Amulet, but that was more due to Arcane Fury and Sigil of Battle).

The same problem is also happening now with Condition damage – The Boon-ignoring, Armour Piercing DPS of Conditions is now also leading to a zero-sum Arms Race between Condition application and Condition cleansing and Immunity.

I’d say that closer to launch back then was when Arenanet should have seriously reconsidered their alteration of %Increased Critical Damage to Armour Penetration. Crit damage has done nothing but harm to the game:

• PvE and Dungeons is Zerker or Bust due to the ridiculous Vitality of bosses requiring multiplicative scaling damage to DPS down in a timely manner
• PvP has Wet Noodle Fights (Guardian vs Guardian at Mid); interspersed with moments where some player gets zeroed out in seconds. (Can anyone honestly say that they enjoyed the Burst Meta where whichever Mesmer got their Timewarp down first won the fight?) There’s no in-between of punch and counter-punch – TTK is ridiculously polarised in range from minutes to kill to seconds
• As a side effect, Crit Damage has also made it nigh impossible to build hybrid Condi-Power due to multiplicative scaling requiring more stat points than are realistically available in a PVP amulet. Has anyone seen a viable build using Celestial? Or Knights? Or Rampager?

The game is now over a year into its launch. The window may well have passed; and knowing Arenanet with their slow “we want to see the meta settle” balancing iteration cycles and incorporating Balance and Bug fixes into Feature patches (WTF?) – turning the ship around to re-align with Armour Penetration may well be far too late.

Axialbloom.8109:

Engineers are the strongest PvP profession.

As an Engineer myself, I actually partially agree with this. Engineers are a jack of all trades profession, but when you really dedicate a build as an Engineer to one specific aspect, you can excel at that role; case in point here being Decap Engi being totally dedicated to CC and survivability.

• If you’re willing to go full man-mode then there’s obviously the Static Discharge build with no condition clear, no escapes, poor mobility and tons and tons of terrible, terrible damage
• The obvious Bomb/Nade which spews out hilarious amounts of AOE conditions with a spare slot for down state control – Though this build is the least specialised and has a just enough of a little bit of everything.

Which really sums up the Engineer at it’s strongest – just enough of a little bit of everything. Nerfing one specific aspect of Engineer hits all aspects.

This was why the best generalist traits like:

• Kit Refinement , (Old version)
• Invigorating Speed and Speedy Kits , (Old Version)
• Incendiary Powder , (Old Version) – have all come under the most flak.

Now, given all this, which particular aspect of, say, decap engi or bomb/nade Engi should be nerfed? I’ve already mentioned Accelerant Packed Turrets and Automated Response; yet all I see are extremely general, _vague posts that refer to some nebulous all in one, 30/30/30/30/30 with 5 Utility slots Engineer.

Do your research before calling for a nerf, and next time, be more specific.

The problem with some of these posts in this thread are the constant diversions to Warrior GS Rush/Warrior Mobility in general as some kind of tu quoque for “parity” in Elementalist mobility. It’s not constructive and it is a false analogy to draw direct comparisons between the two.

This thread seems to have run its course somewhere in the first page:

• Reduction of Ride the Lightning Cooldown from 40 seconds full cooldown, 20 seconds halved to 30 seconds full cooldown, 15 seconds halved
• Fixing the longstanding problem of RTL going on full 40 seconds CD when Blocked or Aegis’d ; contrary to Jonathan Sharps claims

It’s simply a waste of time to post negativity (as an Elementalist QQing about the Ele’s current state) or to somehow draw in Warrior forum warriors by calling for nerfs to Rush.

Honestly, the amount of ad hominem and negativity in this thread is probably what will consign it to be further ignored by the developers.

Thedenofsin.7340:

Decap engi is excellent. If ANet can get their game together and make elementalist viable, I think you’ll see some good play/counterplay between engi and ele.

You’re talking the Elementalist with very low Stability Uptime, right? The one with 90 seconds on Armour of Earth or 2 seconds every 10 seconds on Earth Attunement with Rock Solid? D/D Elementalist is going to have a hard time against decap engi; but I do concede that S/X Fresh Air burst will probably delete Engi easily.

DiogoSilva.7089:

I’ve edited my Lightning Surge suggestion to inlude a 5 CD cooldown. This would make it more appealing to Fresh Air builds.

Would you consider proposing Lightning Surge to be a Charge Skill as it was again back in the day? The problem I have with the 1.5 second casting time is that I can’t use it as a clutch Blind when I need to; yet its damage is pretty underwhelming. Making it a Charge Skill would make it the “Headshot!” skill at full charge, while retaining the clutch Blind aspect. Damage scaling at minimum and at full charge could be adjusted to compensate; while maximum channeling time could be up to 2 seconds for maximum charge for that high-risk high-reward aspect. It would justify the current cooldown of 10 seconds.

Either that, or keep everything as is with the option of casting Surge instantly.

@Lupanic: To be fair, decap engi is pretty annoying to fight against without high Stability uptime (and I’m talking Warrior level Stability) and enough condition clear to get rid of Immobilise when you need.

I could definitely see classes like Elementalist (with obvious reasons), Thief, Ranger (a common backpoint holder) having trouble; whilst Guardian and Warrior will laugh and proceed to beat the Engi at his own game or just kill him (if Warrior). As for Mesmer, depends on the Build. Shatter definitely has an easy time beating Decap engi, while PU has no business trying to hold back point so that’s kind of a moot point.

Really decap engi is only a problem if:

• Your team doesn’t rotate smartly (probably common in soloqueue). You’ll need a Power class. If neither class at backpoint has Stability and/or burst damage, you’re going to have a Bad Time™
• Your team doesn’t have a Mesmer with Portal
• Your team doesn’t have a Thief

If your team doesn’t have a Mesmer, or Thief, then it’s all in the smart rotations. Decap engi is massively vulnerable to burst damage or smart condition burst. I say smart because you can take an Engineer to ~33% HP, then Condi Burst to get past Automated Response. Otherwise, you’re stuck.

And as I’ve mentioned earlier, Automated Response does deserve looking at, but I haven’t seen many smart proposals so far.

Anataboshi.9842:

>>>Most people run enginer because they want to run (yes you see it coming) guns or turret spammers. Few if anything cares about the bombs or the grenade gimmicks they want ’’Guns’’ or automatic turret bunkers. While enginer pistol is interesting for cond damage thief vastly outdamage the enginer in the spec, as for where rifle stands warrior long proven that sniper assasination is their domain and not the one of enginer wich actualy use its rifle more like a shotgun then a sniper rifle.

Well, I don’t agree on this point, all the engi I see don’t play this way, they all play with bombs and boots and all things like that, I almost never see an engi like you discribe it.

In that case are you talking about Bomb/Nade?
This would be (usually) Pistol/Shield, Healing Turret, Grenade Kit, Bomb Kit, Elixir S with:

• 30 in Explosives with Forceful Explosives, Incendiary Powder, Grenadier, with Grenadier as capstone trait
• 5 in Firearms for Sharpshooter
• 20 in Alchemy for Invigorating Speed and Protection Injection (I have seen people run Backpack Regenerator instead)
• 15 in Tools for Speedy Kits and Inertial Converter
• Usually Rabid Jewel with Rabid Amulet, Sigil of Battle (I think EU runs Geomancy) and Accuracy; then Undead runes or Adventurer Runes.
• Variations might be taking the 5 points from Firearms and Tools to put into Alchemy so both Backpack Regenerator and Protection Injection can be taken.

This meta build brings strong AOE Condition cleave, covers its own DPS conditions, has strong downstate control for teamfights, and brings a ton of Combo Fields for maximum support potential.

• As for “problem” traits the main one here is Incendiary Powder; however, it must be noted that Burning is the only strong “DPS” condition Engineer has – All other conditions that Engineer generates is to cover Burning. Steel Packed Powder in particular gives free Vulnerability to Grenades which makes Incendiary Powder cover itself.
• Engineer lacks strong Bleed stacking outside of Crit-procs; although Bleeding does contribute a significant of condition pressure to Bomb/Nade Engineer.

As for nerfs to Incendiary Powder, proposals I’ve seen are:

• For IP To proc burning on Confusion – Does not change meta Bomb/Nade build, increases skill floor, eliminates reliance on Precision
• For IP To proc Burning after Toolbelt Skill is used – Changes meta Bomb/Nade build to shift into Rifle Turret for 100% Burning uptime. Big nerf to Bomb/Nade survivability and Down State control. Will make more Engineers take Shrapnel over IP, but doesn’t address crit-proc problem. This will end Bomb/Nade as we know it currently.
• For IP to proc Burning on Blast Finishers. Does not change meta Bomb/Nade build, increases skill floor, makes Burning procs melee only which increases risk. May shift Engineers using IP as supplemental damage on Power builds away from IP.

The problem here is that most the above proposals (except the first) will crush Engineer’s potential Burning uptime and make its balance very tenuous. An indirect nerf may instead be to hit Steel Packed Powder ; which provides “junk” Vulnerability stacks to cover Burning.

• Nerfing Steel Packed Powder to only give Vulnerability on skills 2-5 of Grenade and Bomb Kit leaves Bomb/Nade intact, increases skill floor (very marginally_).

The problem with Incendiary Powder is that nerfing it isn’t as simple as Dhuumfire being shifted to Death Shroud for Necromancer. Engineer is a complex profession with the best builds dishing out hybrid condi/power damage, and it has its counters like Condi Necro or Warrior (current meta builds like Hambow) due to weak condi cleanse and (near zero) Stability Uptime. Feel free to make your own proposal to weaken Bomb/Nade without taking it entirely out of the meta.

So…are you talking about Bomb/Nade engi or Decap engi? As an engineer player myself, I’m not quite sure which build you’re referring to; although it sounds like Decap engi.

With that build in particular, I’m presuming, say, Accelerant Packed Turrets, 15+ in Tools for Inertial Converter, Automated response as capstone traits, with Protection Injection and Invigorating Speed, Speedy Kits as necessary traits. The remaining 15 points then go on to define the rest of the build; but usually I’ve seen 10 into Firearms for Hair Trigger and 5 more into Tools for Power Wrench.

Weapon is Rifle usually with Leeching Sigil, Utilities are Healing Turret, Elixir R, Flamethrower, Toolkit. Amulet is probably Soldiers with Clerics Jewel or just Soldier’s.

• Some variations drop Healing Turret for Med Kit in which case the 10 in Explosives is shifted elsewhere, like Inventions for Reinforced Shield.

The problem here is that many of the associated traits are general utility. Most individual traits can be used in either Power or Condi, DPS or tanky builds. So hitting them will nerf Engineer as a whole. There are 2 particular traits that could do with some looking at:

Problem traits include Accelerant Packed Turrets with its 300(?) range Knockback and Automated Response. Inertial Converter might be part of the problem but it’s not the problem.

• As for Automated Response in particular, the counterplay is to bring 1 extra Power class when the Engineer comes. But I do agree that the trait needs to be changed to provide some counterplay instead of being a hard counter.
• Accelerant Packed Turrets had never been taken until it was shifted from Master to Adept. 300 unit Knockback is annoying, for sure. I’d rather the Knockback be less if the damage increase from detonating Turrets were increased to compensate.
• As for Elixir R, it was nerfed (again) recently. That said, the issue at fault here is Inertial Converter for the reset. I’ve yet to see a good suggestion for a useful change here, perhaps you can suggest one.

Surprised that no-one commented on the alliteration earlier.

As for instant ticking skills, I do feel that Blinding Flash does need to be instant as it is meant to be clutch. I wouldn’t mind the earlier suggestion to reduce the Blind duration as it does raise the skill floor marginally. Blind itself is definitely stronger now thanks to the buff and I almost use it as part of active defense when running S/x with Fresh Air as you are super glassy and sometimes, you’ve got nothing else.

As for Lightning Strike being instant; it has been part of the basic Scepter instant skills since the Beta Weekends. Changing it now is kind of late but here’s the version in GW1 .

As a cast-time skill in GW1, Lightning Strike probably was best used as a followup skill to another spell causing Overcast (certain spells reduced your maximum Energy as an additional cost).

We can bring some of that into GW2 if you really want to make Lightning Strike “worth” cast time:

• Lightning Strike has 0.5-1 second casting time (I think 0.5 is fair; 1 would require more damage)
• If you strike a moving Foe, inflict 3-5 stacks of Vulnerability (Just trying to port over the conditional mechanics of GW1. To make it more straightforward, Lightning Strike could simply inflict Vulnerability unconditionally)
• As the skill is now stronger, a longer cooldown of, say, 10 seconds, is justifiable
• This would make Lightning strike more of an “Opener” in that you want to make your opponent Vulnerable before you start your burst. It also means that you can no longer cast Lightning Strike while casting Arc Lightning.
• To add counterplay, a black cloud over the opponent’s head appears briefly before the Lightning strikes.