Guild Wars 2

I wouldn’t mind seeing an account bound bonus for completing every fractal level. Say you get 10-15 AR on every character baseline once you finish all 100 fractals, doesn’t have to be on the same character. You could also potentially get another 5-10 for completing 100 CM. That would make it more alt friendly, since your alts wouldn’t need quite as much AR, but it would also not trivialize AR and you’d still have to make a decent investment to get alts to a high enough AR to do T4 fractals.

I think 3 damaging conditions per build is too high honestly. I’d rather see more stuff like burn guard for condi builds, where it focuses heavily on 1, or 2, conditions. It can apply that condition from a lot of different skills/traits, to cover up the inherent weakness in having your source of damage be easy to cleanse.

Vulnerability never worked on defiance bars, as its not a control condition

I think its high time she came back, she was present in the first 3 episodes, yet missing from the 4th and 5th.

@nicknamenick – Who has higher passive health regen then warrior?

Lionheart.7462:

Well, I agree with that as well but I still believe maintaining the 60 second CD on the traited Endure Pain on warrior is a huge contributing factor to their downfall this meta. I still believe the trait should be looked at, because in higher tier play warriors will not be very viable anymore, because people understand how to fight warriors at that level. Warrior will still probably be strong for lower tiers because people don’t understand the conventions of fighting warrior. Anyways, you have held me see something that has been bothering me since the patch in a new light, and I appreciate that! :^D

I’ve seen this argument thrown around before, and I think its an awful argument really. If warrior is only meta because of a single trait/skill, then that skill/trait needs to be nerfed and the rest of the class needs to be at least buffed if not flat out redesigned. Add on the needed nerfs to elite specs and just general reduction of spam (this last patch was a good start imo on reducing spam), and suddenly the original problem is fixed. Same goes for other classes. No class should only be good because of a single skill/trait

Brigand.9502:

Do the races when another guild is also completing them. When they cross the finish line, it counts for yours too even if they’re not in your guild. For example, if it’s the guild race that requires 15 to complete in 11 minutes (hard I think?), I pop my guild mission when there is already a large group doing it. As long as I can complete it 1 time, and they have the additional 14, it counts as a win for my guild too.

Really?

Wait till the new expansion drops and the HoT maps are abandoned.

zealex.9410:

OriOri.8724:

Anet thinks its fine unfortunately. And there is no shortage of people making money off the ridiculous state of leather who also think its fine.

tbh i dont know whats wrong with 1 thing costing more than your avarge crafting mat

Its an order of magnitude more expensive than T6 wood, and 2 orders of magnitude more expensive than T6 ore/cloth. When you say that it “costs more” without giving context you are downplaying this massively.

2 orders of magnitude more expensive than other mats of the same tier. That says something is out of line with acquisition versus required amounts in recipes. Either ore and wood and cloth are all out of line, or its leather that is out of line.

No one said auto attacks are the root of any problem. But at the same time there’s no reason for auto attacks to be applying boons or conditions. Its just pure spam. Rebalances would of kittening course be needed, but really no autos should be applying condis or boons, especially baseline.

Carighan.6758:

OriOri.8724:

I’m glad fire/air sigils were removed. They did nothing but add spam to the game.

Fully agreed. My one gripe is that they didn’t go far enough, and left virtually all autoattacks in a state where on top of causing 2-4 effects by themselves they can have another 2-3 stapled on via traits.

Instead of, you know, being an autoattack. Dealing damage. Nothing more.

Yea, I wish they had addressed auto attacks as well. Being able to trait them to do more stuff is one thing that is debatable as to whether its a good thing or not, but the worst offenders are the auto attacks that apply conditions or boons baseline. There should be a few exceptions of course, for condi weapons. But in those cases the autos themselves should be dealing little to no power damage and just applying conditions. And it really should be limited to a single condition per auto chain (so necro scepter and rev mace would have to be changed, along with any others I missed).

I’m glad it was nerfed because I do think it was a poor mechanic. Yes, you technically had to do something to keep it up, but wiggling back and forth? I’m sure that’s not what was intended when it was designed. And it was also far beyond any other power food available, for no real reason.

I only wish condi food had been similarly nerfed (not 50%, but still nerfed).

Believe it or not, the fight you participated in is a heavily nerfed version of the initial version of the fight. The small room is still a problem, but one that I doubt they will address since they haven’t done so already. Outside of fighting the camera, if you learn the fight mechanics well its fairly smooth, someone else could probably tell you those but its been too long since I’ve done it to remember them.

Considering they pop up every 30 minutes or so, if the last one you beat was a few weeks ago that should tell yousomething about the interest level in these events now.

Usually when I come across one in a map and call it out I’ll get a few people to participate, having a commander tag would probably help substantially more. Other times I get no one, and I’m not quite sure if its because of a low interest level or if its because I was on a dead map.

Entenkommando.5208:

Cynz.9437:

About any teleport (e.g. mes is affected as well) counts as double, it is not exactly intended but yeah…. as far as DH goes, the main issue was always class stacking not DH itself. 1 Dh was never issue, multiple were due to their synergy with each other ( shared blocks, heals, stab, traps everywhere).

Does this actually happen with mesmers? I mean it’s intended with thief because their skills are shadowsteps, but mesmer only has teleports so this shouldn’t happen.

Like Cynz said, blink isn’t an actual teleport on Mesmer, its just traveling to the target location extremely quickly. There was a thread a few months ago (I think it was on the mesmer forums but could’ve been reddit) where someone managed to catch the actual blink travel animation in a SS (its quite beautiful btw). Your character does actually travel there, albeit probably as fast as the game allows. This is why blink only works if you can actually walk there, because its just instant walking. Portal on the other hand is a true teleport, just changes your coordinates to wherever the other portal is.

Maybe not monthly, but weekly rewards? Say 1 week each month would be dedicated to a certain HoT map? Each day of the week could be a different bonus for that map. Definitley would like to see this happen

Poor balance of thief’s mechanic is indeed an issue, but you guys can use your mechanic even without taking trickery. Having that 3 extra initiative baseline would really help thieves out a lot, and I could support that. But fast hands is not at all mandatory to play warrior. Its just necessary to play warrior how OP wants to play it

I’m glad fire/air sigils were removed. They did nothing but add spam to the game.

I wouldn’t mind it if Anet went back and started rebalancing fights that are supposed to be tough after they’ve been out for some time (maybe ~3 months for current event stuff, maybe ~12 months for expansion fights). Its just inevitable that over time fewer people will be interested in participating, especially if they can’t get any more AP from said fights.

For me, the list of encounters that could stand to be rescaled would be the bandit fights (most of them are fine, but a few of them hit ridiculously hard, capable of one shotting me on a lvl appropriate character), the bandit executioner (imo the difficulty of the fight combined with not that great rewards pushes a lot of people away, not to mention that ridiculous bubble that keeps more players without directed teleports from joining), some HoT fights after the second expac drops (which I believe will lead to a permanent decline in teh population in the HoT maps)

Anet thinks its fine unfortunately. And there is no shortage of people making money off the ridiculous state of leather who also think its fine.

Adding concentration and expertise to celestial would only lower the amount of stats that they give. So you’d get even fewer than +639 to your stats. Is that really what you want?

Very, very few traits should be made baseline, and of those that are it needs to be traits that are actively fixing some flaw in the classes’ design. Illusionary persona needed to be baseline because mesmer was at the time the only class that couldn’t just use their class mechanic in combat without first doing something else unless they were running that trait. Nothing stopped engineers from using toolbelt skills, nothing stopped thieves from using steal, or necromancers from using shroud, or rangers from using pets. But mesmer had to get an illusion up before being able to use its class mechanic. That was a design flaw that was addressed by making the trait that fixed it baseline.

Fast Hands is not at all the same thing. Its not fixing some design flaw with warrior. Making it baseline would be pure powercreep. Not only is it powercreep because its very strong, but it no longer forces you to make a choice to take it. You wouldn’t have to take the discipline line for it anymore if fast hands was baseline, allowing you to take a “stronger” traitline, which is even more powercreep.

Fast hands is a perfect example of a trait that should never be made baseline, because it doesn’t actually fix any design problems with warrior.

UmbraNoctis.1907:

“Most dangerous” varies from situation to situation. Sometimes you want to cleanse immob, blind, taunt/fear, weakness, bleed, poison, … first. It is impossible to rank condis in a way that would apply to all situations. It would also make covering condis pointless and would just encourage mindless spamming (of both condis and cleanses) even more. In case that’s possible …
Aside from this, a general nerf to condis is not neccessary, since only a few condi builds are really strong, and it is even questionable, whether those few builds are op compared to certain power builds.

While I agree with you, I still think we need a cleansing hierarchy. It won’t be perfect in all situations, but it could be made to work pretty well. For instance, blind will almost never be as dangerous as immobilize or confusion. Vuln will almost never be as dangerous as burn/bleeding since you could still work on dodging/blocking attacks.

I believe a cleansing hierarchy would make the game substantially better. Or, at the very least we do need to start differentiating cleanses into cleansing damaging conditions first vs cleansing control conditions first.

That’s not a bug with vault but with lead attacks. Likely the amount of stacks you get from each skill was hardcoded and they just forgot to update it when they increased the ini cost of vault.

I agree, its a counter-intuitive attack. It doesn’t fit thematically with OH sword at all. Now that all of the phantasms have additional effects though, I’m going to evaluate them and figure out what I’d like to see instead.

AA and BF are mainhand skills, they have nothing to do with offhand weapon skills. Core memser does lack a melee offhand, which isn’t necessarily a problem. But in that light, I can appreciate Anet trying to give us an offhand, melee skill. I do appreciate the effort

The last balance patch definitely showed that Anet is willing to redesign skills and even, to a lesser extent, entire weapons on some classes. But at the slow rate of balance patches I don’t think it will mean much honestly. Unless patches start coming monthly, it will still take several years to even have a hope of touching all of the underused skills/traits of any class, which is not acceptable

While I agree that SW offhand isn’t the best fit for a melee attack, at the same time core mesmer doesn’t have any melee skills on its offhand weapons. Focus is mid-range ish, pistol is longrange, torch is an odd combination to say the least but I’d still classify it as midrange at least due to the range on the phantasm attack. So I welcome an actual melee attack on an offhand weapon, especially since it didn’t really change one of our pre-existing attacks. But it is definitely an odd skill nonetheless.

the power creep is responsible for this, even though a lot of people don’t make that connection. The reason that you saw more off meta builds pre HoT was because the general power level of each class was substantially lower (with a few exceptions). This means that an off meta build, one that was lacking in some area, wouldn’t be lacking enough to make it non-competitive.

However, with the absurd powercreep HoT brought, it shot the power level of all classes through the roof. This means that an off met abuild from before, which might not have been that less powerful than the actual meta build, might only perform half as well as a meta build post HoT. This effectively shut them all out from PvP, because to take one you’d be crippling yourself unnecessarily. What used to be only a small difference turned into a large one.

So if people really want to bring in more off meta builds again, they need to be advocating for HoT powercreep to be tuned down more. While this last patch was excellent for balance imo, it also missed the mark quite a bit. warrior is a great example, in that a lot of the actual nerfs hit core warrior, without really nerfing Berserker that much, even though that was the line that was overperforming (yes it was nerfed a bit, but I don’t think core warrior needed any nerfs except possibly the change to endure pain). By all means buff underperforming aspects of core classes, but really elite specs still need to be nerfed substantially.

@K THEN You’d be right if the intention of this change was to buff GS, but that wasn’t the intention of the change. The change was, or so we were told, supposed to give the mesmer more sustained pressure. And it still fails miserably at that

zoomborg.9462:

As a chrono main im really curious as what kind of spec could throw out chrono from the meta. Even after all the nerfs to phantasms, alacrity, SoI chrono is still a powerhouse.

Nerfing chrono anymore doesnt make any sense but keeping it as it is will make it stronger than any other spec we might get, at least in PvE.

No single spec, it would be a lot of little changes bundled together. Notice that Ventari rev received alacrity, which was supposed to be chrono unique. This tells me to expect another elite that has access to alacrity.

Then notice that Anet has slowly been buffing some classes’ access to individual quickness access. As long as you can keep that up on a DPS-ish build on yourself, you could get by with having another elite spec that has ~50-60% quickness uptime but is pulling ~20k DPS compared to chronos kitten. Suddenly most to all people in the raid group could have perma quickness with a bit of finagling (probably some amount of quickness from another spec would just be handed out for no real reason).

That’s the best way to “replace” chrono as the required quickness buffer, not to just introduce another spec that has higher DPS and can still put out perma quickness plus some alacrity.

I hope we don’t get another stealth utility. In every game that has had it, stealth has annoyed me because its never balanced. Its either worthless crap, or its overpowered as kitten. GW2 leans heavily towards the later, even though recently they have been trying to scale that back.

vove.2768:

OriOri.8724:

vove.2768:

I guess you meant Arc Divider not Arcing Slice. In my opinion the range is ok (450) because of two reasons:

1. It is an elite spec.
2. It is super easy to counter, especially now.

Also dodge moves you 300 units over 0,75 s. Casting time on Arc Divider right now is also 0,75 s., it’s seriously hard to get hit by it right now if you arent’t cced.

Range on Arcing Slice is 150, if Arc Divider would have the same range the entire elite spec for warrior would be useless as at the moment warrior without a gs is simply a bad warrior. (inb4. i play axe/whatever and i am gosu)

Where did he say the range needed to be 150? Because I don’t see it.

And 450 range for such a low cooldown skill is way too large for what is ostensibly a melee weapon. A range of 300-360 units even is more appropriate and was the only change that the skill needed

Who said anything about range needing to be 150? Because I don’t see it.

The range is: 450.
Range of dodge: 300.
Range of Arcing Slice: 150.
Range of Arc Divider: 450.

I wonder why this is so? I guess it is because everyone who sees you turn on berserker mode either can dodge/counter all your skills or runs away so you don’t get any adrenaline.

But where did anyone wrote range should be 150? Puzzles me. It is something you invented and now try to put your words in my mouth.

Seriously? You’re the one who started going off about how bad it would be if Arc Divider had a range of 150.

vove.2768:

Range on Arcing Slice is 150, if Arc Divider would have the same range the entire elite spec for warrior would be useless as at the moment warrior without a gs is simply a bad warrior. (inb4. i play axe/whatever and i am gosu)

Alneor.3986:

I’m tired to see arguments like “it’s too much work or it’s too expansive”. I mean it’s a MMO, it’s a big universe and features like that are parts of this.

I agree with DarcShriek, there would not be many skins but it’s not a big problem.

Its a lot of work for comparatively little reward. New weapon types will give a few classes some new skills, which lets them complete the existing content with different skills. But it wouldn’t add any actual content to the game. No new maps to explore, no new enemies, no new fights, no new story. Would shake up PvP and WvW, maybe depending on whether the weapon skills were overpowered or underpowered.

But also, it would make balancing every class much more difficult, since they’d have more weapons skills that interacted with their traits.

vove.2768:

I guess you meant Arc Divider not Arcing Slice. In my opinion the range is ok (450) because of two reasons:

1. It is an elite spec.
2. It is super easy to counter, especially now.

Also dodge moves you 300 units over 0,75 s. Casting time on Arc Divider right now is also 0,75 s., it’s seriously hard to get hit by it right now if you arent’t cced.

Range on Arcing Slice is 150, if Arc Divider would have the same range the entire elite spec for warrior would be useless as at the moment warrior without a gs is simply a bad warrior. (inb4. i play axe/whatever and i am gosu)

Where did he say the range needed to be 150? Because I don’t see it.

And 450 range for such a low cooldown skill is way too large for what is ostensibly a melee weapon. A range of 300-360 units even is more appropriate and was the only change that the skill needed

Levetty.1279:

Sly.9518:

Levetty.1279:

Yeah but what you are forgetting is that a Mesmer killed a thief that one time 3 years ago in hot join using power shatter better nerf the whole class every patch.

Funny thing Mesmer has been Meta every season since HoT( and Meta in every game mode since HoT) yet Thief hasn’t, hell Thief was even essentially removed from two seasons when HoT shipped. But yeah Thief is the big bad bogey man bahahaha

See, this is part of the reason why Mesmer is in the states its in. Anytime you try and talk about the stupid changes or point out how mechanics need reworks, thiefs just come in and cry that they can’t beat us.

You know how many times I’ve been on reddit and tried to talk about the state Mesmer is in in PVE and the responses have been, shut up Chrono bunker too stronk, power shatter is meta in pvp, my theif can’t kill you with one hit why are you crying.

Thanks for proving me right.

This kittenes me off to no end, but its not just thief players its everyone. Anytime I try to talk about core mesmer and a problem that it has, someone will bring up chronomancer. No kitten chronomancer might have addressed that with some OP trait, that doesn’t mean the actual problem itself doesn’t still exist at a fundamental level. But it does mean that a potentially interesting and defining trait that chronomancer could have had is now lost forever, because that slot needs to be tied up “fixing” flawed mechanics on core mesmer.

Levetty.1279:

I don’t think stability was responsible for the visual clutter, fast level of play and no cast bars

No, but some skills that applied pulsing stab were nerfed to only apply multiple stacks of stab at once. This allows us to potential strip all the stab immediately via domination line and then come back in for the interrupts, whereas before if we weren’t on top of everything they would get another stack of stab right as we went for an interrupt. Overall it was made substantially easier to deal with these skills

GrahamW.5397:

OriOri.8724:

Unless the next elite spec is as broken as chrono was at HoT launch or core mesmer is redesigned, we will never get a true DPS spec. Its just not possible without one of those two things happening, because of how base mesmer is designed.

And yes, a spec that fundamentally alters the shatter and/or illusion mechanic would be equivalent to core mesmer being redesigned, as it would prove that Anet found it impossible to create a DPS spec for mesmer with its current design.

That’s why I keep pushing for mesmer to be redesigned, at least partially. The class just needs it

If you REALLY, REALLY feel the need to do dps on mesmer, you can always play condi mes, it pulls respectable numbers. Yes i know its not “optimal” and that other condi classes can do more, but it does enough to be viable, and its not like raids are all that hard if you’re playing with a competent group, im sure you can play some “off meta” stuff for fun and still clear it easily.

Condi mesmer is only really good at 1 or 2 fights though. Other than that its not that good. And I don’t see why people want to just accept that. If redesigned even just a little bit, mesmer could still be an amazing support class via chrono and still have decent DPS builds on core mesmer, and have room for amazing DPS builds with another elite spec.

The problem with these attacks is that they suck, literally worse than our autos in some cases.

It would have been fine if the attack threw out a Mirror blade that only bounced once. Decent damage, not too much, but enough to give the mesmer themselves some more sustained damage that didn’t rely on phantasms not dying/being shattered.

And that’s exactly why Anet should introduce a way to get the racial skills for the other 4 races. It adds content, adds avenues for new race lore, removes this problem. Its a win-win-win for comparatively little development time.

Unless the next elite spec is as broken as chrono was at HoT launch or core mesmer is redesigned, we will never get a true DPS spec. Its just not possible without one of those two things happening, because of how base mesmer is designed.

And yes, a spec that fundamentally alters the shatter and/or illusion mechanic would be equivalent to core mesmer being redesigned, as it would prove that Anet found it impossible to create a DPS spec for mesmer with its current design.

That’s why I keep pushing for mesmer to be redesigned, at least partially. The class just needs it

I don’t understand why everyone is so against racial skills being in a meta build. Why is that a problem?

The only change that racial skills need is that we should have an event chain/quest we can complete to acquire the racial skills for the other 4 races. Adds more content to the game that a lot of people would enjoy, its a chance to add in more race specific lore (again, something people would enjoy), eliminates the need to make a new toon of a specific race to access a specific skill. There’s no real downsides to this outside of the development resources to implement it.

Plus, that way it wouldn’t matter at all if racial skills were the best skills in the game or not, because everyone would have access to them.

Smash brawler change should not have been split. Having primal burst skills on a 3 second CD was absolutely kittening ridiculous. It was nothing but skill spam and blatant powercreep. Those skills are ridiculously powerful to be on such low cooldowns. As it is their cooldowns are still too low when traited.

Bigpapasmurf.5623:

GrahamW.5397:

Because chronomancer isn’t a dps spec it’s utility and not dps, leave the damage dealing to the classes built for that.

^ +1 this.

Crono can still hurt through the GS shatter burst and still 1 shot someone. Bench tests are mainly for things like raids.

You forgot the part where they have to dedicate their entire bar to hitting that hard, whereas other classes don’t. And its a combination of low base damage to begin with, on top of few dmg modifiers compared to a few other classes, and of those few dmg modifiers some of them have ridiculous requirements.

Not just reduce CC, also reduce the amount of boons and condis being thrown out by skills, and especially by traits.

Yea that’s what I figured. Thieves were technically nerfed, but the sustain of other classes was nerfed substantially harder than the hits to thief damage.

I mean to be fair IR needed to be nerfed, especially since it can be used in conjunction with chronophantasma. However I would have liked to see RI buffed in PvP to compensate for how much harder it will be to keep up illusions now.

Ok so how do you want to nerf the distortion share? Place a limit on how much you can build up at once, say 5 seconds at a time (remember that you get 4 sec just from a 3 illusion shatter)? Nerf how many people you can share it too (pointlessly nerfing PvE where its actually used in some fights and needs to be shared with the entire party).

I’m all for auras having their visuals restored. For how powerful they are, you shouldn’t have to be looking at the buff bar to see them, but with how pathetic their visuals are right now they can easily hide behind all of the other effects.

In general though I think visual effects could be reconsidered (don’t get me wrong, I love them!). I think that the visual effects should give an indication of how powerful a skill/effect is. That’s why auras need to be easily seen, why Orbital Strike could a really awesome animation. Weapon skills could be toned down in a few places where it makes sense (for instance it wouldn’t make much sense to tone down mesmer shield 4 too much, since hitting that shield directly benefits the mesmer by summoning an avenger), same with utility skills.

Grimwolf.7163:

Not worth getting, unfortunately. The recipe’s account bound, and the ingredients cost more than simply buying the food out right

Maybe now, but it could change in the future. Plus its way cheaper than forking over the 100 gold to buy it off the TP

Bigpapasmurf.5623:

As a teef, typically mesmer/chrono isn’t always easy (esp evady condi ones). Clones can/will get in our way and the reflects/chronophantasma bursts can really hurt. For condi mes: don’t stealth until we do…about a few seconds after we do (if you think we get the full 4 heartseekers off in our blinding powder, wait about 5sec before stealthing yourself.. Always expect us to start with steal/backstab once we are finally able to target you. Keep your clones up as often as possible and time the shatters. (actually this applies to both DPS and condi builds lol). Its also a good idea to stand in our blinding powder circles often, this limits us on how much stealth we get and possibly forces us to use more initiative as we will move away, BP again and stealth twice (wasting a lot of initiative).

If you are NA and want to practice, hit me up in game. Chrono/Mes is one class I want to learn to fight better.

As a thief, how do you think this patch changed the matchups between thieves and mesmers? Mesmer sustain took a decent hit without much being given back, but thief did lose some damage and some endurance regen.