Guild Wars 2

Thanks to everyone who posted feedback on the reaper from this last BWE. I spent a lot of time during the weekend reading over as many posts as I could both here and on reddit and taking notes. I noticed a few trends show up that I’d like to try and address before the next BWE and I wanted to let you know about some of the changes that I’m working on.

Greatsword cost/payoff ratio was undertuned
The original intent here was to make GS feel like more of an AoE weapon while dagger felt like more of a single target weapon. We tuned the damage ratios accordingly so that greatsword would have higher dps vs 3 or more targets as we didn’t want to devalue dagger as a melee weapon. However this didn’t account for the difficulty of actually hitting with greatsword skills, and when we took that into account it made sense to increase the damage multipliers on the core damage skills. There are some other QoL changes made for Greatsword as well which I hope will improve your experience with it in the next beta test.

• Greatsword Auto Attacks – Fixed incorrect range facts. These attacks have the same range as normal Greatsword Attacks. Added lifeforce gain to all hits 1/1/3. Increased damage of all attacks by approximately 20%.
• Fading Twilight – Adjusted animation speed to smooth out attack sequence for non-human rigs.
• Chilling Scythe – Increased chill duration from 1.5s to 2s.
• Gravedigger: This attack now has 100% recharge when it hits a foe below 50% health. Increased damage by 50%. Increased recharge from 5s to 8s.
• Death Spiral: Increased range from 170 to 220. Increased width of cone by 33%.
• Nightfall: Changed animation. This skill no longer roots you to cast. Removed camera shake.
• Grasping Darkness: No longer poisons and instead inflicts chill for 4 seconds on hit. This skill now fires at your target instead of using your facing direction. This skill will no longer fire if your target is behind you.
  • Grasping Darkness is a very complex skill under the hood and integrates programming and art in a very specific way to work the way it does. As a result, changes that would be simple for another skill (like giving it increased range) are very difficult and require coordination from multiple disciplines. I’ve made a few changes that I believe are safe for this BWE that changes the skill to be enemy targeted instead of using your facing direction. We’ll be keeping an eye on this one to see if it needs further tuning in subsequent beta events.

Shouts are weak and feel clunky to use in combat
We were concerned about the possibility of instant damage spikes and trying to emphasize the slow thematics of the specialization when we made these skills. After seeing how things worked out on Tempest we think it’s safe to lower the cast time of these skills as the “slow” theme can be expressed through other methods like greatsword and reaper’s shroud. As a result, many shouts have had their cast times significantly reduced. Additionally I’ve moved some of the reward for hitting multiple targets with these shouts to be baseline, so they should feel a little better when there are less foes around. Also, new minion type for “Rise!”

• “Chilled to the bone!”: Reduced cast time from 2s to 1.25s.
• “Rise!”: This skill is now unblockable and instant cast. Damage increased. Now creates a shambling horror for each foe hit which lose health every second. These minions place Dark Bond on their master when they hit with attacks which causes 50% of the damage from attacks on the master to be redirected to the minion.
• “Suffer!”: This skill is now instant cast. Lowered damage. Increased chill from 2s to 3s
• “You are all weaklings!”: Now grants 5 stacks of might baseline plus 3 per target hit.
• “Your soul is mine!” Increased healing power attribute multiplier to 0.5. Now grants 5% lifeforce baseline plus 3% per target hit

Reaper Shroud 2 has targeting/control issues
Sounds like a lot of you guys accidentally ran off of cliffs with Death’s Charge :P so we’re changing this to be more like the Warrior Sword skill Savage Leap. It will no longer go through targets you have selected, but will go its full distance if you have no target. Because it does very little damage while dashing I’ve allowed it to continue hitting even when you hit walls, we’ll be watching this next BWE to make sure it doesn’t turn into another Fiery Greatsword Rush though. Reaper Shroud has also has a few other general usability and bug fixes.

• Reaper’s Shroud Auto Attack – Fixed skill facts interaction with Unyielding Blast and Reaper’s Might traits.
• Life Reap (Shroud 1c) – Increased lifeforce gain to 1.5%. Fixed bug with number of targets not being listed.
• Death’s Charge – Now dashes to a target, rather than in a direction. No longer passes through your target. No longer stops hitting if the player hits a wall.
• Infusing Terror – Fixed a bug which caused this skill to begin recharging while it was still giving stability.
• Soul Spiral: Reduced recharge from 40s to 30s. Fixed number hits skill fact to show 12 hits. Fixed duration skill fact to list 3s duration.
• Executioner’s Scythe – Made adjustments to hitbox to make the initial attack more reliable. The hitbox for the primary attack is now the entire area of the ice field (still only hits 1 target).
• Reaper’s Onslaught: Fixed a bug which prevented the attack speed modifier on this trait from working properly. This trait no longer recharges Death’s Charge on kill, but instead recharges all shroud skills by 5s on kill.

Chill uptime is difficult to maintain
It seems like we went overboard with how much we limited chill in the last update and you guys are having a hard time applying this reliably. We’re going to tune this up for the next BWE primarily through traits as well as some small increases to baseline chill on skills.

• Chilling Nova – Reduced ICD from 15s to 10s.
• Shivers of Dread – Fixed a bug which caused this trait not function while downed. Increased chill duration from 2s to 3s.
• Cold Shoulder – Fixed a bug which caused this trait not function while downed. Increased chill duration modifier from 10% to 20%.
• Deathly Chill: Doubled damage values.

Finally here are some things that won’t be changing and why:

• Augury of Death – I heard a few good suggestions to make some of the recharge bonus on this trait baseline, however due to the way this trait is set up it’s a little complicated to do this and have the skill facts match up. Along with the other changes made to shouts I’d like to leave this alone for now and see how the other changes affect its value.
• Soul Eater – Similarly to Augury, this trait is heavily influenced by the current power of greatsword. It sounds like it’s a little weak right now, but I’d like to see how the other changes to greatsword affect the weapon before modifying this one.

These changes are all in iterative development so it’s possible that there will be more changes, less changes, or different changes from the ones listed here when the next BWE rolls around. This is just a snapshot of the changes I’m working on now.

Regarding general silence, it’s mostly due to how busy everything is at the moment, but also due to how a company as large as ArenaNet works. I’ll see if I can explain a few things to put the situation into context.

Right now I’m waiting to get feedback from the upcoming beta weekend on Chronomancer and Reaper, but I haven’t worked on either of them specifically for several weeks. Many of the changes you’ve seen from Gamescom were locked down weeks ago in order to assure the stability of the floor demo and the upcoming beta weekend. With a game as big as Guild Wars 2 it takes a long time (and a lot of QA effort) to make sure big events like Gamescom go smoothly. My work over the last few weeks hasn’t been for Necromancer or Mesmer and is actually been for the Warrior elite specialization (which I probably can’t say anything else about). I’m also fixing bugs on live for ALL professions this week and next which has kept me pretty busy.

Now this isn’t to say that I’m not paying attention to what’s being said or what’s been said in the past. I take notes on threads I think are relevant for when I have time to work on them. I have notes on things to improve with both axe and scepter as well as a note about skills that we could add projectile blocking to (incidentally RS 2 blocks projectiles because of a suggestion I read here). These are changes I’d like to get to and see happen, but right now iteration on Reaper and Chronomancer are probably going to take priority over that once the beta finishes.

I hope that clears up a few things. I’m not really as talkative as Roy or Karl, but I’ll see if I can show up now and then to answer the occasional polite question.

Wow, everyone I’m really touched to see a thread like this and I’m really glad to see everyone having so much fun with mesmer since the patch. We’ve all been working on these changes for many months and it’s a really weight off my chest to finally be able to play these changes on live.

I want to clarify though that a lot of the changes you see aren’t my work alone. While I was driving most of the mesmer changes and pushed some of the more… shall we say “extreme” examples coughmimiccough, many other significant changes (like Illusionary Persona becoming baseline) wouldn’t have happened without feedback and suggestions from other folks on the skills team like Roy and Karl as well as our dedicated team of testers.

Praise Lyssa and have fun with the new traits!

Unicorns 4 Life
—Robert