Guild Wars 2

Takes balls to not only post, but also discuss builds on this forum as a Dev. Cool to see that.

The biggest problem with Revenant is visible lack of direction in balance changes since BWE3.

Nerfs are one thing, justified or not, but Devs seem to be really confused with class as a whole – Revenant has that one power build and that seems to be everything ArenaNet is capable of for this profession, at least for now. Maybe all the bugfixes, redesigns are held till next expansion, no idea.

It just looks like each time the time for balance pass comes around, they look at that power revenant build, judge whether to nerf it or buff it. Then Devs recall that there are other legends, weapons and specializations within this class so they randomly toss 1 random buff, a “bone” and hope it suddenly makes other options viable.
And it’s not like these buffs are even any good all the time – see the atrocious “rework” of Momentary Pacification.

No, these random buffs, unless ridiculously overpowered, won’t spark new archetypes. There are simply too many things within Retribution, Salvation, Corruption, Mallyx, Ventari, Jalis and weapons that have core issues and need deeper look, most likely redesign.

And these things have to have their “class fantasy” again – Mallyx had one, for example and it got deleted, getting no new one instead. Not to mention things like Jalis, who never met his “fantasy” of sturdy legend in the first place.

Just make Quickness no longer a boon, but an effect.

That’s it. Done with balancing it forever.

.

Muchacho.2390:

Well if the interaction with death of people is mandatory, why not the following idea.
Gain for each killed foe 1 stack (players give 5) of Soul fortification. (To a max of 25 stacks)
Soul fortification: Increase your max Lifeforce by 1-2% (not sure what the best number would be) per stack.

I really like this one. I would say 4% per stack would be just right.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

What we’re told about the Elder Dragons’ gender is, as close of wording as I can recall: “the Elder Dragons have gender that Tyrians do not understand” – though it’s unclear whether this means they simply do not know the gender, or if “male” and “female” are both inaccurate descriptions for the Elder Dragons regarding gender.

That said, Glint is oft referred to as female, while Glint refers to Kralkatorrik as a male, and Mordremoth sounds male, and we have another dragon champion referred to as female (Pale Tree).

inb4 elder dragons originate from a snail

gavyne.6847:

It’s in the synergy with blind, fear, chill, and bleed. Taking Reaper trait line, whenever you fear, you also chill. So keep that in mind, whenever you pop shroud 3 aoe fear, that’s an aoe chill.

I’m assuming you are talking about the Reaper Viper Horror build on metabattle? If so, Chilling Darkness will apply chill whenever you blind your targets. So every time you death’s charge (since death’s charge blinds), it’ll chill your target, and apply bleed. For blind you’ve got shroud 2 & dagger 4,

As for your question about min/max efficiency between taking Reaper trait line over others, that you’ll want to consult our PvE overlords. I know how traits work, but I only do PvP & WvW.

You don’t generally use Death’s Charge, unless for mobility. It sucks dong for proccing any effects, since they occur on 9th hit.

As for OP: Reaper is minimal increase in damage and offers greater minimal increase than other traitlines in group environment, that’s basically the whole reason. More crit and couple bleeds.
If your group keeps dying faster than Harambe, take Blood with Transfusion over it.

fluidmonolith.3584:

Burtnik.5218:

The Game Slayer.7632:

Revenants skills are very low CD compared to other classes.

No, they arent. We have same cd’s or even longer as other classes but unlike them rev skills still cost energy.

I agree with this in many cases. However, if we just decreased the cd on many weapon skills, I think Rev would become over-tuned.

The question I have: Would users be willing to accept higher energy costs on weapon skills in return for lower cooldowns? E.g. Staff #5 is reduced to 10s cooldown but now costs 30 energy. E.g. Axe 4 is reduced to 6s cooldown but now costs 20 energy.

IMO, there is a delicate balance between over-costed weapon skills regulated primarily by energy and cheap skills regulated primarily by cooldowns. I think right now Rev is closer to the latter and needs to be pushed a bit in the other direction.

That’s an interesting thing to discuss.

Vastly lowering the cooldowns but increasing cost would probably cause Revenant to be the king of incredibly broken bursts and be almost immune to damage for periods of time, but it’s potential would fall flat in a long run/after couple seconds/till next Legend swap. If I were to make a comparison, it would be like playing a huge minion on early turn in Hearthstone with Shaman, but being fully overloaded for next one/two turns.

There are alternatives, however. Revenant could have weapons and mechanics built around ramp-up or setting up bigger damage, with skills buffing each other/being part of combo rather than being separate entities that need no build-up.

Something such as Opening Strike/Off-Hand/Dual Strike behaviour from GW1 Assasin comes to my mind. Something that would make spamming one ability very inefficient/ineffective but promote combining different skills in order to have sort of “combo finisher” later on. This would require a lot of work.

I think the main reason why just plainly deleting Cooldowns from abilities would be a balancing nightmare is 50 energy recovery on Legend swap.
If spending all your Energy at once would be way more punishing in form of not having your resource reset every 10 or so seconds, then we could reconsider the idea.

I believe the removal of Energy reset is a thing worthy of discussion in general as I think that if it was executed correctly, Revenant could turn into different beast, with Energy management being an insanely important factor. But that’s a topic for different discussion.

1v1 me, dank memes only.

While some bans seem…excessive and it certainly favours some particular classes known for being prime 1v1 server heroes pre-HoT, it’s OP’s tournament and his rules, so nothing to argue about. Might watch.

Just lower the dialogue volume after you’re done with story then. There’s no option to split the sounds.

Greatsword buffs wouldn’t matter – the concept of it is flawed for any competitive purposes. It’s a PvE cleave weapon at best, through and through, because people complained Necromancer can’t cleave in dungeons. That’s it.

The vision of slow-moving slow-casting melee DPS without gap closers and periodic damage immunity (evades, blocks – you name it) reliant on tanking hits in a world where autoattacks have been buffed so much that they hit for 3-4k with ease is absolutely not happening in GW2 PvP and would never happen.

You can no longer wait out dodges and then kill someone in one precise burst – there is almost always an answer. Be it removing Immobilize/Chill on dodge, block, passive immunity trigger under health treshold, spammable evade frames.
You can’t wait these out, because by the time everything is gone you’re probably gone from holding on with your combo or short cooldown defensives are up again. You have no sustain or reset ability to make mistakes or try again.

Nobody sane expected Greatsword to be anything in PvP – in a world where your damage has to be instant, because 1/2 second cast is too slow, what would you think about Gravedigger that barely hits for more than Thief’s autoattack.

The biggest problem of Ventari builds right now, in my opinion, is that Salvation spec just plainly sucks.

It is designed in such a way that if you want to heal with a lot of outgoing healing % increases as Ventari was supposed to do, you have to pick conditional traits that actually increase it and give up all self-sustain or utility.
Baseline outgoing healing % increase from Salvation is lower than the bonus from Druid traitline – and Druid isn’t that reliant on outgoing healing % increase at all.

The Legend itself has been getting better and better. At this point, a rework to Protective Solace to make it not a dead slot if projectiles are not present, more predictable/visible spawn pattern of Fragments and possibly something extra on Elite + radius increase from 240 to 300 and a stunbreak would fix the Legend entirely.

I think that aside from Blast occuring at feet of the caster and shorter creation time the teleport range being 1800 would make Flesh Wurm an interesting choice.

Exedore.6320:

akaCryptic.2389:

Would it reduce the power creep and passive carry?
Would it increase build diversity?

The answer to both is “not really”. You may see some gains, but you’d also see some powerful builds become even more cemented.

There was some power creep from the trait changes from the June 2015 patch, but the power creep comes predominately from elite specs. The 4 stat amulets aren’t helping either (more total stats).

The current trait system has major advantages over the old system, but ANet didn’t do a good job of capitalizing on those advantages.

• Mutual Exclusion The new system can force you to choose a trait and at the same time exclude you from having another. Mutual exclusion allows for powerful or unique traits which would have been problematic in the old system (too many possible trait pairings).
• No "Low Hanging Fruit The biggest problem with the old system was that many traits were lower in the lines but still relatively strong. That caused the same lower traits to always be taken and make most high tier traits unappealing because you had to give up multiple strong lower tier traits. Each trait needed to not only compete within its line, but with every other line; balance is extremely hard to achieve like this.
• Trait Line Cohesion Another problem with the old trait system was that most trait lines didn’t or couldn’t develop a theme(s). ANet didn’t want one aspect of a profession becoming far too strong. In addition, the low-hanging fruit problem made trait line themes – usually requiring going to grandmaster – less appealing.

So the idea is sound, but here’s where the execution went wrong:

• More total traits You used to have 14, but now you have 18. 4 additional traits is bound to power creep. Hindsight being 20/20, ANet should have considered reducing the number of traits per line, possibly on a trait-line basis (e.g. one may have 4, another may have 6).
• Trait consolidation Lots of weaker traits were rolled into a single trait, which basically gave you the equivalent of additional old traits.
• Limited use of mutual exclusion Very few traits which should compete with each other did not. In fact, ANet originally had two strong elementalist arcane traits being mutually exclusive, but changed their stance after lots of whining.
• Underdeveloped themes There was a lot of potential to re-arrange scattered traits and make them work together in a single line, but they were left scattered.

Ajax of Telamona.6974:

Question is this map have only one exit? If yes this need to change cause when ur team get killed enemy’s camp on exit and wait u

Each base has two exits, just like any other PvP map.

The new Capricorn is the prime candidate for next competitive map and I wouldn’t mind including it in Ranked.

Spirit Watch and Skyhammer still have their own demons, but they’re getting better.

Jokes aside, but this could actually work. Overwatch’s Payload is well-done escort mode – You can’t harm the escorted thing nor heal it/affect in any way, it moves on pre-set line, it’s extremaly simple and provides “action point”.

Tbf, after the buff to Life Blast, Death Shroud is imo better for Power Necro as far as PvP goes. Reaper Shroud is for Condi builds.

Quite ironical

It copies stacks.

Fragments, Orbs and such would be much better if the pattern they use to spawn was less…RNG. More predictable. They’re not problem per se, they’re cool, but it’s just that sometimes they will appear right under your feet and sometimes 30 y away. If I knew where the fragment is supposed to go, I wouldn’t have any problem with it.

These things could tap into being a bit like smart heals – spawning right under feet of allies on lowest HP%, but not if ally is, let’s say, further than 450 units from location tablet is moving to.
Or simply spawn right behind targeted destination of the tablet.

Also, reduce the delay on their spawn time. It’s annoying.

The concepts of Ventari aren’t bad, tablet doesn’t have to be removed like some say. They just require polishing. I would say that at this point, Salvation specialization is in more dire need than Legend itself. Fixing the specialization could be the biggest fix to Ventari.

I wouldn’t mind if the people affected by bloodstones acted like drug addicts and the ones we saw crazed on the map were just starving ones. So essentially, bloodstone magic becoming a drug for them.

Good points. Tempest was never an exciting concept and instead of trying to give Elementalist something different, it just pushed it deeper into bruiser/bunker + support type of builds Ele had for years.

It functions like Epidemic. Uses your Condition damage stat, but not duration (copies remaining duration).

Dadnir.5038:

“Normalize” : It feellike they will do to epidemic what they did to WHAO on ranger. Look at the conditions on the ennemy, spread a preset number of the same conditions with number of stacks and duration normalized. Simply put, a big nerf on the potential of all the condition that are stackable… well… on all the condition because there is no way that we will have a 10s normalized chill/cripple/weakness/…etc. spread.

That would be a terrible change because it wouldn’t feel rewarding. Why try to squeeze as much condition damage on target before Epidemic if stacks don’t count anymore.

Change like that kills not only the potential of the skill, but also it’s identity and fun from using it, trying to pull off the biggest “bomb”.

Improving weapon and giving it better identity/gameplay mechanics wouldn’t hurt casual pve at all. In fact, if weapon felt more focused, less all over the place and have different/better animated AA it would only help.

The ranged weapon problem of power necromancer can be solved with next Elite Specializations, but it limits the power necromancer to that exact choice only. It’s really better to solve the issue with core set and Axe could be the answer.

bearshaman.3421:

Rym.1469:

Sarrs.4831:

Do we really want a 900 range hitscan weapon to be an extremely strong contender for raw damage? There is a reason it’s tuned as low as it is.

Scepter is hitscan, too.

And, being honest, hitscan is a poor identity of the weapon. I’d much rather have another projectile weapon that can provide good ranged power damage and steady Life Force generation. Power Necromancer needs an alternative for Staff.

Why? What’s wrong with using staff? longer range, piercing, and lots of AoEs. I don’t see the problem…

Keep in mind that everything I say applies to PvP.

It doesn’t provide much Power damage at range. Staff is a utility weapon and is fine as that. But Power Necromancer needs ranged damage once he swaps from Dagger/X. The way PvP combat works in this game, if you’re a damage dealer you need either a good ranged weapon option or reliable way to gapclose to targets.

You just can’t keep up the pressure with Staff. It has utility, but no damage you could use to burst down the target.

Not having an alternative to Staff locks you in Staff+Soul Marks combo. Both other SR Adepts would hold a great value to Power Necro – Vulnerability on Shroud 1 or shorter cooldown on Shroud+movement speed. But you need the mentioned set, because that’s your only choice of getting some Life Force at safe distance which is extremaly important at the start of fights/disengages.

Axe+X becoming an alternative to Staff for Power builds would be great, because you could fill a bit of missing Staff utility with Off-hands – Condition transfer of dagger, CC of Warhorn or Chill+Regeneration of Focus, have potentially better power damage and if Life Force generation was good enough, make other Soul Reaping Adepts an option.

Shadelang.3012:

I feel IF they change epidemic it will be to put a cap on the size of the stack that can transfer. So no more transfering 40 burning from a boss to adds and back again. Or burning through an entire swarm of small guys just by epidemicing off one mob.

It would still be a kitten good aoe nuke. But it would cap out how good it COULD be. And prevent the more extreme examples. (Every condi necro here has dreamed of eping all the condies on a keep/castle lord in wvw onto the zerg around it).

The cap is at 25 stacks per unique condition. They might give targets affected by Epidemic already a temporary debuff that would prevent them from being struck by Epidemic again within short amount of time.

Burning through an entire swarm of small guys is exactly what Epidemic is supposed to do. That’s not the direction for nerfs if they want to keep it fun and relevant.

First thing that comes to my mind is conditions you spread no longer scalling with your Condition damage, but with their original source’s Cdamage instead (in other words, scalling with Cdamage of the ally who applied them).

They don’t scale with your Condition duration, but do with Cdamage – they might have that on mind when talking about “inconsistency”.

Sarrs.4831:

Do we really want a 900 range hitscan weapon to be an extremely strong contender for raw damage? There is a reason it’s tuned as low as it is.

Scepter is hitscan, too.

And, being honest, hitscan is a poor identity of the weapon. I’d much rather have another projectile weapon that can provide good ranged power damage and steady Life Force generation. Power Necromancer needs an alternative for Staff.

If they buff the radius of Tablet skills, it will be probably from 240 to 300. I think it would be fair and didn’t need further increase.

To OP: I fully agree with you. Especially equipped with that new awesome Momentary Pacification grandmaster trait. 3s immobilize delayed by 3s that can be blocked and evaded on 45 second cooldown is really the thing Revenants speccing into Salvation wanted.

Some Boon duration isn’t that big of a deal when you get no defensive stats. And Mallyx benefits more from concentration stat than Glint. But since none of the new amulets has any condition stats, then..well…

Revenant may actually drop in tier quite a bit if the cleanse spam Ele doesn’t survive removal of Cleric’s.

We’re still waiting for the Mallyx rework after radical changes after BWE2 which removed the backbone gameplay mechanics making the Legend unique and left it spineless, as just the “condition legend”.

Soon it will be a year of this sad state of Mallyx alone.

Varezenem.2813:

witcher.3197:

Stop covering up balance issues by removing amulets, it’s not going to solve the core issues but it’ll certainly remove what little build diversity’s left in this game.

It was literally the only amulet that worked on Ventari/Glint Herald, buffs aren’t even close enough to compensate for that loss.
Auramancer nerfs were enough.

Mender’s works all right for Ventari/Shiro. But we’re talking Ventari build here, so yeah…

As for the removal of Cleric’s amulet, I’d much rather see Tempest removed instead and replaced with some other elite specilalization for elementalist.

Trying to sweep the problem under the rug by deleting Cleric’s instead of proper balance changes won’t work in long-term.

The Dagger #2 now feels more smooth. If we had a good ranged Power weapon instead of useless concept of Greatsword or Axe reworked to fill that niche, Power Reaper wouldn’t be that terrible.

Good change on Life Blast. Imo, they should rework more DS skills to be better at longer ranges – Dark Path teleport part of the it being a flip-over skill maybe?

Eh, the patch notes aren’t bad, but just very, very…unimpressive. Again.

The only relevant change is the Pulsating Pestilience one. It’s pretty all right and I will have to test it. I believe it’s nearly always better than Diabolic Inferno at it’s current state and with conditions is many meta builds.

Momentary Pacification trait…I don’t really know what to say, being honest. It’s a short, super visible immobilize with 3 second long build-up that can be dodged, evaded and blocked with 45 ICD.
Could we get the old Momentary Pacification back? Even that one made more sense. What was the idea behind this redesign, who would take that? Was it re-done to this just to match the trait’s name?

I noticed that entering Embrace the Darkness is now instant, but the animation was taken away.

Overall – wait for the next patch?

The camera bug seems to be appearing way more often than before the patch. Like every 3rd UA. You can fix it using Phase Traversal, it also fixes itself after 10 or so seconds, but is annoying.

Whatever it is, it should bring ranged condition main hand weapon, possibly with some bonus healing.

Sorel.4870:

Weakness in itself is fine, it just has become too easy to apply, the two main offenders being necromancers and rangers. In the old days, it was important for a thief to blast his poison field to apply weakness in a team fight, now you just assume that everyone will be weaken anyway because of the necromancer.

We have the same problem with protection, and with damage reduction. Double endure pain warriors, bulwark gyro, minions, Guard and such have completely detroyed old power builds. The only power builds you can play now deal ridiculous damage to deal with this increase in survivability: scrappers, revenants, even daredevil and guardians. This is not very good for build diversity.

In the old days, Necromancer had almost the same amount of Weakness application as it does now. The only difference is, in the old days not everyone was farting Might, which gets corrupted into Weakness.

I think they will want to sort out the Jagged Horrors problem, possibly. Put max duration on them, but Death Nova spawning a bit more at once (i.e. two out of one corpse).

Aside from that, as others pointed out, I wouldn’t mind them re-designing Axe to fill ranged long-range power weapon niche Power Necromancers need. Reliable Life Force generation+good power damage. Otherwise, next Elite Specialization should have something like this, but why leave Axe useless only to be replaced. Greatsword, obviously, didn’t work out for Reaper.

Axe is so all over the place and has no synergy within the kit. Why, if AA applies a lot of Vulnerability, don’t make Ghastly Claws (#2) gain double benefit from Vulnerability on targets (in other words, 1 stack increasing damage by 2% instead of 1%). That alone would already make the toolkit more interesting and fun.

They could tweak some Spectral skills – Reduce the long cooldown on Spectral Walk, speed up and reduce CD of Spectral Grasp, vastly reduce the CD of Spectral Wall or re-design it to be other shape.

Other than that, phleora of useless traits awaits, but that’s true for every class, more or less. They should do something about Master Minor in Death Magic though, it’s the most useless minor I’ve ever seen.

Weakness condition is completly fine. It just has to be accessible for professions designed around having access to it, like Necromancer and less accessible to ones that are not.

Unless the next patch is a miracle that allows me to play more than one build per profession without the viability gap between builds being size of Colorado Canyon I can’t see myself or anyone I know being interested in S4 if it continues to be the same system. The matchmaking is not an issue, lack of PvP players that would give a kitten and play is.

See you in Season 5 then, maybe. Take a look at new Heroes of the Storm ranking system and just copy it.

Evan Lesh.3295:

There are no NPC pirates in this map that interact with players. The secondary mechanic is a periodic 4th capture point (“The Bell”) that awards increasing team score.

There was probably some confusion because once the bell is captured, there is an awesome sequence of cannons blowing up the pirate ship. This is only for flavor, though.

The article was completly wrong then. It had me worried, but if it is just flavour and theme of the map, I don’t mind it at all, sounds cool. Happy we’re getting a new (hopefully competitive) conquest map. Looking foward to checking it out.

Jack Skywalker.5674:

@Rym for me Momentary Pacification made sense because Salvation and Ventari are based around a defensive play style, that’s why I recommended that the effect of Momentary pacification varries for each legend, given the ones who already have CC on elite create a water combo field instead….while I like that Unwavering Mercy trait, I feel it would make Heralds very close to OP due to the amount of skills with Upkeep it has available compared to core class legends (ventari hilariously enough benefits the least with only 1 upkeep skill). Maybe make it a flat bonus while under the effect of Regeneration.

You don’t hold upkeeps for long in Glint in PvP. It’s inefficient and costs too much, you mostly use flipover skills. This trait could change this gameplay, promoting upkeeping skills for longer and add defensive dynamic to it, more decision-making. Number of upkeeps you have doesn’t really matter here – it’s the total Energy degeneration that counts. Ventari might have one upkeep, but it’s worth as much as three or four in Glint.

I like traits that change the way existing mechanics/skills are being used instead of simply making stuff more powerful.

Back when I used to play on duelling servers, norm was starting with LF equal to 2 minions swapped (22-23%).

O hey, it’s the 4Head guy

I think in GW1 some of the dwarves were riding dolyaks, but yeah. Riding animals against firearms and tanks wouldn’t be the brightest idea ever.

Seems good, but I would have to test it myself before giving judgement.

Whenever there is a talent/trait/perk that increases pool of class resource/makes it regenerate faster/more reliably it quickly becomes mandatory for every build and class feels incomplete without it.

See – Necromancer and Vital Persistance, Thief and Trickery line an so on.

Really awesome games and good event organisation this time, without any issues. Matches were intense. If you haven’t watched it live, watch VoDs.

Orangensaft.7139:

they should add stuff like

- T6 mats
- Obsidian Shards
- 1g per Ticket
- Ascended Armor/Weapon chests (for something between 50-100 tickets each?)
- Ascended Trinkets (for 20-40 Tickets each?)
- PvP Arena Tokens
- Unidentified Dyes

similar stuff to Laurel merchant would be nice i guess

I think it is a fair suggestion.

I’m not sure if this would pass in Guild Wars 2, but price of said items could be lower the higher you are in divisions/legendary tier leaderboard system if they fix it. Just a small alternative carrot for people without need of introducing more ugly backpieces or collections.