Guild Wars 2

frans.8092:

They don’t actually, they have no condition damage on them at all. They have condition duration. Condition duration is less effective – for the longer lasting DOT conditions at least – as it seems, as long lasting conditions have a higher chance of being cleansed before doing their work.

But perhaps all condition duration modifiers, increasing as well as decreasing, on gear should be tempered to within a smaller range. Both sides should be options, not mandatory.

Whoops, my mistake.

Condition duration isn’t really there for the longer lasting damaging conditions. Multiple sources of small amounts of condition duration stack up to add extra ticks to quickly applied and dropped damaging conditions, and most importantly every 1% of condition duration affects controlling conditions. When abilities are tuned to deliver a certain amount of cripple/chill/immobilise/fear and then someone slaps on an extra 100% through a mix of traits, food, runes and Giver’s weapons, it at the very least becomes incredibly unfun. The food provides the single highest amount of condi duration in that pile- More than all your traits, and more than your runes, armor and weapons combined.

I think everyone here already knows this though, so.

Kiriakulos.1690:

Change the minor traits in Blood Magic and make them 5 = Vampiric, 15 = Vampriric Precision, 25 = Bloodthirst.

Particularly with this; I don’t really like it. It somewhat forces you to push deep into the tree for the first trait to be worthwhile, and I personally don’t really like minor traits compounding on themselves because it constructs an if→then relationship. If Vampiric and Vamp Precision are bad, then Bloodthirst is bad.

Blood minors don’t really need changes, they’re more or less fine as they are. Play with Spite and Death.

Shelter; like the change to the blocks, gives it more counterplay. Not sure why healing is a channel rather than a big lump at the end because it undermines the newly added counterplay; if you’re worried people will just breeze through the blocks then add more

Healing Breeze; same concern I have with Cleansing Flame, guardians seem to be in a decent place when it comes to how they deal with conditions

Signet of Resolve; at the moment it seems unpopular so raising the cast time seems difficult to justify, but jiggling about the cd and heal amount seems okay. need to check how exactly condi cleansing passive signets work when they come off CD

Hammerguard.9834:

Oh I’m sorry, I meant just the food. The 40% increase/decrease just from food is outrageously OP and should have been nerfed long ago.

There’re also things like Giver’s weapons that have preposterously huge amounts of condition damage on them.

Swagg.9236:

Sarrs.4831:

Is Tequatl a balanced encounter?

Even though you’ve strayed way off from my main discussion point, I’ll humor you anyway:

Yeah I am getting a bit out of the way. I could say that’s the point, and that changes like these can affect things all the way over on the other end of the pond (I was going to make the link between PvP stats→Balanced in PvE→Ascended→Low level economy), but it’s probably just me being up a bit past my bedtime. My apologies.

To all this stuff about encounter design, I’ll say, more or less; yes. PvE does suffer from the overemphasis on damage. One point for large-scale encounter design is that they don’t need to emulate player behavior, but they need to emulate at some level what’s necessary in PvP.

Why is the Marionette destroyed by funneling into lanes and killing NPCs or completing mini-games? Why aren’t we hopping up to its face on temporary panels to deliver strikes at its weak point?

This is kind of a point I want to touch on because the Marionette is interesting in how it spreads out the players, both by lanes and by platforms; at the end of the encounter you’re in a group of something like 5 people and you can almost feel the system starting to actually ‘click’, so to speak, when it’s brought down to that scale.

Swagg.9236:

Yes. And I’m in that group too. I have my ascended everything, but I know that the only way to truly save this game is to fully balance everything around sPvP. Although, at this point, I’d be better off making my own game. Even so, I’d still like to help ANet with GW2.

Assuming that means sacrificing your ascended gear? You might be okay with it, but you’re not really the average GW2 player. If ANet told people that they were deleting all ascended gear tomorrow, that’d have the very real potential to kill the game outright.

DeceiverX.8361:

Consequently, there are likely easier implementations from a developer/IT perspective due to the immense amount of effort it will take to convert the values and of course, assume that they allow players to refund the stat on the berserker/crit items they currently possess.

I doubt it’ll actually be too hard to convert Crit Damage % to Ferocity, at least on gear. Check the item rarity/level, convert it to the appropriate value. Since it always operates as a secondary stat except on Celestial, you only need to have a few numbers in system; the item level algorithm and the rarity modifier.

Offering refunds for gear is already very doable in the structure they have. They gave stat swaps for MF spreads, after all- The tech’s already there.

Hammerguard.9834:

I would like to add that a much needed condi duration increase/decrease nerf NEEDS to be implemented.

I wonder whether changing Condi Duration and Boon Duration to function like Ferocity will would be a good change. There are serious issues as it stands with condi duration in wvw.

I wasn’t around for the last thread, but why is Dark Path there? Dark Path is fantastic. Sure, it got hurt a bit when it got its behavior “fixed” which functionally cut the range down to 600, but it’s still a fantastic skill. Good chill duration, a couple bleed stacks, puts you right in their face.

NG+ Personal Story would be really cool, especially if you could give it a hard mode.

Anen.1742:

If you care about leaderboard, you should not be playing with strangers for start.

The same problem could hypothetically happen in tpvp, though I don’t know how you’d protect it from abuse. Like what if you see that your comp in tpvp is just completely rubbish compared to the other team’s and one of your people alt-f4s out to tank the fall?

I would personally use Zealot’s over Magi’s and just not try to use Runes of Exuberance.

Swagg.9236:

• Balancing the entire game around sPvP means to balance the entire game around player-like encounters.
• Balancing the entire game around player-like encounters means having to use PvE enemies that resemble players.
• Having to use PvE enemies that resemble players means more overworld enemies like what one might encounter in the Heart of the Mists (dueling NPCs, Svanir, Chieftain, Keep Lord and his entourage).
• Encountering Heart of the Mists enemies in overworld PvE means having to rely on CC, timing, positioning and teamwork in order to defeat them (soloing a lot of those enemies at once is very, very difficult).
• Because these enemies are so complex, they wouldn’t necessarily need huge hp pools in order to be a challenge to fight. Their skills and mechanics already make them a challenge—especially if they’re in a group.

Is Tequatl a balanced encounter?
Does Tequatl resemble a player?
This might seem like a copout but this is the fundamental difference between spvp and pve/wvw; any delicate balance that’s constructed on the small scale does not scale up. WVW open field is wildly different from spvp. Large scale PvE encounters are wildly different from spvp. Hell, even 8v8 isn’t considered a serious avenue for spvp, and that still has the exact same stats and mechanics as 5v5 (at least, to the best of my knowledge- but if 8v8 worked well, wouldn’t we see tournies of it?)
And before you say “we’ll just make the dungeons the ‘real challenging content’ and we’ll not really worry too much about the big fights”, the opposite is already happening.

• Because enemies don’t have huge hp pools, the players don’t need inflated stats or consumables to kill them.
• Because the players don’t need inflated stats or consumables, sPvP stats can be implemented everywhere.
• Because sPvP stats are implemented everywhere, stats are more stable and balanced everywhere.

This is a Pandora’s Box problem; that box has already been opened. Ascended gear is already in the game, and people have already spent a lot of gold, and therefore money/time, on it. You’ve probably already seen the thread about Celestial being impacted by the Ferocity change just as much as Berserker’s gear is; how big do you think the thread saying “we’re deleting all the time and effort you put into your ascended gear, sorry folks” will get?

I hope whether we forgive Scarlet or not is a choice.

Because I’d choose to send her to the block.

Swagg.9236:

Let’s stop here for a second.

WvW is this game’s second form of PvP aside from sPvP. In WvW, players fight each other. However, unlike in sPvP, the numbers of players and the stats players achieve vary wildly compared to what one might find in even an sPvP hotjoin match. These variables completely throw off any attempt at all to properly balance any aspect of WvW.

Even though changes made from an sPvP perspective would flow over into WvW, it is for the best in every regard since there is no conceivable way to properly balance something from a WvW standpoint due to the inflated stats, the consumables, the number of players and the stability bathing that occurs in that game-mode. It makes no sense to ever balance from a WvW perspective.

ANet disagrees with you. I know that’s really lazy justification, but part of the reason they’re making the Ferocity stat is because critical damage distorts how small-scale combat/roaming works in WvW. They do think balance is important for WvW and PvE.

As logical as it might be to root changes in sPvP and let them spring from there, the PvE and WvW crowds do need to be considered too when making changes. While it might be nice to think balancing the game in the sPvP bubble without ramifications is possible, I don’t think that ANet can really justify doing that, as they are protecting their income by catering to their PvE/WvW crowd- And at the end of the day, they need to make money to keep the lights on.

Swagg.9236:

With that attitude, [Merciful Intervention] is just a dead skill then. Do you have a suggestion to make change it so it would work well in PvP without somehow further breaking the mess of a game-mode that is WvW? I guess I could go off and come up with some solutions of my own in the mean time.

Making it a Light field would prevent the water field from being blasted, but has problems of its own.

Lazy suggestion; make it target the most heavily conditioned player, and have it heal the target and remove 2-3 conditions from them. This directly buffs its output and makes it more relevant in the current meta.

MatthewMedina.5419:

Regarding trimming stories of all but the “relevant details”: I would say that many of us on the dev team would actually agree with the idea that how two characters relate to one another, regardless of whether that interaction has direct bearing on the direction of the main plot-line, can and should be considered relevant. Such breadth of character traits may advance a side-plot, or no plot at all and can be used to simply establish a personality type or a behavior which informs a character’s actions as they progress through the narrative.

Of course there is a limit: Learning whether or not Braham likes ham, for example (say that five times fast) is probably better left on the cutting room floor, but exploring whether Braham likes Rox, or Taimi, or Logan (does anyone else want to see a guardian duel between these two?), well we believe that there’s real emotion there. And if it advances a plot, great…if not, it’s still part of the landscape of those characters, and that’s really important to us, and something that I would say we are more than eager and willing to explore.

Sure, definitely. In particular, there being friction between Rox and Braham because of how Norn and Charr cultures work differently is great because it helps to flesh out how their race relations work in the setting. You can picture in your head this discussion being had not just by these two characters, but by their races as a whole, and that comes out to me- particularly because these cultures have strong roots in real cultures. It has applicability to real life.

Emotion is definitely cool but I hope you’re not putting the cart before the horse here. Emotion and attachment to the characters needs to spring from the events of the storyline and, in turn, feed into the events of the storyline, and not just slid in there because ‘emotion is cool’. One of the common criticisms levelled against recent Bioware games (at least, in the circles I run in) is that they’re ‘dating simulators’ with tacked-on romances.

Also, sorry if this was a bit of a late response, in case this ship has already sailed! It’s good to hear back from you guys about this stuff, and I hope I’m not being so harsh as to scare you off.

At the moment, I’m wondering how sigil changes will affect the value of Precision. They could possibly help to cancel out the negative repercussions that Valk/Assassin’s/Celestial will eat with this change.

I do think that changing the crit damage is a good idea but doing it in a vacuum will def cause problems with condi bunkers so that sucks and hopefully they’re paying attention and will maybe change something there too. I dunno \o/

Swagg.9236:

Is that bad?

Guardians are already one of three mandatory pieces in a WvW train (guardian, warrior, elementalist). Your guardians usually have Hammer and Staff to lay down Hammer 5s and Staff Lines to control the enemy, Hammer 2s to blast fields that you lay down(your group’s versatility is determined by how many fire/water/lightning fields you have and how many blasts you can bring), and Staff 4 is pretty obvious in its function.

This change would basically make it so that Guardians can easily add another ability into their repertoire which adds a whole bunch of healing onto those water blasts. They’re already a core part of a big group’s functions, and this would make them even moreso.

I know that this is an analysis of the changes from sPvP, but these changes do flow on in potentially unexpected ways in other parts of the game.

Well two main things come to mind.

1. That whole lol discipline thing, Travis has already anunciated that quite well
2. There’s no implication that the crit damage from axes will be reduced. The swords trait in Arms gives a straight 10% crit chance; why can’t the axe crit damage give 10% crit damage (i think it’s 10% don’t jump on me)?

Swagg.9236:

Sarrs.4831:

Identical in what sense?

Functionally identical. One of the biggest detriments of Necromancer staff is that it pigeon-holes itself into Mark spamming. There’s no other weapon set that does something like this in the game, and moreover, Marks don’t even really have that much of an impact on a fight over time. Depsite the fact that some of them inflict conditions, they’re all one-shots that a player just throws across the ground and hope people step on them. At it’s core, it’s hardly a combat-shaping mechanic and more importantly it’s a very poor design from a defensive standpoint. It would make much more sense to just design individual Marks around unique, potentially combat-changing abilities just as all weapon sets strive to do.

Is the problem here the way Marks function, or the staff’s skillset? The staff is mostly doomed to spam Marks because that’s all it has to spam. If you want it to not spam Marks, change some of its abilities to not-Marks.

I know this isn’t game balance, this is more dipping into how scrubs like me interpret the game, but when I read “mark” I expect some kind of behavior consistent with other abilities which are Marks. At the moment, that behavior is “slap it on the ground and wait for some poor sod to step on it” or “put it under someone’s feet”. That behavior might need to be changed, but I expect all marks to function in, more or less, the same way.

Sarrs.4831:

I’ll disagree with you there. Doing something like that would require outright deleting already existing skills and shoehorning Marks into random spots in other weapon sets that wouldn’t necessarily benefit from such a change.

You’re already radically changing the functionality of, or outright deleting existing skills. Don’t see why this is any different.

Also precludes the possibility of them adding new weapons. Not to try to be mean or anything, but I honestly doubt that they’ll try to rework the weapons instead of doing the absolute minimum and continuing on with expanding the game.

I dunno if Sword really needs to be changed; this change subjects it to a lot of rules. You can’t use it to blink past a fear wall or line of warding, the projectile will get reflected, etc etc. Also making 2-1 use Hip Shot’s projectile behavior would make it pierce I suppose which should be an expensive effect on a blind.

Changing Line of Warding has very very serious implications for WvW.

Zealot’s Flame sounds really really cool because let’s face it RTL is a cool ability but I think that the burn->burning req might be a little redundant? I’d personally be okay with a traited Zealot’s Flame just applying a gigantic pile of Burning and not having a chain skill.

Not sure why we’re changing Cleansing Flame. IMHO guardians are in a good spot when it comes to how well they take conditions. My lazy suggestion if I’m allowed to (you’re overhauling the game why can’t I); turn it into a ground pulse that burns enemies and cleanses conditions on allies, a bit like a mix of Ele staff 2 and Ranger healing pond thing.

Changing Merciful Intervention like this will probably make guardians even more desired for WvW. As written, it doesn’t trigger combo fields, so it’ll make them even more mandatory for big fights.

I don’t know about tomes because I’m not really that experienced with guardian and mostly talking out my kitten .

Swagg.9236:

I’ll open it up to anyone here:

I think that Necromancer marks fall short of something truly interesting because they are all identical. I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to make the marks into different things. We have suggestions for bringing back something like the old Mark of Pain (something that we could do with the current game mechanics) among others. I’m also working on a few chain skills for marks to provide more utility (possibly mobility) to the Necromancer while using staff.

Identical in what sense?

Visually identical? That’s def a problem.
They all operate identically (put it on the ground, someone steps on it, it explodes)? If they don’t all do the same thing, then they shouldn’t have a unified naming system. If you change this, then they’re marks which don’t function like a mark and it’s counterintuitive.

Just had a thought; Marks would be nicer if different weapons had them, like how Guardian symbols are spread across weapons. I really don’t care much for changing marks one way or another and I don’t care for changing the Staff, I don’t mind it being a Mark dispenser, but having marks be a more universal class mechanic and not exclusively tied to two traits and a stick might be nice.

Cactus.2710:

Now that was cute. Laughably naive, but cute. Season 1 provided a structure and incentive to actually go to a high pop server and BE PART OF THE LARGEST GROUP THAT YOU CAN. The top ten keys to winning in WvW (in season or otherwise), in order of priority, would look something like this:

1. I’d put 24/7 coverage over high population
2. Is server organisation/communication not a component of skill?
3. Is commander skill/knowledge not a component of skill?
4. I specifically included that it didn’t necessarily succeed in this endeavour.

Please don’t bring the forums down by flinging mud.

Atherakhia.4086:

In what way was Season 1 a success? I can’t think of a single thing they did right and I can’t think of a single reason I would ever consider participating in a second one.

It provided a structure and incentive for people to actually go to WvW and BE THE BEST THAT YOU CAN BE I guess is what I would say if I were him. Whether it actually did that is up for debate.

Personally, I enjoyed having some structure over the top of the matchup system and would welcome a Season 2, but more tweaking wouldn’t be unappreciated.

LordByron.8369:

1) unnneded nerf to critical damage
2) celestial being a victim of war of a nerf aimed at DPS equip while being amongst lowest dps equip
3) ascended it is one of the issue.. the game was designed with 0 grind in mind and that is the reason why stats are tied to equip….differently from other games where you get the top Stats and you use it with whatever build you use.
4) THE SKINS…..have a cost….
5) people that still fuel the wrong idea that crit damage on celestial is a mistake…
It was instead a planned balancing from developers simply using math…. (there was a discussion when was released that explained how despite the sum of the stats being higher, the result was slightly lower than mixing)
6) no reason was given to convert it AS it is….unless you or anyone other proves me that its OP (people already proven the opposite in many threads), or will be OP after conversion you don t have really any point.
(to be fair should be both converted as it is AND slightly buffed on power to avoid an unintended nerf)

1. The nerf is needed. They explicitly said that crit damage is exceedingly high compared to sPvP.
2. They’ve acknowledged this and are considering counterbalances for the nerf, including upping the stats on the spread.
3. Then post in the Ascended gear threads, not in this one. Ascended gear’s more than likely here to stay, whether you like it or not.
4. I don’t understand what you’re saying here. That the ascended gear has a skin that you paid for? No problem. That you applied a different skin using trans stones or w/e? That’s a shame, but transmute extracts are there for a reason, and if your Ascended gear is so useless you can still transmute it back using another trans stone.
5. And they’ve already said that they’re thinking about pushing up the other stats, which includes Power, Precision, and Condi Damage. Apparently, all of these stats are better than the crit damage.
6. I don’t understand what you’re saying here.
(It should just be plain buffed?)

LordByron.8369:

That is as smart as deciding to change berserker into valkyrie and valkyrie into zerker.

Explain your analogy.

Berserker’s is a full-poundage DPS set.
Valkyrie’s is set which, if used in full, is supposed to be used to exploit Hidden Killer/Arcane utilities.
Swapping these two would drastically alter which specs use which set.

Cutting the crit damage and increasing the raw stats on a Celestial set does not do this. The spread is still valuable to its intended audience- Classes and specs which can viably use all stats. It may be less valuable due to a direct nerf, but the audience doesn’t change.

40-50 days for a full celestial set + almost a thousand gold …..

You’re being really lazy if it takes 40 days for you.

What do you think would happen if in a F1/Nascar season they suddenly adopted a new rule making some cars illegal with no way to fix them…..?

They wouldn’t change the rules suddenly. Rules are changed with deliberate intent. This change is far from sudden unless you simply haven’t been paying attention. ANet’s already acknowledged that they’ve changed the rules for Celestial and are looking into rebalancing the spread; what more do you want?

Also instead of saying i have “anger management issue” accept the fact you were completely wrong asking for overnerf….and since you defended strongly that position, you are not a reliable source on this issue.

You’ve spent the entire thread dodging arguments and shifting the goalposts to the point where even ANet acknowledging there’s an issue and saying that they’re considering pushing up the numbers is not enough for you. If that doesn’t bring into question your emotional state, I don’t know what does.

Nike.2631:

What might be a better ‘2 moas with one stone’ solution is to FIX the Giver’s armor by turning Boon Duration into a stat rather than a percent value (same fix as crit magnitude -> Ferocity) and then add that stat to Celestial.

They’d need to do that to Condition Duration if they did it to Boon Duration. Whether or not this is a good idea, I can’t say for sure, but Giver’s weapons would get whacked pretty hard by such a change.

shadowsoul.2134:

these are the celestial ascended staff’s stats
+83 Power
+83 Precision
+83 Toughness
+83 Vitality
+83 Condition Damage
+11% Critical Damage (147.4 Ferocity)
+83 Healing Power

There’s the commonly thrown around 5/8 fraction and a few people (at least, me) would push it up to 6/8(or 3/4). Using these numbers, it’d change it from 83 to about 100 per stat.

I don’t know if it’d really hurt to be generous with the set, but I somewhat doubt it would.

shadowsoul.2134:

BUT
By making this change celestial’s users are losing 64 point in a really useful stat like Ferocity, and redistributed between all stats including 2 “lesser” stats:
- Healing Power which is fairly useful
- Condition Damage which is really weak for the majority of the builds

I’m inclined to disagree with this. If you’re going Celestial, you should be doing it with a spec that can make use of everything the spread has to offer, including healing power and condi damage. There are esoteric sets that aren’t easy to fit into a build; Celestial’s one of them.

My thoughts on necro changes;

Putrid Explosion: This ability is no longer unblockable.

Fair enough; seems like common sense, to me.

Training of the Master: Reduced the damage increase to minions from 30% to 25%.

Overall a fairly minimal reduction in minion damage. I’m not particularly worried by this.

Dhuumfire: This trait has been changed so that it will make Life Blast inflict 3 seconds of burning with a 10 second recharge.

Kind of weird. While I do think tying the Burning to Life Blast is a good idea, it’s weird in that it doesn’t really synergise particularly well with the other Death Shroud traits, particularly Near to Death. I’m also somewhat inclined to say that it should be moved down to Master tier, as it was noted not long ago that having condinecros go 30 in Spite and not 30 in the condi damage line is weird.

IMHO; have the trait instead apply a buff whenever you enter Death Shroud which causes the next Life Blast you cast apply 3sec Burning.

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.

Would like to know what exactly the healing coefficient is; will the 200 points from traiting in the line restore the healing to what it currently is?

There’s also the fairly consistent opinion that Terror should be pushed up into 30 Curses and something pushed down in its place, and musings on this on ANet’s side. Any new words?

lordkrall.7241:

Septemptus.7164:

Why do I get punished for buying my molten pucks (for each character) months ago?!

Well to be fair that is how everything works in real life as well.
If you buy a car today, I will be able to buy a better car for the same price in a few months.

They can’t retrofit your car without incurring cost, though. They can retrofit your pick with next to no effort.

I really hope that this event lasts as long as humanly possible. I’m inclined to say that the Marionette is probably the best open-world boss fight that they’ve made so far.

Swagg.9236:

Yes, the goal of this global profession balance initiative is to slow down combat to a more legible state.

Combat’s pretty legible as it is for a player right now. You more or less know what’s going to happen and how it’s going to happen. Being able to interpret the ebb and flow of combat is part of the skill curve.

You made a note earlier about not knowing when a Ranger is going to use SB 2 (at least I think it was you). It’s pretty easy to tell when they’re going to do this; they try to apply some control and then they close to melee to get all 5 spreads to hit you. If they don’t bother doing that and just let one of the spreads hit you, the ability is more or less wasted. There already are dynamics in how these abilities work.

If you mean it’s illegible for a viewer? Fair enough, but overhauling the entire balancing of the game for the sake of ESPAWTS is a bit too much.

This is an absolutely horrible idea and I’m genuinely amazed that somebody gave it the go-ahead.

Hayashi.3416:

Psst. Elementalist water attunement Soothing Mist is also unstoppable.

Except they won’t have it up all the time if they want to have a hope in hell of actually scratching you.

But, this thread is about LoW, not healing signet.

You’re giving up a lot by taking it. The other options are tooty horn which gives you a lot of swiftness, constant Cripple application to 5 nearby targets, and a cone daze, and the Focus, which gives you a huge lump of single target burst and boon hate+chill. The dagger is definitely good, but Horn and Focus both seem to fit a ZvZ and 1v1 better than the Dagger.

Egon Vidar.9125:

A.. gay agenda?

Emphasis on the shoehorned, not the agenda. All stories need to be trimmed to include only the relevant details. Unless the Marjory + Kasmeer relationship is going to end up relevant in some way, it doesn’t really need to be there.

Caithe and Faolain are in a lesbian relationship but it’s relevant because it’s the relationship between the main protagonist and antagonist in the Nightmare Court/Twilight Arbor, and their previous intimacy more or less establishes why Caithe has an interest in the Nightmare Court at all. It serves a purpose.

Logan and Jennah’s relationship is the basis for the entire story of Destiny’s Edge in GW2. If it wasn’t there, there wouldn’t be a story.

Does Marjory and Kasmeer’s relationship have the same importance to the story? We don’t know yet, but so far, it hasn’t any importance whatsoever.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I’m also not sold on them being a fully closed couple, considering how Marjory can sometimes flirt with my (male) ranger.

And my female Norn.

You know what’d be funny? If Kasmeer thinks that Marjory’s interested in her, but Marjory doesn’t have any feelings for Kasmeer and just flirts because it’s fun. A hole might be poked into this theory by them cuddling on the beach, but still.

V lazy thought; what if Immobilise was capped at 5 or 6 seconds?

Not at all. The Elementalist has loads of skills like this. When it comes to powerful AoE attacks, making them visible to opponents before they go off is a fair way to balance them given that one can choose where to put the AoEs on the ground. By adding a delay to a ground-targeted AoE, the skill gains a higher skillcap based on the caster’s ability to predict and lead a target so as to hit with a delayed AoE.

Equating Elementalists to Necromancers isn’t really that fair because elementalists are a much faster paced class and their ability rotations are so wildly different from Necromancers, most notably because you can instantly flip into any of your attunements after you’ve ‘blown your load’. You’re comparing a class with at least 20 weapon skills at any one time to a class with between 9 and 14(not including your pet project).

The only skill that has a similar power level to MoB in the Elementalist’s kitten nal is Shatterstone. Do people even actually cast that? Is MoB getting drastically raised? We’re starting to get into very serious issues of scope when we overhaul the game.

As for roaming, Necromancers can learn to use themselves as bait so as to ensure hits with Marks. It’s a keen play to do something like cast a [Meteor Shower] over top of yourself as you await a player to engage in melee, or cast one in a place to which you could then immediately move. The key to playing with powerful AoE charge-up skills is to always be thinking ahead of your opponent with regards to positioning and timing.

The first block of this is more or less irrelevant because it’s already the case. You can already pre-deploy your marks defensively; although using some of them in that capacity is pretty silly (putrid mark). This change just pushes them further towards exclusive use in this capacity.

As for roaming I don’t really understand how all this already isn’t the case. Thief is in stealth- You slap a Reaper’s Mark right under your kitten so you can pop him when he tries to backstab you, or you flash out the Mark when he stabs you in the first place. Necros already have to be thinking ahead of their opponent on position and timing because they don’t want to turn their marks into dodge bait (Or maybe they do!).

I’ve said before, this thread is part of a series. I swear, most people on this site think in a vacuum when it comes to class balance. I’m thinking in broad terms, don’t you worry.

Thanks for the condescension.

Sarrs.4831:

If you ask me, there are maybe five things that need to get fixed;
1. Make Signet of Spite more counterable

Already did that.

Good job. Hopefully it happens.

Sarrs.4831:

2. Swap Reanimator and PotH with something useful

And here we are again with “something useful.” “Something useful” isn’t going to get anything done. We need concrete suggestions here. This is no time to pillowfight with vague ideas, this game needs saving.

I don’t have to be a chef to tell whether a meal tastes rubbish. If you want concrete and very lazy off-hand suggestions;

5pt; Barbed Ward; whenever you are critically struck, you have a 25% chance to deal damage and cause 3×4sec Vulnerability to enemies within 180 radius. 10 second cooldown.

15pt; Dark Heart; when your health is reduced by 10% in a single strike, drop a (3sec duration) Well of Darkness at your current position. 90sec ICD.

There’s a huge 4 page thread on the necro forums on PotH and Reanimator with a big pile of ideas which anunciate the problems and offer solutions and apparently people are already on the case in ANet so me getting too in detail about it is ultimately pointless.

Sarrs.4831:

3. Figure out what you’re doing with Dhuumfire already

Already done.

Basically what’s already confirmed to be happening except ANet’s implementation is without the counterintuitive 15 sec CD.

Sarrs.4831:

4. Fiddle with marks a bit

You’re being vague again.

Okay. Give them more distinct circles so you can actually tell which mark is which from a distance and give Putrid Mark a different animation so it can be more easily dodged.

Sarrs.4831:

5. Put a floatie on my golem.

After the game is saved, this is top priority.

Keep reasonable scope in mind. Even if ANet agreed 100% with everything you say, it’s entirely likely that they still can’t change it.

Aberrant.6749:

The specific condition foods are just very UP. Koi/veggie isn’t OP for the reasons listed above.

If they were balanced, they’d need to be something in the field of 50-60%. As fun as it might be to try my experimental Chill Ele roaming, I kind of get the feeling it wouldn’t be allowed to stay at that point for too long.

Aberrant.6749:

But even with the 40% duration food conds don’t come close to direct damage dps…

Conditions have secondary benefits, usually have smaller tells with more assured damage, and cover/are covered by controlling conditions. In a PvP environment, damage doesn’t happen too often without a from of control; condi duration provides both increased control and increased damage.

Tim.6450:

I don’t get this 40% condition food hate, direct damage gets 50% crit damage on default.

And you have what, 5% crit chance by default?

Terravos.4059:

So you think because they drop 10% off crit damage, that magically Condition Players will be able to run non tanky builds?

you realize that I can hit people who are in full tank with my thief for 10k backstab right? My thief isn’t even completely pushing its limits, if I was to go all out on damage it’d be just silly. The 10% crit damage change will change nothing in terms of WvW roaming. You either go bunker, Or you’ll die to every thief/mesmer/warrior out there.

As I recall, they were dropping 10% off total damage, not just crit damage. If you’re a Hidden Killer BS thief, your crits will probably be softened up a bit more than 10%.

Also depends on what spreads exactly you’re talking about.

spoj.9672:

Btw zealots will be 3rd highest dps set behind zerker and assassins (ignoring condition sets cause they are useless for general pve). So if you really want to build some healing power into a pve build then this is the set to go for. Id never recommend that personally. But ill count myself lucky getting zealot pugs instead of clerics or soldiers.

To note, it’s the only Healing Power spread which has two offensive stats and itself.

Terravos.4059:

kind of like how Condition Players are forced to go heavily defensive builds so they don’t die instantly to power build?

Which is being addressed with the Ferocity change- At least, in theory.

I have no idea what any of these skills do except for the new Rending Claws. What does Scepter 3 do? You channel a spell on the target which applies a stacking debuff, and whenever that target is struck by a debuff, they explode with poison, applying poison to all nearby enemies and healing to all nearby allies for an amount dependent on the number of stacks? Did I miss anything?

The Mark and Scepter 2 changes alter the pace of combat immensely, especially the Reaper’s Mark change. While these skills could use better telegraphing, this seems like a weird and counterintuitive way to do it. The Reaper’s Mark change in particular drastically changes how the skill operates and is incredibly hindering for Necros roaming- Or indeed necros trying to move anywhere.

Signet of Spite change is cool. It sounds hilarious because you’re basically firing Bling Blast, but the skill is kind of an i-win button in some situations at the moment so some more fiddling with it is a good idea.

Really, these changes seem to slot into a huuuuuge overhaul of the tone and pacing of combat, and I don’t think that’s what the game needs. If these skills are in a vacuum, then Necros simply become even slower compared to the rest of the game’s classes.

If you ask me, there are maybe five things that need to get fixed;
1. Make Signet of Spite more counterable
2. Swap Reanimator and PotH with something useful
3. Figure out what you’re doing with Dhuumfire already
4. Fiddle with marks a bit
5. Put a floatie on my golem.

Like:
1. Buildin’ thangs. Holding a couple camps and sending supply to a building and making it bigger and better
2. Smashing open camps like pinatas
3. Good roaming fights

Haet:
1. Warriors with 98% condition duration reduction
2. The siege economy is way out of whack
3. Lake got removed.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

For the record, none of the unpopular sets that you have mentioned are getting undeserved nerfs. Also, of these, Magi’s is the only set that is objectively underpowered – its stat combination is basically unviable except maybe…. MAYBE on very specific, mixed sets (and probably not even then). Apothecary’s and Settler’s are both respectable options for condi builds (particularly Ranger condi builds); I would go as far as to say that the strength of Apothecary’s and Settler’s are directly tied to the viability of the Ranger profession. Furthermore, both of these sets are getting indirect buffs because of the diminished strength of Power builds through the critical damage nerf. Shaman’s… I don’t know. It could have uses in mix sets with Cleric’s.

But I’ll reassert the point – all, of these, like Celestial, are unpopular and often considered mediocre. The difference is that, unlike Celestial, none of these are getting nerfed. Therefore, their status is not urgent like that of Celestial.

And there can be no justification for the Celestial nerf. It was not overpowered. It was not outperforming other sets. The high critical damage stat that it had was required just to allow the set to inflict tolerable damage with its pittance of a Power stat. It WILL be affected by the critical damage nerf more than any other set, unless it is given some form of compensation. That’s not up for debate; it’s been evidenced several times over through calculations in this and other threads. Without intervention on Anet’s part, it will be the victim of collateral damage – and it will be just as bad as Magi’s.

I’m not entirely convinced that it’ll be pushed to worthlessness, with my calculations. It’ll certainly be hurt, but I don’t know exactly how much by, and I don’t think it’ll be an amount to push the set into irrelevance- Unless you were using mix pieces for the crit damage and the crit damage alone; but, you probably already know that that’s my position. Without numbers on appropriate condition damage, it’s difficult for me to really agree- That’s dependent on sigils/class/traits, so it’s hard to see where that gets pushed into irrelevance and where it doesn’t.

Shaman straight could possibly be used for a Poisonshare Thief. Leeching Poisons has a pretty solid Healing Power coefficient, and so does Skale Venom- To the point where Skale can heal 1200 with a Settler’s Amulet/Carrion Jewel per hit, and other poisons heal something like 700.

I don’t think Celestial will be the hardest hit set by this change. Mathematically, Assassin’s takes the largest hit proportionally, and the Crit Damage is the main draw of Valkyrie’s when used with traits and skills which assure crits(Hidden Killer, Arcane spells) so I think that takes the biggest hit when “used as intended”.

Pretty headachey at the moment so I can’t really offer the best responses. In short; I want to figure out what the condi impact is. Might do that sometime soon, might not, depending on whether it (the headache) sticks around.

ThiBash.5634:

For the record, the enhanced critical damage was needed just for the damage to actually reach generic generalist level.

Not sure what exactly you’re addressing.

If it’s that entire hullabaloo up there, I think Byron’s pretty much just mad because he built a set to exploit the broken crit damage amount and got caught with his pants down.

At any rate, I dunno if I’d mind pushing Celestial’s ratio up to 6/8 from 5/8, but would need more data.

Now that I think about it, I wonder how sigil changes will affect Celestial; particularly crit:condi sigils.

Raine.1394:

“dodging, poison, kiting, stealth, control” are all significant factors in combat. However, they are aspects of combat that depend on player skill to apply. They may be present they may not be present. Gear will always be present. If you are addressing gear, you want to assume equal skill and so you exclude or hold constant to the degree possible variables other than gear. You can, of course, evaluate various assumptions about variable states, and you’re free to do so if you believe the combination is material. BTW, if you read the first page we cover this ground in more detail.

I’m fishing through and quite frankly I’m not particularly smart so a lot of it is going over my head.

Raine.1394:

The point of the OP is that the problem is not with the gear and I agree completely. You can degrade the success of a good DPS builds in unpredictable ways by nerfing the gear, but why would you do that if gear is not the problem?

The gear isn’t the problem when it’s analyzed in a vacuum, and the skills and game mechanics on their own aren’t a problem when they’re analyzed in a vacuum. The problem is the product of the two. I’m sorry I can’t really express myself much better at the moment, and maybe I’ll revisit the thread once I can collect my thoughts a bit better, but that’s why I think studying gear in a vacuum is disingenuous.

While the numbers in the OP do provide a consistent baseline I’m skeptical that they accurately depict the real state of combat. A lot of factors (dodging, poison, kiting, stealth, control) are omitted, and they benefit the Berserker more than they benefit the Soldier, as far as I can tell. My 2c.

When it’s possible to Endure Pain, Reflect and dodge every incoming attack, are Soldier’s and Zerks balanced?

I think the other solution would be for condition duration reducers to stack multiplicatively rather than additively when they go past the +0% line, but that would probably be too complicated.

I definitely agree. +98% condi duration reduction builds kind of break how some classes’ control works, and +40% condi food makes condition smothering very difficult to deal with.

LordByron.8369:

NO profession has 100% skills dealing both condition AND direct
That results in wasting at least 50% condition or power/crit/ferocity stats and a reason why stats should be higher to match….

I didn’t say they have skills with both conditions and power coefficients to challenge full-power weapons. I said that there are builds which can benefit from a strong mix of both power and condition damage.

it’s really not a very offensively directed build at all so i’m wondering if maybe that’s the cause of your low damage

Sarrs.4831:

you use the wrong weapons and a few wrong trinkets for the discussion.
(NOTE: ZOJJIA/BERSERKER)

Sarrs.4831:

So you’re just exploiting the crit damage on the set, which is getting nerfed because it’s an outlier on the set. You’re the exact target of the nerf.

Sarrs.4831:

Yeah, and your overall damage doesn’t get nerfed more than a Zerker. It only gets nerfed nearly as much as a Zerker if you’re not using conditions at all- In which case you bought the wrong armor set.

Holden.9273:

Will Full celestial gear you would lose 15% of your damage.

This were fast calculations so i could made a mistake, but numbers seems to be right.

You are totally trolling

Can’t offer counters to their arguments? TROLLING

LordByron.8369:

now its clear you are not entitled to speak about it.
Overall DPS will be CONDITION included worse than PVT.

gimme dem maffs

When taking condition damage you should consider that out of X skills some are direct damage and other are cond damage

really few have both (that means that cond damage OR crit damage and power goes wasted on more than 50% skills thus those stats impact is way lower)
And that is why condition damage doesn t cover the POWER loss already.

Figure it when they double nerf crit…

they’re actually fairly frequent; most classes in the game have some weapon spread that benefits from both condition damage and power boosts

the weapon/trait set that you linked before isn’t really one of them because you don’t have the bleed uptime, much burn uptime, sigil of doom, etc etc. it’s really not a very offensively directed build at all so i’m wondering if maybe that’s the cause of your low damage

Stop theorycrafting try it in game
There is a reason why celstial is not popular already.

there are reasons lots of sets aren’t popular in game, i don’t see you marching on the forums to get shaman’s, magi’s, apothecary’s and settler’s buffed