Guild Wars 2

LordByron.8369:

Sarrs.4831:

Seriously, I’m okay with the Celestial ratio moving from 5/8 to 6/8. I don’t have a problem with that.

Lets avoid useless stuff and start from here.
Celestial is clearly an unintended backfire.

Crit damage in celestial doesn t push the damage so much even if you mix it.

If zerk will lose 10% overall dps, celestial should lose overal 5% since PVT is losing almost any.

But even so celestial would possibly get behind PVT….but at least wold not be a so knee jerk nerf.

if today celestial has crit damage equal to zerker, they should make it ferocity equal to zerker even post patch.

If they nerf crit damage and then reduce of 60% ferocity on celestial sets they double nerf a set with no reason.

Why is it useless?
This is incorrect. They explicitly stated that the ratios are out of whack on certain pieces of gear.
It does. That’s why they’re changing it; they explicitly stated that the ratios are out of whack on certain pieces of gear.
It does. Condition damage.
Condition damage.
This would defeat the point of Celestial and the point of the change.
They do do it with reason. The ratios are out of whack on certain pieces of gear.

Not entirely certain why I’m still replying to you because it seems you’re not getting the point.

LordByron.8369:

The sentence was wrong on 2 levels…

The nerf is not aimed at balanced builds.
Since you Always forget to put POWER in the equation.

In my equations? Because absolute damage is irrelevant. If your DPS is getting nerfed “below bunker levels” it’s because your DPS was already junk.

LordByron.8369:

You see OMG XX% crit damage OP 11!!!!1!!!!!
Full celestial base damage < full PVT already…..i ll have to repeat it forever.

Celestial mixed STILL is halfway between zerker AND pvt.

I don’t know if I’ve actually said that it’s OP. I’ve said that the intent of the set is “gentle generalist” rather than “take me for the crit damage”, that the current ratio of critical damage to other stats undermines its intent, and that the Ferocity change will address that problem.

Absolute DPS is irrelevant. I’ve already conceded that I’d be more or less okay with them beefing up the ratio if the set ends up being underpar as a result of these changes, but again, high crit damage undermines the intent of the set.

CELESTIAL sees 0 uses in PVE speedruns it exists mostly in WWW where was the same as mixing pieces.

…All stat sets other than Zerker see 0 use in PVE speedruns (defining speedrun as: maximising damage output to shorten the run). If you’re not bringing Zerker to the party you’re performing underpar.

Secondly, in a speedrun, even if the other DPS sets were on par with Zerks you shouldn’t ever be running Celestial because Celestial spends itemisation on defensive stats. If you are running Celestial pieces (again, you’ll be running it exclusively for the crit damage) then the design of Celestial has failed.

Link me a proof the nerf is aimed at WWW pr balanced builds

I don’t have any quotes for you. Wait until ANet posts in this thread.

LordByron.8369:

P.S. for your info (meteor shower/tornado trick)
-BEST PVT damage with staff is around 2000-2500
-FULL ZERK EXOTIC does 9-11.000
-Celestial (asc) MIXED with zerker does 3-5000
-Full celestial doesn t crit much and does 3000 max

Looks like you should just be wearing Zerk’s rather than Celestial, then.

Seriously, I’m okay with the Celestial ratio moving from 5/8 to 6/8. I don’t have a problem with that.

LordByron.8369:

You should read your messages….before trying that road….

I’m 99% certain that I’ve already used that word in this discussion. I don’t mean exploit in the sense of “you are exploiting the game (and should be banned)” I mean “you are using a specific factor of the rules to your advantage”. My apologies for the misunderstanding.

LordByron.8369:

Now a better question:
Why you are promoting unbalance?
I have a couple ideas…..

I doubt this discussion can go any further if you’re going to accuse me of having ulterior motives. I want to present the numbers and the truth; nothing more than that.

LordByron.8369:

The point of going celestial is mixing with few other things to get a decent crit % (thus the sigil etc….).

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.

LordByron.8369:

For the grindind….did u ever play any mmorpg?
The first thing they do is making sure people progression doesn t get deleted…

Except:
1. Your Celestial gear is still there. It’s not getting deleted. It’s there and it’s gonna be there, and still Celestial, until the end of time (or the servers shut down whichever comes first).
2. Themepark MMOs like WoW invalidate gear which has been grinded for constantly with each patch release.

LordByron.8369:

I had quite enough with fractal delete, flamekissed and now the ascended equipment…..

Those stuff happens in BETAS not in a finished game.
Are we a test server?

It starts to be extremely unprofessional and Beyond ridiculous.

MMO developers goof like this all the time. While the recent rate of goofing might be higher than average, it isn’t a non-occurence.

Holden.9273:

They also said that small amounts of critical damage will be more beneficial, so they can nerf the trait and make up the lose in formula, anyway it must give 300 like every other trait.

I don’t remember them saying this, though it’s possible. If this is the case, they may have a non-linear model for critical damage in mind.

Holden.9273:

or just maybe – 1% critic = 10 ferocity, so trait will not be nerfed hmm

This would actually be a buff for Berserker’s gear.

Holden.9273:

Just one thing about your calculation – Trait, it will change for sure from 30% crit damage to 300 ferocity, so it will probably give 20% crit damage after nerf.

I do not believe this will be the case as it will directly affect critical damage in spvp which they said they did not want to touch.

LordByron.8369:

i needed some time to understand that data shown before doesn t take in account:

1) Fury

You’re right, my calculations did not include Fury. Here is the new set of calculations with Fury in mind.

d=1+.5724(.63+.5+.3)=1.818532

d=1+.5724(.223+.5+.3)=1.5855652

1.5855652/1.818532=0.87189293342

Therefore, 100% fury uptime, full Celestial build suffers 13% overall direct damage drop, using the assumptions I cited.

2) Food

If you want to run a test using my algorithms with an adjustment in the precision or critical damage values for food, feel free. I don’t know which food exactly you use.

3) sigils

There are only three sigils which affect your precision or critical chance, to the best of my knowledge. Again, I don’t know which runes you use.

If you are using Perception/Accuracy, that’s kind of the problem with Celestial gear.

4) potential precision equip added.

Not sure what this means. Are you saying that you’re not using full Celestial gear? That’s a big part of the problem with Celestial gear as it stands; as I’ve said, it has huge crit damage, and on some pieces more crit damage than Zerks. You are not using it for generalist builds; it is used to pump crit damage and not care about anything else.

5) TRAITS

My calculations took into account bonuses from traits. I assumed 300/30%.

Once again theorycrafting led to wrong assumptions.
In the case of celestial is expecially used in conjunction with precision buffs/sigils/food

If you have more accurate numbers to put into my equations, then please, give them to me. You’re currently describing behavior which is used to exploit the current outlier that is Celestial’s critical damage.

That will make REAL dps lower of 15-20% since even fury double the times you crit, making celestial the most nerfed set and putting it behind ANY other possible set.

Except Fury doesn’t double the times you crit. With the build you cite just here, it’s less than a 1/3 increase in your crit chance.

Do your theorycrafting with this:
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fEEQJAoYhImObzR5wjDAEFuYiQxDWUekzM2A-jkCBYfBkEBkIAIRtIaslhBp6KslXRTVTqWXDT9KISBwkwI-w

Tell me how much of a loss this build will have…..
P.S. consider the 3 traits giving access to permafury and +200 precision +20% crit damage.

d is direct damage
p is crit chance = .67 (with perma fury)
P is crit damage = .53 currently, about .23 after Ferocity (not going to work it out exactly if you’re not going to use purely Celestial)
t is trait line crit damage = .2
d=1+p(P+.5+t)
d=1+.67(.53+.5+.2)=1.8241
d=1+.67(.23+.5+.2)=1.6231
1.6231/1.8241=0.88980867277

Therefore about an 11% drop in direct damage, assuming the Ferocity change is accurate. Difficult to tell, as we don’t know what’s happening to Traveler/Divinity runes and you use the wrong weapons and a few wrong trinkets for the discussion.

P.P.S if you really want to go on and make celestial unviable give us a switch so i get knight -.- wasting 1000 gold ain t fun.
At least for armors/weapons that are the most grindy.

The distinction between Celestial and non-Celestial, when it comes to how grindy the set is, is trivial. Stop trying to defend your position with this.

LordByron.8369:

It seems to me like watching again the flamekissed armor thread and the fractal reset thread.

This will always happen forever. It is the eternal cycle of MMO changes.

LordByron.8369:

I can’t think of a valid reason for a mature player to enjoy another to have his stuff deleted or become useless, yet there are many even losing time to promote that…..

I am an old, bitter person who revels in the misery of other people.

ThiBash.5634:

So overall, wheter you agree or not, it’s a nerf. And it doesn’t need one.

This statement is phrased very weirdly. It’s not a matter of agreement whether it’s a nerf. It’s basic maths that it’s a nerf. You lose between 7 and 10% of your direct damage, depending on whose math you use.

I’m not particularly bothered whether Celestial gets a bit of a beef up in the stats department to compensate for the crit loss. I don’t have a horse in this race. But…

Carighan.6758:

But don’t keep it hanging on a nail which relies on the weird rounding of crit damage.

This is the number one problem with Celestial gear at the moment, and it needs to be addressed one way or the other. Fair enough if they decide to beef up the rest of the stats on Celestial gear, but I don’t think the spread will die if it’s left as-is.

Reanimator and Protection of the Horde?

Anthonysko.5204:

Although some Celestial has higher amount of crit-damage, but it provides a lot less power comparing to berserker gear. Crit-damge only provide good damage when power and percison are high enough. Full berserker ascended set provide 1087 power and 745 percision but celestial only provide 469 power and percision. It means the damage ouptut is actually is very low compare to berserker. If Anet nerf our crit-dmg, our low damage become much more worse.

We have something of a logical inconsistency here. You assert that;
A. A celestial player’s benefit from crit damage is not high because of low power and precision.
B. A celestial player’s damage becomes “much much worse” because of the Ferocity change.

These two positions are contradictory. You don’t have enough power and precision to benefit from critical damage, but you do become “much much worse” when your critical damage is reduced?

According to GW2W,
Base Damage done = (Weapon strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

…

The Celestial Average damage is already the lowest, if crit dmg is also nerfed in celestial, Celestial is just a joke. If i don’t do the calculation, i can’t beleive solider gear even do more damage than Celestial gear.

My main concern here is assuming no traits. You note that you don’t have much Power or Precision with Celestial gear, that’s true, but the difference that those lines provide is not negligible.

Also these calculations measure direct damage. Celestial’s losses are softened by their secondary dependence on condition damage.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

For balance reasons. The set is already of questionable use at best and you honestly want to give players even less of a reason to use it?

If it’s getting a crit damage nerf, it had best come with a stat spread buff.

“Even less of a reason to use it”? There are two reasons to use it now:

1. Because you’re a class/spec that can benefit from the entire lineup of stats (ele/engi), in which case, it won’t change for you. You will still get the benefits of having more base stats than any other spread in the game. The crit damage nerf accounts for 10% of your direct damage, if you’re in full Ascended Celestial. You still have unnerfed conditions to support your damage and you still have outlast that freshly-nerfed direct-damage builds don’t have.

2. You’re putting Celestial pieces into specific slots to push your crit damage higher, and because the itemisation budget is out of whack in these slots, losing the other stats doesn’t really bother you. If you did this, you’re getting balanced, because exploiting the crit damage was never intended and you’re kind of insane if you expected to be able to ride that gravy train forever.

Also, something I wonder; Valkyrie and Assassin’s are both fairly unpopular compared to Berserker’s, yet they get hit harder by the Ferocity change. Why isn’t anyone coming to ask that they get changed?

Duke Blackrose.4981:

^It does have more than zerker in some locations, but it has far less than zerker where it counts – trinkets. Overall, a full set of Celestial has considerably less crit damage than a full set of zerker – which it shouldn’t.

Why should Celestial have identical crit damage to Zerker? It’s not the ‘crit damage’ set. It’s the ‘little bit of everything’ set.

Rinzler.8072:

Sarrs.4831:

Rinzler.8072:

I consider iwarden game-breaking for the mesmer. If it doest work 50% of the time, thats huge.

Chaos Storm was gamebreaking for everyone else.

Same could be said about iwarden. Im a detriment to my group in pve and pvp with my kitten out iwarden.

You have the option to use something other than iwarden.

You do not have the option to force other mesmers to not use staff/confounding suggestions.

ThiBash.5634:

The amount of critical damage per piece is reduced by more than berserker.

Yeah. Because Celestial gear has an utterly huge amount of crit damage- It has more than berserker in some places.

What part of that is so hard to understand? It’s not that we get a damage nerf. I’m fine with that. The problem is that the critical damage from celestial gets nerfed relatively more than berserker’s critical damage.

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.

Also, it seems that we now have still a week or two to convince Anet to take a look at this. Let’s make it count people.

Why do you think ANet needs to be convinced to look at it? It’s a 154 (155 now) reply thread. They know the problem’s there.

Rinzler.8072:

I consider iwarden game-breaking for the mesmer. If it doest work 50% of the time, thats huge.

Chaos Storm was gamebreaking for everyone else.

Rinzler.8072:

From todays patch notes:
“Mesmer Chaos Storm: Fixed a bug that caused this skill to stun enemies whether or not it dazed them when traited with Confounding Suggestions.
"

Ok, how come you could fix that bug, but not ones that have been around since release?

Bugs are fixed on a priority system, from most game-breaking to least game-breaking. All game development uses prioritization for killing bugs.

ThiBash.5634:

Your math is probably correct. Now ask yourself: is celestial in a state where a 10% damage reduction should be applied?

I’d say: no.

10% direct damage reduction. There is no change to condition damage in the build, which Celestial builds accomodate comfortably.

Past that, I can’t really say. I don’t particularly care one way or the other. However, I don’t think that Celestial’s numbers as they are at the moment are healthy; some Celestial pieces have more Critical Damage than their Berserker’s counterparts, which is… Not very intuitive, to say the least.

I got bored so I made a formula. I think this is right.

d is direct damage
p is crit chance
P is crit damage
t is trait line crit damage

d=1+p(P+.5+t)

I fished out the numbers for a 0/30/0/0/0 Elementalist in full Celestial and it gave me
p=37.24%
P=63% (assuming that the crit damage from trait lines isn’t being reduced)
t=30%

So a current elementalist’s damage is

d=1+.3724(.63+.5+.3)=1.532532

Now we need to figure out how much Ferocity it takes to make 1% crit. It’s pretty difficult to be certain of what exactly this is, but let’s assume that it’s 21, just to be neat with Precision.

42+42+21+16+47+16+31+16+54+22+43+43+38+38=469 of each stat on a full set of Celestial Ascended gear (give or take a few, that 22 is the back piece, and I can’t remember offhand how much a celestial backpiece gives). Thus, we have 469 Ferocity.

469/21=22.3 recurring. There’s our P. Let’s run that through and compare

d=1+.3724(.223+.5+.3)=1.3809652

1.3809652/1.532532=0.90110040116

Conclusion: You lose about 10% of your direct damage in full Celestial gear.

Let’s run a Berserker through the formula, with the same build.

p=53.76%
P=71%
t=30%

d=1+.5376(.71+.5+.3)=1.811776

How much precision is on their gear, so we know how much Ferocity they have?

67+67+34+25+76+25+50+25+85+35+68+68+60+60=745

745/21=35.47

d=1+.5376(.3547+.5+.3)=1.62076672

1.62076672/1.811776=0.8945734572

Conclusion: You lose about 10.5% of your direct damage in full Berserker’s gear.

Super Conclusion: Because ANet said that Berserker DPS will drop by 10%, I am clearly completely correct. However I am probably wrong because I do not know how to math very good. If I made any mistakes, please feel free to let me know.

Phineas Poe.3018:

So if you’re running a build that makes use of both condition damage and power, the additional critical damage made it a natural choice. Even with the ferocity nerf, if I had to do it all over again, I would still make an ascended Celestial armor set for my engineer over a Berserker’s or Rampager’s set.

You need to be able to make use of the Healing Power as well, otherwise it’s kinda… Eh.

LordByron.8369:

Some elementalists www builds worked well with mixed gear…when celestial was introduced it was a viable alternative.

I know, that’s why I said there are a few builds that work well with it. All classes have a few

LordByron.8369:

people Always forgets a LIGHT celestial is 644 golds ONLY on damask

Add 30 days of gear gating and the money of quartz, crafting, ecto, dark matter….

I made a note to check what exactly the price of Damask was when I made that post. It currently costs 450g to get the 36 damask you need to craft a full set.

Quartz only makes sense as a costing when other items are competing for your Quartz. Once you have a full ascended set of Celestial gear, Quartz is completely worthless to you.

If you’re planning to make a new set of Ascended gear because of this change (apparently you’re just going to leave though), getting your crafting up is not a loss. You still need that crafting to make other stat spreads.

Dark Matter is not particularly expensive, with Exotic gear at a low- Mostly because of the huge dump of crafted items.

LordByron.8369:

Its insane but we were promised by the usual anet, that no further patch would make current gear obsolete…

That is literally what a celestial nerf would do…(its like putting ONLY celstial down 2 tiers)

For most elementalist (for wich celestial is really popular) celestial is a part of a delicate balance that even the 10% nerf would hit a lot, but what they are doing is totally making the set worse than a rare with different stats.

Will it? Is your build genuinely better off going with Rare gear of a different spread than it is with your current Celestial ascended gear, which is apparently your best stat spread? How much +crit damage% do you think you’ll actually lose(My spitball math puts it at 64% of your crit damage from gear)? Where’s the point that your stat spread becomes useless?

What makes you more worthy of a gear reset than Berserker’s, Assassin’s and Valkyrie’s geared players? Their output is getting nerfed too.

LordByron.8369:

And its not a threat saying people will stop playing…
What would you expect a player to do deleting most of his “vertical progression” after you forced him to grind like a korean?

“Forced” is such an interesting word in the context of a video game.

ThiBash.5634:

You don’t get the issue, do you? The issue is not the nerf of critical damage. The issue is that if the stats scale linear, celestial will be nerfed harder than berserker. The reason for this is that if celestial gets ferocity equal to their other stats it gets less ferocity per point critical damage than beserker does. This means that it gets double nerfed.

I know that Celestial loses more Crit Damage than Berserker’s does. I am doubtful that it will kill the stat spread.

Another girl for Destiny’s Edge 2.0? 4:1 now.

You know who’d be a cool Sylvari character for it? Canach. I’d put money on the last one being a girl, though.

Vorch.2985:

Read through 5 pages and this last page…

…WHERE is it said that zerker gear is being nerfed?

The most recent livestream from ANet.

Key notes;

Crit Damage changed to “ferocity”; functions similar to the Precision:Critical Chance conversion
Overall Berserker DPS nerfed by 10%
They are trying to minimise the changes to sPvP

Also I’m wondering where this “20% damage nerf” came from.

On “celestial is an unpopular/underpowered spread”:
I’m kinda wondering why people are saying “only certain classes and builds can benefit from celestial gear”. Why aren’t there Guardians complaining that they can’t use Dire gear? Some stat spreads are good for some classes/builds. Some stat spreads are not good for some classes/builds. Are there even any viable builds which use Shaman’s gear?

On “muh crit damage”:
Looking at Celestial’s stat spread, what did you think it was; “high crit damage” or “gentle generalist” (with a slathering of MF if you’re from the past)? Current behavior with Celestial gear seems to not be taking it because you can boost everything your spec does in a generalist build, but because you can just shove crit damage into the slots which grant you ridiculous ratios for crit damage:stat (see: rings) and ignore the elements which don’t really factor into your build.

On “i made ascended for this i will unsubscribe/delete/stop playing/become an alcoholic”:
yeah if you spent your guild comms on earrings or 400g on damask to make a set that’s a bummer, but circling back to my other two points; you either got it because you’re one of the few builds that can benefit from all of its stats, or you made a- Let’s be gentle, and say “questionable” investment by banking on that crit damage. If you felt how disparate sPvP and WvW were, you knew this change was coming at some point.

On “everyone will be a condi bunker in wvw now”;
yeah that’ll probably be pretty sucky

Stooperdale.3560:

“Not only are we not getting a good amount of content that keeps us interested more then a few hours (in which we finish it)…but it’s also temporary.”

Why are bothered that it is going if you’ve lost interest in it? Most of the good repeatable content has stayed (or will be seasonal) and all the one-off content has gone.

The big problem with it is that MMOs are marathons, not sprints. If a piece of content is permanent rather than temporary, it pays dividends until the game dies. This is just made more pertinent by the game itself having systems that enable, and strongly reward, going into zones and events that are beneath your level.

The game’s been out for about 15 months, and the amount of permanent content put out is not that impressive- Even if everything added was permanent content, it still might not be that impressive. But 15 months is not the timeframe that we’re looking at; what about in 5 years? A decade? WoW’s highest population was 3-5 years after release, IIRC.

Mia Lunarfang.5826:

I like the idea of giving us game changing choices simular to what you might find Iin Dragon Age and other concil games. the issue with this however is deadlines. they were able to give us a choice with the elections, but that’s because its effect wouldn’t be seen until 5 months or so down the road, giving them more than enough time to actually build it. it was also only one choice resolting in two possible impacts, which is relativly easy to manage. but if our choices were to affect the next chapter, which take months to create, they would not have time to facilatate and implement changes, not to mention a mass overhall of raining colateral that would come from multaple choices. its a good idea, but not right for an mmorpg

This really depends on what the scope of the change even is. It’s entirely possible that it could be something relatively minor that’s the ‘choice’ for one of the Living Story chapters.

As a very lazy example, the player gets the opportunity to kill one of two Centaur leaders. One is a Harathi, one is a Modniir. Depending on which leader is killed the most, the mob spawns for certain zones change- Say, veterans of the relevant tribe spawn in all centaur events. This is an absolutely miniscule amount of effort and can still quantify a ‘choice’.

Out of curiosity, to everyone saying “stop balancing spvp”; what sort of timescale would you expect them to stop balancing on? Do you want them to stop balancing for a few months? Half a year?

I do feel as though people might be getting fatigued on how often these changes are happening though and a PTR would be helpful. Alternatively, some kind of alternate spvp server in which experimental changes happen frequently could be fun; a bit like the Domination/Nemesis league in PoE.

Also on rewards in particular, there do need to be structural changes. EVERYTHING is gated behind Glory. I know that this isn’t supposed to be the case in the long term but still.

To play devil’s advocate; if you’re appropriately traited, Krytan Drakehound’s immobilize can last 5 seconds, affect 5 targets in its area and apply 9 seconds of Cripple as well. That isn’t small peas.

F2s are big abilities. Big abilities need tells. Sure, some of them are unwieldy to use (Drake F2s) but pushing them to be instant cast would make them ridiculously good.

These products are not intended to be economically reasonable purchases. They are, at best, a convenience (metabolic primer), and at worst, preying on people’s collecting nature (gotta-catch-all-the-ore-nodes).

If you do not like the pricing of these items because of their economic impracticality, then don’t get them, but economic practicality isn’t the goal.

Ensign.2189:

Looking at that particular market, limiting buy and sell volumes would drive the price of precursors up. Is that really what you want?

Even if you’re not after a legendary, it drives the price of ascended mats up too. Everybody loses.

Condition Duration doesn’t only affect damaging conditions, it also affects the controlling conditions. A big portion of their value is that they also increase the duration of Immobilize in particular.

sPvP and WvW already have condition damage as a viable source of damage. This could disrupt the balance even further there.

A big part of why condition damage isn’t viable in PvE is because of the limited stacks. You can’t really fit more than one condition user into a group without causing you to overbleed your enemies.

Crit damage is getting knocked down a peg. Let’s wait for a bit and see how it goes.

Pin Down in its current incarnation would be insane in a meta which doesn’t revolve around condition clearing. At the moment, it is more or less impossible to dodge based on its tells alone; the projectile is very fast and almost indistinguishable from the auto-attack, and the animation is almost instant. It applies immobilize and a lot of bleeding. It’s also being buffed, with double sigils becoming available.

I don’t see this change destroying hambow.

There are so few ideas which actually address night capping in a way which makes sense and doesn’t undermine the game. A 24/7 matchup can’t be a measure of skill because it’s dependent on too many people, or people which don’t actually exist.

Dump WvW (at least, the current maps) as a ‘serious competitive arena’, and have something on a shorter timescale. A 3hr structured match, with enough guilds on each side to ensure the map is capped for the entire time? That’d be a fantastic way to measure ‘skill’; there’s no issue of people dropping out of the match. And as I understand… This is exactly what Edge of the Mists is supposed to be. I wonder how testing’s going.

Astralporing.1957:

They said they are going to “rebalance” (read: nerf) sigils across the board to compensate for those changes. I’d not be surprised if the effect of dual sigils turned out to be, after changes, even lesser than a single sigil is now.

I doubt that they’ll be simple blanket nerfs to sigils, and if I recall correctly, the stream indicated that this was happening because sigils would no longer share a cooldown. So yeah; certainly, they’ll get changed, but I doubt it will be to nuke them to less than half their current effectiveness.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Yeah it really just depends what maps your on. A lot of the low level maps and slightly more obscure maps have very few people on them because after hitting level 80 there is no reason for anyone to go back to them.

There’s not much of a reason to go to a lot of maps, unfortunately.

Hopefully we can get underflow servers sometime soon.

Got mentioned again in the stream. They were cool!

Can we have them back?

If this is going to happen, it needs to be handled very carefully. Cosmetic gear and unlocks cannot be in the same progression, like needing to choose between opening new rank boxes and getting skillpoints as it is now.

I don’t quite mind it, so long as it isn’t hard to unlock new things. For example, with the current system, if a new stat amulet cost 100 glory, that might be fine.

They also need to be account wide unlocks because I want to be able to reroll to change my character’s appearance without needing to spend a hundred gajillion dollars on makeover kits.

ThiBash.5634:

You’re assuming they’ll ADD a slot…but they’re likely gonna ADD a slot AND lower the damage by 5% BECAUSE the original design was ’the damage is balanced as if it had a Sigil of Force (i.e. 5% extra damage).

Nothing is gonna change in terms of power, except that you get more alternatives.

The post to which I replied contains context for my post.

Killshot is the second easiest ability to avoid, behind Churning Earth, and rifle’s high-poundage attacks (including Kill Shot) are more or less the only reason you’d ever want to use one. 16000 Killshot crits are literally all the weapon has going for it.

Looking forward to using a rifle with Sigil of Intelligence for switch-and-shoot, though.

Harper.4173:

How about no?

Two handed weapons are fine – and your attitude is wrong and malicious.
If you feel the situation is unfair to your class than maybe make a post asking for kit damage for engineer to be increased – but don’t start going off asking for nerfs for everybody because you feel like it.

Protip: The nerf you ask for will never happen.

They are fine, but they’re getting buffed. An extra sigil slot can be used for a plain old +5% damage, with no significant mathematical work. That could most definitely throw balancing out of whack.

Kadin.2356:

How exactly? The quoted damage reduction is coming from changes to the crit damage % stat -> ferocity on bersker gear (and any other stat set that uses crit%) i.e. all power builds. Condi builds generally don’t use stat sets that have crit% thus no damage nerf.

Engi poison duration nerfed
Necro Dhuumfire is getting nerfed in WvW/PvE
Deceptive Evasion is getting slightly reworked for something of a nerf
Longbow Pin Down getting pretty big nerf and Healing Signet nerf

ODB.6891:

So this is 50% damage reduction for a full zerk group?!? 10% per player. This is with no compensation at all. No boon duration, no survival increase….just nothing but double the clear time and double the risk time as full zerk?

You may want to try running your math again. 10% for each of five people is not 50%.

…Didn’t they say that they weren’t knocking it down in sPvP because the damage in sPvP is more or less fine? This is a PvE/WvW nerf, and it’s an important one there.

Nexxa.7306:

Wow. Take the class that’s bottom of the barrel and gut ‘em worse. Why does the balance team still have a job? If I screwed up that bad I’d of been fired instantly. This is just pathetic.

Whoa now, let’s not steal elementalist accolades

Well, everything other than Dhuumfire got a flat nerf. Not sure what I think of that. I can understand removing the unblockable explosion and I don’t particularly care about the Training of the Master nerf because it’s not that big a shave to overall damage, but I’m not sure about the Vampiric Master nerf. Without numbers, it’s difficult to judge, but my hopes aren’t too high.

I think the Dumbfire change is an improvement, but it should probably still be pushed down to the Master trait. Hopefully this trait isn’t done yet.

It does somewhat feel like Necro got hit with the nerf bat the hardest. May just be a case of grass-is-greener.

Chuck Nizzle.6283:

Sarrs.4831:

(Meditation of) Ferocity is a mechanic in Temple of the Silent Storm which increases the amount of points which you get whenever you kill an enemy by 3. They spawn in sets of 2, making the maximum points you can gain from killing 11.

I’m strongly inclined to say that’s not what you’re talking about. <_<

You’re right, that’s not what I’m talking about…sorry for the confusion.

Ferocity is a new stat that will be replacing crit damage, but what I’m asking is, what is it? Is it like an alternative source of power, is it based off of another stat, or what?

Does anybody know what it does?

At a wild guess, it’ll be more or less identical to Critical Damage, except the amount of Ferocity required to gain 1% extra critical damage will increase as you get more- Like how Luck works.

(Meditation of) Ferocity is a mechanic in Temple of the Silent Storm which increases the amount of points which you get whenever you kill an enemy by 3. They spawn in sets of 2, making the maximum points you can gain from killing 11.

I’m strongly inclined to say that’s not what you’re talking about. <_<

To people saying that ANet should make items account-bound when you buy them from the trading post, that is utterly absurd.

What if I want to buy a gift for someone?
What if some idiot forgot his food for the dungeon/fractal/WvW and I want to send him a few bits of mine?
What if I’m following a commander in WvW and want to send them a few siege pieces that I bought on the TP?
What if you’re buying the item to process it and resell it, like Copper Ore -> Bronze Bar? Are those items still soulbound? What about the items you make from that? This is in particular will raise the price of your Ascended materials through the roof.
What if the value of a lot of items plummets because of this change and farmers can no longer gather them for profit?
What if the value of a lot of items soars because a huge number of items are suddenly taken out of the economy?
What if people start spamming map chat because trading these commodities is no longer functional and instead they handle it through the mail system? The easily scammed mail system?

The point of the Trading Post is to make buying and selling items insanely easy, and that’s exactly what it does. Making trading post items account bound would absolutely obliterate this.

DragoTheWise.7256:

@Sarrs- I would rather not put a decrease in range for the nades. It’s a fairly pivotal skill and at that range which helps being on par with staff Eles. On that note, that is why I suggested that the mortar skill be replaced due to that the mortar just doesn’t fit in the game. However, if Anet did go with your decision, I would rather have the nades traited up to 1200 to be on par with other AOE’s.

I have no strong feelings one way or the other about which range would be used. The main draw of the Grenadier trait, as far as I can tell, is that it increases the number of grenades thrown, not the range.

I do think that the Mortar can’t work with Grenadier 1500 range, though.

Speculation isn’t a bad thing. Poor evaluation mixed with speculation is a bad thing, but anything done with poor evaluation is bad. This is a virtual/luxury economy; people aren’t going to be starving in the streets if they can’t pay for their ascended gear, so the collateral damage of poor speculation isn’t really all that much.

How would you realistically enforce a moratorium on speculation? Keep in mind that Arenanet have limited resources and will likely be using code to handle their market laws, not real people.