Guild Wars 2

The only 2 professions not mentioned are thief and mesmer. Ready for a full-patch stealth nerf?

1) I don’t quite see the problem with the current stats
2) I don’t understand what would a condition damage and healing power percentage means. Critical damage is a percentage of the base damage, condition damage is just another power attribute.
3) I do think boon and condition duration should be merged and should start to appear in armors in a more consistent way (meaning more than just 1 prefix!).

@Khristophoros
Have you ever seen a PvP player staying inside a painful AOE? No, the player is trying to avoid it. I agree with your point that as long as it is predictable it won’t be optimally enjoyable, and from the AI talk Anet gave, they don’t mention anything about randomness. But having enemies avoiding AOE, trying not to stack to prevent the whole group being cleaved and doing more than 1 attack every 2s can only be positive. I think the idea is that there should be trash mob with very limited abilities and boss which are challenging not only because they have 10M HP and deal 20k damage.

I think mantra were always used but often only for the “passive” damage boost. Since now you need to use them to get something out of them, this is of course a welcome change, but I don’t believe it is intentional. It it too big of a change for them not to report it. Also, the cool down of the skills does not mean much anymore, so I really don’t think it’s intentional.

Since mimic already replicates utilities, you’d most likely use F5 to refresh elites.

The community noticed, and many think it works as it should. I personally doubt since they never announced this change and this sounds too good to be true.

I recently went back to level 3 areas, and I still felt fairly overpowered, maybe less than before in which case it is a good thing. Nothing to fix there.

There used to be a cleanse baseline but it was not documented and has been removed.

The change with iMage applying burning makes sense and is good I think (although this means we have even less access to confusion outside of shatters). But torch being a defensive weapon, fury is weird, retaliation made more sense. And the phantasm is still lackluster (which says a lot considering how OP burning is!)

Well I don’t think we will get CoF buffed + shorter cool down. And in general, I don’t think we will have shorter cooldown, because of traits, any shatter is powerful and they won’t increase the overall number of shatters that can be done in a specific time. As I said, if they reduce CoF’s cool down, they will increase MW correspondingly and I don’t think the community wants that.

Well you can already stack massive confusion with shatters. It just feels like torment is almost non-existing in the game right now. We have only 2 skills for torment (scepter 1 and 2) and then you can trait to add some torments in shatters. This is not much considering that we should be the best profession to apply it!

I believe the condition cleanse has been removed from the base torch phantasm and now only acts if the torch trait is selected.

That is the absolute best suggestion on the MtD nerf i believe. They didn’t want us to have 2 stacks/shatter because using weapon clone generation, F1, mirror image dodge, F2 was a very fast burst of 16 torment + 20 confusion which is fairly strong (obviously very theoretical but still). But if we get only 8 torment on F2 but 4 on all other shatters, it is most reasonable while still allowing torment burst “to be a thing”.

@Saturn
I guess he meant that currently the blind is unblockable. So even if you dodge the shatter, you will get blind/confusion.

I don’t mind F2 being “useless” for direct damage builds outside of its traited abilities. I mind that F2 is hardly better than F1 even in condi builds! We get 2 stacks of confusion from traits on all shatters, so F1 is still more used for condi builds than F2 (lower CD and hardly less damage if any).

And i want another fun one: precision, condition damage and ferocity… This is very niche, it would be for a condi mesmer who still want good reflect damage.

I think the discussion drifted no?
The funny part is they removed the clone death because it was too cheesy and instead tried to favor a more active shatter play style. But then they add a double layer of cheesiness with excessive PU…

@Twonineone
Well yes, doing all I suggested is a lot of work, I am perfectly aware of that. However I believe the suggestion 1-6 are not too hard (without 4) are not difficult and would already improve the experience.
And balancing UC is not harder than balancing land combat. To be precise they are both hard and they just did not invest as much time for UC.

I have the feeling they had plans for more UC. Maybe they actually intended to release the UC in a later stage (with the underwater dragon?) but decided to give it a try with a simplified version to see player’s reaction… but that turned out bad and now they don’t really want to take a risk and invest time in something people won’t want to play (and buy).

I am not saying it is difficult I am saying that those are the only ones so far which are reported not to work. And they key is the placement of the tablet (skill 6) is based on ground targeting and they haven’t so far managed to do ground targeting underwater (they acknowledged it themselves when explaining why necro wells are not ground targettable underwater).

@GummiBear
In theory:
3 duelists, 8 procs every less than 7s.
without phantasm fury, you can get about 75% crit in rampager. That’s 6 bleeds x 3 every 7s. Add 33% 2stacks bleeds from duelist, you get a bit less than 12 bleeds x 3 every 7s on average.
36 stacks bleed/7s. Add some condi duration and those bleeds stacks add with those of the previous procs, so you get close to 50 on average.

I do agree with Carighan, the question is not why PvP balance affects also PvE but why is it that what improves PvP balance does not improve PvE balance? PvE is currently in a stage where 80% of the combat mechanics is pointless. CC is close to pointless in PvE except for ice bow, most defense mechanisms are not used…

It feels like most classes have gotten a strong buff to their healing and defensive support abilities with the new patch and I believe it is intended to shine in “challenging group content” of HoT. We know they hired a AI expert for HoT whose motto is “increasing PvE difficulty without increasing mobs damage and HP” and I am only hoping for it to happen!

It is especially weird as it damages condition vs damage while condition are already weak.
So they could make it a lower cool down but they would probably increase F1 instead (like putting both at 18s untraited) because with all the traits, any shatter is fairly powerful regardless of its base effect.
Or as you suggest increasing F2 efficiency so that it becomes a real condition burst. I like the idea!

What about ground targeting?

I think people are harsh with the mesmer.
Yes, with a warrior, you will more easily find a group for any game mode. This profession is just strong everywhere. I mean it has the highest passive defense of the game, one of the highest DPS and one of the highest mobility! And yet it is the only class I do not have. I did make a warrior once and got bored and deleted it.
On the other hand, mesmer is just super fun. I completely disagree with Duncanmix, mesmer have a very nice variety in PvP especial post-patch. You have interrupts, shatter, phantasms, conditions variants for each of these, unique support abilities (boon share, distortion share, reflects, glamours, quickness…). + Chronomancer is coming and this looks super fun! I am main mesmer while this is one of the last class I made simply because this is by far the most fun I ever had with any class in any game. But yes, we are often seen as a utility bot and teams would rather not have you if they don’t really need reflects or portals, especially in PvE because of our low DPS…

For the aqua breather, that is why I suggested to remove it and add a mastery instead. I don’t think the effort needed to add 100 aqua breather skins and crafting recipes and stuff like that is worth it. Let us use our usual head gear and say we magically learned to breath underwater. I’m not against aqua breather, I just think this is a simpler idea and let the team focus on more important changes.

Currently out of the utilities we know, all the ventari ones don’t work underwater. It seems that the utilities which aren’t working are mostly the ground-targetted and trap types. As I said (although I really doubt I was clear) you could simply create a virtual plan on the view you currently have and thus use ground targeting as usual in this virtual plan. The UI would just need to temporarily put something to let you see this plan to help evaluating the distance.

Since they try for each weapon to be counterintuitive (ranged hammer, melee physical staff…) I guess they will use a melee trident used like a fork to stab people and a ranged spear

I think Skowcia has a point indeed. Since they mention the underwater-readiness of the revenant skills, one should not see any removal of underwater content with HoT (except for new borderland). Basically my main hope for UC is the lore behind the underwater dragon implies more underwater content. And how could they give us more underwater content without a good rework of the UC?

And if your question is not about PvE (I do level in PvP, it is faster and more fun), the torch brings some stealth which is useful for WvW especially and to some extent in PvP although you have to be aware you cannot cap points while in stealth. Pistol is a more offensive weapon, it has a rather powerful phantasm (both in direct damage and in conditions if you take the traits sharper image or the currently not working duelist’s discipline) and a daze/stun which is good for interrupting enemies.
But yes, in leveling PvE, conditions are not that great. You are more efficient with a sword+focus/greatsword.

Hi
First, “Necro is still master of conditions” is true but only in a way. They have the best boons/conditions manipulation of the game (transferring conditions, corrupting boons, spreading condis….) but they are not that great unfortunately at applying them fast. So basically a necro will shine in a condi team but mostly by reinforcing the effect of the others :p
I am currently leveling my necro and I like it although the play style is not as dynamic as mesmer (less mobility). So for WvW roaming, rabid is the right set. You basically want a condi shatter builds with massive stealth (prismatic understanding), staff, scepter/torch. You can switch to focus to run around faster because you will miss the signet of locust, we are slow as hell! It will improve with chronomancer luckily.
A typical PU condi shatter template is:
Dueling: 111
Chaos: ??3
Illusion: ?11
Have fun roaming around!

I perfectly agree with Blood Red Arachnid.
If bleeding is back to the previously announced formula, already the hybrid mesmer starts to be competitive in dungeons. I did the calculations when it was announced and switching to rampager and pistol was a DPS increase compared to the assassin meta. Of course it had a trade off of slightly more time to build up, but this is exactly the balance we are looking for.
For confusion and torment, I don’t think they will buff it because of PvP. However, if they only added more continuous ways for us to apply it, it would not break PvP where currently mesmer works by shatter bursts anyway (and in any case our torment application is lackluster, un-nerfing MtD is only one step in the right direction).
But to be clear, as long as PvE is as it is (maybe/hopefully different with HoT) confusion and torment will underperform there. But they did hire a AI expert for HoT so I have hopes.

In PvE, if you manage to get your 3 duelists up, with sharper images, and in the future with the non-bugged duelist’s discipline, you can stack massive damage just from the bleeds (in principle, optimally up to 40-50 stacks on your own).

I am sorry, my message probably sounded rude. I saw many messages in the PvP forum of people asking “how do I fight mesmers now” but who really asked “please nerf the class”. I PvP mostly with mesmer and not with the build which seems the strongest right now (stealth interrupt shatter burst) and I haven’t fought that many other mesmers so I do not know how bad it is to play against them. I just know I am enjoying the patch so far

And yet, mesmers are still not that common in high tier competitive play.
Yes mesmers now have strong mechanics, but remember the mesmer theme is in great part preventing the enemy play (lockdown) and even punishing it for playing (reflects, interrupt damage…).

But all professions have their own strength. “before I never had any problems vs mesmers” so it is a good news that you now have problems. No class should cause “no problem” to fight against. Mesmers used to be weak and the update has definitely improved them. They may be currently strong in low-medium tier competitive play, but this is partly because people are not used yet to fight the new mesmers. Let things settle and don’t worry, the nerf war will be tough for mesmers and it has already started!

They gave explanations for all dropped traits. The clone death trait was favoring a very passive play style: just put clones and disappear. The confusion/blind on glamour was weird because glamours are usually cast on allies and not enemies (null field possible exception).
No I think the new trait system is great and I think there has never been as many viable builds. Sure some are still better, but they will slowly work on balancing it.

Let’s be honest, the reason they did that was:
1) to allow elite specialization, and I don’t think anyone can complain about that
2) to make it easier to balance by restricting partially the choices.

I also think it is a more intuitive system for new players.

Sad, I thought there would be more supporters of underwater combat…

Well but that’s the point I tried to raise (although it was probably not clear). I believe much of that is not inherent to UC but simply the fact that they did only a half-implementation. Skill choice and bad skills are only design issues. Distance and 3D awareness is the only inherent problem and thus a tough one to fix (I suggested the filter “the furthest the bluest/darkest”, but it may not be a good solution).

Well “it’s good enough to have fun” is actually not good enough. If there is no variety and thus no build, there is no serious thing every happening underwater. Plus I think many people will even disagree with the statement “it’s fun” . So far, of all the classes I’ve tried, only the spear on my mesmer was fun to me. And sure, there are land weapons I don’t like much with each class, but there is not enough underwater weapons to pick if I don’t like one.

Now I perfectly understand if you think ANet should not prioritize that aspect of the game. That’s the perfectly open question. My point above is I think they can fix it with some work, but maybe they should just work on something else as they don’t have infinite resources. I would love to see more UC, but not everyone agrees.

@BunjiKugashira
Yes I agree, many in the community have probably already made their mind. Which is why if they released an underwater expansion, it would just not sell and that is something ANet is well aware of. I believe the problem may be less severe if they release for free a big overhaul before spending too much time on a underwater expansion. But that is also a risk they may not want to take.

The problem we have with mesmer is that we don’t have much access to conditions. Burning is through torch which is not such a great weapon. The phantasm is lackluster and the prestige is not great at applying burning offensively. Then the staff applies condition randomly and for short duration/intensity.
Poison is also randomly through staff
We apply potentially a hell lot of bleeding with sharper image + duelist’s discipline. But first I don’t think it fits so much the theme of the class to be focused on bleeds; second, duelist’s discipline does not work and third, they nerfed bleeding. Even with 30-50 stacks which we can in principle apply on our own (against a golem, so it will get nerfed I guess), we don’t get such very high damage.
So we end up relying on confusion/torment. Great, I’m all for it, those are true mesmery conditions. Ah wait, how do we apply them? 2 torments for scepter AA which we can’t stack because of their short duration. 6 confusion on peak with scepter 3. And then nerfed MtD shatter.
The problem is that people hate confusion and torment because they just mash buttons and well… they pay for it. So it gets nerfed. Result, condition mesmer lackluster.

For PvE, the situation is worst. The mesmer is just in a bad position because half of its identity (hard lockdown through interrupt/daze, soft lockdown through confusion/torment) just does not work there. For group instances, the boss should not be immune to CC but should only be affected at 20% and have a high enough attack rate that you can’t lock it down completely. Can I remind you of the supposed trinity damage/CONTROL/support?

I think the problem is actually serious. The first time I played gw2, I gave up at about level 20. The quests were too boring. I picked it up maybe 8 months after, rolled a new character which I loved (mesmer) and pushed myself to pass level 20. At some point things became a bit easier. And now I love it. But yes, there are a few terrible quests which take forever because there is nothing to do.
The event system is really nice and I usually wait for the event to finish the quest in the area because it makes things faster (more enemies to kill).
And I know my girlfriend had the same problem until she went to PvP. Now she enjoys PvP and is trying to stay away from PvE leveling which is a shame. And I managed to also bring a friend to the game and he also got bored with the quests and I feel like he’s not motivated to play anymore.

My advice to the team

I strongly believe UC is promising and I would love to see it happening. It is for sure a lot of work but I believe this is not that much more than any additional elite specialization. So here are a few simple (or not that simple) things which could solve the UC combat and make it a worthy addition to gw2.

• 1) Add a UC tutorial early in the game. Motion underwater is not easy at first.
• 2) Add some simple controls: the up motion already exists by default (space), add the down motion by default too and make it so that if you’re on the surface, down makes you dive.
• 3) Add some filters to make the distance more clear (the further from you, the darker/bluer)
• 4) Add an underwater city, most likely with a new playable underwater race. That would be a nice place to roam underwater, get used to the mechanics without being constantly harassed by enemies
• 5) In general, make sure many underwater areas are risk-free so that one can just stay there without getting constantly attacked and learn our skills, make our builds…
• 6) Remove the aquabreather and put instead a mastery for underwater where you learn from Quaggans (or the new playable race) to breathe underwater (magic rocks!). This would be the first one to unlock. Then add better dodging and other stuff, this way, one can keep the dynamism of the UC fight even if this would be realistically impossible but still coherent with gw2 lore. The UC race could have the exact same mastery for above water.
• 7) Let you have a different build which automatically activates when you go underwater with its own set of armor etc. Armors could be the same as on land if not provided (the same way the main-hand is the same upon weapon switch if you don’t provide it). This way underwater could have his own stats, traits and utilities. The traits are the same system as on land (no new specialization line), but you can have a different specialization selection than above land.

I believe the above changes are easy to implement and would already be a huge improvement. But of course, one should also add:

• 8) Add more underwater weapons. If spear is greatsword, trident is staff and harpoon gun is riffle, it is easy to add a concept for the main-hand version which would correspond to sword, scepter and gun. Then add a few underwater concepts: a torch-like should be possible, a defensive one (shield-like) could be invented.
  Add new skills in order to reproduce the different roles the classes usually have. Note that it should not be a 1-1 match with above lands. The staff and trident should not behave the same. You have here the opportunity to create new weapon skills which you cannot add to the current above land combat. I just say that you should have a variety of range, defensive/offensive, CC, damage/condition…. which should be on par with the variety we have on lands.
• 9) Make all utilities working underwater or replace them with an alternative set fulfilling the same purpose. Change ground targetting to a bubble which you can adjust the distance on the current plane your vision is defining. You could easily make some UI to temporarily « embody » the current plane while targetting. This should allow consecrations, wells, traps… as well as teleport… to work above water. Make the spirit/conjure weapons use the corresponding underwater weapon.
• 10) Balance this whole mess. Yes I know that’s easier said than done

Now doing this will hopefully make the UC better. Now give incentive for people to use it with meaningful content.

• 11) Make one or more UC dungeons (on the same format as current ones) with a corresponding unique armor skin fitting the underwater theme.
• 12) Add a UC PvP map or restore the previous one.
• 13) Add more open world UC maps with interesting events and rewards

I believe the ideal would be to implement changes 1-7 and maybe a first iteration of 8-10 first as part of a « feature pack ». See how well the community reacts. Hopefully the community should be positive so you can then release a full expansion for Jormag+underwater dragon which adds a lot of land content but also some meaningful UC content including 11-13. The presence of land content (for Jormag, even if there is plenty of water there) ensures a back up if people still don’t enjoy UC.

Conclusion

So thanks for anyone who read on to that point, and please give me your opinions. Am I the only one who wants to see a comeback of UC? Will the suggested changes fix everything and make UC as fun as land combat? What do you think is the plan of ANEt currently?

Where are we going right now?

It seems that ANet has temporarily given up on UC. They have removed quite a while ago the UC from PvP, with the new borderland map, they are removing it also from WvW, and I haven’t seen much water in general in HoT.

On the other hand, the core specialization patch normalized somewhat the trait system for UC. Now it seems all UC weapons have a trait for them (together with land weapons traits), necro’s death shroud traits now also work in UC…

Also and more importantly, lore-wise, there is an underwater dragon. It would seem gw2 expansions will now be attacked to a specific dragon, so that could imply an underwater expansion. Also, there is currently one dragon per playable race (human-Zhaitan, Sylvari-Mordremoth, Norn-Jormag, Asura-Primordius, Charr-Kralkatorrik), so we should be able to see a new underwater race to go with the underwater dragon.
Of course, there are many ways ANet could shy away from this. First, they could group 2 dragons together so that the expansion has at least half on land, or they could find a way to still fight the underwater dragon on land, or even tweak the lore so that the dragon just… disappears or is dealt with by someone else while we kill another one.

But that would be sad I believe.

I assume this has already been discussed quite a few times but I would like to state my opinion on the subject and hope if we agree we can give an incentive to ANEt to make what we think is right.
Since this is going to be a very long post, I tried to put some structures to it.

Do we want underwater combat (UC)?
That is the first and most crucial question. While we all agree that in the current state, UC is not satisfactory, the question is what are the inherent positive and negative points about it.
First the minus:

• The z-axis handling is difficult, and estimating distances is a nightmare.
• To be realistic, the fights should be slow as hell.
• We don’t have much experience of it in our world which makes it difficult to design weapons+skills
• It’s obviously a lot of work to create/balance a good underwater combat system.

Now some of the plus actually come directly from the minus:

• it creates welcome variety. New skills, new mechanics, new enemies.
• it is beautiful down there! I mean IRL, people go underwater breathing bottled air and withstanding huge pressure just for that right!
• It allows to add a whole new set of skills/builds… without having to balance them with the old ones (like elite specializations which should in principle be balanced with existing core specializations).
• Since we have little expectations of what UC should look like, there is a lot of space for imagining cool stuff (I mean this is fantasy right).
• Quaggans!

And finally an important point I think: we currently have UC. So much work has already been done and it would be a waste to completely scrap it by drying out the whole world like they already did with some maps. On the other hand, having this clumsy mechanics reflects poorly on the game.

The current state

First let us be fair, few games have satisfactory UC, and gw2 may actually be among the best ones. They decided to remove some of the annoying mechanics (you can breathe underwater, yeah!) and make the combat faster than what would be realistic. They went for water-themed weapons with their own water-themed skills. They have underwater enemies/allies,…

And yet, we all know we often try to stay away from water. And when we are there, we feel very fast constrained by the environment and only hope for returning back on lands to find our power.
Here are I believe the main problem of gw2 UC:

• lack of diversity. You have only 1 or 2 weapons available meaning that you don’t make a choice but simply equip all available weapons. Many (sometimes most) of the utilities/elites cannot be used underwater. Making builds is the core of the guild wars series, but you just cannot make underwater builds because of this lack of diversity.
• lack of motivations to go underwater. There is no good and unique reward attached to it. You only take a dive to get your hero point and already this is a pain.
• because of that we don’t spend enough time underwater to even know our skills, so we often end up just pressing everything on cooldown. Really not fun
• somehow, it feels like ANEt tried to make UC even clumsier by making many of our UC weapon skills mobility skills. So you just move around without the slightest idea of where you are and where you left your enemies. Also, there is almost only one personal story episode which is fully underwater (Temple of the Forgotten God) and it is awful design. You have to move around trying to find the doors making the underwater 360° even less bearable. Finally, one of the greatest day in my underwater carrier was to realize one can bind a key to « swim down », why isn’t it done by default???

Well it destroys clones in priority (has always been) but it should destroy phantasm if there was 3 of them.

I think the balance is improving. Now not only thief but also mesmer and engi can 1-shot you from stealth. Just 5 classes to go!

First, I assume you mean dungeon/fractal and not open world. Open world is so easy you can do whatever you want although direct damage is more efficient.
For dungeons and fractals, it still depends on what you want to do: solo or group? Those are 2 very different situations. Solo is more defensive and based on staff. For groups, I would say you have basically 2 reasonably efficient condition settings:
1) hybrid build: sword-pistol/focus. Your almost only condition is bleed from sharper image (and duelist’s discipline when the bug will be fixed). The duelist can then apply about 11-12 stacks of bleed, so 3 duelist = 36 stacks. With condition duration and assuming the fight last forever, you can get up to 50 stacks! This is the most efficient condition build if you can keep 3 phantasms up.
2) “real” condi build: scepter-pistol/focus. Now you get more conditions thanks to the scepter but the scepter AA prevents 3 phantasms. Works best if you would not manage to keep 3 phantasms up anyway.

I think it is worth mentioning though that conditions are not as efficient as direct damage in group PvE. But they can be viable if you are not looking for absolute best DPS.

Well for high-reflect dungeons, inspiration with traited focus + glamour is “meta”. Looks at the reflect variant of the “meta mesmer” in metabattle.

I agree that if it wasn’t for the stealth, torch is really the only weapon I don’t like. The phantasm feels really… pointless. Burning is not OP enough to make this phantasm worth anything.

Duelist and swordsman are not too difficult to keep alive since they don’t melee. Warden can be…
In general, as long as your DPS depends for a big part on a AI-“pet”, dungeons can be a bit more tricky (the “pet” does not dodge big AOEs). Ask rangers their opinion on that (between pets and spirits, they do have hard time with some bosses).
Another problem is when killing mobs, one can hardly use phantasms because the fights are too short. In those cases, don’t hesitate shattering (with iPersona, even no illusion still gives damage and 1 illusion is almost as much damage as 3).

And @Aither if you find condition build fun, go for it! Yes it’s not as good, but is not absolutely awful either and the prime goal is to have fun.
If you pug, just stay away from “zerk only”, there are still people playing dungeons who do not care about the extra seconds/minutes taken. This is especially true as mesmer is not the best DPS anyway but mostly brought in parties for its utilities. As long as you play well, support well your party and have fun, it should not be a problem.

The eagle runes are the one advised by Xyonon in the very first comment of this thread if using berserker to compensate for the lack of crit (eagle = ranger + low but working 6th bonus)

Another problem with condi currently is that duelist discipline does not proc bleeds.

More in the subject, I’m quite ignorant on this: why is a stun so much better than a daze? The daze is already a strong CC, no?