Guild Wars 2

Wall of Reflect is perfectly manageable. You can 1) switch to melee, 2) switch to beam weapon (Druid staff, Mes GS), 3) reposition yourself to not eat your own projectiles, 4) wait it out. It’s fine. Ranged damage in GW2 is extremely oppressive at times so we really need stuff like WoR.

Stealth isn’t really a problem anymore since Rev, Dragonhunter, Engineer, Ranger reveals. It’s more sustainable on Thief to simply evade spam to survive the crazy damage in the game now. Probably the best stealth in the game comes from stealth gyro now, but this also has a very straight forward counter.

GW2 never really has that many streamers because it is still a relatively unknown franchise for the wider gaming audience. I’d say 90% of my gaming friends have no idea that the game exists or just have no interest in it at all.

Yes thanks Anet for bringing Alpine back. I was involved in loads of small and large scale fights as soon as I left spawn. Also the number of sieges is far greater now that we have a map with objective synergy over the relative isolation that the desert borderland suffers from.

Reasons to return:

1) WvW is actually getting attention! It’s something that Anet talks about now.
2) Reward tracks and participation bonus are fabulous additions.
3) The ABL is back! You can now have frequent sieges involving other players.
4) Stability was changed in such a way that it’s now viable to set up a melee focused squad.

Reasons to not return:

1) Skill/trait balance is still absolutely atrocious and there’s so much terrible power creep going on now. Everything hits too hard in WvW to the point where the armour/toughness stat is almost superfluous now. I’ve played WvW since release and I can’t belive Anet have allowed it to get this bad. It’s only going to get worse when the next expansion comes out.
2) The DBL is going to come back into rotation at some point, probably without any needed changes. It needs fundamental structural changes to reduce the geographical isolation of players and objectives.
3) They didn’t bother to change ABL stuff that was needed. The Skritt and Centaurs are still useless and you can still exploit siege building at Citadel spawn.

That’s the sort of thing I cannot unsee. Guess I’m never opening the map on the ABL again.

Mantra of Concentration is my first choice on Mesmer for (forced) underwater combat in WvW where you can be CC’d for days – by Eles in particular. It has saved me so many times now that I simply can’t live without it…for underwater combat only.

I’m totally up for some buffs for it though. I was hoping that at some point it would be a group stun breaker but that seems unlikely now. If anything, they should reduce the cooldown between Power Break use. You should be able to stack stability for a short time on yourself if you so desire. Radius increase would also be nice.

As much as I love how oppressive this trait can be for keeping people locked down at range I will admit that the cooldown of the trait is too low. If I’m on longbow with quick draw both of my subsequent PBSs will trigger this trait before I rotate back to my staff which will also trigger the trait if I happen to kitten a PBS. Even without longbow it’s available so much during teamfights. It feels a little bit like a panic strike that lasts twice as long and with half the CD. I’d happily see the CD increased by at least 5 seconds, but I want to see Lingering Light turned into something…useful.

Can’t tell if satire. Need more sleep.

We’ll actually be able to have multiple objective sieges again, open field fights, well paced respawn times and a map that encourages players to come together and murder each other.

I am most excited!

I’ll miss stealthy gank canyon which I think was probably one of the more interesting things introduced into WvW in its lifetime because it managed to get the ‘players acting as hazard’ thing just right.

I really won’t miss anything else other than the nice looking terrain and ekko the dolphin.

Chrono has a few overperforming skills due to F5 interactions with stuff like Moa and Signet of Illusions that have a big impact on sPvP so are likely to be addressed with the next balance round or possibly sooner. I think that will solve much of what upsets people currently.

If people want more time to react to Moa Morph, they could just make it like Magnet on Engi. 1.25 second channel with an obvious channel animation on the target not just the caster. Target starts to glow in a Mesmery way whilst Moa is being channelled so they can react to it even when a fight has become crazy hectic and it’s no longer possible to tell what the Mesmer is doing.

Difficult set to balance. Can’t really touch pistol 4 and 5 as that would just be a buff for D/P which really doesn’t need it and buffs to pistol 1 and 2 would be buffs for P/D that also probably doesn’t need it.

I like your suggestions for Unload though. The Might stacking is rather silly, but ricochet would be a fun thing to have back if even for just one skill. I propose for giggles that Ankle Shots should just be replaced with a trait similar to Master of Fragmentation on Mesmer whereby all of the pistol skills whilst wielding dual pistols are modified:

Vital Shot – range increased to 1200
Body Shot – immobilise duration increased by 50%
Unload – 50% chance to bounce to a nearby foe
Headshot – AoE Daze on target (5 targets, 180 radius like Mantra of Distraction – mass res interrupt)
Black Powder – blocks projectiles or pulse protection or anything when you or allies are standing in it.

Everything you described makes EB and the ABL far more appealing to me personally. When you lose your keep the impact is huge because it creates a staging ground for further assaults on your towers. It creates this sort of territory war that is absent from the DBL because each objective is entirely succinct. There’s no two structures warring against one another in DBL – you’re either a defender or an attacker with no role change as the dynamics of the battle evolve.

In ABL you could take, say, Cragside and build some trebs to start making dents in the enemy garrison. Players defending the Garrison will likely build counter trebs but won’t be able to hit the Cragside trebs. Opposing forces in the garrison and the tower treb the other’s walls down creating opportunities for both forces to attack and defend. You’d get havoc squads attempting to push into and recapture the lost tower whilst the rest of the server defends garrison. The invading players themselves need to protect their foothold in the tower, whilst still proceeding with their assault. Whilst all this is going on the two sides are attempting to starve each other’s supply lines to get the upper hand. These sort of sieges could last for upwards of 4 hours and they were incredibly exciting because there were so many things going on.

The average siege in the DBL just doesn’t compare. Barricades did nothing but hinder roamers as zergs could tear them down within a minute (they were pointless). You defend until either all the attackers are dead and have to respawn (at which point the siege is likely over) or you spend all the supply repairing your structure and/or building arrowcarts until you’re overwhelmed and lose. Granted, some of these problems are because of the new upgrade system but still, there’s no territory struggle in the DBL or interplay between adjacent objectives – it’s just lots of vertical terrain between self-contained objectives.

I’m glad that at least some one is able to have the DBL meet their needs, but for me it’s just EotM 2.0 and offers no cerebral ‘hit’ that I desire as a WvWer.

msalakka.4653:

I don’t care about the score. The Germans can nightcap all they want for all I care. I’m not here to fight them then, so what do I care.

I am only interested in fights, and all these QoL changes mean very little when the class balance is a joke.

Run in a zombie horde of HoT elites, collect reward track. That’s what this game has been reduced to. It’s a blame equally shared by the developers for completely dropping the ball on balancing, and the community for turning it into Queensdale 2.0.

But sure, fix tooltip typos.

So much this. The two options in the poll are utterly meaningless until more balance changes come to WvW so the actual minute-minute gameplay is as fun as it used to be. You can still whack players for 15K using Coalescence of Ruin – a ground targeted, 3 impact, 5 target, 1200 range skill on a 4 second CD with an energy cost of just 5. This skill just needs to be redesigned completely. Then there’s Spear of Justice that still provides a nigh on uncounterable 1200 range pull to your death. Needs far more opportunity for players to react (think magnet pull and Into the Void). How about the utterly broken boon stacking potential? Was it intended that a group can easily stack 25-30 seconds of resistance? It’s funny to do, but really it’s not good for the game.

Changes to stability, max field CC limits, Hunter’s Ward, True Shot and Gun Flame have reduced the dominance of ranged attacks, but there are still so many skills and traits that need to be addressed as soon as possible for any sort of normality to be restored.

Fun video. I’m glad to see someone hasn’t forgotten how potent CS with MoD followed by a simple GS burst can be.

Scrapper is still the best by a long shot just because the damage and sustain is insane. Thieves kill incredibly quick now – you can easily kill a squishy light target with a basilisk >steal>quickness AA chain. But it’s far better to do this as a group of Thieves because a single Thief just can’t survive focus fire.

Then you have condi PU which can persist, but not really kill unless an objective is involved. Also GS Warrior is making a comeback, but it lacks the stealth to disengage from a sudden zerg appearance.

I think competent players only get irritated by high Moa uptime with F5 – which is very likely to be addressed. Everything else is completely manageable for players that understand the strengths/weaknesses that the current meta Chrono build has. I’m starting to see many players in-game catching on to how to dump on this build now. Surprised that Pro league people aren’t bothering.

Not really relevant to sPvP. Anyway, perplexity runes are a decent choice for Mesmer now as they almost make Mistrust builds worth the effort in WvW. I’ve been able to get 36 stacks on a player by landing consecutive shatters alongside confusing images and mass interrupt procs for Mistrust with surrounding targets. Pity it was immediately cleansed and all those cooldowns wasted for nothing.

This would certainly be the most fun way to tackle Moa Morph. Daze on screech should definitely be a thing. Faster pecking and a longer YOLO leap would also be a lot of fun.

We’ve been able to kill other players in less 3 seconds with a standard power burst from GS for a very long time now.

Stability change is great. You could possibly up the 10 target limit of wall CCs to 15, but don’t remove it entirely.

I’d like to see some more boon strip put in place though to counter how incredibly easy it is right now to stack an enormous amount of boons. For some current skills:

Mind Stab: removes 2 boons if hit 3 or more targets
Null Field: final pulse removes 2 boons

Then add some boon removal (not steal or corrupt) to other skills. Add some boon strip to Warriors in particular.

Removal of barricades and some structural modification of the landscape surrounding fire keep has helped, but it’s really not enough. The dbl still has major pacing issues and its structure still prevents players from coming together for sieges.

Main problems: the two northern towers hold no tactical significance for a subsequent keep push, sentries in the middle of nowhere not really doing anything, hay bales aren’t widely distributed, both fire and air keeps have a huge amount of unnecessary stairs/dead-ends/drops to your death.

These are quite sensible suggestions. The Moa thing is difficult to work out though. Reducing its duration to 5 seconds undermines its use by core Mesmer. Disallowing F5 with elites causes issues for other double elite castings that aren’t causing balance problems. I’m not sure what Anet will go for really.

I’d love to see similarly sensible suggestions for every other class.

If Blue get bear buff. Use interrupt traits. Have some fun with that banish auto-attack.

Yeah I don’t like the new Lead Attacks. There was some eloquence to maintaining your initiative to obtain the buff, whereas now you just get it by doing what you were going to do anyway. ‘Just attack to do more damage’ is such an uninteresting buff. I’m really not a fan of what Thief is becoming.

I don’t think this needs to happen. I like that there’s some reactive counterplay to Infiltrator’s Return – it was really silly when it was instant. It still removes a condition and provides amazing tactical mobility at 1200 range so it’s a great weapon still.

I think its a well designed skill, it’s just that post HoT is full of terribly designed skills that don’t have any opportunity costs like Infiltrator’s Strike/Return rightfully has.

OP Mesmer condition application? Absolutely not. Mesmer is not brought for its dps. Almost all of the condition damage is tied to shatters. If you can dodge a power shatter, you can dodge a hybrid shatter. If you dodge a shatter, conditions will not be applied.

Loads of passive play? As someone who plays more than one class I can assure you that Mesmer has possibly the least access to passive traits.

Stay invulnerable for 10 seconds? I suppose you could do nothing but chain distortion with SoI and CS but that achieves nothing and is highly unlikely to happen due to various illusion upkeep deficiencies.

Unlimited supply of condies? I don’t even know what this means. Conditions are tied to skill use. They don’t just ‘happen’.

Heavy sustain, burst and bunker? Nope. It is a relatively well rounded build that does well in 1v1s but suffers in larger teams fights. It is chosen because of past ESL changes to prevent stacking and Chrono was the next best choice because of map control and eventually the strength of a low CD Moa with F5. The current meta Chrono is optimised to sustain enough to provide utlity but it’s certainly not there to bunker a point or offer the main source of burst for a team.

One of the many problems with desert borderland: the two northern desert towers have little tactical significance. If you took one of the north towers on Alpine it served as a foothold for an assault on garrison and all sorts of interesting offensive and defensive activities could. That just doesn’t exist with the northern desert towers that are too out of the way and irrelevant.

A very important post. Thank you for documenting this for Anet.

The only buff I think it needs is to Surprise Shot. It needs to be more appealing so I think it should bounce and immobilise two targets.

Everything else is perfect.

Perplexity+Mistrust is a match made in heaven. Unfortunately the perplexity interrupt confusion proc can only be applied to one person every 15 seconds. Still, with Mantra of Distraction, if you target a downed enemy that is being ressed by 3-4 people, you can get some awfully large confusion stacks to spreading around, especially if you land a full shatter too. The only problem is that cleansing is rampant in larger fights, so it will often be removed before it can begin to do some serious damage.

There’s actually quite a bit of truth to the OP, at least in respect to WvW. On my Staff Thief I basically just have to spam Vault because it evades AND does very large AoE damage (9K+). On my d/p Thief, I can just use basilisk and then steal/shadow shot to a target to auto-attack them to death with Flanking Stirkes auto proc (around 6-7K per AA chain). On my P/P Thief I can now self-stack 24 stacks of Might whilst using the same high damage ranged skill over and over again. It just doesn’t feel very methodical anymore.

- Stat reduction to pre-specialisation update so damage numbers are representative of the relative effort required to land a skill.
- Reduce access to boons across the board and also reduce the maximum duration of a stack of boons significantly – boon access is far too easy now.
- Reduction in CC sources across the board, why did Anet add so many ridiculous Taunt sources?
- Remove all auto-CC application/immunity traits that put the attacker in a worse situation for happening to attempt a CC.
- Remove all death prevention traits – “get invulnerable because you’re losing” just encourages the community to play terribly.

Double dipping with Consume Plasma gives you a free window to enter melee range and do as much damage as possible.

I enjoyed the video but also felt kind of sad. It used to be all about careful positioning and opportunistic landing of backstabs to deal out heavy burst from dagger. Now we can just port to a target and obliterate them with quickness dagger auto-attacks plus a utility (if needed). It’s a bit like how you can dump huge damage on shatter Mes by simply Mirror-blinking into their face with a shatter – sigh.

Although this says quite a lot of the unfortunate state of the game because you can’t really spend much time negotiating a backstab anymore even if you wanted to. Oh well, I shall mourn what we had and carry on obliterating people with auto-attacks and the silly Unload buff

Double Blink? Err I guess, but you won’t be using it for traversal without Mimic.
Double Moa? Sure you could turn one person into a Moa twice in a row or turn two people into Moas at the same time but that’s really inefficient and not why Moa and CS are so strong together.
Condi pbAoE? Yes, welcome to Mesmer shatters. You will have confusion and torment applied to you and it will stack up and hurt if you continue to facetank them. Almost all of the condi application comes from shatters.
Perma-blocking? Nope.
Good condi cleanse? Yes and there’s nothing wrong with that. You either sacrifice dps by choosing Inspiration, or you don’t use Inspiration and die to anything condition based. Seems rather straight forward to me.

Conditions in WvW have already been changed enough. The ~700 condition damage needed to achieve significant dps alongside the nerf to condi duration food has made survivability against conditions substantially easier. It’s only really Necros that can make an impact with a condi build during large battles.

Anyway, a basic melee train should not be melting to conditions. With a fairly balanced composition your AoE cleanse should well outpace the few condi Necros present.

The 10 target limit for CC walls and the initial change to some ranged skills were for WvW. All other skill balance changes were sPvP focused or important for all game modes.

musu.9205:

1. make f5 not work on elite

2. reduce moa cd to 120s

That’s basically all that needs to happen.

Well each Mesmer build has a different counter, but I guess most people are referring to the current meta hybrid Mesmer. The obvious counter to it currently is CC because it has no personal access to stability and only a single stun breaker. Also, heavy ranged damage works wonder against it because it simply cannot provide counter pressure over range. It’s important to note that the current meta build can only gain personal access to defensive boons when in staff from Chaos Armour or sitting in Chaos Storm – it’s worth keeping this in mind especially if you’re a Necro.

This is a shame. It was kind of interesting that condi players could get themselves on an arrowcart and could actually do some noticeable bleed damage to a zerg. Kind of allowed condi users to have some impact in larger fights. Oh well, it won’t really matter in the long run.

Asrat.2645:

Increase blurred frenzy cooldown by 2-3 seconds.
Only gain access to deja vu if you successfully block 3+ attacks, decrease deja vu activation window by 3s.
Distortion only applies if the shatter successfully hits a foe.
Mental defender icd: 12s
Activating a skill now ends any currently active effect of the skill.

-Blurred Frenzy is a rooted evade that has already had its cooldown increased and counterplay is already there since the invulnerability was removed.
-Mesmer will not get access to deja vu if you don’t hit it during the first 1.5 second block and you can CC the Mesmer between the two blocks. It has the most counterplay of any of the shield block channels in the game.
-Distortion is all about the trade off between current damage and clutch survivability. It’s a very well designed skill in that regard and was never really a problem. It now has had some of that removed due to chronophantasma which is more questionable.
-12 seconds is very long for a phantasm attack that is never used in its active form. I don’t think it’s much of a problem as the Defender is gone relatively quick and its party buff with it.

Meta will likely look very similar or actually be the same. Berserker, Dragonhunter and Daredevil still unlikely to find meta roles because of Herald and Scrapper.

I doubt that the meta will shift much at all in regards to Chrono. Sceptre and wells are highly unlikely to change things up, as current meta Mesmer is all about map control with Portal and team focus support with Moa – there’s no room for the newly buffed stuff. So Chrono will remain in an almost identical role as the fifth choice for a team although there is the potential for new builds to rise that could possibly oust current meta Chrono.

Some good changes, especially to Hunter’s Ward and Necro chill damage. But Seems like a missed opportunity to not reconsider the interaction of Chrono continuum split with Moa and the over performance of Precision Strike on Herald.

I see Anet is pushing for the old Thief>Mesmer counter of the past with those heal buffs and the added Resistance to Consume Plasma. Intriguing…

Good changes. They boost the viability of certain skills but avoid current meta Mesmer quite well (apart from Flow of Time).

Not sure about the Confuing Images damage buff though. That skill is going to be very painful now.

It would be okay if the AoE for the mortar flame round was representative of the actual range at which you take damage. Currently, people walk right through it and accumulate large stack of burning because the animation for the mortar impact site is so much smaller than the radius of effect. I don’t understand why this was changed – the old animation was far better.

I see so many players confused by seemingly random burning application. I wish Anet would remember the importance of skill and animation effects and how they inform the playerbase.

Ah yes build diversity. GW2 has always suffered on that front but it was certainly made a lot worse when the specialisation update was put in place. Now most classes can just have everything and there is no cerebral draw to this game any longer. The worse offender on this front is most definitely Scrapper. You can have absolute everything in one build now with no discernible weaknesses – unlike Engineer pre-specialisations that had all sorts of complex weaknesses based on your build preference.

If anything….give us back a good combat system!