Guild Wars 2

I got a set of durability runes too, for tank/wvw gear – the hero panel shows 25%.

I only did one test, but an otherwise unbuffed temporal curtain seemed to increase from 12s swiftness to 15s – the tooltip after the actual cast did show 16s for a tiny fraction of a second, so I think that means it worked?

If you have a suggestion for a better test I can try tomorrow.

I think if you open a rift at full health in pve and stand next to it… It will die to AOEs before you do, making it a free 15k heal should you turn out to need it. Either that, or I always time it that way by accident.

I tried heaps of variations of this in the beta and found a couple of things: GS+staff was consistently better ( :[ ) and carrion is probably just better than cele.

I really like that mantra loadout for burst, but even so I would have trouble justifying it with Chrono even in wvw – it really uses Dom/duel/insp heavily and pain doesn’t pay off well in spvp

That said, it could be a strange bunker build – alacrity and quickness make it very high heals per second, and it boosts toughness quite a bit. Might test something like that eventually…

glaphen.5230:

Toeofdoom.6152:

The pets are presumably gone for a related reason to that amulet – most minions don’t scale with stats, allowing surprisingly high damage along with huge defensive stats (remember the old sentinel turret engi?)

Remove amulet and remove them in the same patch, makes sense. Cleric’s has been in since launch and power creep wasn’t happening back then.

Sure, but druid, scrapper and so on weren’t.

I suggest allowing it to blast up to 5 fields of different types at once, but keep the cool down

Also, I think in beta weekend 3 it showed up as increasing the damage by 25%, is that still there?

The pets are presumably gone for a related reason to that amulet – most minions don’t scale with stats, allowing surprisingly high damage along with huge defensive stats (remember the old sentinel turret engi?)

Realised this is a HoT issue I guess – anyway, reposting from another thread:

With action camera I often find my chronomancer wells being interrupted instead of casting correctly when failing due to LOS checks (I think it can even happen with blink?) – Basically if the ground target circle is green but it fails due to LOS anyway (even when not moving) it goes on interrupt cooldown.

– the best repro instructions I have (for now) are:

• Turn off snap ground targetting
• Stand very close to a wall (like stacking in a fractal) and point downwards, so the crosshair is somewhere strange and high up on the wall
  * Alternatively, some places have strange line of sight issues in general, like trying to cast on the ceiling in some dungeons.
• Hit the skill button, have it interrupt instead of cast.

Generally I set up an amazing continuum shift Time warp + wells combo only to have every single one of them go on the interrupt cooldown – it’s pretty annoying.

Oddly, I find I can sometimes mash the button repeatedly and it refreshes the 5 second cooldown, so… that’s weird.

Anyway, other than the various ways I have of cancelling casts repeatedly action camera is great!

I often find my chronomancer wells being interrupted instead of casting correctly – the best repro instructions I have (for now) are:

• Turn off snap ground targetting
• Stand very close to a wall (like stacking in a fractal) and point downwards, so the crosshair is somewhere strange and high up on the wall
  * Alternatively, some places have strange line of sight issues in general, like trying to cast on the ceiling in some dungeons.
• Hit the skill button, have it interrupt instead of cast.

Generally I set up an amazing continuum shift Time warp + wells combo only to have every single one of them go on the interrupt cooldown – it’s pretty annoying.

Oddly, I find I can sometimes mash the button repeatedly and it refreshes the 5 second cooldown, so… that’s weird.

Anyway, other than the various ways I have of cancelling casts repeatedly action camera is great!

I’m not exactly sure, but I know mesmer is extremely good at taking the stacks off if you run mantras and potentially use shatters – I think illusions count too, but it’s hard to tell.

I tested celestial Chrono and while it was effective, the builds I found would generally be more effective with carrion or soldier armour. Celestial is in between the two regarding offense vs defense and power vs Condi, but without more uses for healing power and ferocity, it doesn’t quite provide enough to match up for a mesmer.

Embolism.8106:

Toeofdoom.6152:

• drop tides of time to 1.5s

Do you mean Echo of Memory?

Ah… Yes. That one.
Actually meant that with the spinning thing too, but either one works there.

Overall chronomancers offensive benefits seem to be in a good place – I didn’t play Chrono heaps this time because it seems stable anyway, defensively the latest changes may have gone a little too far – specifically with defenses that work for BURST builds as mesmer has plenty of options there as-is. I’d suggest minor tweaks such as:

• well of precognition to 50s CD.
• 1/4s less cast time for well of action
• 25s CD and .5s cast for well of eternity
• drop tides of time to 1.5s
• time catches up could apply briefly on summon so it affects phantasms – largely overshadowed by AWTEW. Ideally it would also add quickness but hahaha no.

Or whatever really point is it’s pretty much there so now’s your chance to do a surprise rework of everything. Teleporting phantasms! Buff gravity well float height to 1000! Tides of time spins rapidly and is a whirl finisher!

(Double post bug fix)

After playing a fair bit, my feedback is probably not all that new, but here we go:

Hammer: Not always that smooth, but generally good. Rocket charge needs to not charge off cliffs OR ALTERNATIVELY use the rockets to return to the cliff reliably that would be pretty cool. Can we cast rocket charge from a glider? Why not?

Gyros… generally a bit clunky and/or underpowered.
Blast gyro: appears unable to crit, which severely limits its uses. It’s also very hard to hit with, NPCs can “dodge” it by simply walking away. At minimum, I think this should hit multiple times (sorta like thief shortbow 2) so people need to double dodge if it actually manages to arrive. If it hits hard enough, we’ll also find a way to lock someone down (but that requires at least 6k damage imo – it’s competing with things like grenade barrage or even minefield)

Friendly gyros in general: Bad at keeping up with you, making them lackluster… additionally, the heal just doesn’t seem like it can be good with a 45 second cooldown. The one engis actually take has 15-20 (even with AMR!) and many traits work much better with that.

Shredder gyro: Uh… didn’t seem to stack much of any condition to me, really have no idea how to make this do something useful. Did anyone find some perfect setup where it melts things?

Function gyro: In pve, pretty average – why can’t it res dead players? It also regularly wandered off instead of resing or simply died, meaning it was useful around 1 in 10 times I wanted it.

Traits: They sound good, but I rarely noticed them in PvE. This may be the result of trying to get damage out of them. The hammer + evade stability trait seems a bit underpowered with it only lasting 3 seconds… doesn’t compare well to the revenant minor trait.

Sounds good to me! I hope there are some improvements to offhands though so we can take more than torch and shield in pvp.

Also, I’ve updated the Cooldown Spreadsheet with the staff trait change, obviously a pretty minor effect.

It seems interesting to me, not exactly what I expected.

I have to say… it kinda screws with the “Something extra” for only getting an off-hand theory. Chronomancer is still great and I’m not annoyed at all – just puzzled what ele, mesmer, rev & warrior got as “extra” things.

With more health, the ability to hover at range (Defender charges in and dies all the time or just gets shattered) and instant cast time instead of 1.5 seconds, bulwark gyro might be quite useful…

That said, it’s still going to be balanced around smaller fights where it will be much more useful – in builds based on teamfights it will get dropped. Buffing it enough to make it useful in a 4v4 would make scrapper impossible to kill in 1v1s.

When playing pvp today it seemed like lag spikes were sort of… better hidden. Things I attempted to do actually occured with much less of a delay. The disadvantage of having reactions delayed was still there, but less problematic and far less frustrating.

Anyway, hopefully that subjective observation is useful – it definitely seemed better though! (I generally get a ping of 260 as I’m in melbourne, but lag spikes above 400 happen quite a bit)

Yeah… the defender is okay in small fights and bad in larger ones, but at least you can get one for free with a trait. I think it’s down to 2 issues that really matter:

• Cast time – easy to fix
• The basic mechanic may well be impossible to balance as it will just die too fast in large fights

Bulwark gyro has a much higher chance of being usable, it’s instant cast, doesn’t mindlessly rush into danger and will gain from engis being far better at healing or applying boons to it. It appeared to have 10k health in the video but the cooldown starts when it dies, around so it’s between 30 and 45 depending how fast it dies.

That said, I think the drone is fine – defender, not so much. Having it apply aegis and protection when attacking would be much simpler… otherwise people have already mentioned useful solutions.

Agreed about utility variation, that’s still a big issue – either of your solutions look fine!

Similarly to the last few posts I think the traits could use some work. The grandmasters are very rarely build defining. Additionally, too many traits are implicitly locked to legends.

• might from retaliation = jails
• daze on elite = mallyx/jails
• boons → damage = glint
• double stability = jails or retri
• burn on elite = mallyx?
• selfless amplification = ventari
• natural abundance = ventari
• pulsating pestilence = mallyx

In short, Herald, corruption and restoration gms tend to require specific things from the build, making them very difficult to work in.

I guess I’d prefer things like “after swapping legends, the next boon applied by a legend skill is boosted and shared with allies”? Clearly glint related but works with everything. Or the same for conditions, or thousands of other possibilities.

My overall impression was that chrono is now a less ridiculous, and fair enough! A cele well build last time using chaos/illu/chrono was quite reminiscent of the notorious d/d eles and worked better than it should have without really learning to use it.

Condi removal
The condi removal change was the biggest impact – now a well build with sustain really needs Inspiration for cleansing and forces some trickier choices. Unfortunately I think this went a bit too far.

This is a particularly important issue as chrono tilts towards builds with higher sustain/support and less burst, which unfortunately melt to conditions without either inspiration or otherwise drastic measures (Chronophantasma + Persistence of memory + IDisenchanter + another utility kinda worked, but not in big fights. Mantras don’t fit chrono well so our best condi removal utility is lackluster – you are too busy casting everything else repeatedly to charge it)

Well of recall/Precognition
These still seem a little lackluster. Recall could use a hefty end effect to reward getting an enemy to stand there long enough.

Precognition is tricky, because it may end up being very powerful in a bunker-style build. I don’t think it needs much to be taken on a regular basis. My preferred idea is simply that it teleports you to the well when it ends.

Shield
Since the traits were fixed, I tested this out a little more. Tides of time is a really solid skill.
Echo of memory and the avengers don’t feel very impactful with such slow attacks. Each individual effect, alacrity, damage and slow seems quite minimal. Maybe I’m just not seeing what happens when they add up? If I had to pinpoint something, the buffs it applies just don’t compare to other sources of alacrity (not even close!)

Traits
After testing, an ICD on illusionary reversion seems better to me. 2 reasons:
1. I actually know if it will work, regardless of clones continually dying (as they do)
2. The “fix” didn’t exactly work perfectly. If you stand at range, you can spam all the shatters. Clones from earlier shatters still haven’t reached the target so they count towards the minimum of 2.
This is still dependent on a short ICD (eg 2 seconds)

Danger time would be much more compelling if it affected illusions too.

The rest seems fine as-is, but there are probably fun extras you can think of

I suggest gs3 could target someone up to 300 range away and teleport behind them, that movie monster move isn’t really available yet.

It looks fine to me, just the same comments about irony as others. Full list of mantra advantages vs dagger advantages

Mantra has longer range
Mantra is not a projectile (Daggers will hit clones/minions etc. all the time, the interrupt wont even kill them until 2s later)
Mantra is aoe, 5 targets
Mantra doesn’t have a time limit (thief MUST use all 3 within 15 seconds or charges are lost)
Mantra has much longer daze

Daggers have shorter cast
Daggers have 3 charges inbuilt
Daggers have power block inbuilt
Daggers do a bit of damage already
Daggers have no cooldown between charges

On the contrary bountiful disillusionment is great with chronomancer – I was playing chaos/illusions/chrono and shattering continually meant permanent stability and heaps of useful AOE buffs. With that build, mind wrack takes just over 6 seconds to recharge.

I went with MoF too mainly for AoE diversion – in team fights that helped out heaps (it had a <20 second cooldown if keeping alacrity up)

BD applied 5 seconds of AOE resistance, it was occasionally handy though I can’t say I used it that way intentionally.

The well trait boosted alacrity from 10% aoe uptime to nearly 100%.

I think that’s sort of a challenge – “how broken could it possibly be anyway?”

If you generally work in pairs of shatters with chronophantasma, then it probably works out a little like this:

• 2s ICD: every shatter gets a clone because you wait for phantasms to attack.
• 3s ICD : the second shatter in a pair rarely gets a clone. The next pair always will.
• 4s+ ICD : shatters further on in the sequence will sometimes fail to spawn clones because of how fast your shatters cools down.

Note I am assuming alacrity does NOT affect the cool down and only looking at one style of build.

All that looks reasonable to me. The alacrity changes are very similar to what I suggested elsewhere

I feel it’s really important to have an alternative to DE so the only thing to keep an eye on is illusionary reversion. In small fights I expect the new one stacks up just fine, but in larger fights… illusions die very fast. That’s particularly important when you consider chronomancer is making bunker/brawler type builds much more plausible. I’d be more comfortable with an ICD as it treats both large and small fights equally – still, we’ll see if this one works fine in the next test

You could also alter the trigger to be 1 phantasm OR 2 clones, that would prevent chaining too.

Silverkey.2078:

Embolism.8106:

The idea of Wells is that they pulse the same effect (with Chronomancy Wells having an ending effect too). I don’t think Anet would be willing to let Gravity Well break the mold, so suggesting a pull or whatever on cast is unlikely to happen even if it is a good idea.

Some wells break stun on cast and add 1 stab.

I get your point but now I just want that well to pulse stunbreaks :O

The tempest seems to have 2 distinct goals – one is simply adding a “full support” option and there I suspect it works quite well … If there is ever a use for it!

The second is the via the overloads – in particular, ele has great sustain by always having new things to cast. Overloads directly weaken that for a reason – you hit hard and burn out.

In theory that’s great, it can open up new roles like actual burst etc. As we know, however… It isn’t powerful enough. This in turn may be due to balance concerns. So. My suggestion is the following:

• remove the 5s wait and make the downsides harsher – half damage until you leave fire etc, longer recharge (even different per attune – earth could be 50s and air 20s)
• buff the effect through the roof
• give a lasting bonus for the next attunement. Suggestions:
  Fire: massive might
  air: tonnes of quickness
  water: resistance, you’ll need it
  earth: stability, so you can overload everything else

Anyway, that’s just me theorycrafting – as I main mesmer, it seems like Chrono does the exact opposite and reduces burst but increases sustain. That worked really well, hopefully similar ideas do here

I’m pretty sure there was a bug where enemy models would sometimes become absolutely massive and block out the screen for some time, happened with some of those mushrooms?

It seems to me like alacrity itself is at a good place (66%) but the uptime from different sources is a bit odd due to self application vs group application balance:
Shatter, 100% on self without much trouble
Phantasms, 75% on up to 3 with quite a lot of effort
Well, at best ~10-15% uptime on a group of 5 (if using continuum shift)

I’d suggest… slightly lowering the shatter alacrity (no lower than .75s per illusion), but significantly boosting improved alacrity (I’d go for 66-100% and if possible improve alacrity applied to your illusions). That means wells and phantasms which are balanced around group application can be used reasonably effectively solo for builds that don’t shatter quite as much.

I’ve been playing a build essentially using near 100% alacrity from constant shatters and it’s very effective. But if you run out of shatters in the middle of a fight the build immediately drops in effectiveness because it relies on sustained casts of pretty much everything (damage, utility, healing) to work. .75s per illusion would make it significantly harder to keep that up.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Do we have any testers besides Tobasco, NICENIKESHOE, Jurica, Skcamow and Messiah?

To be clear I’ll definitely be testing when I’m online (and checking the Alacrity CD Spreadsheet works out in practice)… problem is being in Australia that might not match up with anyone else. I can try testing one of the aforementioned builds but am currently planning things based around either:

• shatter “cadence”/sustain as it may open up new roles
• alacrity + quickness + mantras because I like mantras and it might fit

Also I uh, had to drop the guild at one point due to lack of guild slots :< a reinvite would be handy (Generally just find people are very rarely online while I am)

The immobilize suggestion is pretty funny – makes me wonder if you can actually stunbreak a float given it could be like a midair immobilize and disable most skills.

Fay.2357:

I have an…idea. I don’t know if the tech even exists for this yet, but may as well mention it.

Gravity well would cause an aoe pulling effect. This effect would not interact with stability at all, it wouldn’t cause a disable. Instead, it would be as if you were on a treadmill that was pointed towards the center of the aoe area. This effect would scale up towards the center, so if you were at the outside, you could just walk out reasonably easily. If you got to the very center, it would be pulling you faster than normal running, so you’d have to dodge and then walk out. At the end, the normal float.

This way it’s still an interesting suction, but doesn’t actually lock you with hard cc.

Remember revenant has the enemy teleport stuff too, which I believe ignores stability and doesn’t interrupt. Seems like a good fit to me

I would be up for that if I’m online at the time, being in Australia that part may be a problem

My planned test build is a cele bruiser using Chaos/Illu/Chrono – (BD, MS & Chronophasmata) the idea is to have continual small shatters to keep alacrity and boons up. Scepter should work well as it has excellent cooldowns if alacrity is up and can help with clones too.

Ok so who else is looking forward to killing all their own phantasms with power block?

Given a mantra is a form of repetitive chant I expect all the drones will be performing the chant incessantly (think of the space core from portal 2)

Carighan.6758:

Toeofdoom.6152:

Hey, so I compared this to the engineer trait Skilled Marksman and it is possibly good news.

The engineer trait is quite differently worded, though.

Engineer trait: “You attack faster with a rifle…”
Mesmer trait: “You attack faster while wielding a scepter…”

Indeed, that’s why I quoted the exact same lines you did – if it wasn’t clear, I think the test, and the difference in wording both point towards it being intentional.

That said, it’s not really conclusive.

Hey, so I compared this to the engineer trait Skilled Marksman and it is possibly good news.

Compare:
You attack faster with a rifle or harpoon gun
Increases attack speed while wielding a scepter

The engi trait DOES increase rifle autoattack speed (as it obviously should)
30 attacks untraited: 24.6 seconds
30 attacks trated: 21.9 seconds

The engi trait DOES NOT increase res speed (implying they do have the tech/knowledge to implement it ONLY on weapon skills if they wish to)
Resing a dead NPC on training island (in combat):
Traited: 21.1s
Untraited: 21.3s

These numbers were hand-timed with a stopwatch but the margin of error is sufficiently low etc.

So it is possibly intentional. Maybe.

I like how it found a way to mess with the core mechanics and do something new, even on a class that already does lots of things really well.

While necro shout casts are still too long, keep in mind:

• Ele shouts all have delayed effects on enemies so they can be dodged, only instant effects on allies. So they’re not completely inconsistent.
• Because of the ally effects ele shouts have pretty long cooldowns and no reduction trait – probably a bad choice outside specific aura or support builds.
• necro shouts usually have more powerful effects on enemies (boon -> vuln conversion, condi transfer etc, massive stun/chill) + powerful self effects (unblockable, massive might stacks, long stability) … the jagged horrors still stand out as kinda laughable.

aaand…

• ele shouts do even more damage so… wait no that’s kinda weird.

Anyway, the point is when you take into account weaknesses too, it’s not as clear.

Yeah, I’ve looked at that too and have a similar conclusion. Remember it also scales terribly to multiple targets and faster attacks!

A few approaches to improving it:

• buff it massively (20% per tick)
• buff it a lot and lower the tier (10% adept)
• make it stack per hit, not per second (no variance for weapon speed or targets) – even here 5% is a more reasonable value, capping at a 21% boost.

I wasn’t convinced until I tried fighting veteran karka with hammer/jails/ventari – the ventari utilities and energy management fit really well and are fun to use.

In that fight the issues that stood out were slightly clunky abilities, low damage and long elite casts… Same things you pointed to already I guess.

This does seem like it would solve a lot of issues – even the range thing if done right, mantra of pain is a good example of a utility that can work as an autoattack. Jalis’ hammers sorta do the same thing in reverse, boosting a ranged weapon when in melee range. They could already be planning it given you can select from the existing skills, but it’s hard to tell.

The numbers add up too, with an elite spec elite classes will have 33 utilities + heals + elites (or at least mesmer will) – but with just 5 legends rev would fall quite a bit short at 25…

I liked the descriptions, and the switch of CS and furious interruption is quite a neat idea if CS needs to be toned down.

Not sure about the fragility/dazzling/shattered concentration buffs being needed – why not just add the vuln duration or on-clone-attack thing to rending shatter?

What about a staff + mimic/blink/portal setup, for incredibly fast (team) movement? Given the utilities are taken it probably fits shatter with BD best… But I’d like to see what an organised team can do with it

Can’t actually turn up this weekend unfortunately. Have fun though!

Could also make it apply instantly to yourself… And drop bundles for the team which you can’t pick up.

Testing this in silverwastes I regularly just ditched actual rotations for mortar 1 spam because it hit so hard… It was a bit too good! With the fixes people are discussing (projectile finisher, damage trait) it still seems like it will be fine.

Josh Davis.6015:

Hope that addresses a few of your questions.

Night!

Thanks for the update – I actually think you’re focusing on particularly troublesome traits and skills which is great! I hope you get a chance to review them and make sure they’re still useful… I haven’t had a chance to test much yet.

I’d also suggest when it comes to stealth bits, changing the torch trait so it isn’t a positive feedback loop (stealth = even more stealth etc.) Might be worth trying before taking an axe to PU… Not sure if that’s your plan, but just in case!