Guild Wars 2

TLDR: Some weapon abilities do too much damage when boosted by skills and traits. Nerf the problematic skills and traits, not the weapons themselves since the weapons affect everyone while the burst skill and traits do not.

I’ll admit that some professions probably have a bit more burst than they should. In tournaments and serious PvP between good players, burst is not an issue, but the majority of the playerbase are casual PvPers just trying to have fun in sPvP and WvW. There should be some risk for using a full or mostly dps build, but people probably shouldn’t be getting downed in under a second (instantly on their screen with lag)

That being said, I think ArenaNet is going about fixing the problems in PvP the worst way possible. Not everyone is glass cannon spec, especially in PvE. Nerfing weapon abilities hurts EVERYONE, not just the high burst glass cannon players in sPvP. In fact it hurts the burst specs less than everyone else since they’re usually overkilling by more than 20% (100 blades hitting someone with 18k HP for 22k, backstab hitting someone at 8k HP remaining for 12k, mesmers doing a combined 22k damage to someone with 18k HP, etc.). Nerf 100 blades by 10-15% and the glass cannon warriors will still be killing the same type of players no problem. However, the poor balanced dungeon warrior is now doing less dps because of one spec in a completely different part of the game.

Rather than nerfing weapons, I think they should CHANGE the skills and traits that make them OP. I’ve tried every profession in PvP and on target dummies to make sure there wasn’t some hidden OP ability. However, let’s use thieves as an example since I’m most familiar with their burst.

Cloak and dagger then backstab are not overpowered by themselves. A balanced spec only hits for 3.8-4.5k on a CRIT. Even glass cannons hit the average player for 5-6k on a crit with no cooldowns. Considering it has a built in ~5 second cooldown, requires stealth, melee range, AND you have to be behind your target, there’s definitely a degree of skill required to make use of it. When you factor in steal+mug, basilisk venom, assassin’s signet, signets of power, and executioner, it’s a whole different story. A 6k crit suddenly becomes a 10-12K monster of a hit before average players can respond. Yes, nerfing backstab is the easy way out development wise, but it’s not the right way.

Skills like assassin’s signet should be changed, not nerfed, to balance the problems they cause on use. Rather than increasing backstab’s damage by 50% on use, it should do something like removing conditions, refilling initiative, granting stability, a long condition dot, or even something cool like giving you “predator stealth” for 10 seconds (the transparent but shiny effect). Rather than having signets of power grant 5 stacks of might for 5 seconds, make it give 2 stacks of might for 20 seconds (not exact numbers that I suggest, just an example). For pistol whip thieves, changing haste should have been the fix to the burst problem, not nerfing pistol whip. Now every balanced pistol whip thief in PvP and dungeons is doing 15% less damage because of the effect haste has on the attack.

Don’t punish EVERYONE because of one spec in one aspect of the game. Find the actual problem and fix it.

Having a PvP set with the same runes as your PvE set causes the bonus counter to show up as 12/6. After testing it the runes all appear to function normally, so it’s just a display bug. The superior runes should be designated as different PvP versions to avoid any problems.

Sigils in general need better descriptions or bug fixes. I would suggest splitting them into two categories: main and offhand. Weapon swap and 30% 5 second cooldown sigils (such as intelligence and air) do not function together. If you swap your weapon, the proc sigil will not proc until and unknown internal cooldown expires. Conversely, swap sigils will not work until 5 seconds after a 30% sigil has procced.

5% sigils (such as +damage and +crit) do not appear to have any effect on the hero sheet. There is no way to confirm if they actually work, or to know that you can only use one of them at a time. Again, creating main vs offhand sigils will solve this problem.

Sigils of similar types (such as weapon swap effects) do not function at the same time. There is no tooltip or in game warning, or they are bugged.

Also, there needs to be some clarification on how the diving helm functions when it comes to runes, especially since it will cause your runes to show up as 7/6. I know it replaces your helm when you are swimming, but this can be confusing for many players. I would suggest making the diving helm a visual effect only and keeping your regular helm’s stats and runes active at all times.

I can’t believe they didn’t include this in the game already. It’s an obvious way to make extra money with gems, and would provide a necessary service most people wouldn’t mind paying for (assuming it’s not too expensive). I’d pay $5 right now to make my elementalist 2 ticks taller and my nose slightly smaller.

I agree on everything except #5. Their reasoning was why spend precious development time creating secure code for trading, which will ultimately lead to people getting scammed, when they can just have everyone use the mail system? If you want it for RP purposes, just stand next to the person and send the item.

Seriously…how is there no dueling? That’s a no brainer for such a PvP focused game. Heck, half of the game is PvP (PvE world traits and character progress, and PvP world traits and progress being completely separate). How is there no dueling option in the mists?

There needs to be some new procedures in place for how 12am maintenance is performed. First a little off topic, 12am is too early for maintenance. It needs to be moved to 2 or 3 am.

Anyway, I was playing last night and lost track of time. At 12am the servers shut off and was kicked out of the game with an error message. This is the first thing that needs to be fixed. It’s not a network error or game crash, the servers are down. There should be an appropriate message for the servers being down.

Second, the game should auto log you off prior to the servers turning off. Not just turn off and kill the game. This would probably fix the third problem.

Finally, the server needs to save character progress prior to being disconnected in any way. It’s not a huge deal since it will only take 30 min to redo the map and events, but I lost about 30 min of progress when the servers turned off last night. The amount of time isn’t the issue, but rather the fact that the servers lose any amount of character progress due to a scheduled maintenance.

Please look into fixing these issues since they’re pretty important when considering the overall polish of the game.

1 and 3 are fine, but 2 is worthless. The only thing it’s good for is rooting a ranged player that downed you from max distance. Otherwise they’re going to be on top of you regardless. We really need a knockback since that will combo well with mist form and at least give us some way to defend ourselves when downed. RIght now elementalists are the easiest kill and a good first focus target.

I’m disappointed that Anet is listening to forum complaints and already starting to nerf abilities. However, the change was necessary and they did a good job fixing heartseeker. It was spammable, good damage, a gab closer, and an execute all for a low initiative cost. Good players had no problem with it, but mediocre ones were getting destroyed by it since they weren’t able to counter thieves at all. Since the majority of the playerbase is either bad or mediocre, heartseeker was simply too easy to use and negatively affected a lot of players.

I’m glad that heartseeker is now the execute it was always supposed to be. It’s not worth using except as a gap closer above 50%, it does the same damage below 50% HP, and it only does max damage at 25%. 33% was too high for an execute and people shouldn’t be using it above 50% HP anyway. We’ll still be able to find low HP targets and heartseeker spam them to death, as was the original intent.