Guild Wars 2

The people behind these dungeons are gone, or at least Robert Hrouda is, who was the most prominent face on dungeon revamps (which were abandoned after AC).

Can’t really blame a QA lead for being pulled into this mess and asked to clean up negligent practices by the development team.

Let’s be honest, they haven’t even clarified this is a big because they haven’t even commented on what’s the intention/design behind lupicus’s attacks. Maybe it was intended to hit melee all along, who knows.

And if it was intended, it is then not a bug and hardly the territory of a QA lead. QA leads have no power over design directions for content. Don’t take it out on them. You know something is wrong when a developer can’t even be bothered to come into the dungeon forums to comment on an issue and instead they push guys down the ladder to be messengers.

Developers have said communicating with players in GW2 is not actually part of their job, contrary to the common practices of every current competitive MMO out there (WoW, Wildstar, FFXIV devs all communicate with the community fairly frequently). Meanwhile GW2 devs only show their heads in the forums when they’re promoting an upcoming release and once the cash is in from sales they disappear into the nether.

Quadox.7834:

StickerHappy.8052:

Windwalker.7421:

Not to rain of everyone’s parade of tears, but there are a lot of people exaggerating so much it’s just ridiculous. Let’s just put aside that Anet said all the balancing is still totally open, that they made it very clear that we’re looking more at mechanics and basic ideas, rather than final values and finished abilities.

People are speculating about how Chrono abilities “obviously” are inferior and DH abilities are clearly superior, without having actually tested either of them. Take the whole 25 Vulnerability thing. I bet people would actually whine about this if it were put on a Well, because “Wah we already put out so much Vuln, and so does everyone else, this is so useless! Engie stack 20+ in an instant, then this ability will do nothing!”

Alacrity is also obviously bad or supposedly not as good as many may think, although we all know how strong Chill’s slowing effect is!?

The other CD reducing effects are probably a hidden nerf, although math clearly shows that they can be stronger (if used well aka SKILL) then the current flat reductions.

Thieves will still be a hard counter despite a huge amount of survivability, spike damage, condie damage, etc. being added.

Mostly a lot of stuff being said here is simply “grass is greener” spam, that sadly always happens when another class’ goodies are revealed. While strong, I saw nothing of the Guardian that makes me think I’m going to give up my Mesmer and play a Guardian. I have a strong feeling that to get the DH goodies, you end up having to kitten a lot of what makes Guardians strong right now. (aka TRADE OFFS)

I have no issue on other classes mechanics or other goodies they get, I am only mad on how they presented the mesmer feature which clearly lacks tact and other necessary information. Why did that happen? Why is DH presentation painfully better, well presented, gave all necessary information to those people who main and play guardian?

Now look at ours, till now its all speculation, no explanation or whatsoever for giving justification to their ideas, etc. So..why is that?

Simple, our was a point of interest, aka not pvp blance focused. Which sucks.

Um, he was using staff, a pvp weapon totally worthless in PvE and large scale WvW.

He was using shatters, worthless in pve.

I don’t know where you get the idea that this wasn’t a pvp balance presentation considering he spent a lot of his time explaining all the dumb restrictions and drawbacks imposed on the new skills for the sake of their precious PvP balance.

End product is the same, mesmer will be a burst class eclipsed by thief but people hate all burst classes so mesmer will eat a couple of nerfs to cooldowns and durations of skills and remain a gimmick class in PvE as a result and a deficient competitive PvP class relative to thief and guardian.

Well, Dragonhunter is a pretty lame name for a Guardian specialization. Something as obvious as sentinel or warden matches the guardian motif better.

Dragonhunter sounds more….warrior-ish.

Axelwarrior.9084:

Zenith.7301:

And particularly 10 seconds of revealed which is gonna get so much thief QQ it’s not even funny.

All it’s gonna do for stealth thieves is make them avoid standing next to a certain spot for 10 seconds. Even if you set the trap off when you go in for a backstab, you just need to back off, wait for the reveal to end (like you would anyway, just 1 second longer) and re-stealth away from the trap.
At best, you might be forced to use a utility slot to be safe. Honestly, Sic ’Em is much more dangerous to stealth thieves and nobody even cares about that anyway.

Well, yeah, if it’s comboed with nothing. Now plant the dragon maw trap on top if it that pulls opponents or ring of warding or the other skill that lays a tether boundary and you’ve suddenly forced the thief to blow his shadowstep to get out of the trap and delayed his backstab combo in the process.

It will be a really powerful tool in conquest PvP or even in the new format since stealthing champions/etc is a powerful strat and now a guardian can foil those strats. Also no more shadow refuge rezzing people or stealth stomps.

Also unlike ranger sic em this is multi target and doesn’t need to be preemptively used as it doesn’t require a target, it just requires someone to trigger it. And it’s supremely better than a crappy shout for 40% more damage on a pet that does 500-700 measly autoattacks. 25 stacks of vulnerability is virtually a death zone.

Quadox.7834:

as a said, i would prefer to not have to take a trait to use my profession mechanic

Which makes it all more insulting when you look at chronophantasm. Needing a trait to not make shatters a DPS loss in PvE as a grandmaster trait to boot.

Hey, probably when they reveal rangers they’ll make it so pets can hit moving targets and have aoe resistance in a grandmaster druid trait.

No amount of key binds address the fact he was playing a STAFF mesmer in PvE of all things. It could have only gotten any worse if he had chosen scepter instead.

People are reading the tooltip wrong. They think it only lasts 1 second but that’s because it’s a pulsing effect. So it’s 25 whopping stacks 10 seconds.

And particularly 10 seconds of revealed which is gonna get so much thief QQ it’s not even funny.

Gyler.8150:

Right all professions are getting specializations, if you get the paid expansion. For those players who don’t or can’t get the expansion, they will be getting a bit left behind compared to the new professions.

Examples being chronomancer quickness + alacrity + phantasm blowout fire sale or the guardians 15% partywide damage increase + walking aegis / wall of reflect + insane traps.

It was to my understanding specializations were going to compete with the normal professions, but so far its hard to see how.

You’ve had 2+ years to set aside 40-50 dollars. You get no sympathy there.

No game with pvp gets away with higher skill cap classes having greater power potential, without some massive QQ ocean anyways so it will never happen.

That’s why I don’t care for all these “skill sensitive” class mechanisms which just means jumping through hoops and being really situational to get the results another class gets with little effort and without situational restrictions.

There’s no point in something being more punishing and complex (meaning easier to foil as well from the opponent’s point of view) when you can do the same thing more efficiently and often on another class.

And this whole continuum split ordeal reminds me of rogues in WoW pre-MoP, where they relied on a long cd cooldown reset to use all their cooldowns back to back twice to be as effective as classes who needed no such thing and were more effective baseline without bursts of power concentrated on long cooldowns.

Jerus.4350:

p2w is about having to spend money in the “gemstore” to gain power, it’s not about buying an expansion pack that has power creep.

The direction they’re going with HoT is just horrible IMO. I can’t help but feel that it goes directly against some fo the core ideas that made this game great. Power creep on this level will completely kill off any fun left to be had in old content unless they update it (we know that’s not going to happen).

I’m getting less and less hyped abuot the expansion every time they post something, I wanna see the content and whether it’ll actually be worth playing or not.

Um, you’ve been facerolling 2+ year old bugged dungeons with garbage AI, surely it’s of little consequence how more trivial they get considering all of them are trivial.

Just hope the new content is actually interesting and not just open world PvE farm land with 2 new dungeons and and 1-2 fractals for the next 3 years.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Zoser.7245:

Wheres is the mesmer compensation about the off-hand weapon? I have not counted how many new utilities receive the guardians but al least 3 + 5 skills from the longbow + heal + elite + 3 new active virtues…. Our F5 perhaps?

Even John Peters has opened a new thread in the guardian’s subforum to receive ideas about how change the tomes.

Pretty sure the compensation comes from F5 and Alacrity. Its looking like we’ll be able to manage our cooldowns well enough to make all our other skills recharge much faster, opening up new combinations, builds, and making certain utilities much more lucrative.

(Double portals. Double Illusions of Life., ECT.)

Whether or not that is good enough compensation remains to be seen, but I already see potential for some interesting plays.

@Sticker: I’m gonna just.. Scrape a little bit of salt off your cheek for my fries if ya don’t mind. =P So they got a larger preview than us, not that big of a deal. Besides, Dragon Hunter is a harder sell than Chrono. I’ve seen more than enough to be hyped for HoT.

(Also. I shall be seeing you in-game soon. Come transfer to Pyros server so we can WvW!)

Continuum Split is a whopping 90 sec and Alacrity has low uptime regardless of usage.

Chronomancer is mostly a PvP spec.

Even the phantasm for shield is basically focring you to wait out a blocking cast to even summon it, creating further delay and ramp up.

Just you wait, the luster for PvE mesmers is gonna wear out when they notice all their crap has humongous cooldowns for the sake of PvP balancing because they won’t split skill balancing acriss formats.

Then you’ll have Continuum Split’s temporal rift immediately killed the moment you shatter assuming your illusions can even shatter because the game showers entire areas with lethal aoe.

Gyler.8150:

Yea i’m noticing a huge power creep with both, they really going to turn this into pay to win unless they balance normal skills accordingly.

How is it pay to win, the power is not available through the cash shop or a gold grind, and the power creep is tied to specializations and all of the classes are getting one.

Did you really think they would make specializations optional? Keep dreaming they’re a large part of this xpac’s character progression.

Also lol at True Shot, people were whining about rapid fire in PvP, True Shot is basically a Rapid Fire with 1.75 less seconds of cast time, more damage, baseline piercing and not retaliation bait. Oh and less than half of rapid fire’s cooldown.

Hi rangers, they had to make some other class better at longbow than you. And it is hardly likely that your druid staff will be better than ele staff.

BlueLouMarini.5986:

Zenith.7301:

…
I think you people will have to accept at some point they balance this game PvP/WvW first and PvE is not a priority.

I never understood how you can think you are able to balance both game mods pve and pvp (and wvwvw?) at the same time even so they are so different to each other. Why not make it yourself easy and say there are different versions of a skill with different stats for each game mode?

It took them years to even increase the necromancer dagger from single target to a still mediocre 2 target cleave, while leaving most of the terrible traits alone even until this expansion. Their “big” ranger patch was an underwater patch, the pet is still garbage and doesn’t scale with ascended stats upgrades or shares boons without a trait.

Given that picture, do you earnestly think they’re gonna take on the workload of maintaining and balancing skillsets across different formats given that even in a single format their balancing pace has been glacial?

Their promised precursor hunt 4 months into release turned into a 3 year affair hidden behind the paywall of an expansion pack.

B2P games are notorious for their lack of emphasis on systems and class balancing. Look at ESO it’s an exact copy of this scenario.

What you people appear to be forgetting is that we recently had a developer for the chronomancer in the Points of Interest….

PLAYING WITH A STAFF MESMER.

So this guardian specialization will go in 2 possible ways:

Either the encounters and boon/combo mechanisms really changed in this xpac, or this is the case where developers think a ranged support specialization is remotely relevant to PvE.

Also don’t knock longbow, who knows all staff weapons suck except ele staff so the guardian longbow might be that one exception with a hideously strong cleaving autoattack and lava font/potent aoe.

People celebrating Chronomancer, when they brought PvP garbage into PvE by making the temporal rift killable so every encounter with aoe spam may interrupt your continuum split immediately.

Also a dumb internal cooldown on not shattering phantasms and it needing a trait for such a functionality that should be baseline in PvE. All for PvP purposes.

I think you people will have to accept at some point they balance this game PvP/WvW first and PvE is not a priority.

It is no coincidence that the same dev that works on the mesmer also produced the lackluster necro trait reveals.

He’s not a PvE dev he’s a WvW/PvP dev and it shows, with his obsession on interrupts that aren’t even worthwhile in PvE since a thief or ele shed defiance stacks fine without wasting utilities or killing their damage output.

In fact it’s puzzling they seem intent on making the mesmer an interrupt class when an engineer or thief or warrior have far more frequent access to CC.

You have a longass cd on diversion, offhand pistol, and mantra of distraction. Offhand sword can also come in but it’s less reliable. Diversion kills all your sustained damage potential.

Then the Harmonious Mantra change, that 8 sec buff duration needs to go up to 15.

By the way, saying the change is good because phantasms benefit from staff is the wrong way to look at it. The fact is, % modifiers should have applied to illusions instead of needing workarounds.

The mesmer minor traits are horrendous as well. especially the inspiration ones. Retaliation on phantasms is worthless. 3 sec regen pulse on a phantasm is worthless. Regen is a garbage boon in PvE because you need spike healing against the kind of spike damage that PvE puts out, it takes regen a decade to heal what a mob does to you in a single autoattack that takes off a third of your health.

I want our class dev traded for the Guardian/Thief guy.

Hell, I’m still scratching my head as to why such a strong class as the engineer was the class that got a revamp instead of mesmer/ranger/necro.

Elorna.5329:

I guess I’m one of those rare people that plays the ranger because it’s a pet class not in spite of it. I actually enjoy watching my pets’ position, health, etc.

There’s not much to watch about it when you are meleeing a boss or in a melee train of a zerg and your pet gets mowed down by casual cleave and there’s not much you can do about it since telling the pet to come back to you in melee changes nothing it’s still in cleaving range. You can use a ranged pet but ranged pet AI is awful, the pet constantly decides not to stick to its actual 900 range but prefers to path over close to mobs or stand closer in some lethal aoe circle.

That doesn’t mention the fact ranged pets don’t cleave, do significantly less damage than a jaguar or even drake, and their f2 skill is generally of limited utility (the spider’s root has a delay in activating as it’s queued to its next attack and and the devourer’s barrage is plain useless).

Trust me, I have my hall of monument pets, I really love pet classes in MMO’s when they are done right (WoW pets with aoe avoidance and stats shared with master, for example).

But in this game pets were done pretty badly.

Leo G.4501:

Zoid.2568:

I don’t know why the pet exist in PvE. Either buff it’s defense and synergy with the ranger by a lot or just make it a SPvP thing.

They did that already. Pets are, to me at least, dang near immoral except in extreme cases in fractals. Even if they do die or almost die, you can simply swap them for your other pet.

Sure, pets have their problems, their AI make them make annoying decisions/mistakes, but that’s far different from being “useless” or “not viable”.

I want to see a video of your immortal jaguars on fractal 50 mossman, archdiviner, or molten duo/mai trin.

You’re probably using drakes then, which is a DPS loss, and the drakes even die still to the aoe spam in molten duo so you’re probably resorting to bears in some instances and bear autoattacks do less damage than a single burning condition tick.

And that’s not even opening the whole can of worms that is large scale WvW.

Yeah, I was just commenting on the part about outside control and sustain capabilities, there is no doubt right now that the meta build will not include nature magic.

You’ll stack as many damage modifier traits as you can, so it’s still marksman ship and skirmishing with a choice of either wilderness survival or BM both of which have mixed choices (good pickings packaged with mediocre/terrible ones).

Just a pity that they further widened the gulf between sword and GS damage by not merging the trait for both of them and only giving the sword an actual damage boost.

I also have to comment that on the topic of pet switching for the warhorn trait, the last thing you want to do if your pet could gain might stacks is to switch it out for another pet.

I also think Call of the Wild should have always given 3 stacks of might instead of just 1.

We’ll have to wait and see, but it is fair to say that without mantra of distraction mesmer weaponskills simply aren’t that great at interrupts when stacked against a sword/pistol thief. So it does make you wonder when you have so many interrupt based traits when your interrupt options have fairly long cd’s outside offhand sword.

It also won’t make Diversion any less of a kick to the teeth, taking a dump on your sustained and burst damage capacity just to interrupt.

The mesmer had mechanical problems with shatters and phantasms and it seems by the way the traits are designed that they have no intention of addressing the whole shatter vs. 3 phantasm ramp up elephant in the room.

Well it would help if shared anguish got the hard to catch treatment.

I mean, come on. Thief gets instant stunbreak+ full endurance bar from being CC’d every 30 seconds, but we rangers get a 60 sec cd that transfers cc onto the pet, hampering our utility or damage.

Same goes for empathetic bond, other classes just get their condition clears without killing their own class mechanics.

Make shared anguish just allow the pet to block an incoming CC without it being cc’d and give the ranger protection boon with a 30 sec cd.

Xaylin.1860:

Wrong picture.

Yes, they did say that. They namely mentioned the fear and Whirling Axe. However, they also better look at Consume Plasma. Being able to use its current form twice would be ridiciulous.

Once is already one too many uses of that OP skill.

Anyone who feels good about the mesmer skipped the clips on thief, guardian, engineer and warrior.

Shadow Arts thief is going to be ridiculous as a mesmer.

Greatsword is a nonstarter unless you’re fighting especially dangerous mobs to melee like Archdiviner or Mossman.

The fury on the trait is useless, in any organized group between the ele and warrior you’ll have permanent fury.

I don’t understand why they just didn’t erase that trait and made Strider’s Defense affect both the sword and greatsword.

My real problem is losing boon sharing with the pet. It should be baseline not tied to nature magic. That trait is essential for extending aegis and protection so you can run double jaguars on fractals and make their upkeep in melee much better.

Also we’re still stuck with some truly horrendous minor traits. Opening Strikes is still bad for PvE rangers since they’ll never sacrifice Onslaught for Remorseless. Quickness to pet when we are downed, what kind of crap is that.

Meanwhile our endurance regen stays at 25% (which does not stack with vigor) while thieves just received vigor procs on evasion and 20% extra endurance regen from vigor.

Staff ele wasn’t nerfed though. Sure you’re losing ice bow but staff ele is competitive even with a buffed thief and does far more aoe DPS on top of his many blast fields and versatile utility.

Probably gonna be the guard displacing the mesmer, warrior, one ele, one thief.

What’s clear is if any class gets replaced, it will be the warrior or mesmer or even guardian but certainly not the ele or thief, they simply excel far above the others at what they do best (ele for strong single target and the best aoe ingame, and thief as the undisputed single target DPS class).

At the very least change those awful minors. 3 sec confusion on crit, 5 sec retal on a phantasm, 3 sec regen on phantasm, same low duration confusion on shatter is just bad. Why did all this terrible minors make it live, and why do we get no good grandmasters in the domination line or Illusions.

It’s also the factor of something feeling new and changed for the better, and several classes, especially the ranger, got a bunch of recycled awful traits.

There’s a difference between gimmicks and actually good changes.

The biggest mesmer nerf is the huge thief buffs relative to the garbage mesmers, rangers, and necromancers got.

Warriors and guardians also came out winners in this revamp.

That they nerfed conjures because they were “killing people” is kind of a headscratcher. I’d love to see where in WvW people were using lightning hammer because it certainly isn’t used in pve, and nerfing a conjure’s ice shower is kinda weird while leaving lava font and meteor shower alone in WvW where those aoe’s are racking up far more damage over the course of the playsession than an ice bow is.

They aren’t buffed.

We got 10% damage from vulnerability and the baseline 15% extra damage to phantasms. In exchange we’re locked to 3 lines.

So you have to take domination, where we have a garbage selection of grandmasters (power block, mental torment for useless shatters, or the even worse greatsword training, which actually nerfed phantasm cooldown).

The minors for domination are decent.

Then you have dueling for fury on phantasms, blade training, and harmonious mantras which is a nerf unless you take mantra of pain because now you gotta ramp up the stacks by frontloading the mantra charges from mantra of pain, and the buff duration is only a mere 8 seconds. In a longer fight you’re going to have to start recharging mantras, losing dps in the process.

The dueling minors are mediocre. Bleeding on crit and confusion on crit.

And the real kicker now is you have to choose now between illusion cd’s and phantasmal haste for sustained damage. In exchange you’re locked into a traitline with horrendous minors: confusion on shatters and might on shatters, when you don’t want to even shatter.

More importantly all the illusion grandmaster traits are garbage.

If you want reflect on warden, you now lose the illusions cd reduction, phantasmal haste, and have to eat an awful set of minors: useless retaliation on phantasms and 20% extra health (they still die in 1-2 hits to most mobs), and an even more awful minor that gives 3 pitiful seconds of regen pulsing from phantasms and 100 garbage healing power.

You’ll go mender’s purity, warden’s feedback, and illusionary inspiration.

Either way the mesmer loses either significant damage or significant utility, and the core problems with the class were not addressed, from phantasm ramp up, to terrible autoattack damage, to illusions dying trivially in most pve content to cleave, and terrible aoe options.

So yeah, pointing to PU is kinda laughable as the Chaos line is horrendously bad for any PvE environment besides stealth skips. It’s basically a line you’re using out of combat.

Also laughable is pointing to evasive mirror. It’s a 1.5 sec SINGLE person reflect that comes in exchange of blade training, so you get a 1.5 sec single person reflect off blurred frenzy, for what since you’ll still have a guardian or mesmer laying down reflect fields that suffice.

Necro, mesmer, and ranger got screwed so far…..

WTB Guardian/Thief treatment, actually useful traits and for goodness’s sake delete those “on downed” minors from the ranger. Since when is “when your go downed your pet gains quickness” acceptable.

Or opening strike being crap without remorseless which you will never take because it competes with predator’s onslaught or placing the kitten greatsword trait on the beastmaster line right after talking about how traits should go in matching traitlines.

Necro also in particular got the hybrid treatment, they’re really trying to force conditions on all necro builds, it’s dumb. They should have learned by now hybrid weapons/builds DO NOT WORK.

Then there’s also their pigheaded insistence that necromancers should not receive healing in death shroud.

Yeah, you’re going to talk reading when you bring up dungeon tours instead of actual PvE content like high level fractals.

The biggest contributor to a class’s performance is the weapon itself. 4 new utility skills will not offset the garbage dps of a ranged weapon.

Lazze.9870:

Zenith.7301:

CETheLucid.3964:

Zorby.8236:

Lazze.9870:

Thirdly, you still don’t know what kind of utility the druid will bring. Hell, even these changes aren’t necessarily final.

We all know Druid is going to be some useless support thingy.

Yeah, kinda like how guardian turned out to be some useless support thingy.

Meta guardian is dps guardian, if you’re running support guardian in pve you are pondscum.

You virtually go zerker dps and pop wall/aegis on need. No extra support.

You guys need to be fed with a spoon, or what?

Wall and aegies are both defensive and supportive utility. You aren’t forced to use a staff as a druid, you aren’t forced to wear armor with defensive stats.

Just like a guardian, you will be able to go full dps and bring whatever utility you have.

Such a kitten troll, I guess a thief now qualifies as a support class as well if we’re going to stretch definitions of support classes thin.

CETheLucid.3964:

Zenith.7301:

CETheLucid.3964:

Zorby.8236:

Lazze.9870:

Thirdly, you still don’t know what kind of utility the druid will bring. Hell, even these changes aren’t necessarily final.

We all know Druid is going to be some useless support thingy.

Yeah, kinda like how guardian turned out to be some useless support thingy.

Meta guardian is dps guardian, if you’re running support guardian in pve you are pondscum.

You virtually go zerker dps and pop wall/aegis on need. No extra support.

Ele and warrior are the support classes in this game with banners, blast fields and might/fury stack, virtually all other boons are worthless in PvE the point is to kill crap as fast as possible.

So you get my point then?

Except guardian is predicated on the use of a staff. With the exception of ele you know how staff builds function in PvE. They don’t.

CETheLucid.3964:

Zorby.8236:

Lazze.9870:

Thirdly, you still don’t know what kind of utility the druid will bring. Hell, even these changes aren’t necessarily final.

We all know Druid is going to be some useless support thingy.

Yeah, kinda like how guardian turned out to be some useless support thingy.

Meta guardian is dps guardian, if you’re running support guardian in pve you are pondscum.

You virtually go zerker dps and pop wall/aegis on need. No extra support.

Ele and warrior are the support classes in this game with banners, blast fields and might/fury stack, virtually all other boons are worthless in PvE the point is to kill crap as fast as possible.

PvP changes, basically. Ranger and Mesmer got the same treatment, no changes of real substance that will change their position in PvE and tons of gimmick, situational traits for the WvW/PvP crowd.

I don’t understand why we need a foe below a 33% health threshold to apply vulnerability when an ele pops a glyph of storms and the mob now has 25 stacks of vulnerability off the getgo.

Or why we get 2 measly stacks of might at a low target hp threshold with a long enough icd when phalanx strength warriors will now be even more powerful.

We need that HoT beta session to start already and get PVE people invited for a change, because if the ranger, necro, and mesmer go out anywhere near to these trait setups, they’re gonna end up in the garbage bin of the dungeon community.

Hey guys, let’s take the greatsword trait away from the toughness line and put it in a line with a minor trait that gives the pet quickness when you are downed, which wasn’t removed for some reason despite being garbage.

And let’s take away companion’s might and extra crit damage on pets from our offensive crit line and put it in the pet line so you have to choose between nature magic or beast mastery if you want to keep your group utility or damage modifiers.

It’s good to know you also left opening strike as is and held its functionality hostage to a grandmaster trait that competes with predator’s onslaught so no PvE ranger will ever be able to take remorseless without gutting their damage by losing a 10% damage modifier.

Hell, most of the garbage minors and majors remained garbage.

Thief gets a stunbreak and endurance refill on a 30 sec cd when CC’d, but we keep a sharde anguish that cc’s the pet for a 60 sec recharge.

Good to know the Ranger, Necro, and Mesmer will remain in the PvE garbage bin while the guardian and thief and warrior now have access to even more damage modifiers and offensive build options without sacrificing utility.

And haven’t you seen all that regen? The swiftness and regens are SO, SO USEFUL IN DUNGEON CONTENT.

Wow, mesmers just got handled a steaming pile of crap for traits. The most blatant reference to a class being balanced around PvP, most of the stupid traits are interrupt based.

Regular recharge traits changed to recharge based on clone hits (which die immediately in pve).

Ugh, I can only hope the necromancer is better.

Yeah we’ll see about that when the changes roll out, clearly the reason why d/d cele is favored over glass cannon scepter ele is just a playstyle preference, not the fact ele drops down faster than a prom dress under group focus fire let alone a single thief sneezing at them after an engineer/necro has casually softened up with aoe.

Supreme.3164:

ResJudicator.7916:

style.6173:

“Even with the buffs to other classes”.

You wrote that after seeing 3 classes. You have no idea how it all balances out. Wait until you have the full picture and then discuss.

We’ve already seen the ele changes, so we can at least compare against fresh air ele. Once they go over the changes to the other classes, feel free to chime in.

Note that I never claimed that thieves would for sure be OP, I made it pretty clear in my post that I was speculating.

I don’t think you did the comparison in the correct way:

-New Fresh Air ele : tempest defense, elemental shielding, geomancer defense, stone heart ..and from there either fire ( perma? fire aura/burning on crit) for blinding ashes or water for bountiful power/soothing/stop drop and roll, thief stealthed or not..will be dead the second he gest close and even if get close, he won’t be able to do as much dmg as now…..what concerns have you got still?

lol they took out all the damage modifiers and somehow you think ele spike will be the same.

Look at their obsessions with auras and glyphs, both virtually useless in pve outside the elite.

Who will use the glyph heal ever? Those skills that just give few boons on long recharge are useless in a game where guardians and eles are farting boons via shouts and blast fields.

Meanwhile I look at all the damage modifiers thief and guardian got and it’s just obnoxious. Thief is going to be so strong…

I couldn’t tell you, maybe follow reddit or Dulfy I’m only watching the AMA at Twitch.

So, they’re nerfing conjures. Ice Bow, I understand. But Lightning Hammer?

If they nerf lightning hammer they might as well delete scepter specs from the game. No mentions about improving autoattack damage for scepter and water/earth attunements.

That Piercing shard trait will be obsolete as it was only ever used on lightning hammer builds, which can barely compete with staff as is. Especially now that blasting staff is baseline.

In this AMA it’s pretty clear they are doing the balancing once again based on PvP. Their rationale for nerfing conjures was " cheesing damage multipliers to kill people".

Most of the new ele traits are PvP centered, all those auras are useless in PvE and auras are only consistently accessible via dagger weaponsets…

Forevereveralone.6385:

I am very glad this game don’t have dps meter to be honest.

Carry material. People who don’t have anything to hide don’t care about having more available information on performance.

If you think that’s bad just wait till you see what will happen with warriors and thieves. Hell, even guardians.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Zenith.7301:

Kazhiel.8194:

Who cares about PVE o.o WVW and PVP ftw.

zerg play or dealing with turret engis and shoutbows and thieves sounds like so much fun…

As opposed to free casting, face tanking, 1 spamming mindless AI.

It’s a wonder why anyone plays any aspect of this game at all :p

If you’re spamming 1 in fractal 50 you’re in for a rough awakening, same goes for facetanking fractal 50 mossman or archdiviner, a moosman or archdiviner autoattack does more damage than a zerker thief backstab combo and it happens more often with even less ramp up.

Bonus points if you try to 1 spam with ranger in fractal 50 with that precious mainhand sword attack chain that locks you in animation on the final strike.

But yeah GW2 in general is the most challenging game in any format. I was just making a point that getting uppity about one format can get the same flippant response such as I did when a WvW guy disses PvE while the WvW format outside dueling/roaming is one big zerg joke.

Ok, so you divide sPvP and WvW, but you don’t bother to divide dungeon/hard PvE content from open world zerging and cart off any PvE dungeon community into general chat.

Their big mistake in this “revamp” was leaving in the % damage modifier traits in there. Those should have been deleted, make traits about utility and playstyle not some boring flat damage buff that just eclipses anything else competing with it.

Also I hope they finally make the ranger trait a single one for swords and put it in the kitten offensive lines.

I also think what screws over the ranger is that basic functionality like boons on pets needs to be TRAITED for. Why? It’s so dumb pets should get the boons you get baseline, and they all should cleave 3 targets baseline not just the drakes.

Same goes for spirits, why do you need to dump 2-3 traits just to make the spirits passable when warrior banners are invulnerable, provide unique benefits that aren’t made redundant by someone else’s utility skill (cross class), and can be moved around without a trait.

Then there’s that water trait for more damage to targets with vulnerability in water attunement. It’s a bad trait that only finds use with a lightning hammer build because non-conjure builds will NEVER want to sit in water attunement so long as water attunement autoattacks and skills do such pitiful damage (and really, besides water staff, all the other weapon’s water heals are so pitiful they don’t justify the massive loss to damage numbers and coefficients that water attunement is stuck with).

My favorite colors are magenta and purple.

Kazhiel.8194:

Who cares about PVE o.o WVW and PVP ftw.

zerg play or dealing with turret engis and shoutbows and thieves sounds like so much fun…

Um, ranger doesn’t even have condi cleanse unless he traits all the way in Wilderness Survival.

The real offenders are ele, guard, and warrior. Shadow arts thief can also cleanse plenty of conditions.

rotten.9753:

Windsagio.1340:

People have actually suggested WoW ing it up and removing stats from gear.

Does wow have statless gear? Because I thought removing stats from gear would be going back to gw1 rather than wow because people that suggested it still want an active game, unlike trinity lovers here.

Um, GW1 had a trinity system so pls take your fashionable wow bashing somewhere else.

Should be the case in PvE, will never happen in PvP.