A simple nerf to the healing of Purification will do wonders to help balance DHs. The biggest problem is how much sustain they have with their insane burst. You can’t kite one that knows when to use teleports (By the way, what the kitten is up with teleports being on such short CDs?), and so many skills do unnecessarily high damage. Smite Conditions is a bit too bursty and it only makes sense for it to do damage when it cleanses instead of just doing more when it does. Plus the skill heals for quite a bit without healing power.
Other problems I see is the Longbow AA does way too much damage for a ranged, bouncing/crippling AA, True Shot has way too short of a CD and will eventually hit for insane damage, Deflecting Shot can be an unblockable knockback on a very short CD. The other two skills are AoEs or can be dodged easily enough. My suggestions are to nerf the AA damage, and increase the CDs on True Shot and Deflecting Shot to 6 and 15 seconds respectively. Then go ahead and nerf other professions too because DH isn’t the only OP one. You brought Revs down to a level that requires skillful play to succeed. Now do the same for everything else.
Or we could reduce the amount of conditions being thrown around.
Not everyone likes insane challenges. But, that’s no reason to go afk.
“One viable build”
You have the sympathy of every Elementalist.
Victories after gaining desertion status will be granted assuming you are still connected at the end of the match after the next update.
!
Yay!
And maybe they should actually ban players who throw games. You know, like a functioning justice system would do.
Well, I HAD a post, but then when I pressed “Post Reply” some error came up and now it’s gone. The gist of what I said is this:
- Rework Ele.
- Reduce powercreep across the board by increasing CDs of defensive skills and reducing damage.
Easier said than done, but I think this is what Ele needs more than direct buffs. We can’t risk Ele becoming part of the powercreep problem. They were already there with the Support Tempest. That was nerfed and it’s still powerful.
Warriors became OP with the addition of Adrenal Health. It added just enough survivability to let Warriors survive long enough to wreck anything in their paths. Plus new builds started showing up, so that in combination of AH made for a tanky warrior who could put out crazy high condition burst. Macebow was the build that became meta. Now, Mace/GS is meta, but Macebow is still a great spec. It does better 1v1 because it’s more of a bruiser, but Mace/GS can unleash massive crits in team fights.
But when it comes down to it, that extra 400-500 HPS really made a difference. And what helped keep Warriors OP were cheapness of stances and the auto proc Endure Pain. This is not to mention to ability to maintain more stability than a gyro Engi.
So, the combination of the addition of AH and the discovery of good builds made Warriors OP. Since then, there have been nerfs, but not enough. AH still heals for too long and doesn’t require a hit, so a blinded Warrior can spam Primal Bursts and maintain nearly 1k HPS.
Eventually, Warriors will be nerfed like Revs, but they’ll still be viable in the right hands, just like Rev.
These aren’t so much resign suggestions, but buffs and nerfs based on the current design. Most of these are CD changes. So many skills are actually decent but the CDs are too long. Other skills are too good because the CDs are too short.
Here are trait related changes:
- Nerf Unhindered Combatant (remove ability to remove conditions) and bound damage.
- Buff Critical Strikes and Shadow Arts, and nerf Trickery.
- Scrap Panic Strike and replace it with something less mandatory, passive and OP.
- Nerf healing and damage of Mug.
- Increase ICD of Escapist’s Absolution.
Some utilities need buffs/nerfs too:
- Lower Haste CD.
- Lower Roll for Initiative CD.
- Increase Shadowstep CD (other teleport skills should have increased CDs too)
- Slightly increase Channeled Vigor CD.
- Increase Bandit’s Defence CD.
- Make Scorpion Wire reliable.
- Increase Impact Strike CD.
Weapon skills:
- Decrease Dagger AA damage in PvP.
- Increase Headshot cost by 1.
- Decrease Vault damage.
- Increase other Staff skills’ damage.
- Boost Vital Shot firing rate.
- Change Body Shot to cripple if farther than 300 range and immobility if within 300.
- Change Unload: Teleport backward and Unload both pistols while evading attacks. Up to 900 unit teleport. Costs 6 initiative.
Careful, OP, the Thieves are by far the most biased players. You’ll never be able to get a constructive thread going here. No matter how powerful Thieves get, they’ll always think they’re weak. The truth is that they’re not weak, but that they’re poorly designed. The Trickery trait line is mandatory in all specs and Anet has balanced around that thoughtlessly.
Necros don’t need buffs. They seem weak because powercreep allows other professions to pressure them more than they were designed to take. They were meant to take pre HoT damage, but with HoT, the only things remotely defensive that they received were shouts and a trait that reduces damage taken from chilled targets by 10%. That doesn’t keep up with the insane damage buffs given to everyone, including Necros, through trait buffs and low CD skills. This is also why Necro damage needs to drop with everyone else.
Necros do not need a buff. They actually need a nerf if anything, but that nerf needs to come with everyone else. Then Anet will have to reduce the insane amount of blocks, healing and evades in the game or else there’ll be another bunker meta. Just look at Necros and you’ll see the game’s powercreep. They’re the profession that doesn’t have any ways to prevent damage other than dodges, so it truly can show just how crazy high damage has become, along with damage prevention skills/traits.
I won’t make a top 10, so I’ll just list 3 (because 10 from each profession is possible but would make a massive list) OP skills/traits from each profession.
- Thief: Vault, Headshot, Unhindered Combatant
- Warrior: Arc Divider, Skull Grinder, Adrenal Health
- Revenant: Sword AA chain (3 skills but I’m counting as one), Rolling Mists, Assassin’s Annihilation
- Engineer: Self-Regulating Defences, Bunker Down, Healing Turret
- Mesmer: Chronophantasma, Master of Fragmentation, Blurred Frenzy
- Elementalist: Elemental Bastion, Swirling Winds, Obsidian Flesh
- Guardian: Spear of Justice, Purification, Smite Condition
- Necromancer: Soul Spiral, Chill of Death, Putrid Curse
- Ranger: “We Heal As One”, Ancient Seeds, Celestial Shadow
Some professions are so obviously more OP than others. I had trouble selecting ones from Rev and Ele, but Ranger and Guardian had quite a few more than three.
Vault is a bit like Surge of the Mists. It does (or did) crazy high damage while also evading. But Surge of the Mists was also a CC so if you didn’t have stability and got hit, you were done for. Vault can be dodged. My suggestions for Vault is to increase initiative to 6. Then, buff other Staff skills so that a Thief can’t just Bound and Vault for insane damage while also evading. With these changes, Vault would be the easy-to-dodge bursty skill, but the others would be lighter hitting but harder to avoid while also applying good pressure.
Bound could also use a damage decrease, but that’s another topic. Changing Vault to be less spammy I think is the best solution, but boosting others skills to be more useful as damage skills will help make Staff a better weapon.
Yeah, there’s something wrong with the system if anyone in gold is being pitted against legendary players.
What tier are you in that any players run into mid solo? That’s the kitten hotjoin players do.
I think Lightning Flash is in an awkward position. In its current state, I think it’s one of our best utilities. And yet you’re right when you compare it to the other teleports (Blink and Shadowstep) it’s lacking. Here’s how I crudely score them:
Shadowstep:
-1 points for cooldown (50s)
+1 for Condi cleanse
+1 1200 range
+1 for Breaks stun
= 2Blink:
+1 for Cooldown (30s)
+1 for 1200 Range
+1 for Breaks stun
= 3Lightning Flash:
+0 for Cooldown (40s)
+1 for Damage
= 1And so while I would gladly take 30s cd, 1200 range or stun break (just one, not all) added to Lightning Flash (and would replace the damage for another in a heartbeat), I’m not sure it’s needed because it already competes for our best utility skill. It would be nice but personally I’d prefer to see the weaker utilities brought up to par (and not just for Ele but for all classes).
Shadowstep can be used again shortly after its first use, to teleport back to your original location, and this counts as another stun break and the condition cleanse. I’d say that adds another point. To me, Shadowstep is still slightly better than Blink overall because it offers greater mobility, which is what teleport skills are best for. Personally, I see Lightning Flash as a 1, Blink as a 3, and Shadowstep as a 4.
I don’t think it’ll be a good idea to buff LF to 1200 range. Teleports are already amazing skills, and every profession that has them uses them in pretty much all PvP builds. If anything, teleports are ruining balance because Anet needs to balance around them. Lightning Flash is about as close to a balanced teleport as you can get. It’s a long(ish) CD (40 sec), not a massive range, and that’s about it. It’s useful as a teleport and can do a little damage too. It can be used while stunned, but it doesn’t break stuns. Blink on the other hand has a 1200 range, a 30 sec CD, a stun break, but doesn’t do damage to a any targets. So why hasn’t it been nerfed? Blink is far too powerful compared to Lightning Flash, and buffing LF just makes it more mandatory. Basically the only reason LF has a longer CD is because it deals damage to one enemy. There’s no reason why Blink shouldn’t have a 45 second or higher CD. In fact, I’d actually like to see it at 60 seconds, Lightning Flash at 45 seconds, and Shadowstep at 75 seconds. Then, if the skills are used, they’ll have to be used carefully, and maybe Anet can balance around them only being used one, maybe twice in a fight, instead of two or three times. My CD suggestions are a bit exaggerated, but it gets across the point that better teleport skills should have longer CDs, regardless of profession.
On paper, I like it. The only thing I would switch is the Arcane GM to Elemental Surge, because you can do nice combos with Arcane Blast in Earth Attunement. Keep an enemy in place for a powerful crit combo with good timing (so, trying to get Sigil of Intelligence) will rock lots of players. Plus you gain lots more ferocity. I think it would be a good build overall in the right hands because it’ll be extremely hard to play well in order to maximize crits.
Hopefully this suggestion will actually be seen here.
Can we get character specific keybinds? It’s restricting to be forced into one bind for all weapon or profession skill slot across all characters. For example, I’d like to be able to set my f1 on Warrior to a more easily accessible key, but I don’t want to do that on my Ele. I like having my attunement binds more neatly organized on Ele, but on Warrior, it’s just annoying to have that restriction, especially with how often Warrior uses f1. This is only one situation. There are plenty of other instances in which character specific binds would be beneficial.
In WoW, you could move a skill on any character to whatever slot you want, which was a way to have character specific binds, but in GW2, weapon skills, utilities and profession skills are in their own sections, so it doesn’t work to allow players to move a utility to a weapon slot for example.
So, please, try to work toward doing this. It would be a massive QoL change to all game modes and would benefit all players who bind their keys.
Celestial Amulet probably would’ve been fine if they just reduced each stat. 560 on 7 stats was definitely too good. Elementalist is the profession that uses every stat in pretty much every build because every weapon has access to power, condi, healing and defensive skills. In the end, Eles, from what I’ve seen, have been doing fine without Celestial Amulet. It’s the design of Tempest and our reliance on the Earth and Water trait lines that ruin our build variety. Damage is so high from power and conditions that we have to spec for defensive and play support or else risk being kitten on by any decent player. Fresh Air has pretty nice mobility when played well and can kite well, but it relies on kiting. If you’re unable to kite, it lacks the defence to survive.
This can be looked at as apples to oranges, but let’s really look at each skill/trait in detail. Wiki is my source.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/%22Rebound!%22 Rebound:
2132 base healing with a 1.5 healing coefficient. Once the timer has run out, all affected allies (up to 5 allies) receive an aura regardless of whether or not they take what would be a lethal hit.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dead_or_Alive Dead or Alive:
5220 base healing with a .04 healing coefficient. It also requires the Warrior to be in Berserk Mode.
In the end, Rebound is definitely more effective at what it does, especially with healing power. However, Rebound has 3x the CD for an effect that isn’t really that great. With Mender’s Amulet, Rebound still heals for about 1k less than DoA, but it heals up to 5 allies who take lethal blows. DoA is just the Warrior, and Warriors don’t have bursty healing skills that can bring them back up to full hp, like what an Ele has. If a Warrior is saved by DoA, they have to rely on about 950 HPS (with Healing Signet), or cast Healing Signet and hope Adrenal Health is enough from there.
The biggest problems between these two skills is that one is a trait and the other takes up the elite slot. Still, Rebound is honestly better because it’s much more likely to save you and allies, whereas DoA will save you only if you have support from an ally or you run away. Plus you get an aura which is another 1.3k hp after the 5 seconds, and, if traited, a condition cleansed.
If DoA must be nerfed, it should be less healing, and if Rebound must be buffed, it should be a CD reduction, and maybe a slight boost to base healing, but I’d rather see a CD decrease to either 75 seconds or even 60 seconds, but that might be too good.. Also, adding a CD reduction to the Tempest shout trait would help things too. It’s obvious that Tempest is meant to be a support trait line, so Rebound is going to be weak without a support stat.
Well a nerf to Reaper would definitely be an indirect buff to base Necro! But really, some aspects of Reaper do need a nerf, while some of base Necro’s need a buff. With any buffs not related to Death Shroud, it will be a buff to Reaper. With that in mind, one buff I’d like to see is a buff to Consume Conditions. There are a few ways to buff this, and either one or all should be used.
- Increase all healing, initial and condition consumption ones.
- Decrease cast time (quarter second off is my suggestion).
- Decrease CD (25 seconds is my suggestion)
With such a long cast time and CD, it’s a kitten poor heal. I would rather see a decreased cast time and CD, or increased healing and reduced CD. Implementing all three changes would probably make this skill too mandatory, especially with how weak our other heals are, and even more mandatory because conditions hit too hard and are applied so quickly and easily that we have to use this heal.
Is your title a reference to a Series of Unfortunate Events?
The reason condition builds feel so much more OP than power builds is because you can apply the conditions and then run. With power builds, you have to stay active, but conditions are more passive. At least you still have to hit with the condition applying skills, but once you do, if your target doesn’t have resistance or enough cleansing, they’re done for while being effectively unable to hit you because you can just sit from far away. Or worse yet, there are those builds that can condi bomb you and then sit on you because they have so much regen or sustain (Warriors, Thieves, Rangers). Other professions need to stay far away to survive while bombing you (Mesmers, Necros, Engis). And why doesn’t condi Rev work? Because it can bomb you but it doesn’t have the same level of sustain or the ability to kite effectively while letting the condis do the work.
Condis are passive and thus they shouldn’t do as much damage as power attacks. However, we shouldn’t butcher condi builds. They need to exist because some professions are weak to them, and without conditions, those builds would reign supreme. Plus, more flavour is added to the game with more build variety. Conditions do need a nerf, but it must be done carefully.
You can either nerf conditions slightly across the board, or you can reduce the ability for professions to “bomb” you with conditions and do 2-3k dps and then play passively. I think one of the best solutions may be to reduce the duration of conditions. Don’t reduce the duration on all of them. Only some last too long, others are fine.
- Confusion is fine overall.
- Torment could use a slight shave.
- Poison should be shorter because of the healing reduction it does, but overall it’s fine. Maybe instead, just reduce how easily it can be stacked.
- Bleeding lasts way too long, especially with how easily it’s stacked.
- Burning lasts too long with condition duration builds and can be stacked too easily by Guardians and Engis.
Some none damage conditions could use some duration fixes too.
- Weakness is fine.
- Slow is fine.
- Vulnerability duration could use a slight shave, but it might be better to reduce its output by some specs.
- Immobilize is fine with some specs and far too OP with others.
- Crippled could be reduced.
- Chilled should be flat out changed. It should reduce movement speed by 33% and CD slowing rate by 33%, to match Alacrity.
- Blind should only ever last a few seconds, even from Thieves.
You need to be careful when nerfing duration so that specs don’t require expertise in order for them to be viable, but they shouldn’t be OP with expertise either. So, changes to how easily some professions can stack condis will need to be made, as well as how damaging some conditions are too. An actual balance needs to be made.
By the way, some power builds are OP too, but at least they have to be active to do their damage.
That’s what everyone thought with Elementalist after their nerf for Season 4. But now they’re still meta. We should wait and see how they do in tournaments and see if they can take a place on enough teams and still perform well, like with Ele after the nerfs.
I thought Eles were nerfed into the ground, but turns out they’re still extremely viable at top tier play. I’m sure in the end, Revs will still be viable when played well. When played poorly, like most Revs were allowed to do because they were so OP, they’ll be crushed, just like a poorly played profession should be.
Few too many stunbreaks there. Don’t think Anet wants any heals skills to break stuns.
Endure Pain is meant to absorb all power damage. It’s the same mechanic as Signet of Stone for Rangers. What I think people have the biggest problem with is the passive proc trait. Anet just needs to ditch it for something less passive or at least less powerful if it must remain passive. I’m thinking something that applies protection.
15 seconds of quickness from Frenzy is extremely easy to get in PvP. Even a single Mesmer can provide you with 4 targets. And how many stacks of might per player?
I like the Balanced Stance change.
The problem with Stances is that they make the Warrior too powerful with them and too weak without. And if you balance the Warrior to be good without them, then with them, they’re unstoppable. It’s a tricky situation. If stances were the only utilities Warriors had, then it would be fine to make them powerful with and weak without. But if they’re always weak without, then you can’t choose other utilities because you’ll still be weak.
I think seeing how the EU one turns out will inspire some NA players to bring back tournaments like there used to be before HoT. I look forward to seeing what happens and I’ll definitely be watching Heldrineer’s one.
Warriors have a lot of problems, some of which need nerfs, others just need changes. The nerfs need to go to Adrenal Health, Arc Divider, and Skull Grinder. The changes should go to Stances, particularly the meta ones (Berserker Stance and Endure Pain).
Adrenal Health could use a duration cut. Make it something like 6 seconds and healing for 75% of what it does at 15 seconds. This makes the healing more bursty, but doesn’t allow the warrior just to run away and regen so easily when its stances and Berserker Mode are on CD. Numbers can be tweeked, but that’s my idea for it.
Arc Divider’s Range is massive. 450 units AoE, which gives it a 900 unit diameter. 900 range is huge for something instant cast, hard hitting, is AoE, cleanses 3 conditions on hit and applies Adrenal Health. The damage of the skill itself is honestly fine. It’s meant to hit hard, but at least cut its range in half. It should be more powerful than Arcing Slice, but multiplying the range x3 is not the way!
Skull Grinder is next on the list. It dazes, blinds, confuses, cripples, bleeds, blasts, jumps you forward (not a leap finisher thankfully), and it hits really hard too. My nerf idea is simple: drop the blind, blast finisher and jump. With this, it’ll still hit hard, CC, do some condi damage, which is better than Skull Bash which only stuns a duration based on your adrenaline stage. Having the jump on it adds an unnecessary anti kiting tool to the skill, just like with Arc Divider. You no longer have to set up the burst to try and hit your target. Just press a button and they get hit (assuming they don’t dodge, block, blind etc., but that applies to any skill). Kiting should be the weakness for a Warrior. If a skilled warrior or team can let the warrior hit with this skill, the crippling helps against kiting, but Arc Divider and Skull Grinder together remove the need for such setup.
I have no good on idea on how to change Stances, so I’ll just give my terrible one. First is Berserker Stance. This provides too much condition immunity for too long, in spite of its CD. So, my idea is to make it cleanse 2 conditions every 2 seconds for 6 seconds. That’ll be a total of 8 conditions cleansed, and keep the CD the same. Second is Endure Pain. 6 seconds of total power damage immunity is too much. Just cut down its duration and CD. Third is the EP passive trait proc. Remove it. I don’t care if you don’t even replace it with anything good. Just get rid of that kitten trait. It removes all skill from every Warrior ever. Just make it proc protection for when you take a certain amount of damage over a certain duration. Like, “Gain protection when you take 5000 damage in 3 seconds. 15 second CD.” I don’t care. Anything is better than what it currently is.
One last thing that I didn’t mention before is my concern on how long Berserker Mode lasts. It’s 15 seconds! That’s 15 seconds with 2.5 second CD Primal Burst skills that cleanse 3 conditions on hit, grants 15 second of uncorruptable regen, and do way too much for any skills, especially on that CD. And then there’s pulsing stability.
So, with my ideas, Warriors might become extremely weak without any CDs, but be fairly balanced with them, meaning they would be UP overall. So, something would need to be done to help make it a bit more useful outside of Berserker Mode and Stance CDs. I have no ideas for that, but I know the community can think of them.
Reason why Ele should be in a 1v1? Because it can’t kill anything.
All it does it take valuable support away from a team fight. D/F Tempest is a support spec, not a bunker. It’s not designed to take as much pressure for your team as possible. It’s meant to relieve pressure for your teammates. Both support specs and bunkers aren’t made to kill things alone (except Druid ‘cause pets), but a bunker can sit on a point during a fight and take the damage. Season 1 Mesmer wasn’t called a support Mesmer. It was called a bunker Mesmer because it didn’t provide much support, but it could hold a point against 3 or even 4 players. Bunkers can be in team fights, but they can valuably duel too while keeping a point. Support Tempest cannot sit on a point against anything that knows how to pressure and interrupt. It will have to leave and give up the point eventually because it’s too squishy when pressured.
Interesting idea that could be part of an upcoming elite spec. It would definitely need to be carefully designed so not to be too OP.
I think something that revives a nearby ally when another one is defeated might be too powerful because it effectively punishes the enemy team for playing well. But overall, I like this idea.
Anet, do your job! We payed money to play (most of us), so the least you can do is give us a good playing experience.
Actually, I think they just need some minor tweaking to have condi removal. That’s about it — many of the builds that can solo him do so slowly, building up condis.
Power builds destroy the Lord too. Power Reaper, Power Berserker in particular demolish the Lord and all the adds with ease, and can even end with full hp and life force. Anything can tank the Lord and the adds while doing insane damage can kill it easily alone. Professions like Rev, Thief or Mesmer lack either damage or sustain to kill the Lord quickly and easily. Condition specs just have the advantage of running in, bombing and then kiting while the condis tick.
There’s no Arcane attunement. Do you mean Air?
Any advance you get for switching attunements happens through traits. The Air traitline causes a quickly lightning bolt to hit your target, and you’ll gain other benefits like higher crit chance if you spec for the middle Master trait. If you spec for Fresh Air, swapping to air grants 250 ferocity for a few seconds. Speccing in Water gives you and allies a wave of healing when you swap to Water. Fire attunement can increase damage by 10% if you choose the top Master trait in the Fire line.
In terms of rotations, I can’t really help you there, but hopefully my other info helped.
You want a dueling mode with ranking? Because otherwise, you just have custom arenas, and you can easily create dueling competitions.
What would be really nice is if all our own healing effects healed through shroud. But it should be strictly Necro heals, so no runes or sigils. This could help make Well of Blood better since you could use it and then go into shroud and still be healed. And, if they finally make it a dark field like the other wells (light field makes sense for Mesmer, but not for Necro because cleansing bolts over leeching bolts does not fit the Necro theme), you could whirl in it to for a bit more healing. I don’t see this being OP honestly. Perhaps if the healing is too strong, it could be reduced by 33% as if you are always poisoned. Think about it. You lose health every second and healing effects are reduced by 33%. It’s exactly like being poisoned. Simple adjustments can be made and it would be a nice buff to our survivability.
All other healing sources would not work through shroud. Then an Ele could keep you alive eternally.
Can I have your stuff?
That’s how signets work. A signet has a passive effect and an active effect. The Passive effect is just a small bonus whenever the signet isn’t on CD. When you use the signet, you put it on CD and thus you lose its passive effect, but you you or the enemy gain the active effect, which could be a teleport, AoE conditions, reset on certain CDs, immunity to power damage. As soon as the CD of the signet is finished, you regain the passive effect. So when Signet of Stone isn’t on CD, you gain toughness, but as soon as you use it, you are immune to power damage for a duration and then you must wait for the CD to finish before regaining the toughness.
The spawn of this phantasm can be blocked/“dodged” by the other player if they jump at the right time. Try jumping near the end of the Shield 4 block and it should be spawning more consistently
No. You never jump at the end of casting. Jumping will simply prevent phantasm from spawning.
It used to work…I just checked in game and now the spawn isn’t delayed at the end of a cast like before.
Trapper still works in WvW against anyone not running cleanses. But if they are running cleanses, then it’s pretty risky to show yourself. Stuns are in high abundance right now and if you’re not careful, you’ll end up running more than attacking.
In PvP, it’s 100% useless. D/P is meta, and sometimes players run Vault Spammer or even a D/D evade spam build, but D/P can still burst extremely well while also decapping more easily. Vault Spammer is better in team fights than D/P, but its mobility is lower than D/P so you can’t make a quick decap without risking a respawn getting to the point around the same time. Overall, Vault Spammer is viable, but D/P will outperform it usually. D/D condi is countered by anyone who knows how to time CCs and kite.
…nobody is squishy with a bunker ele next to them.
Except the “bunker” Ele. Support Tempest spec isn’t a bunker. It’s actually incredibly squishy without its CDs. Every profession is actually very squishy without their CDs because there are no more tanky amulets, aside from Paladin’s. So, just like every profession, Elementalists die quickly without CDs, and the only way for them to survive without CDs is to heal, which is easy to interrupt, and to kite, which is impossible with a THIEF around. That’s right. KILL THE ELE! Force it away and the rest of the enemy team will drop like flies once all their CDs are gone too.
The whole idea that Thief isn’t OP simply because it “can’t 1v1 or team fight” is 100% false. There are plenty of matchups that Thief beats. Thieves can clobber any Necro 1v1 as long as Shroud can be forced, and Eles can be killed in seconds against any decent Thief who knows how to Steal Earth Overload and headshot heals and other Overloads. How about Zerker Warrior? All a Thief has to do is stay at range. If the Warrior charges, the Thief can literally just dodge a couple times or teleport to a better position with ease.
Let’s look at team fights. A Thief doesn’t need to be sitting in the middle of a fight because its burst is high enough to wait for a low HP target and burst it down nearly instantly. If a Thief had this bursting capability while also being able to tank team fights, Thief would absolutely be the #1 most OP profession. I don’t want to make a massive post about all the problems with Thieves, so I won’t. I’m just disproving that Thieves aren’t OP just because they don’t thrive in 1v1s and team fights. They can actually do pretty well in them if careful enough, and the areas they do thrive at, they are godly.
The DH heal definitely heals for way too much. Without healing power and with the meta spec, it heals for a total of 10048 health, split between the initial heal, the trigger heal and the Smite Condition on heal trait tied with Monk’s Focus. That’s almost 90% of the Guardian’s base HP! Without Monk’s Focus, you lose almost 2k healing, but that’s still insane for something on a 30 second (24 seconds traited) CD. The skill also blinds and applies regen for another 1300 HP over 10 seconds, and with Monk’s Focus and Piercing Light, applies fury and slow. Now it’s fine for a skill to do a lot when there are lots of traits affecting it. But on it’s own, it still heals for too much. If it didn’t apply regen and blind, it would probably be fine for a 30 second CD. But traps always provide a boon and apply a condition, so you can’t remove those, so the only option is to reduce the healing and increase the scaling with healing power. With healing power, make it heal for slightly more than it does without any.
So, without healing power, IMO, it should heal for about 75% of what it currently does. Guardians are a class with many heals, so it shouldn’t be a weak heal. Drop the initial heal to about 1100ish and drop the trigger heal to about 5000ish. That’s about a 75% decrease. Now it heals for about 6k-6.5k instead of 8k. 2k less health will be noticeable, but not devastating. With healing power, it should heal for about 9k, and be powerful like a heal should be when using a stat that improves the strength of healing.
Then, after all this, nerf the healing of Monk’s Focus from almost 2k to about 1500 without healing power and of course improves its healing power scaling.
This should help make DHs be a little less tanky while not nerfing their damage. A damage spec should deal high damage, but not be excessively tanky. The high healing provided by Monk’s Focus and Purification is giving too much tankiness to a high damage spec. If DH’s are still too tanky after all this, then reduce the duration on F3 a bit more and give F1 a real cast time (1/2-3/4 is enough) while making the pull evadable.
Now, onto Thief. I’m surprised you mentioned Vault and condi evade spamming specs instead of the issue of the D/P doing too much damage in the wrong areas. Headshot still has too low of a cost for being a ranged interrupt, and tied with Pulminary Impact, can actually do massive damage. There’s also Shadow Shot being a teleporting skill (only requiring a hit) and doing damage almost comparable to a Warrior’s Burst skill. And what about the AA hitting so hard? I’m strongly against AA’kittenting hard in PvP, and with Anet finally doing PvP/PvE splits, they can lower the dagger AA damage without harming PvE. So I have a few suggestions:
- Significantly reduce Shadow Shot damage.
- Cut Pulminary Impact damage in half but make it able to crit, or just reduce the damage by 25%.
- Increase Headshot cost by 1 initiative.
- Reduce AA damage.
- Find ways to make the Trickery trait line less reliable.
- Make Critical Strikes line better in order to help compensate for damage reductions.
If a Thief wants to do insane burst, they’ll need to spec for it. Right now, Anet balanced Thieves around still requiring the Trickery line. And they went all out on this because they added Lead Attacks and added an extra boon to the boon stealing trait, making Trickery even more mandatory. Something needs to be done because you balanced Thieves to be able to do everything bursty without really needing to sacrifice anything. They didn’t even really have anything to sacrifice in the first place. Their defence is crap aside from evade spamming, and they don’t need lots of stealth anyway. With changes to traits, they’ll need to sacrifice the Trickery line for Critical Strikes in order to do the same insane burst they do now without the CS line. But if they want utility, they should have to sacrifice damage. Your changes in previous patches only made the situation worse, Anet. Do the right thing for once.
Edit: I had a whole thing written about Druids, but for some reason it wouldn’t post, so I’m gonna just summarize it.
- Reduce HP of the thing (I forget its name) that roots with Ancient Seeds. This keeps the counterplay while still making the trait useful.
- Massively nerf pet damage and boost Ranger damage in different areas to compensate. Do a PvP/PvE split here.
(edited by Zintrothen.1056)
Elementalists of any spec are prone to CCs, and support Ele is especially prone to them, with most running literally no stability traits or skills, except for Earth Overload. However, don’t spam your CCs all at once. The best thing you can do is pressure HARD and force CDs and them to kite. The most pressuring professions are ones with the ability to stick to them. Mesmers have superspeed shatters; Warriors have plenty of leaps and charges and whatnot, along with plenty of CC; Reapers have fears (can be cleansed though), a daze and a 2 second CC from Chilled to the Bone, but their biggest strength against Ele is high poison uptime and boon stripping. Thieves, though, are a nightmare. They have a ranged, nearly spammable daze, which makes overloading impossible. Even Earth Overload can be interrupted with Steal. Plus, they’re impossible to kite and have massive burst to force out every CD quickly.
So, stick to them, CC heals and they should be forced to use CDs, and then they’re fairly squishy if they don’t kite.
I’d rather see Continuum Split be changed from increased duration per illusion to a number of charges per illusion. I agree that it’s too good with elite skills, but I don’t think removing it’s ability to work with elites at all is the way to go. Instead, just nerf CS. Allowing Mesmers to use unlimited skills over a duration and just reset those skills is pretty freaking powerful. With charges, they only have a number of skills they can use. With 4 charges, 1 from self and 3 from each illusion, you have 10 second to use 4 skills. One would be an elite, the others could be Shield 5, and then Sword 3 with the teleport. That’s 4 skills. And those ones would be reset only. With the current CS, you can do those 4 skills and then switch to staff for two more illusions, and you could spam your shatters do you need some condi cleansing or a quick burst. Either way, changing the skill to use charges is a nerf, and I think it would solve some problems.
Another, much simpler, solution is to reduce the effective of everything being reset by 50%. So, after the rift ends or is destroyed, you gain half the endurance and health lost during the split, and CDs used are cut in half. A Moa CD would be 90 seconds instead of immediately refreshed. This is something that could be tuned easily too. Instead of 50%, do 75%. Moa CD would be reduced to 45 seconds after CS ends.
Actually, I like my second idea better. It’s simple and effective. Either way, CS needs a nerf, and not one that removes its effectiveness with elites.
Oh boy, this forum is going to be spammed with troll questions. Anet should just make a separate subforum just for Helseth.
My problem with Thief isn’t so much that they can nearly spam a ranged daze (not to say that that isn’t OP as hell against professions with little stability), but it’s their OP AA damage (which can be dropped now for PvP’s sake and kept up for PvE’s sake, now that they’re splitting skills) and Shadow shot’s damage. Shadows hot is one of those skills that does a lot for one skill. It teleports, it’s ranged, it’s cheap, and it hits insanely hard when combined with a quick AA burst. My suggestions for D/P nerfs are:
- Lower AA damage in PvP only.
- Slash Shadow shot damage significantly
- Increase Headshot initiative by 1.
And now, to help make up for the drop in damage:
- Make extra initiative gain from Trickery baseline. Move initiative spent damage increase to replace it. Lead Attacks does too much for a minor trait.
- Move boon steal with Steal to a GM other than Sleight of Hand.
- Make 20% Steal CD reduction from Sleight of Hand baseline. Keep Trickery based Steal reduction.
- Make some changes to improve Critical Strikes line.
- Add a Stealth Attack damage bonus to Shadow Arts. Why is there no trait that boosts Stealth Attack damage? Critical Strikes has a critical strike increase for those attacks, but that’s a plain damage boost.
With a damage reduction to weapon skills, Thieves will need to get that damage back through traits and sacrificing the Trickery line, which is impossible to sacrifice right now because it’s far too powerful.
Or, instead of boosting damage, they could boost some other utilities or change some weapon skills to be more defensive and allow Thieves to work better in team fights and be able to do a different role. Who knows if that’s at all possible though at this point.
@Abelisk
Players run focus because top players run it, and top players run it because it’s better than warhorn at the top level. Plenty of top players experiment with different weapons all the time. By now, we would’ve seen a change to warhorn if it was better. Players like Nos tried out a power Reaper spec and now it’s meta. Things change when top players make those changes, and focus has yet to be changed to warhorn, so my reasoning is that focus is better at top end play, but warhorn works anywhere below high plat.
So, play warhorn if you like it and it works and you win games with it, but don’t be afraid to go back to focus if you find more and more players are focusing you and you need that invuln and projectile hate.
Scrapper, Herald, Tempest, Dragonhunter, Reaper, and Druid are OP.
DH > all
I had to.
But really…
DH > Mesmer, Daredevil, ?
Berserker > Chrono, Tempest, Reaper, DH
Druid > DH, ?
Daredevil > Tempest, Herald, Druid,
Reaper > Herald, Scrapper, Tempest, Druid
Herald > ?
Tempest > DH (used to be other way around when traps dazed with the trait),
Chrono > Tempest, Druid, Herald
Scrapper > Tempest, Druid, DH
This list is based on experience, logic and plain facts. It’s also based only on meta builds. It’s also incomplete because professions, such as Rev, I’m just unsure about.
Staff 5 damage nerf was absolutely the right move on that skill. It was obviously meant to be a skillful CC and evade while providing some damage, but the damage was overtuned. Though part of the high damage came from OP traits.
The AA should be kitten. It’s an AA. AA’s should always be kittenty filler attacks. They cost nothing, so they should do almost nothing. The best buff Staff can get is a buff to skill 2. That skill is definitely “slow and undependable”, no doubt about it there. It costs energy and has a CD, so it should do something decent.
They shouldn’t do anymore damage nerfs to skills anymore. What should be nerfed is their ability to maintain nearly 100% crit chance, be able to spec for 560+ ferocity and still be survivable because of all their evades/blocks. That’s what made them OP. SotM still needed a nerf, but if they nerfed some damage related traits, I wouldn’t be against buffing SotM back up another 25%. So, my summary of what I think should be done:
- Buff Staff 2 to be more reliable and useful.
- Buff Staff 5 up 25%.
- Replace fury increasing GM trait with something not impacting crit chance. Perhaps increased ferocity while having fury.
- Replace trait giving 7% damage boost with fury.
- Reduce block duration slightly on Shield 5, but keep healing amount the same. This’ll reduce sustain but also make Rev faster. It’s what happened after the nerf to Shield 4 on Chronomancer. The skill reduced sustain but made the profession faster.
- Slightly nerf life leeching GM in Devastation.
- Actually make Salvation useful so maybe Revs can spec into that for some defence. Then maybe you can make real nerfs to all their evades without demolishing the profession.