Guild Wars 2

Adding in more volatility between the servers would probably be a step in the right direction. Think someone mentioned before that rather than having a complex system of server ratings/w.e a simpler system of winner-up / loser-down might make for more enjoyable matches. This would probably be a bit too radical for the development team tho, so perhaps just adjusting the algorithms they are using to make the servers more volatile would be acceptable.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

Out of curiosity, how long do you think a well balanced 1on1 pvp encounter should last, on average?

Well, if you REALLY want my personal opinion (although I’m not sure why you would, aside from possibly allowing you to give more or less weight to what I wrote) I’d say a comfortable time would be somewhere under a minute on average, as most of the lengthier utility skills do not exceed that amount ( I don’t actually have the figures for this, this just seems to be the case from my observations ). Accounting for people performing better or worse, as well as builds, encounters can fluctuate in time, but I feel like a good target would be for a minute long encounter, assuming both sides are ready to face each other ( element of surprise is always something to try to take advantage of, particularly for burst builds ) with balanced (by this I mean builds that actually take stun breakers and/or account for conditions, while still keeping respectable damage) builds.

This is of course just my opinion, since you requested it.

Black Teagan.9215:

Believe me, when I say that they never can balance GW2, as long they dont split PvP/PvE and WvW.

Well, good news for you, they did announce that they plan to do so.

Counldn’t get the title I wanted in so that will have to do:

A trend I’ve observed with the approaches to balance that the dev team has been making is the insertion of internal cds (which are often hard to track when not attached to a fixed cd mechanic such as weapon swap), and reductions “across the board” (quickness & confusion). As far as I can tell, these have been done in order to slow down the pace of engagements. Balance folks… please tread carefully with this trend. We don’t need battles between players to have back and forth forever, particularly with the self-sufficient nature of the classes ( everyone can heal themselves ). With enough back and forth capability 1v1 encounters soon become endless cycles, until an outside force intervenes. Fights can be balanced through the notion of defeating someone quickly after investing everything in a do-or-die attempt to bring someone down.

TL;DR: In your efforts to balance the classes, please don’t slow the game down to a crawl. While being insta-gibbed might not be fun, recursive cycles are problems as well, and they take up more time.

Also, yes, this was partially due to personal experience finding someone I could not kill, but he couldn’t kill me either. Contrarily tho, I run a 75% zerk geared engineer with bursts of around ~13K dmg on a 25 sec cycles time. Possibly a L2Play issue to time the burst properly on my end, however the fact that I was able to attempt this cycle a good 8+ times on an enemy with them not being able to take ME down, while fun for this one occurrence, can become become an unpleasant experience if such situations are encountered with too much frequency, something I feel will likely occur with the current trends in balance.

jportell.2197:

Im not as peeved about the confusion nerf as the blinding befuddlement trait being hit… But we’ll see when I play later.

Haven’t played my mes yet since patch but this is the change that leaves me confused (haha, get it?). Why bother having synergy with Dazzling Glamours a combo you need to invest 30 points into Illusions, when you now add an internal cd to remove the synergy… ( w/o investments in condi duration ). The balance team seems to be obsessed with slowing down the game with their internal cds… Battles are starting to take WAY too long.

Yamsandjams.3267:

Christos de Soufre.3802:

Just watched the SOTG. They only thing they said about Retal was that they’re concerned with how much of it comes from light fields because it allows for groups to put it up very often. They’re concerned with uptime and will likely only change that.

Something about high group uptime lowering the value of direct AoE damage.

I also wasn’t aware that Retal did less damage in PvP. I feel like I would have seen that in patch notes somewhere in the last several months (granted, I’m only rank 15 in PvP and am almost exclusively a WvW player).

Odd that they mentioned the light fields for retaliation stacking in WvW…

The most utilized fields in WvW are water, fire, and lightning (and possibly dark since they still damage the supervisors). Maybe smoke as well for small groups. The problem zergs have with light fields in WvW is that the retaliation has generally worn off by the time you actually engage, so you can’t just stack it up and run a perma-retaliation zerg across the map. At best, your zerg will maybe have about 5 or so seconds of retaliation, but that’s not worth the sacrifice of a zerg with 25 might stacks, or a zerg with perma-swiftness.

In fact, people usually find the light fields annoying because they interfere with other fields, particularly when a guardian lays their swiftness symbol in the middle of a static field, or an engg shoots super elixir in the middle of healing rain.

Although this has never occurred for me, despite being an engineer player when I wvw, apparently I’ve seen mention on the forums where people get hit by boat loads of retaliation for having the audacity to throw in some grenades into a zerg. Having never experienced such a situation that they described though, I am unsure if it is hyperbole/their personal build/ other factors. Theoretically though, if retaliation is too easy to maintain uptime for, I can definitely see it being a bit of a grievance for players who are now taking more damage than they deal, particularly with AoE’s which are normally expected to be zerg-busters..

@Sebrent: Few people complain that snow leopard does not have niche/fun uses.
Every other form on the other hand…

Or—— they could actually revise the norn forms.

While cool, i don’t think it’ll serve the purpose of making the cities busier, because it would kinda be a do once and forget type of thing. Unless they provided something unique to the city jps over others. WvW has badges and seige; Not sure what the cities could offer that would allow them to be more unique. Than again, maybe other people find them fun enough to do them repeatedly.

Kardiamond.6952:

Fear suffer from both being a condition and a disable.

And that mesmer prolly didn’t have any condition removal equip to counter any of your conditions.

Pretty funny from a mesmer to call you cheap.

Nobody is calling fear imbalanced, frustrated people will call anything OP.

Seriously. a mesmer calling fear cheap. Complete fail. They have so many good stun breakers, all of which break fear. LOL.

dirtyshame.1863:

I also think ranger pets should stop rezzing if you manage to kill them in the process as well.

Pretty sure that the ranger pet doesn’t continue ressing you/or others when it dies. Maybe I need to actually explicitly go out and test this.. but I’m 95% certain it should be working as intended (as in when the pet is dead, it is not ressing you).

Back to the ACTUAL topic though, I’d say that the underwater downed state is what really makes the mes strong, b/c they can’t be stomped, so confusion actually works defensively. On land tho, it’s w/e.

Thaladred.1406:

I wonder if they can put a system to make events not so frequent in zones with a small amount of player in

I feel like there might already be such a system for at least some of the events, as I often times find that events start up as I approach the area (/some are triggered by the player actively). Perhaps it’s a problem with perspective though, but I feel like a lot of the times, the failed events occur because the player that was near it ignored it or couldn’t complete it, not because there was simply no one around. If you mean making it so that GROUP events don’t start unless a certain X number of people are around on the other hand… that might be something I feel could be made, however a lot of times group events are tied to an event chain that can be solo’ed up to that point.

VOLTCIEAGE.3029:

I think that wells should be targetable (without traits ) . other classes don`t have to spend trait to make their skills targetable . they should change it for well duration 5-7 sec etc

Actually… I’m fine leaving this the way it is currently, as there are actually plenty of similar cases: Traps ( Rangers), Kits & Turrets ( Engineers ). I suppose something that would be a counter point would be… warrior banners? I actually don’t play a warrior so I don’t really know about that. What skills did you have in mind in particular from the other classes that seem to get an unfair free ground target ability? However extending the duration could be something tacked onto the cooldown reduction, but not needed.

Bhawb.7408:

Jokes aside, the unfortunate thing about a lot of the “changes” threads is that a vast majority of changes aren’t thought of from a balance perspective, they are imagined from a perspective of “what would make necros stronger” or alternatively “what will make necros more ‘fun’” (fun is subjective). And whenever I see a huge “changes” post from someone that I don’t already recognize and respect, its really hard to read them. I can’t imagine that isn’t a shared feeling either.

This is a fair sentiment, as I, too ignore extremely lengthy posts about one person’s thoughts on improving the necromancer. Perhaps if we had that one group, [BoC] maintain a topic of community discourse it’d fair better.

Was testing around with a joke build i thought up of earlier involving spectral wall + spectral grasp and fear ( basically constantly yank and send the enemy over the wall ) which, while fun, was not at all viable in a pvp setting partially due to lack of needed damage from giving up my utilities for those two spectral skills, and long set up time (partially my fault to insist to put our staff+4 mark on the wall so I get chaos armor). Something that would have made THAT particular build viable would be perhaps adding damage to the spectral wall that gets applied when an enemy passes through it. something sub-1000 would have worked wonders. Now… I don’t usually slot in spectral wall myself… but I hear it seems to see enough play to make this potentially Over powered in other builds.

Still, thoughts on adding damage to wall effects (for consistencies sake, this would include stuff like temporal curtain and veil(? I don’t think this actually does anything to the opponent) on mesmers, flame walls on eles, other walls I might be missing)?

Rather not “necro” a thread, but been seeing people create new topics about ways they think things could be changed to improve the necromancer, so I thought I’d bump this. Any fresh ideas folks? Trends seem to be asking for more options for vigor/ dodging.

Hmm… well assuming your opponent doesn’t run heavy stun breakers/condi removal, i can think of a (pvp) build that would be pretty amusing. Would basically be a spectral fearomancer. Put this together really quick: http://en.gw2codex.com/build/25053-fear-of-the-spectre

Edit: Btw, the above is a terrible build, or I am a terrible player with it. ( long cast times )

Regarding the discourse on the Flesh Wurm, it’s currently functioning along similar lines to blink ( can’t go across gaps ) so as long as there is no consistency difference I personally don’t care too much. Now if they modified blink on the other hand. Regarding necromancer support, while a lot of it is clunky in terms of restoring health, the focus does seem to be towards mitigating damage through blinds. I added the mark of blood to the top thread because it seems like a simple improvement that would bring more consistency to our skills.

ha, for some reason i was focusing on plague blast instead of that uber fear wave. yeah—- that’d probably definitely need to be adjusted.

Bhawb.7408:

Make it possible to use Underwater death shroud on land, but make it so only 1 can be accessed (so you can’t have both available, keep only 1 shroud at any time, but you can choose).

I do think this would be an amazing change for our versatility ( giving it to us as an option like f1-f2), but I’m wondering how big a change this would be on the backend, haha.

Bhawb.7408:

flow.6043:

alemfi.5107:

Wail of Doom (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wail_of_Doom):
Changing this to a 1 second stun I think would fit the theme of the necromancer better than the 2 second daze it currently is.

Why cut the time in half? Stun and daze is essentially the same control effect.
The sigil of paralyzation even works on both of them.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/stun-sigil-work-for-wh-daze/

I posted about this in another thread. Base 1 second fear, trait increases base duration by 50% to 1.5 second fear, 100% fear duration turns this into a 3 second fear, terror turns that into 3-4k damage, on a 25.5 second CD, in addition to the other fears that terror builds have. If they did make the change, it would have to be reduced in duration, otherwise it would be a 5 second AoE cone fear (traited, technically 6 seconds but 5 second cap on fear), and be far too strong in terror builds.

This, combined with the fact that Warhorn is currently an amazing offhand for dagger builds, and pretty bad for condition damage builds (outside of running around), and that changing it to a fear would suck for dagger builds, I don’t really see this being a good change. It would kitten a lot of MM and well builds, and be a minor buff (if reduced base, OP buff if not) to terror builds. It just doesn’t work well imo.

To basically everything else said in this thread, +1.

Adding your post to mine as a counter argument to what I proposed. Sounds reasonable from that perspective, as I forgot to take into account the short cooldown. I assume you are saying it messes up wells/mm because the targets are then leaving the hit areas of the wells/minions? Is this not a concern for them just leaving the areas of the wells through regular movement? I don’t run war horn personally in my well build so I thought I’d ask.

PinCushion.7390:

I’m beginning to understand why the cooldown is so long. If LF is basically just more hitpoints, then SA not only reduces incoming DPS by 33%, but it “heals” you for a flat 1.8% of your total health per strike on top of being a stun break. So, if you’ve got 30k hitpoints then SA turns a 15k 100b into 5,600 damage. So, it’s going to be much better if you’re already low on LF and if someone’s hitting you with a multi-strike ability. The catch is that we’re healed in the form of more LF, so it’s not as good a deal as it sounds. I’m not saying that I like the long CD. I’m saying that I think it’s there for a fairly good reason.

Perhaps.. I’m curious where you got the values for life force <—> health values ( Namely the 1.8% of your total hp per strike). Without seeing the numbers I really can’t make a judgement call on whether or not I’m simply underestimating the value that aspect of the ability holds. Currently what I see as strengths of the ability are the stun break and protection it provides, with the spectral effect being candy on top. So perhaps it’s just my perspective that looks at Spectral Armor as a trash skill. As it is now though, VERY FEW people actually slot that skill, and I think giving it play time by making it more appealing might be able to show further insight into its effectiveness.

Wow… forum is crapping out on my post:
Furthermore, the spectral effect ends when going into death shroud, so—- after taking that 15k *.66 hundred blade, to fully utilize that extra health pull you’d need to be able to enter deathshroud to absorb more hits, which means you’ll probably be terminating it before the 6 seconds are up, due to the nature of —- wanting to not actually die by all the burst.. if that makes sense…

flow.6043:

alemfi.5107:

Wail of Doom (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wail_of_Doom):
Changing this to a 1 second stun I think would fit the theme of the necromancer better than the 2 second daze it currently is.

Why cut the time in half? Stun and daze is essentially the same control effect.
The sigil of paralyzation even works on both of them.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/stun-sigil-work-for-wh-daze/

Sorry, meant to say fear, which with terror might be to powerful as 2 secconds.

Since we already have a bug post, thought I’d see if the community would like to create a compilation of suggestions of SMALL changes to currently existing skills and abilities that they feel would significantly improve the necromancer/their game-play.

Some things that come to mind for me personally:

Summon Bone Minions -> Putrid Explosion (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Putrid_Explosion):
I think this could be significantly improved by changing Putrid Explosion into a ground targetted AoE. Behavior would be that the closest minion would then go to the location and explode instead of the current behavior of (closest?) minion explodes.

Spectral Armor (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Spectral_Armor):
Cooldown should be reduced significantly. Anything above 60 seconds for me is far too much for this type of ability. Further tuning below 60 would need to take into account cd reductions/ other effects.

Wail of Doom (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wail_of_Doom):
Changing this to a 1 second fear I think would fit the theme of the necromancer better than the 2 second daze it currently is.
Counter Argument:
(https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/List-of-Small-Changes-to-Improve-the-Necro/first#post1819544)

Flesh Golem: Should be usable underwater. Having to resummon it is annoying and inconsistent with the other summons. Thanks Mister Mustard.7203

via Ezeriel.9574:
I’d like to see Mark of Blood’s (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mark_of_Blood) regen occur at the caster as well as at the mark.
- For consistencies sake if nothing else.

Expanded Death Shroud Options:
-Access to Underwater/Land Death shrouds regardless of being underwater or on land.

Traits:
- Siphoning health from traits should scale with SOMETHING (power, healing, w/e).

Will add to this post ideas that the community seems to like:

@Rising Dusk

Basically, you are saying that they should make the skill a Ground Targetted AoE (gtaoe)? From your first sentence, if you didn’t elaborate, it sounds like you are just saying that they need to draw a white/red circle around the area the minion will explode.

@Xavori: no need to be condescending, particularly because you are only 1/2 right. For the PvE leaderboards, he does have the achievement point value, but the sPVP leaderboards do not provide the information for the player’s placement.

@Adry: 3rd party site: http://www.gwshack.info/?region=na

Hmm, regarding adding in a (short?) leap to the ground targeted location for the minion, (aside from additional coding that would need to be done for that behavior), would you not be worried about this providing an extra tell to your enemy, giving them the chance to dodge?

Edit: I guess i missed your “far less obvious” part somehow ( i guess it wasn’t obvious enough, haha..) Regarding potential misses, all you’d need to do is make sure your mouse is over where the minion is currently standing to essentially MAKE it instant, no?

sigh…. probably shoulda looked at our bug list first:

“Bone Minions: When using Putrid Explosion, the combo finisher heart pops up immediately, but the actual effect is delayed for around three seconds. At this point the ‘stored’ finisher will activate, even if the combo field has faded. (28 Mar, 2013)”

Well… I guess, what would the community think of making the explosion ability ground targeted? ( nearest minon would run to targetted area and boom ). Over powered? overly complicated? awesome?

So while testing the bone minions explosion last night in HoTM, I noticed that there seemed to be a delay on applying a beneficial blast finisher for the bone minion, but none for the offensive ones ( area blindness from triggering minions in my wells seemed immediate, but heal/ might stacks/ chaos armor all seemed to have 1.5+ seconds delay ). Was wondering if the necro community knew if this was intended?

Also, I’m thinking the explosions really ought to be able to be ground targeted, so that you could tell a minion to run to an area to explode, as it would be much more reliable. Or at least explode on your target, rather than just randomly blowing up ( out of field, and enemy hit radius.. ). Sure, you CAN play melee only, summon them at melee range etc. but the player shouldn’t be forced to work around bad ai… ( minions repositioning, trying to reach target to melee ) This was only during HoTM, I imagine this would be ridiculously annoying playing against actual players…

Having been in Naga as my primary WvW guild, and with plans to stick with CD, I was just wondering if any CD guilds with a primary emphasis on WvW are looking for more members? Small disclaimer, I generally only represent what I designate as my WvW guild when I’m in WvW. It’s a shame that this stuff happens whenever it’s a close match up. :\

I think a partial solution to this problem would be to give leaders the ability to signal members that something “big” is going on, which would just play a message in the chat log something like “<Guild Officer> of X requests your presence” or something (this functionality would be triggered by a guild officer hitting a button in the guild panel, perhaps limited to some Y times per day, to limit abuse), and it would be up to the player to choose whether or not to switch over and represent/ participate.

very… interesting… just wondering, how does this affect allies who start reviving you in comparison to other classes being revived?

Upvote for Orochi’s suggestion to change Wail of Doom to a fear instead of daze.

Manekk.6981:

It has to be the spirit, sigil of fire does direct damage not burning conditions.

Bolded.

Impulsively bought a Mad King rune set for my mes, thinking I could poof and turn invisible while summoning ravens to attack my foe. Of course, turns out It breaks stealth… (For future testing make sure to put runes on a garbage set of armor) Costed about 16g for the set… but I really really liked the skins I had… ( a lot of them were dungeon skins ) so now I’m torn between which one I should sacrifice, and I’m leaning towards the runes, but I wish i didn’t have to.

Long story short, I would pay for an upgrade extractor.

It’s perfectly viable! Well, this is of course subject to opinion, haha. Being someone who primarily focuses on Necromancer, Ranger, and Engineer, I’m FAR off the beaten path.

First time trying this out: http://en.gw2codex.com/build/24886-capture-the-target

That’s my personal build that I’m running, although I’m still experimenting with the last ten points ( currently invested in crit on blind ). Description is all there. Summary: Lock down target with immobilize, pile on the might and vuln, start chunking away.

Catisa.6507:

you can easily dps the rezzer through the gate also.

You missed the issue. Consider a dead mesmer on the inside of the gate.

Short bow =/= trap ranger only.

eldain stenlund.4306:

*Increase HP to be atleast the same as Guardian.

lollll. Sorry, i didn’t give your post much credit throughout, but I completely lost it there.

Thought I’d do some silly forms of theory crafting, and so I was playing around with this trait, and rune of the flock. So it looks like the (4) bonus will trigger for birds that come from other rune levels; for example, with 4 superior flock runes, and 2 major flock runes, you’ll get blind ( and by association confusion ) to proc whether or not the bird comes from the major runes, or the superior ( they do different base damage ). Based on my testing against lvl 30 fire flies, the superior bird does about the same damage as my sword #1, while the major bird does about 75% of that. I know that the tool tip internal cooldowns tend to have…. problems ( sometimes they are 15 secs vs. the tooltip’s ten seconds ). Regardless… without crunching the numbers, I’ve found the firefly will trigger one of the birds somewhere between 2-3 times a minute, which may be do to factors of their attack rate, and the internal cool down. With auto-cast on my heal skill, the firefly ended up killing himself in 4 minutes do to the birds and confusion(+blind) alone.

This is mostly a for kittens-and-giggles thing, but regardless, thought I’d see what the community thought of it? Also, if someone was able to crunch the math for me, regarding what are the chances that ONE of the birds will proc on hit ( based on 10%, and 7% ), that’d be appreciated.

EDIT: After thinking about it, I realized that the chance that one or “both” (only one as far as I can tell) to proc is IN THEORY 16.3%.

Someone correct me if my math is wrong:
.7% (both) + 9.3% ( chance that superior procs, but major doesn’t) + 6.3% ( chance that major procs, but superior doesn’t) = 16.3% chance that a bird will attack.

So what this means is that you have a 16.3% chance, when you are hit, to inflict blind and confusion, ( and a minor amount of damage ), with an internal cooldown of 10 seconds. Granted, this is still kinda really bad, however I can see this being pretty interesting if the numbers are brought up to have some more viability.

hmm… obviously this is a very small sample of player opinions, but it seems that you folks are fine with the current effects that the spirit provides, if the spirit were to be able to maintain its presence longer?

My personal opinion, is that making it such steers it towards too much towards a passive playstyle, particularly if it’s invulnerable. Aside from benefitting in a specific area, all that would be done would be dropping a spirit down and triggering its effect when it is favorable for you based on positioning. Not neccessarily a bad thing per se, but a bit bland in my opinion.

I still believe that the proccing of their effects need to be looked at and adjusted, as, while they might be intended in a more supportish role, they don’t appear to have been designed to have been able to procc so easily within its window. 35-50% chance per hit, once per ten seconds? I just don’t understand how that is reasonable. the amounts that the active skills on the spirits ranges from 1-3 times for the spirits duration, and perhaps I should consider the effects of those more..

My personal stance would be that spirits would be improved by making them into things that our enemies would actively want to destroy, rather than having them be just accidental casualties. Of course… this will probably need balancing in the pve aspect of things, as bots could probably create a spirit train (can be traited to follow ranger) and with npc ai… they can’t let spirit passive effects be too powerful.

After the patch hit our dps builds through the change to quickness, I thought I’d take a look at our other ranger utils. As the title suggests, one of the primary types i looked into were spirits. Now we all know that the dev team devoted some major attention last patch to the engineer’s turrets. While arguably still not enough for a pure turret build ( which imo is a silly concept anyways ), it’s moving them in the correct direction towards viability imo.

I thought I’d make this topic than, to discuss what WOULD make spirits viable. Not having looked into spirits before, I don’t know what their state was like —- since ever. Looking at the descriptions for example, I thought spirit of stone looked actually pretty viable ( http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stone_Spirit ), as an activate-able immob is always pretty nice, but poor ignorant me thought that I’d be able to stack 2 secs of protection 50% (traited) of my hits for every 6 out of 10 seconds. How silly of me…

Regardless, I don’t know whether or not this internal cooldown on the spirits ability to proc its effect per player has been in the game since launch, but I feel like adjusting this 10 second value would be a key way to improve the spirits’ viability. I always hear about how it’s a problem that spirits are so fragile ( die to stray aoes ), however to me the problem isn’t that they aren’t durable… it’s just that they aren’t useful enough. People don’t even need to target them ( like they would on that boss in FoTM, name escapes me at the moment ).

Constructive discussion is appreciated.

Edit:
Forgot to mention a bullet point that I wanted to bring up:
I believe they probably adjusted the chance for a spirit’s effect to proc on hit based against outdated build editors online from 15% ( or so ) to 35%. That’s all well and good… except it kinda makes (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Spiritual_Knowledge) completely useless with the internal cooldown the way it is. 35% on ten seconds by itself is already way too long on the internal cool down, especially for the ranger who, despite the nerf to quickness relies more on # of hits per second than most of the other classes.

Although this doesn’t change the math you’ve show Solandri, I’d also like to mention that the quickness nerf hits us harder than other classes b/c it also applied to our pets who make up about 60% of our dmg. 2secs of quickness on pet swap is pretty much completely useless b/c of the downtime on the pet immediately after the swap, letting them get in perhaps one additional attack, if that.

Other points of note as people have mentioned is that it’s simply not a fair trade off getting no ability to regain health for only 50% increase in attackspeed. Healing is something we need to be concerned with for both ourselves and our pet, so the extra duration is a big pain in the kitten

They probably should have just replaced Quickening on TW and given it a TW specific buff. Or adjusted TW itself.

Overall, Quickening Zephyr is garbage now, and our benefits from pet swapping are really kitten

The problem is, this nerf hits us two-fold. Our QZ affects our pet, and reducing it to 50% pretty much has axed our ability to burst with both our character and our pet. Pretty much QZ is garbage… 5 pnts into BM is garbage… and the ranger with it.

Durzlla.6295:

That being said, howd they nerf pets? I’ve barely played since the patch came live, so i’m really curious as to what they did there…

“Ranger pet cooldowns are now properly preserved when stabled.” Basically now when pet swapping the pet cds are still where they were prior to the swap. For example Wolf/Drakehound/Hyena pounce knockdown will not be available immediately when swapping. you have to wait the full 40 seconds.

seriously. wth is with this change: Ranger pet cooldowns are now properly preserved when stabled.

Friggin huge kitten to the ranger class.

Adding my voice that this needs to be updated to, probably to 3seconds to be viable. I expect since it was in a trait line it was just neglected. Same for the sigils of rage.

So I’m just starting to level an elementalist, so take this with a large grain of salt, but I think a big problem with the ele traits is that specializing in anything aside from arcana cripples the player simply by discouraging the use of the class mechanic of attunement swapping (without enough benefit, although this is a tangential argument). What I feel would be a trait that would encourage the specialization into the other traitlines while still encouraging/synergizing with the attunement swapping mechanic would be a grand master trait that will allow you to come back to that attunement after swapping out of it very quickly ( basically shortening a specific attunements cd by a significant amount ), perhaps filling the minor slot of the grandmaster with reduce <attunement’s> cooldown by <20-50%>. That way, even though you are able to specialize in one (or two) field(s), you are able to switch out quickly to the other attunements to cover either mobility/damage/defense/healing/ w.e you need at the moment and then switch back to your specialization. I feel like this would allow people to diversify out of going purely into arcana. Not sure how this would work with Elemental Attunement, ( like if you’d be able to stack might ridiculously ). Would need balancing for sure, but in my humble opinion, such a trait would allow for people to specialize while still making use of the class mechanic.

gemstore, cycle through tabs. I believe it’s under upgrades, not sure.

purpleskies.3274:

Edit: why do they also seem to ignore team mechanics? Rather than just saying a thief or warrior should burst a boon class, why aren’t you looking at it from a team perspective, so you bring a necro or mesmer to strip boons then the burst to kill them.

That would be assuming/expecting that the majority of (sPvP) people are able to think about such things. Can’t give them that much credit.

In all seriousness though, it is a rather unnecessary thing to throw in, but not as big a deal as the guardian and ele community seem to be making it out to be (as far as i can see).

Jski.6180:

There is boon hate as is necro can make boons into debuffs but ppl still want them. Mesmer can steal them and give it to there team too. Look at it like this would you say you would not want reg or protection if it increase the dmg you take by say 2% each?

In regards to that, (surprisingly , you also chose 2%, as I am expecting it’ll be) i personally would not care, and believe that the guard and ele community in general are making too big of a fuss about it, however I thought I’d see how a more “general” community would feel, since a common concern on the guardian topic is about ppl not wanting the boons the guardian gives. Glad to see that other people share my perspective. Still if thieves do not have a trait that lets them steal boons, I figure.. why not? Doesn’t seem like it should do too much harm, and fits the thief theme.

TwoBit.5903:

alemfi.5107:

TwoBit.5903:

A “boon hate” mechanic? The last thing this game needs are new mechanics to mitigate existing mechanics. How about addressing the problem with boons themselves by re-balancing them and the existing mechanics that are meant to deal with them?

this isn’t something I’m proposing, this is something they are actually considering implementing.

Yeah, I just read the transcripts. Still, it seems idiotic. The last thing this game needs are more mechanics, especially ones so specialized as to deal with very specific situations. Balance and depth come from meaningful interplay of mechanics not the abundance of unnecessary ones.

Ah I see. For sure, I consider this entirely unneccessary. If boons ( namely probably protection ) are too strong for bunker viability, then it should be adjusted as opposed to adding additional complications.

XxTAFxX.6741:

I hope this is a joke. kitten what’s with all the nerfs going on,this will def kill the guardian,in wvw/pve and dungeons.

dungeons…. really? First understand what is changing before posting. They are considering/implementing traits for thieves/ warriors to combat against boon heavy builds… While a bad/lazy decision imo, this has absolutely no effect on guards in dungeons.

TwoBit.5903:

A “boon hate” mechanic? The last thing this game needs are new mechanics to mitigate existing mechanics. How about addressing the problem with boons themselves by re-balancing them and the existing mechanics that are meant to deal with them?

this isn’t something I’m proposing, this is something they are actually considering implementing.