Guild Wars 2

Fortus.6175:

Bran.7425:

Fortus.6175:

but I can guarantee you that the VAST najority of the players in gw2 would gladly have balance classes over toxic, unbalanced, annoying classes such as thieves currently.

That statement is equal bias as you should only speak for yourself not the vast “najorities”

Please show me a thread where people want classes to remain unbalanced and toxic.

You know, maybe the bias is not in the fact people might want or not the presence of toxic unbalanced classes, but that the thief is toxic and/or unbalanced in the first place.

Interrupted HS still used all the initiative. Since Initiative is the thief CD, you can consider that when you interrupt it, it’s equivalent to placing the skill in the full normal CD for another class.

Thedenofsin.7340:

Metas now all run thief as roamer. Not ele, not mesmer, not engineer. That’s because the thief is the alpha predator for that role.

The top 3 Mesmers all quit and rerolled thief. That should tell you something.

/END

So, for a month or two, the thief has taken the sole role as roamer in sPvP, and this is a problem? Do you know that it has been more than a year that the main bunker role is completely dominated by the guardians and somehow nobody is saying we should nerf them in that role?

There are a few completely original GW2 tracks that are as good as GW1. Overall in fact, I’d even say that the best musics can be found in GW2. But overall GW1 music does a better job of setting the mood of the game.

See, the issue isn’t the quality of the music. It helps obviously but GW1 did something better here in that the great musics were also linked to very memorable places. Crystal Desert, Jade Sea, Desolation, Torment etc… Awesome places with fitting music that sets the mood perfectly.

GW2 is less interesting on that front so the music while good cannot really do all the job alone. There are still some very nice places to visit but there’s practically none that combines a good music with a good environment. The best so far is the Zephyr Sanctum event map. A shame it’s temporary only :’(

I do remember some GW2 places through their music alone which for me shows that the quality issue isn’t in the music itself but in the environment which is somewhat less interesting overall than what we had in GW1 I say.

sPvP balance kinda dictates that melee does more damage than ranged.

Where it kinds of fail in PvE on top of it is that due to the lack of tank, ranged classes cannot really afford to fight completely ranged because the bosses will kind of move all over the place then which is chaotic and a recipe for disaster.

Maugetarr.6823:

The mesmer one just shows that they watch too much anime

Actually there is an Asura you meet in the personal story (the Asura story and later on you meet her in Orr again) that fights like that in Orr.

Why don’t you wait for the huge crit damage nerf before nerfing those?

Aveneo.2068:

Because it means it is in a good spot and ANet should strive to bring the other classes to its level so all classes would be equally desirable to have in a group? As I recall that is what balance is all about.

And to me the Guardian feels like it is the most balanced class there is at the moment; so it could serve as the perfect example for ANet to use as a base when working on the others.

It could be balanced. But it could be a perception problem. See, there’s complaints that the Thief in it’s current state overshadows and destroys so hard the other backpoint capping/roaming classes that they go no spot left in the meta. One could say the thief is OP.

What about the main bunker guardian? The class is so OP in that role that nobody every contests it. There’s nobody trying to say “Hey, my main bunker engineer is too weak compared to a guardian, guardian OP” because we’ve been conditioned to the point nobody even thinks about filling that role with something else.

So yeah, the guardian for that role is balanced compared to the other alternatives, which don’t exist. Which doesn’t mean the guardian is OP or anything, but it does feel a lot like the “must have a monk” that ANet was trying so hard to prevent.

As far as I remember, the sPvP meta always required at least one guardian per group. Why should we consider the guardian balance to be almost perfect when the class has been a must have for as long as GW2 existed?

ManCaptain.3154:

I also love how thief doesn’t lose stealth and backstab opportunity or any initiative for spamming skills 2,3,4,5 if they hit me while I’m dodging.

Yeah right, no initiative used on missed skills! Maybe you should try playing a thief one of those days.

They even got C&D that with the correct trait costs more initiative when it misses than when it lands, 6 instead of 4.

Dardamaniac.1295:

Agree with the OP..
Take a look at this pic

thief did more dmg than Ranger..Rangers Longbow attack speed is 1sec and must be at max range for max dmg..

Thief did a leap, a gap closer and huge dmg..

It’s almost as if the whole GW2 game was balanced so that melee did more DPS than ranged !

Also, the thief did 2 and a half autoattack chains in that screen.

Cbomb.4310:

Increasing all stats is certainly better than out-right nerf, but it changes the purpose/function of this set. You can argue that it would better fit that ‘little of everything’ function but it changes from ‘little of everything + tons of crit damage’ which is often how I would justify even using it in the first place.

Except that the set was obviously meant to be “a little of everything”. And the extra huge amount of crit damage on it looked like a mistake. Or maybe it had a lot of crit on armor because the trinkets had so little in the first place, so that the whole set was more balanced. In all cases, this is the reason why Ferocity is introduced : to avoid those kind of mistakes in the future.

ens.9854:

The thief single handedly excludes all other professions from glass based builds

Funny, I tough the reason most glass based builds were missing in PvP was because nearly everyone is playing condibunker which glass builds does poorly against due to their lack of survivability to take down in time the condibunker.

Vargamonth.2047:

It’s hard for this to work when some condi specs are bunkers too :P

This. Absolutely this.

I was thinking that it’ll be 19 Ferocity => 1% crit.

frans.8092:

The damage mechanics lead to precision being an ‘underpowered’ stat, that is, if you choose gear with x points in power you will get a higher increase in damage then by choosing gear with x points in precision. If you choose gear that places precision before power you loose damage but you get a higher chance to trigger on-critical effects. It’s a matter of choice.

It’s worth mentioning that sigils will be rebalanced and maybe even buffed in that patch too. Precision might gain some nice power independent from Ferocity there too.

ANet can solve the petting zoo issue by removing the AoE cap in sPvP, only keeping the 3 target cleave caps.

LordByron.8369:

The sentence was wrong on 2 levels…

The nerf is not aimed at balanced builds.
Since you Always forget to put POWER in the equation.

This sentence is wrong too. You say the “nerf is aimed at balanced builds”. But if you rewatch the cast, you’ll see that the FIRST thing they mention about the critical changes is :

Crit Damage – stat ratios compared to other stats are all over the place. You get way more crit dmg from your trinkets than from other pieces of gear so it is more efficient to stack crit dmg for them. By adding this new stat, we are able to normalize critical damage with other stats.

And then only they mention that it’ll result in a 10% DPS loss for zerk gear.

Ichishi.9613:

Also, from previous experiences, 10% damage decrease for full zerk in their words means around “A minimum of 10% total damage decrease in most optimal setup”. That means around 30% average drop in most situations (since they nerfing whole mechanics but a single stat – loss in a single stat will have to result all of the damage lost).

Actually, the most optimal situation is high precision/crit chance. It means that hybrid builds with low crit chance or low crit damage will lose less than zerk. For example, Celestial will probably lose a lot more crit damage than zerk. But even so, since it has such a much lower crit chance in the first place, it will lose less overall DPS.

Atherakhia.4086:

What mobility issues in WvW?

The issue where some players are more mobile than the OP I suppose.

The PvP amulet will remain the same. If the stat ratios can be decided from that, it’s exactly 1% crit damage every 19 Ferocity.

LelouchViBritannia.3607:

stof.9341:

Malediktus.9250:

Celestial would be nice

Did you ever check the PvP vendor or was the amulet removed recently without me noticing?

Celestial in pvp is nowhere near as good as celestial in pve.

That’s … a different issue altogether. On that note, just wait until the crit damage changes are implemented and we’ll see how good the PvE Celestial is

Malediktus.9250:

Celestial would be nice

Did you ever check the PvP vendor or was the amulet removed recently without me noticing?

Romek.4201:

give everyone points (with a max) they can put in to:

Power, Precision, ferocity,heal,thoughness,vita, condidamage … whatever i forgot

give this stats a cap so ppl cant do all points in one stat

done

We already have that. It’s called trait points. It has been already mentioned a lot.

You know the reason the thief healed THAT much in stealth? Well it’s because he was full glass canon and has practically NO health at all. Of course it’s easy to heal that tiny health pool

style.6173:

In this case, it is something they should change.

You don’t need to convince me :p

Warkupo.1025:

I don’t even necessarily care if they nerf zerk; I just want content to be challenging enough that I can’t approach every single aspect of it with exactly the same solution. This whole “bash your face into things with maximum DPS gear” isn’t really satisfying my desire to play a slightly intelligent game.

Yeah well, I’ll tell you what I want : I already grinded long enough to gear up my chars in zerk gear, I do not want content that requires me to grind alternative stat sets in the first place.

lordhelmos.7623:

By going into stealth using their main heal, with no traits, a thief effectively removes ALL condition damage.

ALL condition damage. Well except Confusion. And Torment. Hey, that’s still 3 out of 5, it’s nearly ALL!

I don’t think Dire should have ever existed XD Why do you make a stat set that is both a bunker (Vitality Toughness) and the only bunker counter (Condition Damage)?

No wonder other stat sets have no real room in WvW. Either you are Condition damage yourself or you cannot kill them. If you Condition but not Dire, you’ll get killed by the few Power builds left around instead. Power builds that are only good to kill that and themselves in the first place.

Sigh, you don’t get it do you? Making it linear like that is a MISTAKE.

Toughness is linear with your survivability. Your survivability is defined as the time it takes you to die which is directly related to the number of attacks someone needs to kill you.

Making damage reduction linear will make you immortal quick. It’ll add a hard cap on damage reduction because at one point, you’ll already be taking 0 damage anyway. It’ll make getting 1 more point of toughness when you have 5000 armor a hundred times more valuable than getting 1000 points at 2000 armor.

TBH, the effect on toughness on your survivability against conditions is linear too. Having 0 effect at all is a linear function :p

I said as the “Effective HP against direct damage”. Obviously here, I’m talking about a situation with no condition damage implied.

Impact.2780:

A linear equation cannot have a division where the denominator is a variable. The damage calculation formula does. It is therefore, NOT linear.

It’s all a matter of definitions. In my opinion, the BEST way to measure survivability is to talk in effective HP.

The survivability gained from a Toughness increase, as defined by the Effective HP against direct damage you gain is linear. Thus the Toughness effect on your survivability is linear.

Columbo.5924:

Thing is, they would need to increase the total stats in order to make celestial a viable option again – from a stat ratio of 5/8 to about 6/8 (you can find the math in this thread). They are not going to do that because of power creep and stuff, so the celestial owners will get the shaft.

If that’s what it takes, then so be it! It’s not powercreep when you buff something weak to the level of the other choices.

ThiBash.5634:

The reason celestial had so much critical damage was to make it worth using over other gear IF you stacked enough boons and critical stats. If it’s nerfed too much it’ll not even be useful in those circumstances, essentially making it useful.

That’s the old Celestial which was a Critical Damage major stat with a little of all the other stats minor. The new Celestial will be what is was meant to be : a set that gives you every stat in equal amounts.

Celestial should NEVER had as much critical damage as it stands, it made no sense. But if Celestial gear becomes too weak once this issue is fixed, Anet should increase how much stats you get with them by giving you more of all of them, not by giving you a lot of Ferocity only.

Retaliation is already skillless enough as it is. Are you suggesting Anet should tweak it so that semi invulnerable builds can deal heavy damage based on their toughness?

If that happens, I’ll start asking Anet to increase my HP based on my critical damage stat.

Skyrim and Oblivion before it are clearly broken here. There is no point using low quality armor at low skill level. It was all penalty for little benefit. But you needed to wear it to train in it anyway.

Actually, one can see that GW2 has actually the exact same issue. With Critical Damage! Critical Damage as it stands has horribly weak returns on low level gear because the higher level the gear, the more critical damage you get. With changing the formula to be with Ferocity like Precision, they can give us much more critical damage % per Ferocity point at low levels and solve that issue.

Toughness increases linearly the number of hits required to kill you. Same as vitality.

Let’s say you got player A that kills you in 10 hits. Then you acquire 100 more toughness. Now player A kills you in 11 hits. For every 100 more toughness you acquire, you’ll survive one more hit. You could be a 2000 or 5000 armor, it doesn’t matter. Get 100 more toughness = 1 hit more is required to kill you.

This is a linear return. Number of hits you can survive = base + toughness/100

Hammerguard.9834:

First things first, I think Anet forgot to add torment to the list of condis Hide in Shadows removes. Then we’ll talk…

It was asked and reported as a bug already. And the answer from Anet is that it’s working as expected.

Cold Hearted Person.6154:

That, zerker=pro and pvt(or any other tanky stats)=bad, mentality should already tell you that ther is no point in hopeing that ther is place for discussion.

Honestly, among all of the needed changes to mobs just increasing armor while decrising the hp of some of the mobs/boss’es would be enough to makes condition equal power dps.

Condition can equal zerk DPS the day you equip something other than Dire or Rabid sets that has not a single point of Toughness, Vitality or Healing power.

It’ll be exactly like Precision.

Einlanzer.1627:

I do think that the stats on zerker before had too much synergy creating too much of a hyperbolic growth curve, so something needed to be done about it, so this may be a decent change overall, but we’ll see.

Wait until ANet adds the Toughness, Vitality, Healing Power stat set and we’ll talk about polynomial growth (not hyperbolic)

Palador.2170:

I’m hoping this is just step one. They make this change, see how it works “live”, and then move on to step 2. Step 2 being boosting other kinds of builds to start making them more on-par with Zerker.

If that’s what they’re up to, then it makes sense to bring it down a bit before bringing the others up to its level. Especially for the more defensive builds, as that requires giving us more fights that are a) A challenge, and b) Not one-shot kills. That’s easier to do if things are dying a bit slower.

This makes little sense. Zerk is the only defenseless stat set used in PvE. (Well Assassin too but it’s practically the same).

Dire armor should NEVER under any situation have even remotely close DPS than Zerk, except for the currently inexistent mobs that are very resistant to direct damage.

Crit was always supposed to be a secondary stat anyway. What they did mostly was nerf all the armor parts and trinkets that due to the rounding issues on crit damage had a lot more stat allocation than they should. Which results in a loss of 10 points of crit damage from maxed gear.

It also opens the way for a stat set with crit damage major I suppose :p

Talonblaze.3175:

Unfortunately this isn’t just to Zerker gear though, there are plenty of other stat sets that use Critical damage and if the rumors about rune changes are true too, then they are likely nerfing Crit damage in those areas too.

Yeah well, those other stat sets got survivability stats. They are just changing the way crit is computed for a system that better allows them to maintain correct stat allocation on parts. You expected that only zerk gear set would lose crit damage without it getting replaced by another stat and so making zerk the only endgame set with lower than normal stat allocation?

The only people that are really hurt by this change are those that optimized their gear by replacing some zerk pieces with less crit allocation by tank stats.

Well, obviously before in full zerk you could have 80% crit damage from gear before traits and food, and after with the new stat and formulas we’ll drop to 70%.

Fake numbers of course but you see the idea.

you obviously don’t know how the armor stat works in GW2. Your idea of armor penetration has merits, but you should REALLY consider how the stat works before rejecting valid criticism in the formulas you propose.

Going from 1000 to 500 armor will double the damage you receive. Going from 10000 to 5000 armor will double the damage you receive too. Going from 3000 to 1500 will double it again.

What you can do is setup armor penetration to reduce only the bonus armor players receive from the toughness stat. Since a player armor is “base + toughness” and pure glass canons don’t have the second component (well, actually everyone has at least 900 toughness if I remember well), your armor penetration will only affect people that gear for defense and have no effect on the others.

kyubi.3620:

Well if they had armor penetration as a stat make the crit damage static and reduce precision slighty to make zerker viable against bunkers without ruining the game we could actualy get something around what one could call a balance.

Although I do relinquish the idea of nerfing the bunker meta somewhat in PvP, I wonder what the point will be of defensive stats, if every offensive build ignores it.

We already got conditions that ignore toughness. Should we make most physical attacks ignore it too?

kyubi.3620:

cept zerker will obliterate knight because zerker will ignore armor dude… no more issue with those bunkers now we break trought theyr tanking style like if their armor was made of jelly.

Because the knight DPS got a lot of armor to ignore when it hits the zerk player back?