Guild Wars 2

Nothing locks you into using your spec weapon, it’s totally optional. There will probably be a couple of trait choices that either affect the Torch directly or work best in combination with what the Torch offers, but you won’t have to use one if you don’t want to.

Faking this kind of thing almost always introduces some heinous bugs. Honestly, there are tons of projectile skills that aren’t finishers as it is, so why should this one be any different?

Lyger.5429:

Rage Skills o.o what happened to sacrificial skills (corruptions)?

Like all data-mined information, it’s subject to change. Or, most likely in this case, to being uncollected garbage from early iterations.

Yeah, I don’t see any issue with Reflected damage applying Revealed. The only real issue is with Mass Invisiblity getting miscategorised into Manipulations, and even that is only a problem because of Master of Manipulations (which is otherwise a really good trait).

Sagat.3285:

Tabootrinket.2631:

With the recent berserker reveal, it’s pretty much confirmed that this trait is for the berserk trait line.

“Like all other elite specializations, the Berserker will come complete with a full line of traits. While we were not told any of the specifics, the traits fall into three categories to buff different aspects of the berserker. The first is focused on brawling by providing benefits for going berserk and to help gather up enemies.”

http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=36349

Unless the trait is wrongly worded Berserker doesn’t use physical skills they use rage skills so thief still could get it. I hope it’s wrongly worded.

The preview article directly compares Rage skills to Physical skills, which makes matters even more confusing. Could Rage skills end up counting as Physical skills or something weird like that?

The Brawler tag points to Berzerker, but the Endurance gain is a very Thiefy thing. At the moment, I suspect that it is indeed a Thief trait, that Dare Devils are getting Physical skills, and the name of the trait on the data-mined tooltip is wrong.

Toeofdoom.6152:

The well trait boosted alacrity from 10% aoe uptime to nearly 100%.

Right, the Flow of Time nerf is tiny, but All’s Well is a really significant buff to the amount of Alacrity we can provide to a group.

Well, the Tempest was crap, so it’s not surprising it got buffed. Should we act all shocked that Reaper got buffs as well?

Chrono was fine, and we honestly didn’t see any serious nerfs apart from Illusionary Reversion. (Alacrity got net buffs, you just have to actually trait into it now. And the new All’s Well provides a PvE group support option in Chronomancer that we were lacking before.)

Cynz.9437:

nearlight.3064:

Mesmer was already nerfed, and its probably in a pretty good state of balance now in my opinion. As for ele, I’ve heard from a streamer that was at the WTS that the ele balance dev is on vacation right now, so thats why there hasn’t beenany real balance for eles. Thats also why the tempest beta weekend notes aren’t up yet.

Anyway though I seriously doubt mesmer will be nerfed again. It feels to be relatively well balanced again, and the only thing thats close to over the top is PU, which isn’t that strong in conquest, so I don’t mind too much. Plus Robert Gee is on top of his kitten as a balance dev and probably would have nerfed it by now if he thought it was needed.

If you think that mesmers are in good state now then half of the classes need massive buffing lol.

Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

Mesmer needs at least bug fix on The Pledge trait before we can really tell if PU is OP or not. (It’s providing something like three times as much cooldown reduction while stealthed as the tooltip claims, which means that the uptime on Torch 4 is way higher than it’s supposed to be.) Confounding Suggestions could also stand to be tweaked so chain-stunning is a little harder, though actually the recent Mantra bug fix took most of the sting off of that one.

apharma.3741:

On the bright side it means you’re probably going to get an enhanced class mechanic which certainly could play into warrior hands very well depending on what it is.

Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what it turns out to be. Curious where ANet can go in tinkering with Adrenaline/Burst skills. Hopefully, it’s not a dud like Tempest Overloads. I’d expect a new F-skill at the very least.

Chronophantasma gives Phantasms a Daze, not a Stun, so they can move to shatter even if they can’t attack. iReversion putting a 1s Stun (or even Immobilise) on the summoned clone would be an interesting approach.

Solori.6025:

So instead of using IR, you can summon a or clon, dodge. shatter, dodge, summon a phantasm, shatter, then shatter the phantasm after switching weapons and start the chain all over again.

That’s exactly the point, the shatters are broken up by having to summon phantasms or clones, where before you could literally just press all your shatters at once and stack up a ton of Confusion and Torment.

It was possible for a Chronomancer Condi Shatter with the old IR to do F5 → F1-4 → F5 → F1-4 and get 16+ stacks of Torment and Confusion with no setup required. The new IR requires setup at the beginning of the shatter chain and some work to sustain it, which means enemies have the opportunity to actually play around it instead of just eating all those Condi stacks within a second or two (most likely while stunned by CS).

The new IR definitely works to solve the worst case scenario Condi Shatter that we saw during the last BWE. That’s not the problem. The problem is that it fails to provide the viable alternative to DE that we all desperately want and need.

Solori.6025:

Illusionary Reversion: Updated functionality. You must shatter at least 2 illusions in order to generate a clone from this trait. (You do not count as an illusion towards this total.)

• Yeah I know this one probably stings but when we started looking at it it was pretty silly that this trait could let you get so much power out of just using all shatter skills back to back.

All this does is force people to want to stay with DE.
What’s the point of this change.
You generate clones now at about the same speed with Deceptive Evasion.
All this does is guarantee that people that want to play chronomancer with shatters are going to be shoehorned into dueling.
Also.
To generate a clone you need two clones?!
I could understand if this was given a small ICD of like 3 seconds to prevent shatter spam.
But really all you have done is make this trait look less desirable to the other choices.

I think the logic is something like this: Every possible Mesmer weaponset has both a clone generating skill and a Phantasm summon, so we can get two illusions out without having to dodge or swap weapons. So we can still open with a chain-shatter if we take Chronophantasma and do something like: Phant (weapon) → Clone (weapon) → Shatter → 1.5s wait → Shatter → Shatter. Other variations are possible if we swap weapons for a second clone or Phantasm before the third shatter or if we use F5 for the first shatter and then swap weapons for the Phantasm from our second set.

Because of the Daze on Chronophantasma, this scenario was never really problematic, so it’s ok to support it.

The problematic case was literally rolling across the F-keys and getting a dozen stacks of Confusion or whatever, which I can definitely see being something to avoid. And the change to IR definitely nips it in the bud. However, a ~2s ICD on IR would solve the problematic case just as well without sacrificing as much flexibility in how we build our Chronomancers.

To be fair, I think it’s like one person saying that Robert ruined anything. The rest of us think he’s doing a great job.

Zenith.7301:

It’s about time the mesmer gets some balancing for the PvE side instead of being constantly nerfed due to pvp.

This isn’t about PvE balance vs. PvP balance. This is about the fact that a 2s Float is kittening useless in PvE, while 10s of group Quickness is extremely powerful. There is no iteration of Gravity Well that Pulls and Floats stuff and is also useful in PvE, because all PvE encounters to date explicitly invalidate CC application as a useful thing to do. Even if Breakbars change that, applying one big CC on a 3s delay and a 90s cooldown is still completely kittening worthless.

Windwalker.7421:

I can live with a very short CD on IR, I’m talking 2s max, but I also see some good points made in favor of the 2-illusion rule. Still, I have to say I believe the 2-illusion rule is unintuitive, unreliable, and basically strongly favors DE builds whom can more easily get those 2 illusions in order to reliably proc IR.

The “Keep It Simple Stupid” principle has got me thinking that a 2s ICD is the better route. It fixes the problem we’re trying to address in a simple and intuitive way. It prevents shatter spamming while providing reliable & intuitive clone production.

This is my feeling as well. A clone-generation trait that only generates clones if you already have clones just doesn’t make sense.

Which is really sad, because a lot of people with similar job titles in software make twice as much or more and never even have to interact with customers at all, never mind put up with the kind of ridiculous disrespect that game devs do.

Zenith.7301:

It’s an academic discussion though. Even in its unnerfed form Well of Gravity would NEVER be used over Time Warp in PvE.

Right. Given that WoG cannot possibly be better for PvE than Time Warp, then it should be balanced to provide something useful for PvP. Three Pulls are tremendously useful for PvP, where a 2s Float that enemies can walk out of by accident is not.

If you can spam your gamechanger skill, then it’s not actually changing the game is it?

Seems to me that most games which successfully incorporate stealth break it down into two forms:

• A long-duration, primarily non-combat “sneak” mechanic, that depends heavily on your environment, i.e. breaking LoS.
• A short-duration, in-combat “invisibility” mechanic that relies on skill usage.

GW2 Stealth is an “invisiblity” mechanic, but the classes that use it (Mesmer and Thief, mainly) both have the ability to stack it up into a long-duration effect to cover some of the same ground as “sneak”. And this is the core of the Stealth balance problem in GW2, I think.

Invisibility with less than kitten duration doesn’t need a counter-mechanic, because opponents can play around the timing instead. But when invisibility goes beyond the 5s threshold, then you can’t play around timing any more — this is what upsets people so much about PU Mesmers — and a counter-mechanic becomes necessary.

So, basically, GW2’s implementation of Stealth is inherently flawed, And they can’t fix it without creating bigger problems. Even if Stealth-stacking were removed, Stealth-chaining would still be possible, which would still necessitate Revealed. Worse, removing Stealth-stacking would completely break skills like Shadow Refuge.

Seems to me the only thing ANet can do at this point is re-evaluate the Thief’s survivability mechanics so they have good defensive options other than Stealth and one or two sources of Blind-spam.

Exciton.8942:

I don’t understand the preference of float on gravity well from some players. I think pull fits the theme much better and pull is a very useful effect in PvE.

Seriously.

I can’t emphasise this enough: NOBODY is going to willingly stand in your Gravity Well as it expires anyway. You were never going to actually see the Float effect proc. Ever.

If it still had the Float, maybe it’d be an “I Win” button. But with just the three Pulls, it’s not going to be OP unless you combo it with something else nasty. Which is good play that should be rewarded.

The radius of the well is still really tiny, too. It’s less than the distance of a dodge roll. And most classes have either movement skills that can get them out, or sources of Stability.

Worst case scenario, you don’t have a blink or stability… So you eat ~2500 damage. iZerker does more than that in a single spin.

Never fight them 1v1. Stick with an ally and try to 2v1 them.

Running Null Field in place of Decoy or Mantra of Distraction is also an option.

A cool effect that we’ll never actually see is way less useful than a slightly less cool effect that we’ll see all the time.

Yeah, iDuelist is the best Phantasm for stacking condi damage just because its Unload attack has so many chances to proc Sharper Images.

I’d be inclined to use Sc/Pi with Sw/F. Pop two iDuelists and Sc 3, then swap to the standard dungeon set for your Warden and Blurred Frenzy until Sc 3 comes off CD again. Rinse and repeat.

OMFG, that’s amazing.

Embolism.8106:

Re: Gravity Well’s Float: I’d rather have a functional skill rather than one that looked cool but is functionally useless.

Ditto.

Walrusaur.5840:

I think rather than nerfing illusionary reversion, it should be mutually exclusive with chronophantasma. They both serve essentially the same purpose, but lead you down two separate paths (phantasm dps, versus alacrity/shatter), and are probably too powerful in combination.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Well, at least for open world, the change of Illusionary Reversion will cause two things:

1. Everyone will still have to pick Dueling for Deceptive Evasion
2. People will pick Improved Alacrity or Danger Time over Illusionary Reversion, as it is usless if you have Deceptive Evasion anyways…

Goodbye build variety, welcome back Deceptive Evasion.

These are my concerns as well. I played Condi Shatter a couple of times during the BWE, so I get why that build maybe needs a little toning down, but I’m disappointed that the new version of Illusionary Reversion is basically worthless unless you’ve already invested into clone generation elsewhere.

This nerf doesn’t actually hurt the power of the Condi Shatter build at all, since it was probably already taking Chronophantasma and Deceptive Evasion anyway. What it does do is double the weight of Deceptive Evasion around our necks instead of providing the viable DE alternative most of us were hoping for.

Condi PU is useful literally only for WvW roaming and nothing else. There are lots of things that have been said already about why balancing around WvW in general and WvW roaming in particular doesn’t really make sense, but I think I might go so far as to assert that roaming as a WvW playstyle would be literally impossible without cheese builds.

I mean, a build that can survive 1vX for an indefinite period of time while picking off isolated stragglers is the definition of cheese, but you can’t roam without a build that can survive 1vX for an indefinite period of time while picking off isolated stragglers.

The Pledge really needs to have been fixed like a month and a half ago for lots of other reasons, but apart from that I don’t see the point in nerfing something that’s only strong in an area of the game that is fundamentally, at its core, only able to exist because of imbalanced builds.

It would obviously be stronger if it worked on any death. It wouldn’t be better.

The trait is strong enough as it is and any buffs to it would be entirely inappropriate.

Or, hear me out here, leave it alone because it’s fine.

Nope, shatters only.

Sylent.3165:

Everything being upkeep…..so really we can do nothing but auto attacks. Auto attacks really need to grant energy, or these up keeps HAVE to be small enough where we can still gain small amounts of energy otherwise we will never be able to use weapon skills

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the Glint traits revolve around Energy management.

There’s only one overtuned thing on the Mesmer kit right now, IMO, and that’s Confounding Suggestions. We shouldn’t be able to attain that kind of lockdown from a single trait in one of our two best damage specs. It either needs to be toned down with a bigger ICD or moved to a different trait line or both.

Torch stealth is literally broken in that the Torch trait is bugged to give over 3x as much CDR as it should be. It’s annoying that this hasn’t been fixed by now, since it totally distorts the discussion around Mesmer stealth in general and PU in particular. (Lots of people calling for PU nerfs when it’s not even the worst offender as far as giving us “permastealth” right now.)

If those two things get fixed, then Mesmer should be in a healthy place, especially after the Mantra fix-nerfs.

Not sure what Thief needs right now, I don’t PvP on my Thief and haven’t done much PvE on her in a long time, though I wouldn’t have any issues with seeing Thiefs get some utility/survivability buffs.

Guys, we’re both classes that everybody loves to hate even when Guards and Eles are objectively stronger in every game mode. We gotta stick together against the unwashed “Nerf now!” hordes instead of fighting each other.

Hey, the Thieves keep bugging for us to get nerfed, seems like turnabout would be fair play.

Just kidding. I have trouble with them as well, most of the time. I think we need to acknowledge that D/P Thieves will pretty much always hard-counter lockdown builds, because they inherently just can’t be locked down.

Condition builds seem to fare better, though. You can whittle them down with phantasms and bleeds for as long as you can mitigate their bursts. Not sure if it’s the optimal play, but it’s what has worked for me.

Knock it off, you two.

morrolan.9608:

Embolism.8106:

I share your worry, although there hasn’t been quite as much outcry against Chronomancers as I expected; so I’m hopeful we won’t see huge nerfs.

I thought there had been quite a bit of hate directed at chronomancer.

Yeah, but I think all of us were expecting even more.

If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college…

MailMail.6534:

Clone Death builds were the perfect match for phantasms utilizing bouncing effects btw.

Is this a joke?

What you expect is indeed the case for iDefender, which has a special buff. But it’s not true for the three that Chaos named in his post.

Nachyochez.9758:

Side note, what if Pledge isn’t bugged, but the tooltip is just wrong?

Then the tooltip needs to get fixed.

Kusa.6438:

There is absolutely nothing wrong with either PU or the Torch trait.

Torch trait is literally broken. It’s giving something like three times as much recharge reduction as the trait says it does.

She does a ton of video game covers, so I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it were.

Agreed with Silverkey. I tried out both Chronophantasm and StM, and StM just supports the bunker style way better. BD+StM makes Distortion stomps and rezzes so good.

Agent Noun.7350:

arkealia.2713:

Slow is a very strong condition as it doubles all activation times. Nerfing this instead of Lost Time is probably for the better.

Slow might be worth splitting between PvE and PvP versions. The current slow is good, but not super good, in PvE; nerfing it would make it useless in PvE. But lowering its effect in PvP is probably a decent move.

Let it keep its current effect in PvE but have a lesser effect in PvP.

Seems reasonable, I guess.

If I’m mathing right, infinite Slow would turn a 1s channel into a 2s channel? Seems like a 33% reduction in activation rate would be more appropriate for PvP, turning a 1s channel into ~1.5s channel. 50% is fine for PvE since enemies use skills less often there in the first place.

Just kidding.

Mesmer
Inspiring Distortion: Fixed a bug that allowed this trait to apply distortion to WvW structures.

Still no fixes for Duelist’s Discipline or The Pledge, though.

Bounce skills are okayish coming from the Mesmer because we can position to make them effective. (E.g., melee Mirror Blade.)

Bounce skills don’t matter on clones because we mostly use them for shatter fuel anyway.

Bounce skills on Phantasms are bad because Phantasms don’t know how to position to make them effective.

Fixing the Pledge does not fall under balance. Tinkering with PU (which is the subject of this thread) does.

Sword is fine. iLeap needs QoL fixes, but other than that Sword shows up in 3/4 of our PvP builds as it is.

Thanks, Dulfy!

I agree, Exciton, the cast times for the wells are way too long considering that the skills themselves are super-telegraphed.

AlphatheWhite.9351:

tobascodagama.2961:

Curunen.8729:

I don’t like quickness with Blurred Frenzy. I don’t have a lot of use for quickness in my primary build besides stomps/resses. Therefore I don’t want it.

I’ve tested this, and the Blur effect lasts the full 2 1/2 seconds no matter how long the channel is. It’s really easy to check. Without Quickness, the channel and the Blur effect end at the same time. With Quickness, the channel will end but the Blur effect will keep going for like 1/2 s afterward. It’s super easy to check with Time Warp.

So it’s actually better with quickness.
That doesn’t help block abilities, though.

True.

Curunen.8729:

I don’t like quickness with Blurred Frenzy. I don’t have a lot of use for quickness in my primary build besides stomps/resses. Therefore I don’t want it.

I’ve tested this, and the Blur effect lasts the full 2 1/2 seconds no matter how long the channel is. It’s really easy to check. Without Quickness, the channel and the Blur effect end at the same time. With Quickness, the channel will end but the Blur effect will keep going for like 1/2 s afterward. It’s super easy to check with Time Warp.