Guild Wars 2

LetoII.3782:

There’s a point of diminishing returns for Rev now. No matter how many do a CoR, only one will hit. Prenerf the more the better, now they’re stepping on each others toes.

That’s huge

Definitely. I just don’t think it’s enough. Don’t get me wrong, I think the benefit this offers to frontline sustain is great, but you’re overestimating the impact it will have.

Well coordinated CoR spikes may not one-shot guardians anymore, but that doesn’t change the fact that the overall pressure put out by revenant substantially surpasses any alternatives.

Also, it still kittens all over anyone who’s playing even remotely glassy.

LetoII.3782:

And thusly did the short Reign of the Rev see it’s conclusion.

and the peasants rejoiced

Unlikely. The damage itself is the problem. As long as that remains the same, CoR will continue to dominate the gamemode.

Tongku.5326:

For myself and many others, we did not leave WVW due to lack of stability, we left it because there was too much of it and got sick and tired of playing nothing but hammertrains.

Then we came back for the condi patch pre-hot, but that turned out to be basically roaming only, it was and still is completely and utterly useless vs any decent group.

Add to that the pointlessness of fights due to nightcapping, 30-40 of us vs 2 servers with full map ques etc.

For me to come back A-Net has to do 2 things:

1. Solve Nightcapping / population issues
2. Make condi playstyles viable in large scale organized combat.

I care relatively little for stability or CC since I have ways to counter CCs on almost all my toons which work out pretty well. Yes its a team thing, yes it requires some coordination, but isnt the crux of the matter to preserve the higher coordinated team wins vs just mindlessly spam stab like condi cleanses to the point where its completely pointless to play condi builds ?

Stab changes will do nothing except make a bunch of those who are current backliners spamming at max range for extra super boring fights into frontliners and it will be back to power based stab+melee, again for extra stupid and boring fights.

You’ll notice that I’m not advocating a return to the hammertrain meta. There’s no reason to assume that we have to go from one extreme to another*.
My suggestions guarantee a minimum (quite short) stability duration while still rewarding people for avoiding CC as much as possible.
You are of course right that the goal is to benefit the more organized group. And this can indeed be done by making it more difficult to maintain stability up to a certain point. We’re far beyond that point. Because you can easily lose all your stacks a split second after you pop your stability, it’s become more a matter of luck than skill. This issue is worsened by the unpredictable nature and sheer power of some of the new CC skills, like Hunter’s Ward which will easily rip 5+ stacks off an entire frontline with an animation that will not realistically be noticed in a 30+ fight.

In fact, I’d argue that the current system promotes mindless stability spam much more than what I’m proposing, simply because you’re safer if you just fire it all and limit your pushes to very short durations. This, once again, results in 95% of the fight being spent staring at your enemy from afar.

*regardless, even with a reversal of stability’s functionality, the amount of damage going around these days would likely be enough to prevent full on hammertrains.

Guys, guys.. I used PPK as a way to broach the subject only because this is one of the few times Anet has done something that pertains to actual fights in WvW. That’s all. I did not intend for this to be a discussion on PPK.

Cerby.1069:

I 100% disagree with the OP on what the current state is and the direction he seems to want WvsW to go. So I guess for once in a very long time I can say: goodjob Anet

Would you care to elaborate?

Introducing PPK to reward fight oriented players is fine and all. The problem is that there are hardly any such players left because large fights in WvW have been downright agonizing since the release of HoT.
Not too long ago, I made a post detailing how certain skills are causing massive issues in fights. It didn’t get a lot of feedback so I’m going to try again because against my better judgment, I actually care.

The current “balance” in WvW fights is massively (MASSIVELY!) skewed towards playing defensively. Back-pedal and counter bomb, and you’re golden. Being passive has never been more rewarding. This is boring. Let me state that again: This is absolutely horribly boring. Players need to be rewarded for being aggressive or the game deteriorates into a stare-down where no one ever actually fights, let alone dies.

To put it in terms that a dev might better understand: WvW is currently suffering from something every bit as bad as a PvP bunker meta.

The primary culprits are obvious to anyone who actively play WvW: absurdly high damage and (so much worse) ridiculous amounts of CC completely nullifying stability.

Today’s “balance update” shows clearly that the damage and CC will not be sufficiently addressed. This leaves only one option; we need a rework/buff to stability. The current iteration of the boon becomes significantly weaker the more enemies you’re facing. Note that this is not (only) and issue of fighting outnumbered. Due to so much of the CC having no target limit (barriers, lines etc) the mere presence of more players on both sides of a fight severely weakens frontlines regardless of your backline/frontline distribution of players.

There are plenty of potential ways to fix this. For instance:

• A limit to the amount of stab you can lose per second.
• A player specific internal cooldown on being affected by hard CC (similar to how static field works)

Either of those would be a start. Anything that strengthens stab in large fights would be good at this point. The added benefit with the above two suggestions is that they would both reward people for coordinating and timing their CC usage. The current system rewards you for spamming it.

There are also ways not to fix it, like:

• A limit to the number of people CC skills can affect (barriers, lines, rings).

I include this as an example of a very poor fix because I can imagine (and fear) it being proposed. This would only serve to weaken outnumbered players.

I’ll end the post here because I feel I’ve rambled long enough. If you only want a tl;dr, here it is:
It is currently far, far too easy to simply wait out your opponent and counter anything they do without taking any initiative yourself. Something desperately needs to be done to encourage WvW groups to be active/aggressive in fights. The obvious solution is to buff stability.

“Melee trains are still too strong”

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t think scepter is as bad as people are making it out to be. It gets kitten on by condi builds and bunkers, but does fairly well against other burst builds. That said, let’s get to it.

Everyone knows scepter autos are really weak. But how weak exactly? I had a look at some of the other ranged weapons in the game. I’ve normalized the listed values as damage coefficient/second (the combined damage coefficient of the auto-attack divided by the time it takes to complete it) to approximate a dps coefficient. Here are the numbers.
(This does not take into account trait modifiers and boon uptime etc., but I think it still tells a rather interesting story)

Pure power damage relative dps modifiers (sorted):
Ranger longbow: 0.735 – 0.84 – 0.945, depending on range
Guardian longbow: 0.89
Engineer rifle: 0.89
Revenant hammer: 0.84
Guardian scepter: 0.83
Necro axe: 0.81
Mesmer greatsword: 0.43 – 0.53 – 0.64 – 0.75, depending on range
Ranger staff: 0.73
Warrior rifle: 0.72
Fireball: 0.67
Guardian staff: 0.66
Chain Lightning: 0.62
Thief shortbow: 0.58
Warrior longbow: 0.58
Ice shards: 0.54
Necro staff: 0.53
Thief pistol: 0.49
Arc Lightning: 0.48
Stoning: 0.41
Water Blast: 0.24

I’ve left out autos that also have condi damage because scaling makes it difficult to compare them. However, suffice it to say that Flamestrike (0.26) and Stone Shards (0.24) have some of the lowest pure damage modifiers in the game (only beaten by Mesmer staff and Water Blast).
The above should be most of the pure power based ranged attacks in the game. I may have missed some but I think the trend is clear enough. The ele scepter autos are at the bottom in terms of average dps. Meanwhile, the skills which are most similar in functionality, namely necro axe and guardian scepter, are almost twice as strong.

Now, I’m not a big proponent of strong auto-attacks. I think they ruin the pace of the game and devalue the dodge mechanic too much. However, I am realistic, and it’s far more realistic to imagine a buff to these auto-attacks than a nerf to everything else. So what could be done to improve the scepter in this aspect?
I think it’s perfectly fair that the water and earth skills are weak compared to fire and air, so I’ll focus on the latter two.

Air: Make the damage the same over the entire channel. The backloaded damage on this is a major hindrance as you’ll rarely use it long enough to get to stage 3.

Fire: This is possibly one of the single worst weapon skills in the game. Do away with the burning damage. I’m pretty sure that’s the justification for the super low modifier, but let’s be real; condi damage has no place on scepter. If burning goes, the modifier and the rate of attack can be massively increased.
A big strength of scepter ele is that almost none of the skills require you to face your target. This allows for a lot of kiting and freedom of movement. I suggest adding this to Flamestrike. In turn, the dps can be slightly lower than Arc Lightning.

Note: I do NOT think that auto-attacking should surpass the damage output attainable when cycling attunements. That would be silly. But sometimes it would be very helpful to be able to stay in an attunement for more than 2 seconds without losing all your pressure.
One of the reasons why tempest is such a massive improvement for scepter builds is because it gives a source of high sustained damage (Air Overload) as an alternative to the bursts.

Thought? Other ideas for improvements?

Also, a few “fun” facts:
The water auto is the strongest on scepter ele.
In terms of only direct damage, Arc Lightning is inferior to mesmer and necro scepters, both of which are condition based weapons.

edit: corrected my “dps modifiers” to account for weapon strength.

For reference, instead of these rando numbers:

Sword autos average damage coefficient/second
Guardian: 1.24
Revenant: 1.54 (soon to be ~1.33)*
Warrior: 0.97
Ranger: 1.06
Mesmer: 1.01
Thief: 1.15 (soon to be ~1.5)*

*using the changes revealed in the preview

KOPPER.1458:

a lot of the times it sounds like players just want an open space to have large scale fights in? Am I incorrect in this?

Not really.
Some of us would be able to enjoy that, but a lot of people would get bored with it quickly. WvW needs to be centered around fights, but there also needs to be something to fight over. The structures work fine for this purpose as long as there’s some incentive to keep them.
The problem is, no one has cared about “winning” a matchup for years. What drove defense in the old borderland was not PPT, but ego and a sense of possession. Your borderland was designed to be owned by you, and the reward for defending and taking structures was entirely psychological.

The new borderland splits your 3rd between three maps thanks to the waypoint system. Literally no effort goes into upgrading keeps, so there’s no sense of loss when they’re flipped. Upgrading them also doesn’t give any real advantage anymore (again thanks to the waypoint system). Towers are entirely useless because they no longer serve a strategic benefit like the ones in Alpine did.

While I do think the design of the desert map is atrocious – it’s too complex, there are too many chokes and narrow corridors, travel time is too long, too hard to find other groups – I also think it would have been much better received had it launched with the old upgrade system and the same layout of structures as Alpine (keeps treb-able from towers).

That said, it’s way too late now. The desert borderlands require more people than Alpine to man effectively (not as suitable for map hopping due to the long travel times), and with the dwindling population it’s not realistic to get that many people on anymore.

I end up feeling pretty silly when all my posts contain the terms “power creep” and “less skill-based combat”, but this really is the biggest thing pushing me away from the game at the moment.

I agree completely, OP. Also with you, Blackbeard. Cooldown management, skill/dodge timing etc. It’s all gone out the window.

I would expect a game so focused on esports to attempt to create as skillbased an environment as possible. Then again, as I recall, that’s what they thought they did to mesmer in the specialization update that made it super OP and easy to play…

Hexalot.8194:

vana.5467:

Straegen.2938:

CoR is broke all to hell. Nobody should be landing long range AoE damage over 12k on a crit add in that it is ridiculously spammable. Even the Hammer Bolt auto-attack can land for 5k on a crit.

Sustain also needs an adjustment. I am looking forward to the first balance patch that will address some of this.

I got one-shot by it today (19k hit). Yes, it’s ridiculous. I do, however, think that the CC issue is much worse.

The only way you could receive that much damage from CoR is if you were either running naked, an up-level, or you received the infamous “double hit”. Anet has said that the patch release next week will remove the latter. As for the first two… it’s your choice to play that way.

\sigh..

Ascended hammer damage: 1035-1166
CoR damage modifier: 2.25
Glass herald buffed power: ~3500
Crit damage: ~230%

Ferocious aggression: 7% (req: fury, always up)
Targeted destruction: 7% (req: vuln, 25% chance to proc on hit)
Swift termination: 20% (req: <50%)
Elder’s Force: 8-10% (req: boons)
Cruel Repercussion: 50%

Seaweed salad: 10%
Strength rune: 5%

Ele base armor: 1920

Combined maximum potential damage: 25564 – 28800*
On full health target: 21304 – 24000

I run 2020 armor, making it 20249 – 22812.
Remove Targeted destruction: 18924 – 21319.
Looks like I got lucky and the guy rolled a low hammer damage.

*using the hammer damage range

Straegen.2938:

CoR is broke all to hell. Nobody should be landing long range AoE damage over 12k on a crit add in that it is ridiculously spammable. Even the Hammer Bolt auto-attack can land for 5k on a crit.

Sustain also needs an adjustment. I am looking forward to the first balance patch that will address some of this.

I got one-shot by it today (19k hit). Yes, it’s ridiculous. I do, however, think that the CC issue is much worse.

More and more people are realizing that Hunter’s Ward will completely incapacitate an enemy frontline so you now have entire groups doing nothing but spamming the Ward, pulls (Spear of Justice) and Coalescence.
It’s a whole new level of pirate-ship’ing and it is quite literally making people leave the game in disgust.

BlueBoy.1236:

A very well thought suggestion. I agree with most of em, especially the eye for an eye trait. It definitely needs a duration nerf.

About stability, I think we cant really have a good solution for it, until anet decides to separate pvp and wvw skills. The current stability system revolve around 5v5 match, thus you don’t see skills that give tons stacks of stability.

My suggestion was an attempt at finding a middle ground between the old and the new stab. It would cause 5 stacks to guarantee CC immunity for at least 3 seconds. So essentially, you get rewarded for avoiding CC, but you don’t get insta-downed as soon as you’re hit with the CC bombs that are so common these days.

I don’t agree with the people suggesting a complete reversion of stability’s functionality. I think there should be some punishment for getting hit but currently it’s just way too much.
Of course, the ideal solution would be to nerf all the CC, but I don’t think anyone is naive enough to think that Anet would even consider that. And to be honest, stab was a bit too weak even before HoT..

Spurnshadow.3678:

Excellent post.

Funny, I just made a topic myself about stability just before I read this. Was just fed up after tonight’s reset.

The power creep has been happening before HoT. It started with guard stacks. HoT brings it over the top, becuase the damage co-efficient is so much higher on the elite skills over older skills. So many people complain about CoR, and rightly so, but the auto attack is very high, too. It’s on par with some of the other classes auto-attack (not all, it’s among the highest), but the revenant has the benefit of heavy armor and amazing defenses.

I do think Hammer Bolt has a bit too much going for it. At the very least, the damage modifier should be slightly reduced. And the projectile speed should be reduced a bit. It currently reaches almost 1600 range and it’s far too reliable at the extreme end of that.
But the biggest issue is still the revenant (Herald) itself. If they didn’t have so many damage modifiers and so much boon stacking potential, they wouldn’t be hitting people for 5k+ autos.

Since the launch of HoT there have been many complaints about the state of balance in WvW. Based on what we know so far, most of these will be largely unaffected by the balance patch. A lot of this revolves around the excessive amount of CC and damage in the game, and how it seriously hampers frontlines, strongly enforcing a playstyle which no one really enjoys.
For all its complexity, the tactics used in WvW can be roughly broken down to just two approaches – melee focused and range focused (also termed “pirate ship”). When I label a skill *problematic" it’s because it strongly enforces the latter.

The following is an unexhaustive list of some of the skills and traits currently ruining fights in WvW and some proposed tweaks.
I’ve based this on large scale fights (15+). Many of the things listed below become worse the larger the fight gets.

• Coalescence of ruin: The damage is way too high. We all know this. There’s no reason to put a lengthly explanation here. I have 3 alternative suggestions for this one.
  (1) reduce the damage. Simple, yet effective. Drop the damage modifiers down to 1.25/1.50/1.75 for the three hits. Those are entirely reasonable numbers (maybe not by HoT standards, but Lightning Surge is 1.3 for comparison).
  (2) Make it reflectable. A big part of the issue is that this skill offers very little counterplay. If it could be reflected, you would no longer be rewarded optimally for spamming it, and we’d have a reliable defense against it.
  (3) Invert the damage so that the first hit is the strongest.
  Any one of those would be great.

• Cruel Repercussion: This trait deserves its own bullet point because it’s so completely out of proportion. 50% damage increase is ridiculous – especially considering how easy it is to proc this when you need it in WvW. This trait needs to die. I have no other solution.

• Herald in general: Due to their previously unheard of ability to passively buff allies (and themselves), herald has singlehandedly been responsible for a large portion of the absurd damage increase that we’ve seen in the game.
  A possible solution for the boons stacking (something I’ve suggested before) is to make the active facet itself shared with allies instead of the boons. I.e. if I’m in a party with a revenant with Facet of Strength active, the facet is applied to me and pulses strength. This prevents people from simply stacking multiple revenants in a party for permanent 25 might because the facets would just override eachother.
  This would retain their ability to stack permanent might (fewer stacks), fury, regen, swiftness, and to be honest, I still think that’s too much – the passive buffing is just not a good thing for the game.

• Gravity well: Firstly, it’s an issue that it’s a pulsing hard CC. Anyone caught in it without stab or invulns is practically guaranteed to die. But there’s an even bigger issue. It ticks immediately when cast, making the first tick essentially unavoidable. Two possible easy fixes would be:
  (1) first tick is delayed 1 second. This would allow players to react to the animation on the ground or
  (2) the first tick is a daze instead of a knockdown. Wouldn’t solve its impact on stability management, but it would allow people without stability to react after being dazed.

• Hunter’s Ward: The concept of uncrossable barriers is fine when it comes in the form of lines. You can easily walk around them on the ground, but if you don’t see them they only take 1 stack of stab. The wards created by this skill will easily rip 5 (or more) stacks of stability off an entire frontline. That’s completely unreasonable. Ideally, I’d want the whole uncrossable barrier ring removed (from Dragon’s Maw as well) but I’d settle for an internal cooldown that prevents the barriers from taking more than 1 stack of stability from a player.

• Eye for an Eye: A big part of WvW play is trying to CC people before you push (to put them in combat and maybe catch a few in the CC). Commonly, this is done with static field. Using static on a group with revs in it is currently an absolute nightmare for eles. You will proc so many taunts that you’re often forced to either mist form or blink out because you can’t just stun break all of them. On top of that, taunt is an extremely strong condition in WvW compared to the other automatic CC reflecting traits (from mesmer and necro).
  My solution? Remove the trait. Remove all the silly passive life savers. They have no place in a competitive game. However, since that’s probably unlikely, reduce the taunt duration to 1 second and give it a longer cooldown. At least this way you will be able to wait out 1 or 2 procs without having to blow your utilities and the other group would have to make a conscious decision to push you since they wouldn’t be able to just autoattack you down from 1500 range in that timeframe.

• Dragonhunter traps: Not only do these deal way too much damage, the fact that you can simply stack a ridiculous amount of them on top of each other and instantly kill anyone that triggers them is beyond silly. Traps need to either
  (1) have a visual tell similar to necro marks (this would be my prefered solution) or
  (2) despawn when the caster is more than x range away from them and after a fairly short time period (50 – 70% of their recharge seems fair).

• Spear of justice: Pulls have always been a bit of a dirty tactic in WvW, but it’s been reasonably kept in check because the two main sources (mesmer focus and engi tool kit) don’t contribute much else to the fight, so they aren’t seen too much. With pulling skills on guardian (which there are a lot of in WvW) you’re just further enforcing boring, no-skill tactics.
  Additionally, the visual tell is not clear enough.
  Proposed solution: Remove the pull effect from the skill. If not that, remove the “link” after the target dodges once. This way, you’ll have a way to avoid it if you notice the effect after you’ve been hit. Also, it should at least be limited to 1 target.

• (pre-emptively) Basilisk Venom: We’ll see how this pans out but I can imagine a resurgence of venom share is coming. Considering how reliant guardians are on blocks right now that’s probably not going to end well.

On top of what’s listed, I’d also like to see a significant buff to stability. Even with nerfs to the biggest offending CC skills, the sheer amount of effects that rip 1 stack off you makes stab extremely weak in the meta we have now.
For example, a limit to how often you can lose a stack would be a great addition to the game. If you could only lose 2 stack of stability to CC every second (random numbers), not only would it require more coordination to use CC to its full effect, it would give frontlines time to actually react when their stab gets stripped.

And finally, an honorable mention that does not fit the skill/trait criteria:

• Banners: Let’s be real, they’re extremely poorly thought out. One of the biggest complaints of WvW players over the years has been open-field siege, and now you give us movable siege weapons? Not a good idea. Since I doubt Anet will remove them, I’ll suggest this:
  Connect them to objectives. They can only be used inside the objective in which they’re spawned and will disappear if you move them outside.

On top of these specifics, I’m of the opinion that the overall damage output in WvW since HoT (actually since the specialization update in June, but HoT made it so much worse) is way too high, but we’ll save that discussion for another day.

Thoughts?

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Of course boons are completely out of hand (so are conditions though). But making boon removal completely out of control too is the worst thing to try to fix that.

Pretty much.
They refuse to acknowledge the major design flaws (like boon spam) that have crept into the game over time and just continue to band aid fix things.

As an example of why this is bad:
If they allow the boon spam to continue, and make necros the anti boon bot, they’re just enforcing a strong rock/paper/scissor game where builds matter more than execution. Hard counters against hard counters against hard counters does not foster skillful play.

Let’s have a quick competition. No cheating – target must be level 20 in at least exotic.
My entry is attached.

Guildie of mine hit 27k on an ele once, but I don’t have the screenshot anymore.

Karl be like “They still complaining about passives? Let’s give them some more. lel”

They could make CoR hit only 1 target, but as long as it can nail glass builds consistently for >15k it’ll continue to be a problematic skill. While I do think True Shot has a way too high damage coefficient (it’s higher than backstab), it can be reflected. That’s really the big difference here. If they make CoR reflectable, most of the problems will go away. In its current form it offers next to no proper counterplay in a large group setting.

The new cooldown changes nothing.

BlackBeard.2873:

Don’t expect much from air buffs either, because air is objectively pretty good

Xillllix.3485:

it’s the fire line that really needed a buff, not air.

These were my first thoughts when I read the notes.
Air is pretty kitten good right now. All 3 grandmaster traits are useful in damage oriented builds. The fire grandmasters are immensely subpar in comparison.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

We’ve avoided adding this feature because we don’t believe it would be healthy for WvW. While we can appreciate why some players would want a feature like this, lots of other players only engage in WvW when, upon entering a WvW map, immediately see a commander icon to follow. We try and avoid adding features that can be used to intentionally exclude other players.

And generally, lots of commanders will run public raids or pugmand for these people. But I cannot stress enough that there are a lot of dedicated, hardcore WvW players who play highly organized and do not want random pugs following them.

Leaving out this feature has two unfortunate side effects:
- It’s either a nuisance to the guild group because they have to find ways to avoid having a tag up. This is usually done by running a tagless squad or not using the squad UI at all. Doing this, you need to have a constant target on the commander so it effectively removes the target call feature from gameplay, which is a shame.
- Or it results in verbal abuse of the pugs when they show up to follow a group that wants to play alone. Some of us kindly ask them not to follow, others are more blunt. In any case, it’s not a good experience for the people you’re trying to help with this decision.

I realize that you like to cater to casual players in WvW, but as one of many people who prefer the tactical and communicative requirements of WvW fights over sPvP as a competitive environment, I can tell you it would be much appreciate if you would show some love for the more dedicated WvW players.

Noyalty.7849:

- Make banners only useable within a certain range of the structure they are activated from. Decrease the uptime to 10 mins (long enough for a defense) and increase the cool down to 30 mins and only allow one of each banners per side to be activated per map.

This is in my opinion the best compromise.
It’s very unlikely that Anet will remove banners but this is a realistic solution.

Best I could do. Had to gut the names in the process, though. Unfortunately, all the useful BBcode appears to be disabled on this site. If you want to use this, you can copy it directly and put the {pre}{/pre} tags around it (with square brackets).

Guardian | 1 | 6 | 2 wpn, 2 util, 1 elite, 1 trait
Elementa | 2 | 4 | 2 wpn (staff and d/f), 1 prof mechanic (in Air), 1 elite (in Air)
Engin        | 4 | 4 | 1 wpn (plus combo), 2 util, 1 elite
Mesmer   | 4 | 4 | 2 wpn, 1 prof mechanic (up to 4 hits), 1 elite (3 hits)
Necrom   | 3 | 5 | 2 wpn, 2 prof mechanic, 1 elite (plus randomized corruptions)
Ranger     | 5 | 7 | 2 wpn, 1 pet, 1 prof mechanic, 2 util, 1 trait
Reve         | x | 2 | 1 wpn, 1 elite
Thief        | 3 | 3 | 1 wpn, 1 prof mechanic (traited, +guard steal), 1 elite
Warrior   | N/A

As for the topic, I agree completely that CC is out of control at the moment.

I would be okay with this as long as it reduces your armor to that of an ambient creature while in the air.

Ara.4569:

I have yet to see a post from anet acknowledging that this game suffers from power creep. So this balance patch will probably just be a shift of power, certainly not a significant tone down.

I’m pretty sure the power creep is their attempt at creating “fast paced” combat.

It’s a bit ironic considering the game has always been criticized for being too “busy” – too many effects flying around etc.
And unfortunately, all it’s done so far is lower the skill ceiling (significantly) and frustrate the players.

ronpierce.2760:

Josh Davis.6015:

Aside from skill adjustments, another way we can adjust balance in PvP is by looking at the runes/sigils/amulets that are available for use through the customization panel.

I would be interested in hearing thoughts (with the high-level goals from the blog in-mind) on adding/removing various sigils/amulets/runes. In general, our goal for PvP is to be faster-paced with a higher-level of lethality than what we’re seeing in S1.

I know we’ve had this conversation a few times before, but it’s always important to have this discussion with the correct context in mind.

Just be careful of over-correcting by “making bunkers less sustainable” and “making damage dealers do more damage” resulting in a hard swing in the other direction. Other than that, it sounds good. :}

Well put.

Here’s to hoping they only mentioned 0.5% of the nerfs they’re intending to implement.

MadVisions.4529:

ty for forwarding this! when can we expect more specifyed data on the chanes?

Make sure to tune in for the January 15 episode of Guild Chat over on the official Guild Wars 2 Twitch channel for more in-depth discussion on the upcoming balance changes.

I completely agree.
I find it very poor design that a single skill chain CCs.
And the “barrier ring” functionality has always bothered me. It wasn’t a big problem (yet still annoying) when only one such skill existed (Ring of Warding), but Hunter’s Ward and Dragon’s Maw really highlight some issues with this skill type.

Zoltreez.6435:

eeeeeeeeh no
meta is full of bunkers that allready cant be killed
nerf the bunkers instead then we can start looking on the dmg.

To be fair, the ridiculous damage introduced by HoT was part of what promoted the bunker meta in the first place. If they just nerf defense, you’ll have people one-shotting each other left and right.

Fellfoot.8156:

This is the new direction Anet is taking things. I’ve been having a hard time accepting it myself. I’m now so tired of being kittened off that I don’t really give a kitten anymore. Got to see first hand what Turtle kittens and Dragon kittens do when you’re on the receiving end. They’re complete kitten. I’ve never seen such kitten.

It’s sad.

This is to ensure that you can get the full satisfactory experience of going out on reset and capturing objectives for your world!

Ok, that’s paraphrased but I’m pretty sure that was the gist of some dev’s take on WvW. Oh, how well they know us.

Crucifier.6457:

Has anyone used the Cloaking Waters upgrade yet? I’m interested in the duration of the stealth (probably minutes).

As I recall, it’s 2 minutes. I may be wrong.

Schizotypy.8059:

Some classes are going to get overly buffed while other classes will get overly nerfed. It’s just trading one terrible meta for another.

That’s basically what I fear at the moment – that they’re just going to be continuing this ridiculous power creep by buffing something else.

I get the impression that their “balance patches” are/will be more focused on changing the meta than actually balancing anything. That’s not going to end well..

Naix.8156:

I disagree. Imo its the mmo portion – that fact you are playing with friends – that keeps you playing long past the point of actually enjoying the game itself.

Fair enough. But wouldn’t the point at which you stopped enjoying the game have come later if you hadn’t been playing the same metas for 6 months at a time?

Naix.8156:

Would you feel the same if you had spent hours grind the same content over and over and over to optimize your build for pve raiding, or wvw and the devs were changing/tweaking every two weeks on you?

For WvW, yes. For PvE, probably not. But in that case, the issue wouldn’t be the updates themselves. Rather, the updates would simply be highlighting the poor design of the gear system (something that raids have already done on their own to a certain extent, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3vrvvg/raids_highlight_the_insane_cost_and_inflexibility/)
Conceptually, I stand by my point that frequent skill updates would be good for the PvE side of the game as well, simply because it would encourage theorycrafting/experimentation and force people to learn more about the traits/skills of their class and continuously change their approach to existing content.

That said, I’m not opposed to a split as long as WvW is included on the PvP side (or given its own independent skillset).

Skill updates are quite literally the only thing that keeps an MMO interesting in the long run. You can’t possibly create enough content to continuously keep players engaged, but you can challenge them by altering the tools they have available. This applies to all areas of the game, but none more so than PvP.

I can’t even describe how unfathomably stupid I find their decision to do balance passes so infrequently.
Monthly should be the minimum time frame. Ideally, we’d get a small patch every 2 weeks.

apharma.3741:

Range is 1200 (looking at it right now on tooltip) same as everything else, if it is hitting from much further away then that’s a bug.

It does. This isn’t a revenant specific issue though. Ranger longbow has almost 2000 range, ele staff 1500 etc.
Hammer Bolt has slightly more range than most other projectiles listed as 1200, but it tends to connect more reliably. That, in combination with the super high damage, makes the discrepancy especially obvious/obnoxious with revenants.

apharma.3741:

It’s the modifiers you should be complaining about.

I do. All the time.
My post was not intended to call out Hammer Bolt as a core issue, though I do think the range is silly.

Any minute now someone will come in here and tell you that a Cruel Repercussion proc is not a realistic representation of revenant damage, and that when you disregard the trait, the remaining 5.5k, 1500 range, piercing auto attack is actually completely balanced.

Anet devs will read that post and silently nod in agreement.

Xillllix.3485:

The new map is better designed for more varied fights.

Choke Wars 2: The Stare Down
“This time we only assjam when we’re out of focus pulls”

This is kind of silly.
Coalescence will continue to dominate WvW as long as it can reliably hit for these absurd amounts (e.g. 15k+ on other glass specs), and that will continue to be the case until we get a change to revenant traits and their ability to maintain full might and fury so easily.

Not to mention that the skill itself just deals too much damage compared to similar skills on other backline classes. For instance, here are some damage modifiers:
Eruption: 1.25
Ice Spike: 1.50
Lightning Surge: 1.30
Meteor Shower: 1.30 per hit
Putrid Mark: 1.2
Well of Suffering: 0.66 per tick
Coalescence: 2.25

The only problem this will alleviate is backlines getting one-shot while standing behind their heavies. The skill will still destroy frontlines. Long live the pirate ship..

Elmo Benchwarmer.3025:

The June patch was a catastrophe, HoT a complete disaster.

Pretty much this. The elite specializations deserve aggressive nerfs, but I also want to see the core trait lines toned down to put builds more in line with the pre-June versions.
Hey, I can dream, right?

Apolo.5942:

If the option is between blowing everything up in a split second vs a bunker meta, i prefer the bunker meta.

It saddens me that the two are so consistently driven further apart.
What ever happened to aiming for a nice middle ground where fights are long enough to allow plenty of back-and-forth counterplay, well-timed dodges, careful cooldown management and mindgames between builds that are actually capable of killing eachother?

They seem to be under some delusion that simply adding more, more, more of everything will make the gameplay more action-packed and engaging, while in reality it just lowers the skill ceiling of the game and makes combat frustrating.

Xenesis.6389:

Guildhalls also are a major roadblock with it resetting WvW guild upgrades while doing damage to small guilds. I’m sure a few have left the game disgusted with how that turned out. GvG guilds at least have their arena to screw around with.

Except the arena is way too small, severely limiting viable compositions, the “invisible” barrier around the ring obstructs the camera making it impossible to see the other team properly from the starting position, and the color and shininess of the floor makes it difficult to distinguish nameplates quickly.
I think most GvG guilds would strongly prefer OS still. No one really got what they were hoping for with the guild hall..

Sadly, it’s not just Coalescence, though.
The whole concept of the passive party wide buffs is ridiculous at the moment. Partly due to the stacking potential and partly because there’s too little sacrifice involved.

For the stacking part:
- The utilities should spread the facet to allies, and each facet should give boons only to the affected player.
- Facet of Nature should be personal.
This way, you can’t just stack revenants together for permanent full buffs, yet you’d still benefit from having multiple revs in a party providing different buffs.

For the sacrifice, either energy cost of the hammer skills or the upkeep cost of facets needs to be increased. Right now, energy is practically a non-factor.

On top of that, damage modifiers from traits are way too high.
Roiling Mist is a barely-conditional ~15% DPS increase in glass builds. For comparison, all weapon-specific modifiers are 5-10%.
Cruel Repercussion just needs to go. It’s completely ridiculous. Especially combined with Malicious Reprisal.

They also have way too good defensive options. Infuse Light needs a cast time. Riposting Shadows needs to have at least 1 of its effects removed (ideally the endurance gain). It currently removes all movement-impeding conditions, breaks stun, and lets you chain 6+ evades together (realistically 10-11 with an energy sigil and hammer/staff).

As for Coalescence, if a complete rework of the skill is out of the question, it needs a recharge increase and either a damage decrease or to be reflectable (on top of the changes listed above).

TheBlackLeech.9360:

(…)our damage creeps up and up and up.
(…)and now, every class has access to absurd amounts of cc.

This about sums up why I currently dislike the game.

Honestly, it feels like everything in HoT was designed for PvE, and PvP and WvW were considered acceptable sacrifices.
They introduce break bars, so they need to give all classes decent abilities to deal with those. Hence all the CC.
98 percent of PvE content is entirely DPS focused, so in order to incentivize expansion sales they jack up the damage on elite specs.

In contrast, adding alternative play styles (of equivalent strength) to existing professions would have been plenty motivation for PvP/WvW players to buy HoT.

Da Beetus.1275:

Also, the ticks of damage don’t quite line up with the animation, at least not how I expected to see it. Head to the Heart of the Mists and throw a Lava Font at a target dummy and watch the numbers closely to see what I mean.

This always bothered me.

Necro wells tick instantly when dropped.
Mesmer wells tick instantly when dropped.
Guardian symbols tick instantly when dropped.
Ranger bonfire ticks instantly when dropped.
Lava font ticks 1 second after it’s dropped.

Tongku.5326:

You guys are over exaggerating as usual due to the fact that most of you do not play rev.

To hit that hard the rev has to be glass build as well and have 25 might stacks and crit you. Might + fury can be provided by eitehr other team members or by rev, however, there is a LONG set up and quite a bit of timing involved on the part of the rev here, basically you go into glint, wait for max might from the facet, pop fury, switch legends and let loose 1-2 auto attacks, then you do the unload.

That rev, will be running relatively little self sustain its extremely vulnreable to CC and condis. A rev that is not so vulnreable will not be able to hit you that hard cause of traits and gear.

I like running mixed gear, sometimes more on the defensive / healy side, other times more on the offensive side, and I can tell you when I am about 50/50 I usually do 2-3k, crit on glass opponents for 5k, its when I go full glass and rely on other people to provide boons, cleanses, heals etc. is when I can achieve those kind of numbers. But I do go down a LOT when I run glass.

You’re underestimating the potential of the class, seemingly due to the fact that you don’t play WvW in any organized fashion.

No one plays 1 revenant. You stack 3+ together and they’ll have fury/might/regen/swiftness permanently. There’s absolutely no reason for them to leave glint for anything other than hard kiting.
The glint heal is probably one of the single best healing skills in the game for WvW gameplay, blowing Defiant Stance out of the water by not having an activation time. There’s your sustain. And thanks to Riposting Shadows, revenants are not at all vulnerable to CC. This skill also allows them to chain 8+ evades.
There’s very little risk involved in playing glass revenant compared to ele / old wells necro, yet it offers considerably more damage.

Spurnshadow.3678:

I play a rev, Tongku, and no, you’re wrong. I run full zerk with cavalier armor, and runes of fury. Basically, I stack as much ferocity as possible.

For the record, stacking ferocity is usually not a good way to go. You’ll get the biggest crits by having a 15:1 ratio between power and crit damage when fully buffed.

dank.3680:

Yeah if you are running around in a zerg like a little zergling running no upkeep just spamming 2.. I GUESS I can see where you come up with your point of view.. Try leaving the safety of your blob and see how awesome that hammer works for ya.

I think it’s pretty clear that this discussion pertains to large scale (>15) fights. No one has stated that revenants are OP in roaming/duels.

Burtnik.5218:

The amount of salt in this thread is real. Ps real range of CoR is 900 cus bug.

No. It’s like ~1150.
But since you brought up the issue of range.. the auto is 1500, which is also ridiculous.

A lot of people have left because they dislike the new borderland. I don’t like it either but I don’t really mind sticking to EB. As I see it, a bigger problem is that the meta is absolute dogkitten right now.
Between the June patch and HoT, overall damage output has become absurd. They’ve just piled both hard and soft CC onto the elite specs. Frontlines are in a terrible state. Backline and focus builds are one-shotting eachother left and right.
It’s just not particularly fun to play at the moment.

Burtnik.5218:

but we cant do boom rip 17k hp in one combo likr shatter mes right?

Right. A single skill technically doesn’t count as a combo..

Straegen.2938:

The Rev’s long range Coalescence of Ruin attack clocking for well over 8k on a crit in some instances. I think sometimes it is stacking the impact damage because the wiki numbers are very wrong on its damage output potential.

On frontlines maybe. It’ll easily hit >15k on another glass build. This skill has literally made players quit the game..

The wiki is correct that Coalescence has a 2.0 damage modifier at max range. The damage you see comes from a combination of ridiculous buffing (2+ revs in the same party), very good general damage modifiers on Rev, and the trait Cruel Repercussion (+50%).

And yes, I do agree that certain skills are massively overtuned (e.g. Coalescence, True Shot, dragonhunter traps, Gravedigger..).

So from what I can tell, at 1 proof per rank and 5 proofs to a hero challenge (each worth 10 points), an elite specialization will require 200 WvW ranks and 6000 badges of honor.
Per character..?
kitten ..

Thank you for the quick reply!

Lawton Campbell.8517:

The sums probably won’t match up — you’ll have more deaths than kills due to NPCs killing players. 50% seems a bit high though, something’s probably wrong somewhere.

Sorry for the issues with this, won’t be able to fix them until some time after launch.

Maybe Jade Quarry is just really bad at clearing camps
But in the limited data I have recorded, all these strange deaths have been accredited to another server.

Don’t worry too much about it, though.
As I mentioned, the total is the only part showing strange behaviour. As far as I can tell, purely based on their progression, the map-specific values appear to be good.