Balance appreciation thread.

This is a thread for people to show their appreciation to the balance team for taking a bold step in a new direction. Feel free to share stories about people coming back or simply drop a "thank you" for the devs to see.

Stories:I was in WvW messing around on thief ( @"bluri.2653" your stream made me want to play thief) then I encountered another thief, was pretty good and was trolling a few of us on DP core like me. Eventually after 10 mins and a lot of distance he finally gets me because he's better, I decided to block him to see who it was, was none other than sbobby! So I sent him a message and we chatted for a bit as I knew him through Seven, talked about how skill-less the game had become when I mentioned it wouldn't be like this for long.

Puzzled sbobby asked me what I meant? I was a little stunned by this as he's one of the best WvW thieves I know frequently destroying people on core D/D in duels even when core was considered bad. So I tell him the general ins and outs, damage across the board going down by 30% or something, healing the same amount and longer cool downs all over. CC? Yeah expect no damage from it at all if you CC someone. He couldn't believe it, you might need skill to play the game soon and those who mash skills will die fast, you could tell he was seeing the game a new way, sure sceptical because a lot of the broken stuff will still be around but hope was restored a little.

Also amongst my friends they have all seen a renewed interest in playing the game, every time we play and encounter endlessly sustaining warriors we say "won't be long..." when we see a rev chunk off half your health before defence spam we say "won't be long...". When we chunk off someone for twice their health bar we say "won't be long...yeah but they will still be dead to the co-ordinated burst." I've seen guild members come back and poke their heads in, been talk on our Discord server about playing again when the patch comes out, everyone is genuinely excited to see the pace of the game slow a little and for tactics and co-ordination to matter more than spam and rotate cooldowns and you win vs what you win against.

So a big thank you to @Ben Phongluangtham.1065 @Cal Cohen.2358 @"Irenio CalmonHuang.2048" and everyone else that is working on the balance patch.

You can watch sbobby's videos here:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_VbrQ3rDA7KMVlY8tfRn7w

You can watch Sindrener here:https://www.twitch.tv/sindrener/

Cal released an update to the balance patch before it was released using the complaints as a basis. That's more then I've come to expect. I'm absolutely giddy.

repo

Despite my own personal critiques, I am definitely excited and I appreciate the follow-up post that was recently written acknowledging the oversimplicity in blanket reducing all CC to do no damage. I truly hope that they do work hard on continually pushing the game in a better direction. What I really hope the Systems team as a whole considers is to reexamine classes and their elite specs and their intended role(s), and if they are not meeting them, to attempt to fix those issues. It's unfortunate to see builds like Chrono, Scourge, and Druid get hit hard by the nerf bat without any acknowledgement of the issues they are currently facing. Related to this, I hope they re-evaluate all of tradeoffs the elite specs have been issued. Mirage's upcoming change in particular is, no offense ANet, one of the laziest and messiest ways of approaching a tradeoff. Tradeoffs for elite specs are good and I 100% agree with them in theory, but in practice I don't think most of them have been issued rather successfully or elegantly.

I watched the Devs stream last week, It was great to see the devs in action playing WvW and how educated they are with all the class aspects. After 2 years of micro combat changes, the upcoming patch is like a breeze of fresh air. I'm well aware that this patch is only a lay ground for future updates and there is tons of work to done, but this is definitely a good way to start 2020.

Thanks for modifying how unblockable work.And if you're gonna change the toughness that some minor traits give by either vitality or damage reduction, thanks as well.