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Balance Patch Preview - Global


Irenio CalmonHuang.2048

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@LKEY.9567 said:

@KidRoleplay.3615 said:I'm a bit confused about the wording of the Revenant trait changes in the Corruption spec. If I'm reading it right, if you don't pick Invoking Torment in the minor tier, this means none of the Grandsmaster tier traits work?

Invoking Torment is Minor, so it's not chooseable. Adept/Master/Grandmaster are so it seems reasonable.

Ahh. Thanks.

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"Confusion has been removed from various Revenant skills as they didn't really have any meaningful ways to take advantage of it and instead we've replaced them with Torment which can be used in a more cohesive character build."

I disagree.

Confusion from Banish Enchantment was what kept more faceroll builds in check for PvP/WvW, ironically they had all boons too. So I don't think this is a good decision if the current state of the game will remain similar to what it is with all those nerfs.

Temporal Rift was already pretty weak too with it's Torment, so removing Confusion is a pretty big nerf for how it already had to interrupt for application.

I saw all the changes, I'm hoping for the best. Really hoping that all of it will correlate in the end.

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I expected more.Also balance of damage and buff also in pve as well as in pvp and wvw.
Most of the patch is a small comfort improvement that could have been there 4 or 5 years ago for the pve (I specify).I was expecting some real change.

  • example here the thief's stealing skills are updated.But compare "Whirling Axe" skill you can steal with "Ice Shard Stab".Ice Shard Stab is completely useless even in this new version compared to Whirling Axe.if you update skills made of skills that people want to use, example "Whirling Axe" or "plasma shower", "magnetic bomb", ...There's no point in updating skills that are useless anyway, it's a waste of time for you. Take them off or do a real overhaul.

  • for example : necroThe pets make them more dynamic, take away the incantation time.Currently they are only used for either CC, given back FL, or for AFK farm.All reaper cries are useless in pve, ...+spell reshuffles that are useless skills in pve.


  • On the aura do not forget the aura of light and darkness.Besides it would be nice to make the aura of darkness apply like the other aura when you pass in a combo zone directly.Currently only the aura of darkness has the additional restriction that you have to finish the entire animation of the attack, so that the aura is given.While the other auras apply directly even if you cancel as long as you are in the combo box.It's been buggy for a year.

  • All projectile weapons such as longbow, shortbow, rifles, ...Look what Path of Exile did to make them more interesting.They're about passive skills, basically strokes in GW2.There are 2 passive we can put that change a little bit our skills either:
    1. Which reduces damage / range but generates extra side shots which increases the width of the eye and the number of targets hit for the mob packs.Here it is as if you had 1 clone of mesmer to the right and left of you invisible who makes the same attack as you in a straight line but with less damage and less range.
  1. Either in cadence increased the number of shots in mono target of the other what makes it possible to make proc more often of other trait or crit and increased the dps mono.Basically here all your skills become the "Rapid Fire" of Ranger but do much less damage with each shot.
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Any plans on revisiting that Chrono "rework" that will still make this spec incredibly bad for anything competitive related by design and played by nobody in their right mind?

Rifle needs a lot more love on Warrior. Just making underwhelming skills into ammo skills allows me to be twice as underwhelming?

Other than that, waiting to try these changes out in game. The modifier ones look... a little suspicious, since I didn't see a lot of condition adjustments, yet a lot of cleanse shaves. Good start, overall, but fix my chrono pl0x.

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For Guardian, honestly, after scanning all the changes in sPvP, I cannot specifically tell what will land where. But, the changes you have here with the explanation border on silly. DH is not meta in sPvP or WvW. Deflection shot damage was literally buffed 6 month ago, since someone, who at least have set a foot in sPvP before, realized this skill require significant aiming and planning, and thus should deal more damage. So... what the fuck happened? If you will make it deal no damage, can it work like ranger LB CC then? Otherwise this just stupid. And the CC is disadvantage in PvE anyway (not sure would you use in LB PvE to begin with) is a disadvantage.

Heavy Light, this trait is now absolutely pointless. Guardian does not have the ability to CC and quickly do damage. It is not mesmer. And the other grand master, big game hunter adds 20% damage to tethered targets, right? So.. is the damage heavy light on CC, which is extremely situation, will be much higher, so it would be considered? Did someone even half thought this through? Is this RNG? I cannot tell anymore.

Stoic demeanor, good change. I still dunno why it has an ICD, since it is only used in PvE sporadically. The ICD only makes noting the effect infuriating. At least 1 sec is better than 3.

Changes to virtues are good, but depending on the damage on virtues use and the duration may or may not have much value. If you are serious about making it deal damage in PvE, Unscathed Contender is what needed to change. I guess not.

Changes to zeal are useless but buffs. Better than nothing, eh?! "I need more sources of vulnerability" said no guardian ever.

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soulbeast - not being able to do a fundamental basic ranger ability pet swapping ... hmmm if this is a balance why has it taken YEARS to balance .... it's disappointingmesmer - removing a trait and replacing it with another because anet do not have the skills (the real devs lost their jobs or found something more productive to do) to balance it ... well anet balances I guess are total hack n slash and break things as usual ... rather than improving gameplay enjoyment.Also now i know why i don't pvp .... because the transition from pve to pvp is too split up

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I know this is mainly a PvP/WvW update, but I had a suggestion for the Daredevil elite skill, Impact Strike.

The third strike, Finishing Blow, has almost no purpose in PvE. I was wondering if for a PvE only change that it could deal significantly increased damage to foes with 25% or less HP? Considering its rather lengthy cast time of 1.5s, I feel this would at least add some utility to an otherwise useless ability.

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I understand that guardians and warriors are likely the most played classes so balance is likely skewed in their favor.

It's been reported that the Zealous Blade trait for Guardians (Dragonhunters running power builds) is still giving 10% additional damage despite the patch notes stating in July 2019 that it was removed. Users reported it here in bug forum. That's partly why dragonhunter is favored for power DPS currently especially for single target scenarios due to the huge damage boost from spear of justice when traited with BIg Game Hunter. People are suggesting above that Feel my Wrath be nerfed, but the most effective way to do that is probably making the quickness nonexistent for allies while increasing the duration on the utility mantra (Potent Haste), especially when you compare it to Time Warp (the mesmer elite). Making the quickness shorter will just result in stacking more guardians.

Warrior is in a good spot in all game modes, rifle changes will likely just add a different methodology of playing it since the melee weapons have been favored. Maybe I will get to break out the Charrzooka on my charr warrior for laughs. Piercing attacks generally aren't as potent since clustering mobs is easier than lining them up.

I don't know if these changes are final, but chronomancer is extremely clunky due to clone requirement for shatters. In a prior WvW stream it was mentioned that would be reexamined. It's especially an issue for the interrupt on Time Sink / F3 replacement for Diversion. Elusive Mind will likely negate the entire inspiration line for condi builds though, since the heal scaling on inspiration's heal power relies on power otherwise you need healing gear.

Engineer is in a difficult spot since it generally requires more skill to play due to the heat mechanic or the kits. The cooldown reduction to bomb kit skills is a nice change however. Not sure on the toolkit 15s recharge increase when overheating, I suspect most people won't opt for Photonic Blasting module unless the damage is extremely high to offset this. I made an engineer at launch but it didn't receive as much playtime until scrapper because the highest damage kit (grenades) attack sequence is repetitive strain injury inducing due to needing aim of auto attack.

Revenant is a dominant support now but none of the things listed here seem to be massive changes for PVE. It's more that every other class is getting normalized it seems.

I anticipate the customary necromancer whining in light of this patchnote.

Thief pistols aren't used that much, but as with warrior rifle it should be a fun weapon to play when min-maxing is not of a concern (as in things not timed). Piercing is still weaker than cleave as stated above with respect to warrior rifle: it's harder to line things up than to cluster them.

I like the change to soulbeast since the change is meaningful. Losing access to a second pet means it will likely be run with a damage-oriented pet at least for PVE. Ranger is a highly played profession and people that haven't been keeping track of balance patches might be still running druid.

Will add more when I go over them completely, but that's my initial reaction to it.

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Mesmer:

  • Confounding Suggestions: This trait has been retired and been replaced with Bountiful Blades.
  • Bountiful Blades (NEW): Mirror Blades bounces 2 additional times. Phantasmal Berserker summons an additional berserker and they each deal less damage (33% instead of 25% less damage.

This is a big nerf to damage right there and we already suffer as it is with instant death phantasms being replaced by almost no damage weak clones and now you're going to force us to choose between an extra phantasm on greatsword OR 15% damage boost from all illusions via the Empowered Illusion trait which is in the same line as Confounding Suggestions which will now be Bountiful Blades. Do you even have anyone who plays a Mesmer because it seems like these are such arbitrary and random changes with little thought to them.

The loss of cripple on all attacks is also telling as now we'll be easier to be chased down by foes with only one source of cripple coming from Mind Stab and less, albeit small, breakbar damage.

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i like the way of you indirectly making better synergetic traits for renegade-revenant but still i think shortbow 2 and shortbow 3 needs reworks, also F3 citadel bombardement needs some faster rockets and precise radius to hit its targets when "using/wasting 35 energy"....

I am so happy to see sudden reversal renegade trait, reworked for something better.

I think renegade got buffed its bleeding even further with corpution traitline change, i am just curious what will be done with its real bleeding sources.

About shortbow 2 bloodbaine's path, arrows misses if target moves.... fix that please

About sevenshot(shortbow 3) spell is hard to hit.....you need to be 900 m distant to target+target must not move+you need to aim to hit arrows.

I like the way of nerfing mirage total endurance to 50 , removing its initial double dodges to one dodge every time.

I would like to see more love to chrono....it is unplayable in pvp, clones has very low health, just dies too fast so you can't shatter properly.

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Deflecting Shot: This skill now knocks back and its animation has been slowed down so the arrow is fired at 740ms (up from 280 ms).

Honestly I think most of the DH changes are good given the context of changes to other specs. I'm very wary of the animation slowdown though. From a competitive perspective, D Shot is already manually aimed and is a fairly slow projectile that is easy to outstrafe past a certain range. Currently it requires a decent amount of movement prediction to be used well. With a 3/4th second cast time it will most definitely feel very clunky and miss a lot more often simply due to the longer cast time paired with slow projectile speed even if the user perfectly aimed it. Granted, this looks to be as a tradeoff for knockback being baseline, but nothing kills a weapon spec faster than making it feel clunky. If a tradeoff is desired, as a longtime DH player I would strongly prefer something like increased cooldown. 12 or 15s up from the current 10, or even a range reduction.

Another thing to consider - DH competitive gameplay is focused on combos off of CCs. With a .75s cast time a lot of these combos are effectively eliminated.

Please reconsider this change. DH LB is already fairly niche. It sees some use because it's actually quite a smooth and fun weapon set to use. Even something like a .5s, up from .25 but down from the suggested .75 would be fine, but .75 is just too slow for the skill type.

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Mesmer:

In this update we are making some changes to the greatsword and domination trait line in order to provide a more reliable baseline ranged damage build or mesmer. We are removing the Confounding Suggestions trait which has been problematic to balance in the past due to its power level and adding in a new trait Vicious Expression which plays better with the Domination line's boon removal. Finally we are changing the Mirage Elusive Mind to no longer break stuns as we feel that the necessity of including exhaustion as a balancing factor has made it too binary as a choice.

While we're reworking domination, can we finally make "Rending Shatter" more useful?Something like "3x 3s vulnerability on boon removal" will make it just as competitive as other adept trait, while picking off on the "boon removal" theme for adept trait to punish boon spam.I don't have the internal game statistics, but pretty much every mesmer I know would pick other traits over this.

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I'm a bit concerned for weaver :

  • Bolstered Elements: This trait now grants barrier instead of stability when using a stance skill.
  • Stone Resonance: This skill now grants stability on initial use for 5 seconds in PvE and 3 seconds in PvP and WvW

The tradeoff stab with barriers, that are already very weak on weaver; on base and related effects (there is none. that's simple) compared to engie or scourge for example; for a melee spec, with 11k HP and the lowest armor ... add up to the cut of healing base and coefficient (and barriers, lol), it seems a bit too much.224 barriers on stance instead of stab will absolutely not help to set up otherwise than (the "cancer", but one of the few viable sets) Celestial or Vitality/Healing power and 3 breakstun in utility bar.

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One tiny request: please make Deadly Ambition (thief trait) actually work with Repeater and such. Due to DA revamp, condi thief builds are in a really bad spot PVE-wise as Deadly Ambition's "poison enemies when using dual-wield skills" only works with Death Blossom and Shadow Strike and not Shadow Strike's follow-up Repeaters. Though wiki lists all main-hand 3 skills as dual-wield, in-game only the first skill of their sequences do and mainhand-only builds (like pistol+nothing) can't trigger that effect at all as their mainhand skill 3's aren't marked as dual-wield in tooltip.

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@"Irenio CalmonHuang.2048" said:Hi Everyone,

Today we're previewing the next set of balance updates to come to Tyria.

With this release there are a significant number of changes we've put together for the the competitive game modes, but many of the fundamental principles are applicable in every game mode. In particular, the focus on gameplay being more active is a big piece of the planned changes.

That said, we recognize that there are many specific differences between game modes and the nature of changes for game modes should follow suit.eg. Many bosses and creatures in instanced content focus attacks on the player with the highest toughness. A minor trait, Stone Flesh gives an Elementalist additional toughness while attuned to earth and can cut off both going into Earth attunement and selecting the Earth traitline. So we're changing that trait to grant 7% damage reduction instead of 150 Toughness, allowing it to play well with that type of content and expand some build options.

We're planning many changes of this nature, as well as re-works and more. We look forward to seeing your feedback both on this set of changes as well as future potential changes.

We've posted additional threads for the more PvP oriented changes and WvW oriented changes.

-The Systems Team

Awesome step forward! TY!

Questions...

Are there any future plans to improve team gameplay mechanics for heal and non-heal support roles and builds? Examples...

"Druid is clunky to heal with and some ideas would go a long way... https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/39412/eye-on-druid-ideas-yay.Ventari Tablet would be leaps more enjoyable if it were a "back pack", not a tablet that needed to be moved around trying to heal the cat herd.Ele healer is most "fluid" of them all, but still feels uninspiring. Frustrating to heal teammates outside of tight blobs."

Any plans to rework the contentious stealth mechanics? Example... https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/60005/stealth-rework-2-0

Any plans to reevaluate the Condition system? Example... https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/29999/condi-system-rework-2-0

Any plans to reevaluate the outdated resource mechanics? Example... https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/91980/resource-mechanics-need-to-go-and-competitive-gameplay-will-be-better-for-it

Any plans to improve lesser used weapons for pvp and wvw? Examples...

"https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/32525/if-you-want-more-build-diversity-then-we-need-to-work-on-weapons-tooGW2 Path of Fire was released on September 22, 2017, and Ranger daggers still only have a niche use in pve… https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/568/daggers-need-redo-and-backstab.

Roam around in wvw and try getting into fights while using Reaper GS, and any competent player will pick you apart more often than not… hence the thoughts behind these… https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/58958/eye-on-necro-ideas.

Playing melee can suck much of the time, especially when ranged skills can hit super hard and there are a ton of melee weapons devoid of positioning, mobility and gap closers... Hence suggestion like these...

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/56624/warrior-needs-more-ranged-weapon-optionshttps://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/54848/melee-weapon-improvements-pleasehttps://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/9819/greatsword-changeshttps://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/25754/necro-needs-movement-skills-tied-to-weaponshttps://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/9688/sugg-core-necro-needs-a-melee-weapon"

Wil there be any larger shifts or changes that tackle some of the root causes of balance issues and frustrations with the game? Example... https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/62555/putting-fun-back-into-designs-and-balancing

Any plans to improve visual aspects of combat gameplay? Example... https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/67283/i-would-like-to-discuss-visual-tells-for-wvw

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@Jzaku.9765 said:So the only good skill on Warrior's rifle was nerfed hard to give more uses of the other incredibly bad ones? How's that a positive change? Please give the weapon better utility or identity and make Brutal Shot less clunky at least! I don't know how a skill like Brutal Shot exists compared to Quick Shot on Ranger and Disabling Shot on Thief!

To me it feels like the shot is backwards, it should be dodge first then shoot at the end.Pointless using the skill as a dodge in its current state.

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I think thief initiative regen should get slowed. Builds like s/d thief are going to be nuts post-patch because their tempos haven't been nerfed.

Who cares if the damage gets nerfed when s/d thief can still use their s3 evade multiple times. And defensive cooldowns have been increased so it's just gonna be incredibly strong.

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Hello.I really hoped that you would change the "Unload" skill and show some love to P/P pvp. Right now it is a very slow (1.5 sec), expensive (6 ini), easily avoided skill that does moderate damage. You almost never get 1 initiative back and 8 hits, since everyone dodges, blocks, reflects, absorbs. And now you plan to cut the damage from both the auto attack and the "Unload". Why reduce auto attack damage? It is already very weak for power builds.Can you change the skill so that the initiative is spent during the application of the skill, and not immediately? This will allow more flexibility to manage the stock of initiative. Or reduce the application time if you decide to reduce damage.P/P is only weapons set that doesn't have any viable defense. No stealth acsess, no evade, no block. "Black Powder" was nerfed. Another idea is to make "Black Powder" smoke cloud to block projectile, like DE 4 skill. P/P need some defense.

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