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Balance Patch Preview - WvW


Cal Cohen.2358

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@"Taylan.2187" said:Can't believe people are so panicky over these changes. Apparently the game will "finally" die for the 971389th time. Guild Wars 2 is Palawa Joko!

I'm really happy that TTK will increase, first of all. The extremely fast-paced fights in competitive game modes makes it feel like it's impossible to learn fighting strategically unless you have no life and play the game 8 hours a day. Some of us are adults with full-time jobs and still want to be able to learn some competitive gameplay, you know. Can't learn from my mistakes in a fight if it takes a skilled player 5 seconds to kill me. After 2 seconds I'll be spamming my stun breaks, condi clears and heals like crazy because otherwise I won't even last for those 5 seconds...

Taking away the damage of hard-CC skills makes sense also. Clear separation of damage skills and CC skills means less skill spam and more strategic thinking. So even as a mediocre player you'll have an edge over someone who just face-rolls. Yay for having fewer builds in the game that allow the player to spam skills mindlessly and beat players who play more challenging builds and just haven't mastered them yet. (I'm a big thief fan for instance, and I was shocked to see how much other classes can just face-roll when I tried out some more.)

The 90s to 300s cooldown increases make me wonder whether those skills shouldn't be changed completely. Maybe they will be swapped out slowly over further patches. I guess a powerful passive skill that can only trigger every 5 minutes is still acceptable for the time being, until the devs have enough time to replace them with active skills.

So all in all, I say THANK YOU! Excited about the patches to come.

+1

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Catapulting thru a door, killing the baddies outside without damaging the door yourself.........50 man zerg just vanished better than a Marine Sniper............Thief moves faster than superman on meth.................They're pushing..........nvm it was just 30 clones from 3 mezmers............

these are the realistic parts of the game we should ignore..........

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My main reaction (and this goes for PvP as well) is that toning down both damage and healing might have unintended consequences. To illustrate: suppose right now build A vs. build B leads to build A winning in about 30 seconds. With less damage and less healing, it might take build A 60 seconds to win. But taking twice as long might mean build A does not win at all: for example, build B can run to NPCs in WvW, or teammates have more time to come and assist in PvP. If this goes through, it should get harder for a thief to disengage from a fight and use its superior mobility to collapse on a duel on the other side of the map, scoring a kill before the opposing support can get there.

Another thing to note is that PvP matches last for like 15 minutes. Any skill that has a 300s cooldown is only ever going to be used at most two times a match. That's pretty damn severe.

Overall I'm apprehensive for the changes, they might not be completely bad, but they're scary. Please make sure to playtest!

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Why? What lead to this massive power and sustain nerf? Condi is already to toxic joke of wvw and spvp. So you want eveyone just to play condi and die from it? Closing doors and leaving a window open was the old policy, I see nothing but a dead end with this release. If your mass nerfing is the bases to repack and sell us a new expansion than that's okay.

JUST TELL US YOU ARE GIVING US A NEW EXPANSION AND HAD TO NERF SOME NUMBERS!!! That's kinda okay then! :)

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@Waisenpai.6028 said:Why? What lead to this massive power and sustain nerf? Condi is already to toxic joke of wvw and spvp. So you want eveyone just to play condi and die from it? Closing doors and leaving a window open was the old policy, I see nothing but a dead end with this release. If your mass nerfing is the bases to repack and sell us a new expansion than that's okay.

JUST TELL US YOU ARE GIVING US A NEW EXPANSION AND HAD TO NERF SOME NUMBERS!!! That's kinda okay then! :)

I would hate to see an expansion based off of these changes because its basically HoT all over again except in more depressing and worse way. Its just a way of saying maintenance mode or either deleting wvw altogether.

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@Stand The Wall.6987 said:they nerfed overall condi stacks as well.

But does it rly matter in a full blob scenario? 30 or 60 stacks of any condi will kill you. If everybody runs condi and everybody does 1 stack of bleed or burn or poison etc, it will kill you, doesnt matter if they each apply 1 or 2 stacks with each attack.

The biggest concerns i have for zergs are the stab nerfs, bringing us back to pirateship, with condi clear nerfs getting us also to condi meta.

For smallscale my bigest concern is stealth, sinve it has been barely touched and with lowered dmg will be even harder to deal with. If you cant burst them down, they will just reset with stealth.

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@"Waisenpai.6028" smh no! they did still not give WvW even its share of PoF-content... how horrible would a new expansion now?we'll just get the condi bunker meta back, once more it seems. the only "idea from the forums" i saw they've used is "make 3-linked servers" to fill the maps up. nice, now we have more people on the maps that can get bored of not getting new stuff together :]

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There have been so many changes to the classes I enjoy playing in wvw. I quit playing guard because of all the changes and switched to another class and have been playing a build I have been happy with for a long time. Now you are messing with the ONLY class I will play in wvw. I almost exclusively play wvw and would like to say "wait and see" with these newest changes but I may finally quit the game if these turn out how I think they are going to.

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With regard to the Instant/Passive Traits Cool Down increase, examples such as Warrior's Defy Pain, The Last Stand, Ranger's Stone Form and Shared Anguish, and Guardian's Hunter's Determination while I do think it's a great idea to push rewarding good timing and punishing poor timing on use of skills all of these type of traits aren't generally controlled by the players as to when they trigger and in making the Cool Down so high (300 seconds = 5 minutes) this basically removes the usefulness of these in any average PvP setting ( the match is either generally decided by the time these cool downs would end) , if after due consideration it is still felt that the cool down needs to increased place it at 120 seconds versus the 300 seconds so as to allow these traits to still have some bearing in the PvP setting.

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@RedBaron.6058 said:Anyway, when thinking about reducing the impact of damage in this game, increasing base HP and toughness across all 9 classes seems way simpler than changing hundreds of skills...just my 2 cents.

Basically, these intended changes are throwing away more than 7 years of constant balancing by changing almost everything at the same time...

Even simpler, change damage calculations themselves so players do 1/3 of the damage, and 1/5 of the healing they have been doing.

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any cooldown longer than 90 sec, 2 min at most, in a PvP setting is an insult, imho. you may as well remove it from the game, it is completely asinine to trait a skill I can use once, maybe twice in a match, or once every 2 or 3 wvw pushes.
The use of 5 min CD's, imho, shows a complete disconnect from those who play these modes regularly. If you want the skill gone then delete it, but this is an insult

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@Kilamanjaro.2705 said:any cooldown longer than 90 sec, 2 min at most, in a PvP setting is an insult, imho. you may as well remove it from the game, it is completely asinine to trait a skill I can use once, maybe twice in a match, or once every 2 or 3 wvw pushes.

The use of 5 min CD's, imho, shows a complete disconnect from those who play these modes regularly. If you want the skill gone then delete it, but this is an insult

They Smiter's Boon'ed them

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@"Virdo.1540" said:SO, when will the condis be nerfed?

They are atm equally strong to power and if power specs die out, condis will be overpowered², since classes can put up 20-30stacks of condis within secondsThey are "strong" because of the ability to just barely outsustain todays roflstomp power damage when its < 3 in combat and the enemy not bringing cleanses, not because of damage.

With sustain skills and heals heavily nerfed and people predicting a bunker meta... you do the math.

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@apharma.3741 said:

@apharma.3741 said:If you think they do not cleanse or provide condition immunity (not registered in arc fyi) through correct application of resistance then you must be playing with your eyes closed and your brain off. It won't be the top 3 cleansing players but below that when played by people who use skills they make up a significant part of a groups cleansing and double firebrand played by anyone who isn't a potato can more than keep up with condition application.

Sure Chap 4 is nice and all for resistance. But we weren't talking about resistance, we were talking about cleansing. Resistance can be corrupted and counter-played, cleansing can not, which Firebrand is so low cleansing in comparison to say a tempest or a scrapper.

Think of it this way... If you are fighting a condi-blob, you are fighting against corruption...where resistance will get stripped instantly and turned into a condition that you need to cleanse... If you think firebrand is what's holding that play-style at bay, then i don't know what to tell you.

2 things.
  1. Pulsing 1s resistance is as good as cleansing. Do you know why?
    Because you get to not suffer the penalties of the conditions.
    This is honestly not a basic concept that should need explaining. Whether you permanently remove the condition or differ it's effects to a period of time where the enemy cannot benefit from it's application is the same thing in effect.
  2. You're comparing FB built for healing to 2 class/build combinations that are set up to cleanse primarily and built from the ground up to do so. FB outheals both these classes or should if not played by a brain damaged monkey, however we don't turn round and ignore the amount of healing tempest and scrapper both contribute to the group simply because they come behind FB. Likewise we shouldn't ignore the amount of cleanses FB contributes and it can contribute more if it drops MI in favour of group cleanses like purging flames which will depend on how much they nerf healing on MI etc. I would still expect FB to come further down the cleanse list though because 10 target literally doubles your cleansing power however I don't think it would be needed.

You clearly don't have arcdps up or you're not asking your guildies how much they heal man. scrapper and tempest are putting out 2x the cleansing and 2.5x the healing fb does very consistently. Get with the times lol

and as for 'no one uses condi builds because cleansing is too high'...

I read it, then clicked the video, saw it was N/A.

Of course, i forgot how much better the EU players are!

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@"Dawdler.8521" said:TL;DR none of us have any idea what's going to happen in practice, on the field. The changes are just that many and that extreme it changes every class interaction in combat.lol yeah, honestly this too.

Personally, I am mostly worried about these ever increasing cooldowns in order to "balance" skills (in particular the ridiculous 90->300s) and they are just making the combat unfun. Its not just this patch, it's been going on for a while. GW2 at its best is quick play-counterplay. The enemy pops a skill, you dodge. You pop a skill, the enemy block. The enemy stealth, you AoE knockdown. I'm all for skills doing less things at once and damage being weaker but the cooldowns... man...If I understand the patch note correctly, those features with a 300s cooldown are all passive ones that are automatically instead of manually triggered though. They do not make up the "play-counterplay" dynamic you described in the comment, if not hinders it. I'd argue that, by restricting such features, players are pushed to do more manual response and the dynamic would become even more like how you'd prefer.

@jakolasku.4971 said:

@Virtuality.8351 said:Will this leave Expertise some potential, for that the attribute contributes more the higher the base durations are, or will it be completely neglected as how it is at the moment, due to constant cleansing and possibly Resistance, which might just start to prevail in response to the shift to condition pressure, or
just the sheer enhanced baseline duration making further investment pointless
? Will the attribute become actually viable?

Expertise becomes worse the longer the base duration of the condition is due to a higher likelihood of getting cleansed. It works better for condition bursts.Yeah...totally agreed. Still, I'd really like to see this attribute become actually viable in the competitive scene...thought that would require a severe overall decrease in both condition duration and cleansing, which is completely contradict where the developers are going right now and just would not happen.

@"Swagger.1459" said:My thoughts are... post your feedback in the main feedback thread so it’s more orderly for the devs to read said feedback.The content of this post was not mean to be addressed to the developer. I do, however, have something to feedback to the developers and have written a
under the official thread, in case you might be interested.

@"apharma.3741" said:...having said that if you're already dying on first push you're still going to die first push because it's sheer numbers and even a 30% damage reduction across the board isn't going to save you.Agreed. I was of course not advocating the shift toward glass cannons in the OP in case I left that impression.Roaming is affected too much at the moment by warclaw, longer fights = more chance of add ins which makes "roamers" perform worse especially with more warclaws chasing them while they can't escape. I doubt much will change here except small scale group fights might be more enjoyable till people get overwhelmed by numbers.You described it way better than I did.

attribute allocation
nope, they are making condis no longer burst but be over time like they were meant to be. problem is their cds are the same so they will be worthless in zerg fights, so nothings changed there.Also cleansing...I admit I really can't tell for sure on this one.people will still beat the 3k armor max drum so nothing will change there either.That true though lol

@subversiontwo.7501 said:Nice thread, good effort. I blurted out my first reaction in the announcement thread. I don't have anything more to add for now. I like the summary here though.Thanks <3

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@Cal Cohen.2358 said:

Revenant

Hammer

  • Hammer Bolt: Reduced power coefficient from 0.95 to 0.633
  • Coalescence of Ruin: Increased cooldown from 4 seconds to 10 seconds
  • Phase Smash: Reduced power coefficient from 1.75 to 1.36. Increased cooldown from 8 seconds to 12 seconds
  • Drop the Hammer: Reduced power coefficient from 1.5 to 0.01

I cannot help but wonder what exactly the identity of Hammer for Revenant is. With these changes implemented It'd completely underperform in all game modes.

Maybe go with the Jalis/Dwarf theme and make it the ultimate weapon of choice in terms of sustain for Revenant?

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Good analysis and good foresight. My thoughts are somewhat same in some cases but some of these arguments are new to me and really good. You put a good effort OP and I thank you for that.

My only hope is that the balance patch will have more than what they put into forums.

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This "Endure Pain: Increased cooldown from 30 seconds to 40 seconds. Increased duration from 2 seconds to 3 seconds" has to be a mistake. The skill 'Endure Pain' does 4 seconds of invulnerability and 5 seconds if traited with Defensive Grand master trait 'Last Stand'.

Please make the following change to 'Endure Pain': Increased cooldown from 30 seconds to 40 seconds. Decreased duration from 4 seconds to 2 seconds, and disables all weapon and utility skills while under the effects of Endure Pain.

We might just see an end to a core part of the meta exploit god mode warriors love making as warriors will no longer be able to offset their lack of defensive gear to a passive botted block (heal on block from Superior Rune of the Defender) -> invulnerability -> block (heal on block from Superior Rune of the Defender) -> invulnerability -> block (heal on block from Superior Rune of the Defender) combo.

Bad enough the heal on might exploit.

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@Jski.6180 said:

@"primatos.5413" said:Maybe .. wait til patch drops .. then try how this all is working out .. think .. give feedback ..

This is the same Anet once they do something they dont go back. You can only stop them before the fact and it has helped to give them feed back on the ideal of the update it self as they "fixed" things before the full out come of the patch. So just keeping your head down and hoping it will work out dose not work for GW2.

are you a smoothbrain? :)

"This patch is unusual in that it’s more about establishing a new paradigm than it is a regular balance update, and the result is a giant set of changes. Moving forward with competitive balance, we want to make smaller adjustments more often. The specific cadence for balance will always depend on our overall release schedule, but ideally it will be closer to every 4-6 weeks, while still having the opportunity to make minor tweaks outside of the regular balance update. The goal here is to have better flexibility to fix problems in a timely manner."

Anyone who doesnt see that wvw is totally power/utility crept is ** It should be obvious to anyone who played since core... or just switched to spvp for a while, since even there the game was less power crept than in wvw. This balance update is a first step into the right direection. btw they nerfing condi output/burst also. If it turns out that there are builds that are completely broken they will be hotfixed.Dude how can you be so pessimistic. Finally wvw gets some love it deserves.WTF seriously I dont get it to all the wvwer shitting on this balance update. Do you hate yourselfs??

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@"xDudisx.5914" said:

-Passive procs going to 300s. I support nerfing passive procs, but 5 minutes is too long of a cooldown for anyone to even consider using a trait. I believe that 180s would more fair.

-Mirage having only 50 endurance. I hate the current traillblazer scepter staff mirage that is god tier and requires nearly no skill to play, but that does not mean we should destroy the entire specialization. The nerfs to scepter #2 cd, staff #2 and #3, blink cd, decoy cd and the removal of stun break on evade are already enough to balance the class.

These two things really struck me as well. I have long been in favor of removing passives since it is the epitome of "no skill required" play. But I agree, a 5 minute cooldown will essentially make the traits empty space. They should've been removed and replaced with something else long ago, and with the reduction of power damage across the board, I think its time. As far as the one-dodge-mirage, it will destroy the elite specialization. Condition mirage has been a blight on the game modes for far too long, but instead of nerfing an aspect of the spec that hurts all builds, they need to focus on the main problem which imo is infinite horizon. It would require more work on their part, but its work that should be done. The entire class has devolved into being based around that trait, even power builds. It needs to go, and ambush skills need to be made more impactful to compensate.

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