[FEB 25TH BALANCE PATCH] Examining the Feb 2020 balance one year later. What worked, what didn't.

[Master Ketsu.4569]

This is a thread that I wrote in pieces and mostly 6 month ago, and decided to post close to the anniversary of the Feb 25th mega-patch of 2020. The point of this thread is to showcase various errors in that patch that to date have not really been addressed, and have now evolved within the meta to result in some noticeable problems in the gameplay. This thread also exists to highlight some of the good ideas from the patch that proved successful in improving gameplay. Most of this also applies to WvW.

1. Downstate was never updated to match the changes in damage. ( Oversight )

A side effect of damage being reduced across the board is that downstate generally now lasts noticeably longer, and cleaving out a downed target can be a losing game in the presence of support specs. It seems that downstate was just never really accounted for when factoring in the DPS reductions, and this has had some serious repercussions.

-”Support Balls” where multiple support/aoe damage hybrid builds ball together can be all but unkillable if they work together, because they can just instantly revive each other. This has proven an effective strategy in AT s, and is an extremely easy strategy to execute.-Traits that help with resurrection are now a lot stronger and can at times pretty much instantly revive someone. Blood necro is especially strong at this.-People in general staying in downstate for much longer than they previously would seems to hurt the flow of the game much more than anything. It also greatly increases the “Team rallybot” problem, where a teamfight can be won not by who plays better but by which team brought more stomp+revive options. “Build wars” aren’t fun.

Possible fixes:-Consider reducing the HP pool of downstate, or the HP gained during revives by at least 10%-Consider nerfing traits/skills that aid in revival

2. Pet / Summon / Spirits HP and stats were never updated to match the changes in damage. ( Oversight )

“Pets” such as spirit summons, Necromancer minions, and other summoned “Adds” were never updated to reflect the changes in DPS. The most noticeable of this being their health pool. This means that builds that could previously be countered much easier by simply killing the adds ( Kalla Renegade and Minion master are two notable examples ) now take a lot longer to take down. It also results in various implementations of the “run away/sustain while pets play the game for me” ""“strategy”"" which are never good for the game.

Possible fixes:-Just reduce the base stats of all pets/summons to match the damage reduction from Feb 25th 2020, and the inherent counterplay to these types of builds will be restored. This one is a pretty easy solution, as none of these builds were especially effective pre-patch.

3. Poor visual tells and poor balancing of the "Cast time + Effect" tradeoff continues to be one of the biggest balance problems plaguing GW2 PvP.

One of the good things about the Feb25th patch was that it did focus on some level of the concept that "Big damage should come from big tells." Unfortunately, it just didn't do enough. This continues to be the biggest issue with GW2 PvP, and why so many builds and skills that would otherwise be fine feel extremely frustrating to play against or feel very gimmicky to play due to the fact that a large portion of the damage comes from abilities that have very low cast times and/or poor quality visual tells. There's also the problem of big AoE abilties casting as fast as single target abilities, while doing either the same or even more damage. The result of this is a lot of mindless "Stand on point, spam AoEs" builds continue to dominate in conquest.

A good example of this done right would be looking at the game SMITE by Hirez. All abilities have clear animations. You can easily understand what abilities are being used from a fair distance away. The vast majority of the most powerful abilities have a noticeable windup time to give players a chance to react. There are many reasons why Smite has a pro league and GW2 doesn't, and this one of them.

Possible fixes-This issue is pretty self explanatory. Less damage coming from invisible passive sources, more coming from clearly recognizable abilities. This is something the patch did right, but just didn't do enough.-Consider adding a system of glowing skill symbols for certain abilities that appear over a characters head, similar to what existed for many skills ( Such as Ressurection signet ) from GW1. These "extra animations" Could be toggled on/off in player options.-Certain visual tells actually get blocked by damage text depending on your settings. This is a considerable oversight. Consider allowing players better control of the UI so this doesn't happen as often.-Consider giving more AoE skills the "Shackling wave" Treatment: IE, increase the cast time by double, and then increase the damage proportionate to the cast time increase in PvE to make up for the DPS loss so the change doesn't hurt PvE-only players. Having tons of AoE abilities that can be quickly cast in succession due to all of them being <1s casting time is one of the biggest factors in GW2 that causes the game to feel like the gameplay is "spammy".-"Reveal on hit" instead of "Reveal on cast" as a stealth mechanic is extremely controversial.-Consider giving stability a noticeable visual tell. This boon is easily the most important buff in PvP, and yet it has no visual tell at all. This forces players to constantly check their targets status bar. As a basic example from smite, CC immune players gain a golden VFX to their model.

4. The problems behind Condition damage were not directly addressed.

When it comes to power damage, the Feb 25th patch generally hit the mark: Spike damage needed to come down, because oneshots were way too easy as a result of the previous two expansions massive powercreep. However when it comes to how condition damage works, the changes that were mostly the reduction of passive stacks and increase to cooldowns didn’t quite touch on what specifically causes condi builds to be oppressive in PvP.

To put it simply, the real issue with conditions is that they have three upsides to two downsides.Downsides: 1. Damage over time is inferior to instant damage 2. Can be removed/transferred.Upsides: 1. Damage is overall higher 2. Stat advantage ( Only 1 stat required -condition damage- VS 3 stats -Power, Precision, Ferocity- ) 3. Condi abilities generally have low visual tells and/or are heavily carried by invisible passives and AoE spam.

The Feb 25th patch didn’t address this disparity at all, and instead tried to mask it with random numbers nerfs and dartboard cooldown hits. The result is that condi builds don’t really feel like they have seen any improvement in gameplay over the last year at all, and still for the most part come down to build wars instead of skill.

Possible fixes:-To put it simply, either one of the upsides of condition damage should be reduced, or conditions need a new downside.-IMO the best solution is unfortunately the one that requires the most work: Condi skills should have the same level of animated tells and cast times as Power based skills. Getting hit with invisible passives and fast casting unblockable AoEs is probably what most people dislike about condi builds the most. In other words, see problem #3.-A band-aid solution is to increase the number of conditions removed by most condi clears by one. This isn’t the best solution by any means, but it's relatively easy to implement.

5. Not all CC s are created equal, and they haven’t really received the post-rework treatment that most expected. This has resulted in most CC skills being either a lot stronger or weaker than they should be

The basic change to CC in GW2 that came along Feb 25th is something I personally found favorable. Reducing stability and stunbreaks meant people actually had to actively try to avoid CC ( As opposed to just running around with 10 billion stacks of stab and never having to learn what the tells are for CC skills ), while removing the damage from CC also meant that CC now had to be used as a part of a skill combo than as a free kill when it lands.

That being said, the main oversight here is this rework made it so CC that takes a long time to cast and have huge animations are not nearly as strong as they once were, while CC that have poor visual tells or comes with additional benefits such as being multi-hit in a huge AoE, unblockable, or even unevadeable got a huge indirect buff. So yet again, see problem #3. This disparity has not been well addressed over the last year, leading more and more builds to gravitate towards CC spam of unevadeables and unblockables. Gale, Dragon’s Maw, Shock aura, Sleight of Hand, and Darkrazor's Daring are just a few example skills/mechanics that are now much stronger than they need to be. Meanwhile, certain elite CC with huge tells like PLB still seem underwhelming.

Possible fixes:-Consider removing the mechanic of unevadeable CCs from the game entirely. Unblockable CCs already perform the job of being able to break through block-spam, so unevadeable CCs don't really add anything to the game other than to further encourage the "Stand on point, spam AoEs" cheese-strategy. Unevadeables also severely lack counterplay and are thus just in general bad for the game.-Severely tone down CC s that have no visual tell, or give them a visual tell.-Consider “gain stability for 2s when you break a stun” a default mechanic of all stun breaks, similar to the trait “Glaring Resolve” minus the heal ( You only get the stab if you are actually CC-d when you use a stunbreak skill ). What this does is cut down on the effectiveness of CC spam, without the problems cause by “On demand” stability.

6. While sustain was brought down to match the damage reduction, Indirect sources of sustain really were not.

Many players warned before the patch went live that indirect sources of sustain such as barrier-spam and Necro lifeforce were not really being touched as much as they should. A year later, things have slightly improved, but this issue has overall proven to be a noticeable side effect. This can also result in a lot of builds that are better at bunkering than they should, because they gain a source of sustain that can be easily spammed. "Decap" builds are a solid example.

Possible fixes-Skills and traits that have no ( Or an extremely low ) ICD tend to be the biggest offenders.-Pay close attention to bunker builds and what enables them. Too much bunker leads to an extremely stale meta.-Continue to monitor indirect forms of sustain that add more health but don't technically "Heal".-New players tend to have problems with skills like Defiant stance ( Warrior ) or Infused light ( Rev ) that convert incoming damage into healing. While it's easy to tell these players to "gitgud", and in many ways it really is a L2P issue, it's also another case of problem #3. The visual tell on these skills just aren't good enough to match how serious of a skill they are, to the point where it is easier to notice them by looking at their status-bar than their player model. The stats ( Cooldown/Duration ) on these skills and how they function are fine, but consider adding a brighter glow to them to help the noobs out.

7. "Just increase the cooldown" didn't work at all.

See thread: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/97262/why-increasing-cooldowns-does-not-reduce-spam-and-can-even-make-spam-worse#latest

Most of what I warned about in that thread has come to pass. The most effective method to kill someone in the game right now is to +1 them. While this has always been true, it's far easier now since the chances of two players engaged in an on point 1v1 being out of cooldowns is noticeably higher. This is not some weird theorycrafting opinion, it is a mathematically demonstrable fact. If the average CD of skills is 20, and this is increased to 40, the odds of a person being out of CDs when they are +1ed is roughly 50% higher. All "Just increase the cooldown" as a primary balancing method does is encourage outnumbering as a primary strategy.

Possible fixes-Consider why a skill is overpowered before nerfing it. More often than not, the cooldown has little to do with it.-In the case of GW2 especially, most skills that ended up getting a cooldown nerf actually have a cast-time problem rather than a cooldown problem.-In other words, see problem #3.-Consider reverting most cooldown nerfs, replacing them with actual nerfs.

[Psycoprophet.8107]

Return damage to all cc's and adjust damage done based on cast tines, cd, ease of counter etc. Uve got one cc doing a single target knockdown and another pulsing knockdown for .....secs,the damage needs to be adjusted for each individual cc, blanket adjustments are lazy and just cause issues elsewhere.When adding damage back to cc remove their ability to crit.Increase healing signet slightly as its literally useless and never used now.Remove passive burns on guard, change the 6th bonus on trapper rune.Slight shave to core necro sustain, its still too high post feb.Ren sustain needs hammered and aoe's coverage reduced.Return dodge on Mirage so it feels less clunky for Mirage players but shave its evade frames elsewhere or else its evade potential will be too high.Lower the hp on Ranger vines further to match feb damage nerf.Explosive entrance needs a nerf as does flash bang.Revert the cost of Infiltrator’s arrow, remove the blind and lower range to 800.

[shadowpass.4236]

The february patch and the reworks leading up to it were still the worst things Anet has ever done to this game. This thread and the "https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/97262/why-increasing-cooldowns-does-not-reduce-spam-and-can-even-make-spam-worse#latest" one are both really good.

[Aktium.9506]

@Master Ketsu.4569 said:1. Downstate was never updated to match the changes in damage. ( Oversight )A side effect of damage being reduced across the board is that downstate generally now lasts noticeably longer, and cleaving out a downed target can be a losing gameThis was most definitely intended. Anet never wanted cleaving downed people to be as outright better than stomping as it became prior to the February patch last year. I think it's a healthy change. If a change does have to be made it should be something that keeps cleaving downed people somewhat ineffective but slows down the ressing itself like making the ress heal ramp up happen slower or something.

-Traits that help with resurrection are now a lot stronger and can at times pretty much instantly revive someone. Blood necro is especially strong at this.Are you aware that Transfusion and Lesser Well of Blood revives for just 1% each in PvP? You pretty much only take Ritual of Life these days so you get an auto heal on yourself and a ticking heal to help sustain you while you ress. It practically does nothing to actually speed up the ressing process. It just helps you tank cleave while you ress if anything. Same with Transfusion. If you slot it in a build, you just want the heal for sustain, although moving downed people to you can be good.

[Loboling.5293]

Since I don't agree with everything you said, but appreciate a new discussion on the topic, 1 year later.

Point 1 - Downstate was never updated to match the changes in damage. ( Oversight )I simply don't agree, and I think the balance between cleaving and stomping/rezzing is good.

However, one of your fixes touches on a real issue, is that some more work needs to go into balancing rez skills.

Point 2 - Pet / Summon / Spirits HP and stats were never updated to match the changes in damage. ( Oversight )

Again, I don't think any changes to pet or summon hp are required. I don't see the issue here.

Point 3 - Poor visual tells and poor balancing of the "Cast time + Effect" tradeoff continues to be one of the biggest balance problems plaguing GW2 PvP.I mostly agree with this. It's not as bad as when standing next to a scourge would 1 shot you on a rev if you just swapped into shiro, or when mirages would be nearly permanently evading while all their clones blow you up. I think the balance between visual commitment and perceived attack is better, but it still needs more work.

Point 4 - The problems behind Condition damage were not directly addressed.

I don't think this issue is separate from point 3. If skills that did lots of damage were obvious to the player, including condi attacks, players could respond more easily. Besides seeing a few very slight shaving to some skills. I think it's fine for condi damage to scale differently. Especially if they do the right thing and bring back damage with certain CC skills. Which will increase the burst of power builds. Skills like Prime Light Beam, Headbutt, Warrior Hammer 4, 5, etc. Skills that look impactful, should deal some damage. Even if it's a bit less than other skills. That would even out the damage disparity, and increase the pace of the games more, without making the gameplay more toxic.

Point 5 - Not all CC s are created equal, and they haven’t really received the post-rework treatment that most expected. This has resulted in most CC skills being either a lot stronger or weaker than they should be

Completely agree.

Point 6 - While sustain was brought down to match the damage reduction, Indirect sources of sustain really were not.

I mostly agree. I'm just worried A-Net would go overboard with nerfs. I really think they need to be improving the underdog builds that could keep them in check instead. If they could bring builds like berserker, or zerker staff ele into the mix, they would wreck bunkers. But they keep giving them nerfs like Meteor shower doing less damage on each attack, and remove the damage on Headbutt and bull charge. They need to be careful about nerfing the very builds that keep bunkers from getting out of control.

Point 7 - "Just increase the cooldown" didn't work at all.

I completely agree.

[Psycoprophet.8107]

Oh and pls don't forget to nerf reapers lich autos lmao what carry bull$hit, u destroy a brain dead reaper and they just lich for 5k or so autos and are carried so hard, gw2 shouldn't be promoting such gameplay obviously.Lastly as mentioned in op some classes are also carried by ridiculous downstates and insta rez should not exist either. These devs really need to Crack down on these brain dead promoting skills and traits if this game has any hope.

[Kleshr.7358]

Just tired of the bunker builds. If you down someone today, good luck stomping. There's so much CC and passive healing going around that actually finishing a kill is a luxury if there are 2 people.

[Multicolorhipster.9751]

@Sheobix.8796 said:Just tired of the bunker builds. If you down someone today, good luck stomping. There's so much CC and passive healing going around that actually finishing a kill is a luxury if there are 2 people.

It's true. I've been playing a CC-spam bunker warrior build and I tend to get the rez off on most of the people that go down.

Nerfing CC just lead to an overabundance of it. Why use it to combo when the CC itself does no damage, and the follow up skill only does a fraction of the damage it used to?Why go full zerks to do less damage than demolisher's used to do when I can load up on tank stats & 13 different CC skills, boop someone once, and force them to use their stunbreaks which take a good 5% of the entire match to recharge now?

Without a doubt, probably the single worst patch in PvP's history. The follow up patches haven't really been any better, essentially getting praise for solving issues the patch created months after the fact. Dug people into a hole, then gave them a shovel, now everything's good. ?Amazing. 10/10. It was a good step in the right direction.

[Master Ketsu.4569]

@Sheobix.8796 said:Just tired of the bunker builds. If you down someone today, good luck stomping. There's so much CC and passive healing going around that actually finishing a kill is a luxury if there are 2 people.

That's why I list it as a problem regardless of whether or not it was intended, failing to reduce the downstate pushed things towards bunker meta in a not very good way. Support specs that can instares can thus just build super tanky and yet force the other team to deal with them since they can res squishies over and over.

[Master Ketsu.4569]

@Loboling.5293 said:

Point 4 - The problems behind Condition damage were not directly addressed.

I don't think this issue is separate from point 3. If skills that did lots of damage were obvious to the player, including condi attacks, players could respond more easily. Besides seeing a few very slight shaving to some skills. I think it's fine for condi damage to scale differently. Especially if they do the right thing and bring back damage with certain CC skills. Which will increase the burst of power builds. Skills like Prime Light Beam, Headbutt, Warrior Hammer 4, 5, etc. Skills that look impactful, should deal some damage. Even if it's a bit less than other skills. That would even out the damage disparity, and increase the pace of the games more, without making the gameplay more toxic.

You aren't wrong.

I was mainly just trying to over-emphasize the problem of poor visual tells by showcasing various parts of the game where it's a big problem. Condi skills and traits in general have extremely poor quality animations and very low cast times when compared to their power counterparts. The fact that condi metas tend to get more hate than power metas is not a coincidence to this. It's an advantage that these abilities simply do not need to have, and adds nothing to the game other than to encourage spammy and unskillful gameplay.

Like right now in the meta, I would much rather fight a good power Reaper necro than a Vanilla condi necro, even though the Reaper is actually capable of far more damage and utility. The reason is simple: Core condi nec has bad visual tells, and this makes it less interactive to fight. Half the skills coming out of it look like some variant of barely discernible auto attack handwaves that are so small you can't even see them over the damage number graphics. Even GW1 curse necros had better animations than this when you account for the fact that they had a casting bar. It also causes the build to require much less skill than it should, since the animation quality is so poor the most effective strategy is thus to just 1234512345 as fast as you can and defeat your opponents via Gish-Gallop.

[otto.5684]

The 2020 Feb patch had even major fundamental issues. The game pacing. Risk and reward. AOE spam. CC spam. Constant removal of options. This is what happens when you throw away 7 years of tuning and think you know better, then lack the resources and competence necessary to fix the issues you created.

Spvp is a lost cause.

[Axl.8924]

You gotta be careful with nerfs if reaper gets nerfed in sustain and dmg and ends up not being a scary monster who chases you with their reaper shroud, it would ruin the elite spec entirely.

[Dadnir.5038]

@Axl.8924 said:You gotta be careful with nerfs if reaper gets nerfed in sustain and dmg and ends up not being a scary monster who chases you with their reaper shroud, it would ruin the elite spec entirely.

I doubt the thread is focused on nerfing the reaper.

I think some of the thread points are outdated, thought, a lot of tweaks have been made since 2020 feb patch that this thread don't seem to take into account.

The thread also ecchoed the common prejudices about things like downstate and condition damage. Which really are less about balance than simply disliking game mechanisms. Afterall, the optimal way to deal with a downed foe is and should be to stomp it while condition skills do have just as many tells as power skills does.

[Master Ketsu.4569]

@Dadnir.5038 said:

@"Axl.8924" said:You gotta be careful with nerfs if reaper gets nerfed in sustain and dmg and ends up not being a scary monster who chases you with their reaper shroud, it would ruin the elite spec entirely.

I doubt the thread is focused on nerfing the reaper.

And you would be correct. I consider Reaper to be the best designed spec that Necro has. Best animations, requires the most skill to play, most rewarding.

Reaper vs Corenec vs Scourge is actually one of the best examples of what I meant by the problem of condi abilities lacking good quality animations. You generally can't tell which ability a scourge is using unless you intentionally get hit by them, and the casting animation of most staff skills are the same "Hold staff wave hand" nonsense. Reaper on the other hand has clearly discernible animations for each skill.

IMO we really should just have an option for cast bars to put over players heads that can be toggled in options. GW1 had it and it increased the counterplay a ton. The idea for GW2 to not have cast bars was based around the idea of having animations, a design choice that WOULD be correct if the animations were actually well made. But they just aren't.

[Stand The Wall.6987]

everyone is so doom and gloom about the megapatch, but it was the lack of follow up that was the suicide move. the one shot meta was garbage and anyone who wants to return to it probably relied on cheap builds. sustain meta isn't much better but at least noobs can't roll some brain dead build and gank you with zero brain effort. now they run around and deal no damage, better then them getting kills imo.

[darren.1064]

Literally nothing worked. Thread solved

[Shao.7236]

Still standing by the fact Riposting Shadows and Empty Vessel were the worst thing ever created and made Revenant stupidly easy.

By the time you're done stunbreaking you'll have 15% anyway that of which makes the profession finally able to be stunlocked in 1v1's.

This patch has honestly done wonders and I have yet to be extremely disappointed. I am more satisfied by the complexity added rather than 2 seconds fights, that mind you can still happen.

Anything I try to play has some form of success and potential which before I couldn't have. It was a good patch and learning to adapt is the way to enjoy it.

The small stuff that still made their way around it will be dealt with afterwards.

[Arheundel.6451]

@Axl.8924 said:You gotta be careful with nerfs if reaper gets nerfed in sustain and dmg and ends up not being a scary monster who chases you with their reaper shroud, it would ruin the elite spec entirely.

People are asking to nerf that stupid gutling gun Elite 11111 spam, that would make things much more tolerable....or at the very least stop the elite from being affected by quickness, due to this boons you'll receive around 12k dmg within 1s

[Psycoprophet.8107]

@Stand The Wall.6987 said:everyone is so doom and gloom about the megapatch, but it was the lack of follow up that was the suicide move. the one shot meta was garbage and anyone who wants to return to it probably relied on cheap builds. sustain meta isn't much better but at least noobs can't roll some brain dead build and gank you with zero brain effort. now they run around and deal no damage, better then them getting kills imo.

So its better now if bust type specs or builds that one shot run around doing no damage than doing a appropriate damage for a burst spec, or its better now there's braindead builds like core necro,burn guard/trap dh etc? I mean atleast pre feb u saw more classes represented, now every match is multiple guards/dh, necros, rens and holo's with the rest spattered here and there, was definitely better pre feb imo. Most it seems agree as post feb pvp lost even more players at a faster rate. Had they did proper follow up then who knows maybe more would stayed.

[Arheundel.6451]

@"Shao.7236" said:Still standing by the fact Riposting Shadows and Empty Vessel were the worst thing ever created and made Revenant stupidly easy.

By the time you're done stunbreaking you'll have 15% anyway that of which makes the profession finally able to be stunlocked in 1v1's.

This patch has honestly done wonders and I have yet to be extremely disappointed. I am more satisfied by the complexity added rather than 2 seconds fights, that mind you can still happen.

Anything I try to play has some form of success and potential which before I couldn't have. It was a good patch and learning to adapt is the way to enjoy it.

The small stuff that still made their way around it will be dealt with afterwards.

The patch was a mess due to the actual process behind it, they just applied numerical changes without any regard for each class raw stats and basic gameplay, EX: a flat number reduction in healing will affect a class like ele differently from say a thief or mesmer or necro which have access to better inbuilt defensive mechanics and don't rely on heal burst to stay alive, this is the reason builds disappear.

When Anet talks about sustain nerfs they just go around nerfing raw numbers, professions like ele mostly and guardian will ofc suffer the most but other professions with access to evades, blocks and stealth won't care at all for the so called "sustain nerfs"

A balance patch means numerical AND mechanical changes necessary to reach a state of balance between professions, when you go and nerf raw healing number what about : block and reflection uptime? barrier spam? stealth and clones? shroud generation? evades rotations?

They do the same thing with dmg, they go and nerf dmg across the board but...some skills will still have 1+ cast time plus after cast and becoming worthless, other sources of dmg will now have just lower dmg but will still be insta cast.........How can we consider that balance?

[Leonidrex.5649]

lol pre-feb even glass cannon fights usually took ~20s when both parties were on equal level, meanwhile now I have fights where I zone out, and forget to dodge anything for 1min and still dont die, cuz you know, everyone is a bunker since going for damage is a risk with no reward.Supports in gw2 are done poorly, in most games supports are REALLY easy to kill and have to be defended since they bring massive value with damage buffs, heals and utility. But in gw2 supports are absolute fucking un-killable bunkers, like warrior with its 26k hp and 2,4k armor. Legit 2x effective HP of dps classes with more on demand defensive skills to boot. If you dont focus them you cant kill anything since they keep healing and then drop an insta-rez but if you focus them you cant kill them since they are fucking bunkers, and if there are 2 fucking supports combined then fuck me.Legit boredom incarnate, for all the faults off DH its the only thing that can kill those fucking things.And IMO we need more damage in the game, and less sustain.

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

We lost intense fast paced fights for mindless slogs where you just try to out rotate your opponent and eventually land a cc burst when they are out of cds, and thats only if its not a stalemate. Yeah there were issues before, but the feb patch created more problems than it fixed.

[Dadnir.5038]

@Arheundel.6451 said:EX: a flat number reduction in healing will affect a class like ele differently from say a thief or mesmer or necro which have access to better inbuilt defensive mechanics and don't rely on heal burst to stay alive, this is the reason builds disappear.

Don't you think that's an heavily biased argument you got there? Just from core and without even including traits, elementalist got the ability to equip defensive mean amongst:

• invuln (Obsidian flesh, mist form, fortify)
• block (arcane shield)
• instant mobility often coupled with dodge frame (lightning flash, burning speed, burning retreat, Lightning leap, Fiery whirl, fiery rush, earthen rush, updraft)
• Reflect/block missiles (magnetic aura, magnetic surge, magnetic wave, ring of earth, swirling wind)
• Without forgetting about barrier access (crippling shield, stone shift, magnetic shield), boons (protection, vigor, stability), conditions (weakness, blind, chill, cripple), aura (frost aura), hard CCs... etc.
• Even elementalist's ability to condi cleanse options are underestimated granted that at any given moment you can have up to 4 cleansing skills sloted (Ice elemental's crashing wave, cleansing fire, ether renewal, cleansing wave, magnetic wave, healing rain)

I doubt there is another core profession with this many active defense skills and effects available in game, maybe elementalist relying on heal burst isn't it's only option to stay alive. I would say that the reason build disappear is often narrowmindness, people focusing on a single aspect that proved to work well at a moment and forgetting that there is many other aspects that only wait to be exploited.

NB.: Traitlines and elite specs only had more to this list.

[Axl.8924]

@Arheundel.6451 said:

@Axl.8924 said:You gotta be careful with nerfs if reaper gets nerfed in sustain and dmg and ends up not being a scary monster who chases you with their reaper shroud, it would ruin the elite spec entirely.

People are asking to nerf that stupid gutling gun Elite 11111 spam, that would make things much more tolerable....or at the very least stop the elite from being affected by quickness, due to this boons you'll receive around 12k dmg within 1s

I don-t know if its truly necessary or not considering a few things: They can be kited and are very slow. If the damage was nerfed by lets say 50-70% on 1 they would be a joke in reaper shroud.

[Lucentfir.7430]

@"Stand The Wall.6987" said:everyone is so doom and gloom about the megapatch, but it was the lack of follow up that was the suicide move. the one shot meta was garbage and anyone who wants to return to it probably relied on cheap builds. sustain meta isn't much better but at least noobs can't roll some brain dead build and gank you with zero brain effort. now they run around and deal no damage, better then them getting kills imo.

It was naïve to think Anet would follow up appropriately given their track record for good execution and delivery. Even more so with how much they care and support the PvP activity side of the game. Everyone who knows Anet well, already knew it was going to be bad and there were going to be issues. Lazy blanket changes is what we got instead of deep dive class/spec tuning, and you can't tell me otherwise or disprove it when there's an entire traitline and traits that were broken intentionally with 5 minute ICDs that have a sticky note with a "will fix later" from over a year ago.

Funny thing talking about noobs, one in a bunker build/meta can make a bunch of severe mistakes and still be alive. Though a noob in a burst build/meta, they'll kill people easier , but crumbles under pressure and panic because all s/he knows is how to execute damage, and they'll make some really bad mistakes good players can capitalize on. Punishing players for making critical errors/mistakes is a rewarding factor of good pvp, especially in a game with fluid action combat like Gw2's.