4/6 PvP Balance

[Cal Cohen.2358]

Hi everyone,

Tomorrow’s release will include a few PvP balance changes, some of which we discussed in our post two weeks ago. We’re back again to provide some context behind these upcoming changes. We’re still evaluating the impact of the previous PvP balance update, but at the end of this post we’ll talk about a few areas we’re keeping an eye on for future updates.

4/6 Changes to Build Items and Support Heals

• Removed Mender Amulet from the PvP Build panel.
• Removed Marshal Amulet from the PvP Build panel.
• Added Sigil of Transference to the PvP Build panel. In PvP, this sigil grants a 20% increase in outgoing healing effectiveness.
• Elemental Bastion (Tempest): Increased heal scaling from 0.4125 to 0.55 in PvP only.
• Selfless Daring (Guardian): Increased heal scaling from 0.6 to 0.9 in PvP only.
• Call of Valor (Warrior): Increased barrier attribute scaling from 0.5 to 0.82 in PvP only.

As previously discussed, we removed Mender and Marshal amulets from PvP and added Sigil of Transference to compensate for the reduction of allied healing to support builds. While Marshal is currently overshadowed by Mender and not as much of a problem, we wanted Transference to be powerful, and we were concerned with how high it could push outgoing healing in combination with a 1000 healing power amulet for builds that are less reliant on the extra health that Mender provides.

Removing Mender amulet serves 2 purposes: it forces high-sustain side node builds into more aggressive amulets, and reduces the self-sustain of support builds. Mender amulet side noders are much more prone to stalemating fights and generally slowing down the pace of the game. Similarly, by reducing the self-sustain of support builds, we hope to see an increase in kill potential in fights and a general increase to overall pace. We still want support builds to be able to support their allies well, and targeting their self-sustain lets us keep a lot of their other skills at the same power level.

Our goal with Sigil of Transference is to keep support healing to allies around the same level that it currently is with Mender. Elemental Bastion, Selfless Daring, and Call of Valor stood out as three sources primarily used by support builds that are most heavily impacted by the removal of Mender, and so we’ve preemptively bumped up the healing coefficients to bring their allied healing with Avatar amulet and Sigil of Transference closer to where it is currently. Looking over other allied heals, some sources will heal for a bit more than they currently do with Mender and some will heal for a bit less, but overall output should be similar. We’ll keep a close eye on healing values as the meta develops without Mender and will make further adjustments as necessary.

4/6 Changes to Scourge

• Sand Cascade: Reduced barrier attribute scaling from 1.0488 to 0.77 in PvP only.
• Sand Flare: Reduced barrier attribute scaling from 0.75 to 0.45 in PvP only.
• Desert Empowerment: Reduced barrier attribute scaling from 0.77 to 0.62 in PvP only.
• Harbinger Shroud: Reduced barrier attribute scaling on detonation from 2.0 to 1.65 in PvP only.
• Transfusion: Reduced pulse heal scaling from 0.1 to 0.08 in PvP only, when the Scourge specialization is equipped.

Scourge has continued to show strong results in both ranked play and automated tournaments, providing strong defense to itself and allies through barrier generation and healing while also creating a good amount of pressure through boon removal and damage. While Scourge sustain is affected by the removal of Mender amulet, given the current power level of the build we were concerned that the move to Avatar amulet alone wouldn’t be enough to bring it in line, so we’ve made additional shaves to the healing power coefficients of some of Scourge’s barrier generation and Transfusion.

Feed from Corruption is the most notable omission from this list. It’s a very powerful trait, granting Scourge access to a wide range of boons in potentially large quantities to enhance both its defensive and offensive potential. We are considering reducing some of the stronger boon applications in a future update, but we want to see how the removal of Mender and the reductions to healing and barrier coefficients play out first.

Looking AheadWe’ll be evaluating the impact of tomorrow’s changes in addition to the recent March update on the side node meta and support builds. We still want dedicated support builds to be a viable option, and we’ll be paying close attention to how the meta develops following the removal of Mender and the addition of Transference.

Sigil of Transference has the potential to enable stronger healing from non-support builds that can afford to run Avatar or Sage amulet and may end up being too powerful for an individual sigil. We’re not opposed to enabling this type of build, but if they end up pushing dedicated supports completely out of the meta then we may reduce the outgoing healing granted by Transference and roll more outgoing healing into support traits or support runes to create a greater tradeoff for non-supports.

We’ve also considered the possibility that moving support builds from Mender to Avatar amulet could end up making them too squishy due to the reduction in self-healing. This is something that we’ll evaluate on a case-by-case basis, but we’re prepared to make further adjustments as necessary to find the right balance between squishiness and support power. This could involve buffs to more selfish survivability skills, or possibly further increasing outgoing support potential to justify the level of vulnerability.

That’s all we have for today. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you in the mists!

-The Systems Team

[Kuma.1503]

If we're buffing supports to compensate for mender's removal, can we also get the 50% nerf on Medical Dispersion Field reverted?

Being forced into avatar is a big nerf to heal scrapper since self healing = allied healing.

Also keep Marshal.

Swap stats to

1000 Power1000 Precison500 Healing Power500 Condition Damage.

[mixxed.5862]

Nice, happy easter to you, too!Praise CMC \o/

[Megametzler.5729]

Even though I don't agree with all the changes, the communication and the frequency of adjustments is greatly appreciated!

[mistsim.2748]

Bro, did you forget about Druid? You gutted his healing output, and 20% increased heals to allies is nothing man.

Anyway, glad to see the frequent changes.

[xXxNikiGoesWildxXx.3678]

Druid use to be pure support and i see no changes for druid. There is only tempest-warrior-guardian.

[mixxed.5862]

@mistsim.2748 said:Bro, did you forget about Druid? You gutted his healing output, and 20% increased heals to allies is nothing man.

Anyway, glad to see the frequent changes.

Leaves room to buff it into something other than the lame sidenode decap role later.

[mistsim.2748]

@Svez Poizon XD.5268 said:Druid use to be pure support and i see no changes for druid. There is only tempest-warrior-guardian.

I think it's time to dust off my Sage Druid. Might be decent.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

@mixxed.5862 said:

@"mistsim.2748" said:Bro, did you forget about Druid? You gutted his healing output, and 20% increased heals to allies is nothing man.

Anyway, glad to see the frequent changes.

Leaves room to buff it into something other than the lame sidenode decap role later.

Yeah we're 9 years in. No one wants to wait 2 years for the "possibility" that a completely ruined class might get attention to become semi-viable.

Druid had received nerfs to the actual skills/traits rather than it being handled with amulet removal. So when they remove Mender/Marshal to tend to 1 build on Scourge rather than nerfing the Scourge's actual traits/skill in question, Druid CA kit and the entire Druid specialization line will be completely useless outside of Ancient seeds. I mean USELESS capital and bolded.

Removing Mender/Marshal is not the way to go about this at all. 100% guarantee you it's going to force the stalest most narrow meta we've ever seen x10.

Have you been to wvw lately where there are still options for making different kinds of builds? Yeah it's amazingly fun. Going in there and messing around will remind you of how much more fun the game is when there are options to do different things.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

Low and behold, what did i say would happen?

[Master Ketsu.4569]

Removed Mender Amulet from the PvP Build panel.Removed Marshal Amulet from the PvP Build panel.Added Sigil of Transference to the PvP Build panel. In PvP, this sigil grants a 20% increase in outgoing healing effectiveness.

This is a very good change.

A lot of people were concerned that removing Menders from the game meant the end of support as a role, but with that sigil should allow supports to still exist -likely using Avatar- but just fixes the problem of supports also being able to Bunker and situationally 1v1.

[Master Ketsu.4569]

@Kuma.1503 said:If we're buffing supports to compensate for mender's removal, can we also get the 50% nerf on Medical Dispersion Field reverted?

Being forced into avatar is a big nerf to heal scrapper since self healing = allied healing.

Also keep Marshal.

Swap stats to

1000 Power1000 Precison500 Healing Power500 Condition Damage.

They would have to just make a new amulet for this to exist, since Marshals unlike Mender is also available to PvE and changing the stats of existing PvE gear is a nightmare.

[Kuma.1503]

I should stress, I do not agree with the decision to remove mender amulet There are better ways to go about this, but I know these changes are most likely locked in and guaranteed to ship at this point so I say we use this opportunity to address some struggling support builds that have fallen by the wayside.

That does not mean talking about the option of buffing them in the future after more nerfs go out. My god, we've had enough of that. We're still waiting on the possibility of getting the 300 sec cooldown traits reworked. I mean put the nerf bat aside (burn it if you have to), sit down, and really address the builds that are negatively impacted by the change.

On a more positive note, I really do appreciate the communication. It's a welcome change of pace.

[Kuma.1503]

@"Master Ketsu.4569" said:They would have to just make a new amulet for this to exist, since Marshals unlike Mender is also available to PvE and changing the stats of existing PvE gear is a nightmare.

PvP Stats differing from PvE is nothing new. All we're doing is swapping the weight of stats around.

It'll still be less jarring than the difference between Wanderer Stats and Wanderer amulet

[Avatar.3568]

Druid OP !!

[bianco.4150]

CMC you are very appreciated , thanks for your great work.

[mixxed.5862]

@Trevor Boyer.6524 said:

@mixxed.5862 said:

@"mistsim.2748" said:Bro, did you forget about Druid? You gutted his healing output, and 20% increased heals to allies is nothing man.

Anyway, glad to see the frequent changes.

Leaves room to buff it into something other than the lame sidenode decap role later.

Yeah we're 9 years in. No one wants to wait 2 years for the "possibility" that a completely ruined class might get attention to become semi-viable.

Druid had received nerfs to the actual skills/traits rather than it being handled with amulet removal. So when they remove Mender/Marshal to tend to 1 build on Scourge rather than nerfing the Scourge's actual traits/skill in question, Druid CA kit and the entire Druid specialization line will be completely useless outside of Ancient seeds. I mean

USELESS

capital and bolded.

Removing Mender/Marshal is not the way to go about this at all. 100% guarantee you it's going to force the stalest most narrow meta we've ever seen x10.

Have you been to wvw lately where there are still options for making different kinds of builds? Yeah it's amazingly fun. Going in there and messing around will remind you of how much more fun the game is when there are options to do different things.

So you really enjoyed playing the current druid build that much?

[Kolzar.9567]

@"JusticeRetroHunter.7684" said:Low and behold, what did i say would happen?

Let me start by saying currently have no opinion on the change, but whilst trying to form one, I believe it is useful to have the correct math.I am not understanding the math in the second post you quoted. As you noted given a base heal of 442, a heal of 1200 with menders means the sum of your healing multipliers is at ~1.61 (I am not sure having modifiers of %60 outgoing healing falls into whether high or low, if someone has data on this it will be greatly appreciated), adding 0.2 with the new sigil and any amulet with 500 healing (which still exist) would yield an outgoing heal of 5921.81~1075, a loss of 125 healing, or in relative terms a loss of less than 10%. Admittedly frost bow is just one example you picked, but it doesn't seem that large of a change, especially if the goal is to shave outgoing healing say around 10%-15% except a few targeted skills that had their coefficients changed (increased or decreased respectively) Overall it seems grossly misguided to require a 100% sigil, given the sum of healing multipliers is used at the tail end of the formula:Total healing done = [(mechanic-specific base healing) + (Healing Power) (mechanic-specific coefficient)] * (sum of healing multipliers)Of course this could be readily verified as a total if there was a complete list of healing coefficients somewhere, but I couldn't find a list of coefficients in wiki without having to click through each healing skill individually.

As a side note, while the removal of an amulet is by default reducing the set of feasible (not necessarily viable) alternatives a player can choose, the addition of the sigil makes the napkin math a little unclear as well, previously there were 18 amulets and 25 sigils, leading to 450 feasible (again not necessarily viable) combinations, now there are 416 feasible combinations of amulets and sigils, so even though the set of feasible choices got reduced the effect on the set of viable alternatives is not clear to me.

[Chaarliee.2307]

@"Cal Cohen.2358" said:Hi everyone,

Tomorrow’s release will include a few PvP balance changes, some of which we discussed in our post two weeks ago. We’re back again to provide some context behind these upcoming changes. We’re still evaluating the impact of the previous PvP balance update, but at the end of this post we’ll talk about a few areas we’re keeping an eye on for future updates.

4/6 Changes to Build Items and Support Heals

• Removed Mender Amulet from the PvP Build panel.
• Removed Marshal Amulet from the PvP Build panel.
• Added Sigil of Transference to the PvP Build panel. In PvP, this sigil grants a 20% increase in outgoing healing effectiveness.
• Elemental Bastion (Tempest): Increased heal scaling from 0.4125 to 0.55 in PvP only.
• Selfless Daring (Guardian): Increased heal scaling from 0.6 to 0.9 in PvP only.
• Call of Valor (Warrior): Increased barrier attribute scaling from 0.5 to 0.82 in PvP only.

As previously discussed, we removed Mender and Marshal amulets from PvP and added Sigil of Transference to compensate for the reduction of allied healing to support builds. While Marshal is currently overshadowed by Mender and not as much of a problem, we wanted Transference to be powerful, and we were concerned with how high it could push outgoing healing in combination with a 1000 healing power amulet for builds that are less reliant on the extra health that Mender provides.

Removing Mender amulet serves 2 purposes: it forces high-sustain side node builds into more aggressive amulets, and reduces the self-sustain of support builds. Mender amulet side noders are much more prone to stalemating fights and generally slowing down the pace of the game. Similarly, by reducing the self-sustain of support builds, we hope to see an increase in kill potential in fights and a general increase to overall pace. We still want support builds to be able to support their allies well, and targeting their self-sustain lets us keep a lot of their other skills at the same power level.

Our goal with Sigil of Transference is to keep support healing to allies around the same level that it currently is with Mender. Elemental Bastion, Selfless Daring, and Call of Valor stood out as three sources primarily used by support builds that are most heavily impacted by the removal of Mender, and so we’ve preemptively bumped up the healing coefficients to bring their allied healing with Avatar amulet and Sigil of Transference closer to where it is currently. Looking over other allied heals, some sources will heal for a bit more than they currently do with Mender and some will heal for a bit less, but overall output should be similar. We’ll keep a close eye on healing values as the meta develops without Mender and will make further adjustments as necessary.

4/6 Changes to Scourge

• Sand Cascade: Reduced barrier attribute scaling from 1.0488 to 0.77 in PvP only.
• Sand Flare: Reduced barrier attribute scaling from 0.75 to 0.45 in PvP only.
• Desert Empowerment: Reduced barrier attribute scaling from 0.77 to 0.62 in PvP only.
• Harbinger Shroud: Reduced barrier attribute scaling on detonation from 2.0 to 1.65 in PvP only.
• Transfusion: Reduced pulse heal scaling from 0.1 to 0.08 in PvP only, when the Scourge specialization is equipped.

Scourge has continued to show strong results in both ranked play and automated tournaments, providing strong defense to itself and allies through barrier generation and healing while also creating a good amount of pressure through boon removal and damage. While Scourge sustain is affected by the removal of Mender amulet, given the current power level of the build we were concerned that the move to Avatar amulet alone wouldn’t be enough to bring it in line, so we’ve made additional shaves to the healing power coefficients of some of Scourge’s barrier generation and Transfusion.

Feed from Corruption is the most notable omission from this list. It’s a very powerful trait, granting Scourge access to a wide range of boons in potentially large quantities to enhance both its defensive and offensive potential. We are considering reducing some of the stronger boon applications in a future update, but we want to see how the removal of Mender and the reductions to healing and barrier coefficients play out first.

Looking AheadWe’ll be evaluating the impact of tomorrow’s changes in addition to the recent March update on the side node meta and support builds. We still want dedicated support builds to be a viable option, and we’ll be paying close attention to how the meta develops following the removal of Mender and the addition of Transference.

Sigil of Transference has the potential to enable stronger healing from non-support builds that can afford to run Avatar or Sage amulet and may end up being too powerful for an individual sigil. We’re not opposed to enabling this type of build, but if they end up pushing dedicated supports completely out of the meta then we may reduce the outgoing healing granted by Transference and roll more outgoing healing into support traits or support runes to create a greater tradeoff for non-supports.

We’ve also considered the possibility that moving support builds from Mender to Avatar amulet could end up making them too squishy due to the reduction in self-healing. This is something that we’ll evaluate on a case-by-case basis, but we’re prepared to make further adjustments as necessary to find the right balance between squishiness and support power. This could involve buffs to more selfish survivability skills, or possibly further increasing outgoing support potential to justify the level of vulnerability.

That’s all we have for today. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you in the mists!

-The Systems Team

Great. Now what will you do with all the bots and hackers in the game ?

[mindcircus.1506]

While the attention to sPvP is greatly appreciated, the lack of attention to wvw balance is becoming a little worrisome.

[Virdo.1540]

@mistsim.2748 said:Bro, did you forget about Druid? You gutted his healing output, and 20% increased heals to allies is nothing man.

Anyway, glad to see the frequent changes.

what was with ventari rev? Where the healing output got cut by about 66%

[Excursion.9752]

The pendulum swings from one meta to the next. Eventually we will stop on a class balance version that resembles James Bond Golden Eye 007 where we all use golden guns and one hit quit people. Of course the support builds would see a nerf after the countless nerfs of power creep builds. The problem was always there they just couldn't see it yet.

The answer in my opinion is they should have worked on builds to bring things up to par with the current meta builds not the opposite. Removing amulets just reduces options. I would suggest they take a look at what amulets are not being used and fix those to make them more desirable.

[Sereath.1428]

@mindcircus.1506 said:While the attention to sPvP is greatly appreciated, the lack of attention to wvw balance is becoming a little worrisome.

If they are balancing PVP around the removal of amulets then WvW is truly **, because so many people run PvP banned prefixes such as Minstrels and Trailblazer over there.

[Kondor.2904]

@XxsdgxX.8109 said:

@mindcircus.1506 said:While the attention to sPvP is greatly appreciated, the lack of attention to wvw balance is becoming a little worrisome.

If they are balancing PVP around the removal of amulets then WvW is truly

**

, because so many people run PvP

banned

prefixes such as Minstrels and Trailblazer over there.

And that's probably why wvw looks like a complete pepega fest ¯_(ツ)_/¯, which is most likely still intentional, so i wouldn't be worried

[Master Ketsu.4569]

@Excursion.9752 said:The pendulum swings from one meta to the next. Eventually we will stop on a class balance version that resembles James Bond Golden Eye 007 where we all use golden guns and one hit quit people. Of course the support builds would see a nerf after the countless nerfs of power creep builds. The problem was always there they just couldn't see it yet.

The answer in my opinion is they should have worked on builds to bring things up to par with the current meta builds not the opposite. Removing amulets just reduces options. I would suggest they take a look at what amulets are not being used and fix those to make them more desirable.

No items, Thief only, Final destination.