Bear on the job.6273

That's a bit harsh friend. No one is "making" it hard, it's an error with a vendor they are resolving. Let them work it out.

Both through the Trading Post in-game, and through the website. Get to the point where I can select my credit card for the purchase method, and then it fails with error 108.

Yes there should be a general fix to remove all profession-specific buffs when swapping traits. That issue is not isolated to WB, other professions can do it too (some to funny effects). But none of them were as exploitive as WB. If the ICD stays, I think it should be per-target not global. If you put Aegis on 5 allies, Shattered Aegis should trigger on all of them with their own independent ICD. Other traits have that, it's not a new invention. Also it's Tuesday (patch day), and no update on this yet from the devs...

Saying Shattered Aegis is a niche trait, and disabling it has less impact than disabling Crashing Courage is a debatable statement. And there are other solutions than just putting a flat ICD on Crashing Courage, like putting an ICD on just the aegis application of the skill. Or if they really must keep the 1s ICD on Shattered Aegis, make it per-target, not global. So that way if you want to use Shattered Aegis with other skills that apply aegis to allies, you can without it causing this bad interaction with Crashing Courage. That really is the crux of my complaint, you can't use skills like Advance or shield 4 with Shattered Aegis on Willbender.

Yeah it's kinda silly that they disabled Shattered Aegis and not Crashing Courage in this situation. The root issue of keeping the WB passives when you swap templates is still there, and there are probably more exploits to be found. Yes the ICD is specific to Willbender, and that's the bad design I'm talking about. Why make a special exception when you can adjust Crashing Courage and make no exceptions? And I don't understand the logic in making more changes to SA. That would kill a lot of build diversity for all guardians, for something that's not currently a problem. Change Crashing Courage and you fix the root issue without affecting other guardian specs.

Yeah but it's just bad design from a development perspective. With EOD, they introduced a new feature (Crashing Courage) that interacted poorly with an existing feature (Shattered Aegis). Instead of fixing the new feature to minimize impact, they changed the existing feature that was part of a core traitline, and reduced build possibilities by doing so. Sure it works, but there are better ways to fix it (by adjusting Crashing Courage) that will be more robust against exploits.

So the same interaction that was found during beta has popped up again. Could we please get a different fix for it this time instead of the 1second cooldown put on Shattered Aegis when Willbender is selected? That change killed a lot of potential build diversity with Willbender, when a more appropriate fix would have been to fix Crashing Courage. Put the 1second CD on the Aegis provided by Crashing Courage instead and you can fix this properly from the start.

Tested this with a squad of 30+ people. Everyone in the squad stood in tight formation, all within 180 radius of each other. Targeted a party member and used scepter skills 1-3 with pistol offhand. All skills that generated barrier seemed to apply barrier to random members of the squad. Only my direct target received barrier in my party.

Those are the cooldowns when you have Virtues traitline slotted. Without Virtues the durations are (same as old book cooldowns): Dormant Justice last 30s. Dormant Resolve last 50s. Dormant Courage last 75s. Not quite...with Quickfire, you will have both the Tome of Justice passive and Dormant Justice debuff at the same time. This means things that would happen when Tome of Justice is activated (like Justice is Blind) will not trigger while Dormant Justice is present. But passive traits (like Permeating Wrath) will still work because Tome of Justice passive is still present.

This is coming from WvW/PvP perspective, but applies in general to a lesser extent. The combination of shared pages, page regen time, and skill cooldowns has changed things significantly for FB, and in essence we now have 1 Virtue "slot" instead of 3 different Virtues. You basically choose which skill you want to use among the 15 available (3 books x 5 skills), you open the relevant book, use that skill, then go back to your weapons while you wait for that skill cooldown to elapse (which is the same time it takes for the pages to regen). Once the cooldown is done, you can pick the next skill you want to use out of the 15, go into the book, use it, then back to weapons. Repeat. Things are slightly different at the start of a fight, since you have pages stocked. But once you've spent them on those opening 2-3 skills, you are in the situation described here. So in essence, you have 15 virtue skills, but you can only use 1 at a time. 😑

I think you're misunderstanding how this trait works. Because of the rework to FB books, they no longer have a direct cooldown. Instead, you get the debuff for each book (Dormant Courage), which acts as the cooldown for active traits. The previous cooldown for Tome of Courage (with Virtues traitline) was ~64 seconds. The new duration of Dormat Courage is the same ~64 seconds. When Dormant Courage is present, you cannot trigger any traits that would normally activate when you open book 3. You have to wait for the debuff to disappear before you can trigger them again. So for Indomitable Courage, the first time you open Tome of Courage you get your 3 stacks of stability. Then you have to wait 64s, then the next time you open Tome of Courage you get the stability again. In the tooltip for Indomitable Courage, it says "Interval: 30 seconds". This is talking about the passive ability of Courage, which gives you Aegis every 30 seconds as long as Dormant Courage is not present. It does not reduce the duration of Dormant Courage to 30 seconds.

Can we have a discussion about Shattered Aegis with Willbender? I know in the beta, the interaction was just silly, especially in WvW. But the solution (adding a 1sec cooldown to Shattered Aegis when Willbender is slotted)...as a developer myself, that's a bad kludge. Why change the functionality of a trait in a core traitline because it interacts poorly with a completely new elite spec? Why not adjust Willbender Courage itself? Add a 1sec cooldown to the Aegis application of Courage, or remove Aegis from Courage altogether. Or change the 1sec cooldown of Shattered Aegis to be target-specific, meaning it can still effect multiple allies in a single trigger, but would prevent rapid-fire application on the caster themselves.

EOD was released Feb 28th. Block of Tofu worked for about a week and then it got bugged. It's been 2 1/2 months and ~13 updates since then...and it's still not fixed. The saddest part is it actually worked at EOD release. What a tease. Any update? This would actually be a top tier DPS food if it worked...

The way it worked in beta - Crashing Courage gives you Aegis every 5 hits, Shattered Aegis hits 5 targets whenever Aegis pops. Those 2 things by themselves give you an effective infinite loop. If you stand in a group of 5 people, every time they hit you, they all take damage and you immediately get Aegis reapplied. Tenacious Defense was not necessary to make it work, it just reduced the cooldown on activating Crashing Courage significantly, so you could go BRRRRRRRR again. I was hoping the new balance patch would have come up with a more elegant solution to this...but seems nothing has changed. If they made it so the 1sec CD applied per ally with Aegis instead of globally, that would also solve the issue without killing all possible uses of Shattered Aegis with Willbender...

Trying to test this in PvP or WvW environment and it has been difficult...is this actually supposed to be a global 1 second recharge, or 1 second recharge per ally with Aegis? Meaning if you use Advance and 5 allies get Aegis, and they all get hit by the same AOE, is it supposed to trigger once (1 second recharge globally) or trigger 5 times (1 second recharge per ally)? If it is the latter, then that is reasonable. If it is the former, that is unusable...

I had really hoped this would have been changed before EOD release, but looks like it hasn't been. I don't know why it was a good idea to cripple an existing trait because it interacted poorly with a completely new skill (Crashing Courage). Why not just fix the new skill, and put the 1sec CD on Crashing Courage trigger? Or remove the Aegis portion of Crashing Courage and replace with Protection? Very disappointed here.

The change to Shattered Aegis when Willbender is equipped is a bit overbearing imo. I understand the interaction with Crashing Courage needs to be limited, but applying a 1 sec ICD for the whole build seems a bit much. Is there any way to limit it so Shattered Aegis only has the ICD when Crashing Courage is active? I see a lot of potential for other Willbender support builds using Shattered Aegis (not DPS focused), but they are severely hampered by this ICD when Crashing Courage is not active. The other alternative (which has been suggested elsewhere) is to change the boons provided by Crashing Courage, so it applies something like Protection when it triggers instead of Aegis. That removes the need for a clunky work-around with the Shattered Aegis ICD and doesn't limit other Willbender builds.

“Restorative Virtues” also does not work in WvW. No alacrity is provided when you activate Flowing Resolve, or when the passive effect is triggered after 5 hits. I will test more to determine if is is a result of some combination of other traits that cause the issue…

Stuck in Grenth's Game AT. Enrolled, got to "Waiting for opponent", and stuck there for 1.5 hours so far without joining a match...

Tome passives will randomly fail to refresh when the tome goes off cooldown. I will have all tomes available to use, but no passives on me. The only way I can seem to fix this is by swapping Firebrand trait line out, and then back in. Zoning sometimes fixes, but not always.