Acheron.1580

There are so many changes to druid that have pulled autonomy away from the player and made what I would have considered a pretty LI healing support into the sweatiest support in the game now that even if it "works" I have a hard time agreeing that it's been saved. Even before the use of spirits was a partial consideration to help generate CA when you were in fights with limited healing capability, which is now gone due to how the new spirits work. There will still be those concerns, but now it's also a concern for keeping alac up whereas before in dead zones you probably didn't need the emergency healing anyways so no big deal right? Again I feel like testing perfect conditions for generating CA is biased, whether you intended it to be or not. I don't agree with praising the devs for doubling down on a terrible design idea. Alacrity tied to elemental overloads is not the same as alacrity tied to CA skills, which is not the same as alacrity for renegade, and the devs need to stop treating class mechanics as equal. The balance devs have demonstrated they don't understand the nuances between classes at all, and if they really want to stubbornly force the alac on CA playstyle then generating CA should be standardized instead of situational. All of that aside still doesn't change the fact that they made the pet this weird extension that has even less consideration than you would have for any other spec and there's nothing inherently fun about watching nothing but cooldowns.

Is it? I saw nothing in the balance patch that would cause that. I'm not saying you are wrong, Anet loves to just conveniently leave changes out with zero communication. What's different?

Ideally you can set up to have enough prot where you maybe don't need to spam stone to make use of that sweet sweet aegis but in general yea still a spam fest, they just can't die on you now.

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Noooooooooooo.....

Let me just get this straight. You picked scenarios were the damage output is a constant thrum, thereby enabling you to enter CA regularly and pointed at it saying "see, it works now", but what about fights were the damage isn't constant? What about scenarios where your group is actively avoiding damage, or fights were there are dead damage spots? I'm asking what happens when you can't do constant heal throughput and suddenly you can't go into CA form often. This is a really biased test. That aside, is it fun? Did they make it enjoyable to play again? Are you just spamming 1 and 2 in CA just to keep alac up and calling that dynamic play? I'm impressed they managed to make pets EVEN WORSE for the druid because now I don't even care what they bring to the table, being originally a CC and aegis, or turtle bubble occasionally, because I gotta spam these swaps and beast abilities on cooldown, so why even bother? I'll admit the gambit of boons the druid provides is pretty impressive, I could see that without testing and just looking over what options were available to me. It just doesn't feel anything like it used to, and yea I used to pop into CA on cooldown before the changes too but now my pet feels like baggage and if there's a reason I would want to save CA for what I know is coming (or if I suddenly want to be able to use the rez part of the glyph) well too f'n bad for everyone I guess.

I mean not at all surprised. Just disappointed. I'd already cut my GW2 time down a lot, this will probably be the nail in the coffin for me haha.

I wouldn't hold my breath.

Pretty sure all these weapons are already figured out, which is why they announced what they were going to be in the first place. I don't think any number of polls, suggestions or feedback are going to change it, if their patch note previews are any indication. Personally if we wanted another ranged weapon I'd take scepter over rifle any day, but that's cause I can't imagine how rifle would be fundamentally different enough from longbow to make me want to even use it; they would be better off just buffing longbow.

I'm a strong believer that this world could use fewer battle royal games. The reason they work though is because the playing field is equal to everybody, it only comes down to luck and skill. When you throw in random factors like class abilities and builds, it's basically just WvW on a different scale. There's no clean way to balance that without removing classes, basically exactly what southsun survival already does. Additionally, I don't think that it attracts the right group of players, it seems like a lot of work the dev team would have to do and it's entirety of value comes from whether people buy stuff from the BLM or not.

This just makes the least amount of work for devs. It honestly should have just been given at the same time as a legendary helmet was crafted for the same armor type. Maybe with the new Legendary Armors coming they could just implement that.

I actually have legendary runes, which isn't relevant to the discussion at all because it still is about how they are implementing a system that I don't think they have considered. My main concern is simply that they haven't considered this and there will be some impending kitten storm after the expansion is launched as everyone comes to realize it. It is as equally important for the player as it is for Anet, should they actually read these forums. I mean that's pretty much what I've been saying since the beginning, which I assume means you just skimmed it. Again if they remove those runes, who gets left with the tab? Do they just disappear into the ether and nobody gets anything? Do they arbitrarily decide to make them into some other random rune? It doesn't even matter because no matter how they handle it it will affect economy. Ok once again I AM taking relics into account. Which is the entire point of this, relics being a piece of the runes that are simply separated are WHY runes are being devalued. And it's really REALLY obvious which way rune prices are going to go, it takes the bare minimum of thinking about it to see that when you remove value from something, the price of it goes down. The ONLY way to take relics into the calculation is if they make taking runes apart part of the requirements to make relics, but it won't change the fact at all that runes will inherently have less value. At best that gives a half-assed solution to keeping runes from completely flooding the TP to the point of bottoming out at best, at least for a little while. Yes there are assumptions but they are what I'd consider reasonable ones with the information we have at hand, with how they have explained their goals in handling runes, and even with basic speculation it doesn't change the fact that when you remove value from anything, it will affect the economy.

Yup that's where I'm seeing it too. You will basically need 1 meta rune setup per build and there's going to be a huge abundance of runes piling into the TP because there's going to be less need to have more than 1 set for power, 1 set for condi, maybe 1 set for healing / boon support. Since there will be less overall need to buy more runes and there will be more of them they are going to be the lowest possible value the TP can set them at, maybe not immediately but inevitably.

Those are some of the most loaded poll options I've ever seen. I won't vote because the missing answer is yes, I think it needs to be reworked some, but no it doesn't need to be entirely scrapped. I enjoy the playstyle significantly more than soulbeast, which I've never been able to click with. I find it's an ok spec, but it could be better. Also, do you mean pvp, wvw, pve, and out of pve do you mean open world, fractals, raids, strikes? It's why having only 2 options (where one is basically THIS ESPEC NEEDS TO BE BURNED TO THE GROUND vs YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO DISLIKE A PART OF IT is a bad comparison). I don't think there's a single spec in the game that doesn't have shades of things I don't love, even if I understand why they are there.

I gotta ask, how do you think knowing who left you a cry or confused emoji is going to further better discussion in the forums? They clearly aren't interested in adding anything of value to the conversation, why would you want to have a back and forth with someone like that? Just accept people aren't going to agree with you and just ignore the emojis it's super easy to do.

Racial abilities are generally a bad balance idea and so I don't mind that they exist and I sometimes give them a try but in general we don't want more bow/bear scenarios, it's unhealthy for the game, and would basically require them to add a race change consumable for the gem store. People are already unhappy with current balance philosophy, this would make it worse. Specializations would make than worse to an nth degree. WoW racials are always a perfect comparison point, they have always been unbalanced, with the new races they add having some crazy huge advantages, and there are some racials which actually become wasted if you aren't also the right class. Before EoD came out I was super on board with the idea of a tengu race, but I mean the amount of work going into a new race is insane. Weapon animations, Armor fitting, a whole new zone for their main hub (which I assume would be the domain of winds in Caledon, so no need for a new starting zone too which at least would be less work, but you'd be in a weird spot for starting), voice acting, an organic way to include a new race who technically hasn't been a part of the story in a major capacity to be shoehorned in. I think that's why they went the tonic route with the kodan, and I wouldn't be opposed to similar for the tengu.

They might just make it flat expertise, and then again have relics specific to unique conditions that would "replace" the old condi runes. This just feels super likely to me.

If it's "do daily get astral acclaim" fine, if it's "try to force fix the economy with an ill conceived concept" then no thank you.

Oh I very much get why they are changing thief runes because as you said it's sort of a free 10% bonus damage for certain content, but I'm saying that we can't rely on current 6-pieces to remain as they are. For runes that have bonuses for specific boons (like quickness, might, fury) and for specific conditions (bleed, poison, torment) I worry they are going to remove those and sell them back to you as relics.

The only change that Anet has been doing since EoD (which is honestly probably why it's my least favorite expansion so far) is that they seems to be drifting away from their original game concept. Guild Wars has always been about horizontal progression rather than vertical, it was made with the idea that your gear plateaus so you don't need a loot treadmill in order to keep your attention. The strong core part of this concept is that you rely heavily on good content, story, and in GW2's cases metas that are exciting enough to keep coming back to them. EoD feels like it was built entirely around gen 3 legendary weapons. The entire grind of the zones and its rewards are all about making these new legendary weapons. If you aren't super hyped for them, then the zones are pretty but pointless, the metas are super long and with little reward, and the story was not the worst but I felt no burning desire to do it on more than once. There's no special interactions like when you were a Sylvari for HoT, or a Charr for IBS. I'm really worried that SoTo is going to go down that path and make it all about relics and daily / weekly / monthly / quarterly check lists, and I can only pray they don't add a completely new pointless mechanic like research notes.

Not to be the bad guy but I don't think they said they wanted to get away from skill spamming, they wanted to get away from forced utility spamming. Mostly because people thought forced utilities were stifling creative play and there's nothing interesting about spamming one skill that doesn't fit your kit to provide a buff. They got the first part right, specs are no longer forced into specific utility skills, but they completely messed up the execution of the second half. They just transferred the spam to a class mechanic without considering that not all class mechanics are the same; in some cases it was already part of your rotation so no big deal, in others it forces you to use it off cooldown which brings back stifled unreactive and uncreative play. In the case of druid they completely changed their utility spam spirits, I think people mostly just wanted them to be unkillable by stupid crap in PvE but they couldn't figure out how to do that so we got the new version, which some people I believe enjoy but I really do not. I think they are super clunky, and their buff durations are abysmal.

I didn't feel like it was relevant so I didn't include it is also a concern that there are runes already that are just so good or don't even have a relevant 6 piece and my immediate thought is that the power creep is going to get ramped up again (already guaranteed extra stats, and with the ability to choose a specific 6 piece bonus that is better is going to make it happen). I think Anet will actually tweak those runes so they aren't going to be as strong as they are currently because otherwise it'll get out of hand. (And there is already SO much whining about condi vs power damage and how unfair it is they need less stats, which they don't but that's not this threads point). The condition damage runes might not get changed beyond what they are that's true, but since they all have a very ignorable 6 piece already (except thorns which you can't trade) I kind of doubt it. I remember the insane amount of crying over the change to the 6 piece from tormenting, which suggests that its 6 piece was also a big factor for it's choice. I think when you have runes like that (Or the really weird outlier Elementalist which doesn't even really have a 6 piece already) they are going to bring them down in some way to try to curb the power creep which is obvious problem if they leave things the way they are, since in most rune's cases you will get more stats that weren't there before, and in the case of these condition runes a 6 piece that is now relevant. Additionally some of the relics themselves aren't going to reflect the 6 piece that accompanied the rune in the first place. In their own example of how relics work, rune of the thief is losing its original ability (10% bonus damage against flanked or defiant foes), and replaced with “Upon striking an enemy with a weapon skill that has a cooldown or resource cost, gain 1% strike damage for 6 seconds, up to a maximum of 5 stacks, and refresh duration of all stacks to 6 seconds.” Laughs are cheap, I'm going for confused.

It's not even about "potential" pitfalls. I'll dumb it down even more without throwing numbers in. Runes share similar / identical stats with wildly different prices. There are a lot of runes out there in peoples builds, or just floating in the TP waiting to be sold. When runes become homogenized, runes across the board are going to plummet in value because: A) Significantly more supply when runes get categorized into stat groups (and most likely much easier to craft since the expensive crafting ones were outliers) B) the value is very demonstratively tied to the 6 piece bonus, which will be placed elsewhere It's basic economics, this rework WILL affect rune prices negatively across the board. What are the possible outcomes? Runes have their current unique names but same stats across several? Unlikely as that would be unnecessarily confusing, and even if that was the case why would you buy the expensive ones over the cheap ones? Reclassify them all into the same name based on stat category? This is the simplest and most likely scenario, in which case your Runes of the Chronomancer just became the same value as Rune of the Infiltrator, but have a fancy new name. There isn't a solution here where people with the expensive runes come out on top. The unknowns are if Anet had even considered it, and if they have or are able to instate a plan around it. They haven't demonstrated they understand their own games economy, look what removing the easy jade rune stone farm did to the costs of every other resource used by Gen 3 legendary weapons, they all dropped in price because the bottleneck changed. If you don't have legendary runes, you are still likely to lose money on the transition, how much depends on which and how many of the expensive runes you have. Legendary anything is obviously more attractive the more characters you have on your account, but if runes are going to bottom out at 5-10 silver, or let's assume the category for ferocity is still around 1 gold (since the 3 runes that share those stats are reasonably tight), there's just no reasonable cutoff point where Legendary Runes are remotely worth it, even as a convenience item.

Like a tiny non-stop screaming sun would do the trick I think

With Fervent Force gone I don't even see why you'd care if you can have the CC and the non-CC versions on the same bar, that would have made the spec so mindless to play it would have been nerfed/removed way sooner. Before it was obvious that you always wanted to CC, even if the target couldn't be, just for the benefits of Fervent Force, now at best you unleash to your pet just to use their skills or if you need the CC, want STAB, certain buffs etc. There's a lot more depth to it as a whole. Even with soulbeast and having the free reign to swap the skill type outside of battle, for fights where CC isn't useful you probably shouldn't be using the pet-unleashed versions because they won't do as much. I feel like a lot of what you don't like about hammer unleashed is that it's just overwhelming and you'd rather have less to think about than more. And that's perfectly fine, LI builds are a good idea, but for untamed the ability to use ALL of it is what makes it pretty unique. What they should do in my opinion is go back over the traits in that line which were clearly designed around FF or before let loose. I assume debilitating blows is for pvp/wvw, with movement and healing denial, but both it and nature's shield are just really useless in PvE. Corrupting Vines again feels very WvW/PvP to me and I see it's value, but Cleansing unleash does so little for such a long cooldown, and with the addition of let loose the quickness on Enhancing Impact is a little lackluster, maybe it can also add group might or stab if you already have quickness. I find most of their cantrips pretty heavily weighted towards pvp/wvw as well (I really get the complaint about this being or feeling like a PvP only spec). It's not a perfect spec, far from it, but it's problems really aren't the unleash and hammer mechanic, it was the class being designed entirely around 1 GM trait, which now that it's gone feels a bit lost.

This is going to be very long and I apologize but it's all relevant I promise. I'll preface this by saying I really like the idea of separating rune 6 piece bonuses form relics as it should in general open up a lot more flexibility in build options while also giving the player more direct control over the stats that they want. The main problem I see going forward is that there was no way they considered the way that it would impact the economy of the game on release, and in that case how to handle the fallout. Legendary Rune (and rune prices in general) discussion Lots and lots of discussion on how players who have Legendary Runes should be compensated and there are technically right answers on both sides of the argument. Let's start with really straight comparisons. Rune of the pack adds 175 total power, 15% boon duration. Total cost to buy (straight up) 16 silver Rune of Fireworks adds 175 total power, 15% boon duration. Total cost to buy, 1 gold 24 silver Rune of Infiltration adds 175 power, 100 precision. Total cost to buy ~9 silver Rune of Chronomancer adds 175 power, 100 precision. Total cost to buy 2 gold and 50 silver Rune of the Revenant adds 78 to all stats. Total cost to buy 1 gold 70 silver Rune of Divinity adds 78 to all stats. Total cost to buy 74 silver Rune of the Zephyrite adds 78 to all stats. Total cost to buy 9 silver So TECHNICALLY after the rune change they both will add the same stats, and lets assume the 6 piece on infiltration and chronomancer is an extra 100 precision to make things easy. Yes, going forward your rune will still have 6 bonus stats at the end of the day. But the VALUE of the runes is entirely dependent on the 6 piece bonus that accompanied it. In some cases as demonstrated here the value of the lesser costed rune is not even 5% of the expensive one. Hypothetical My assumption is they will try to make runes fit nice little packages so that they have less work to do. I considered what the absolute laziest way to do that was and came up with an example. Lets go with condition runes. Krait, Balthazar, Grenth, Perplexity, Thorns and Tormenting. All give 175 condition damage, and then 60% of their respected condition duration. My guess (No basis for it other than thinking of possibilities), the easiest way to pair that down to require the least amount of work would be 175 condition damage runes with 30% conditions duration (maybe not the chill, maybe still involved), and then 30% bonus poison, confusion, bleed relics. In this example though there is a huge distance between costs: Balthazar 6 silver Grenth 7.5 silver Krait 2.2 gold Perplexity 4.4 gold Tormenting 6.15 gold and thorns which can only be bought through the wvw or HoT vendors. In this scenario, Balthazar runes aren't even 1% in value of Tormenting. Ignoring the hypothetical, you can still see the problem where the rune costs which share the same stats and have different finishing values have wide spreads of costs on the trading post. Other weird outliers are things like Rune of Exuberance and Wurm which add stats based on Vitality, which I assume they will standardize and instead make the bonus stat effects into relics. This is the core reason why legendary runes should (in at least my opinion) have some sort of compensation, they have becoming significantly devalued. It also impacts people who don't even have legendary runes, which I will get to in a bit. Relics and what we don't know What we DO know is that relics will be replacing the 6 piece bonus in their own slot, and that there will be new ones added. Not all 6 piece bonuses will remain the same either. What we do not know is - How expensive it will be to craft (or if crafting is even involved)? - How easy it will be to acquire relics, or their patterns if crafting is involved? - Will there be different rarities of relics? - Will relics be bound to SoTo content or will you be required to have it in order to collect them if they aren't? The emergent problem The value of runes across the board are going to get wild. There are already pretty clearcut clumps of stats that runes nicely fit into, there are a lot of outliers where they can be sort of homogenized and then relics made to compensate differences. In the best case scenario, I'm guessing there's going to be maybe 20 - 25 rune combinations paired down from 100+ (Lets be honest though, there's a lot of duds in the current list). What it means for Legendary Runes holders There is going to be maybe 1/4 of available runes to choose from., and ALL runes will go down in price since the stats were less important than the bonus that accompanied them. Additionally, because of homogenization there will simply be MORE of each in the market also bringing the price further down. There was an obvious appeal to legendary runes as being able to get some of the harder to craft runes, harder to acquire runes, and the more characters you had the less of the most expensive runes you needed to buy. Runes are going to basically be probably 5 - 10 silver a piece. That's a huge chunk of change. The cost of each individual legendary rune is simply not worth it in any scenario. You are getting less quality AND quantity per rune. What it means for the rest of us Anet didn't even consider legendary runes in the first place, as they kind of indicated in the mega thread about compensation for Legendary runes, saying that they would look into it. Do you honestly think that they have considered what the change in runes is going to do to people who don't have legendary runes on a personal level? Most likely they are going to smash rune types together, say power/precision is going to be Rune of Aggression or something, and they will most likely just convert all runes in that category to the one same name. Would you be happy if your Chronomancer runes suddenly became the same value as Infiltrators? Do you think they have the resources or the mechanisms in place to compensate the difference? Do you think they've even considered it? They probably assume it will just blow over after a couple weeks while the player just sucks up the loss. Your compensation will be 1 (one) Relic box PER ACCOUNT (which is another whole grab bag of issues when you consider people with multiple daily farming accounts but that's not here or there). Solutions Legendary Runes If you are thinking of crafting legendary runes, DON'T. Gather/hold resources in case, wait for something concrete from Anet, but my guesses for how they will compensate is: A) They lower the costs of crafting each legendary rune by maybe 1/2 to 1/4, compensating players the difference for each rune that they made. B) Add a legendary Relic and simply gift it to players who have 6 runes (Really not favorable, since it would remove the new thing to grind and the value of said compensation if relics are really hard / annoying to get vs. easy to obtain kind of change how good/fair the compensation was, and leaves people who have less than 6 runes in the lurch). C) Decide that they don't really need to compensate players and leave it at that. In all scenarios, it's really best to find out what they plan on doing before you make any serious commitments. Non-Legendary Runes This one is a whole bag of bad news. The best solution I can come up with is to make ALL runes at release of the new Rune/Relic system into vendor trash with a value decided upon by Anet based on Crafting costs mats, Average TP costs (with removal of any values that fall way outside a reasonable mean to prevent price fixing), or a combination of the two. This way would make buying and selling runes work even with uncertainty all the way up to release because sellers caught with suddenly undervalued runes will still make money, buyers won't have to be as cautious about buying new runes in case they are the ones stuck with devalued runes, and it affects everyone equally in the end, though in reality probably to some (but controlled) loss to the players in total. The downside is that the TP will have a clean slate on runes, which means prices might get really crazy for a couple of weeks to a month, but since it would be implemented at the same time as relics it would basically be a sort of grace period for the market to correct. TL,DR It's not just Legendary Rune Holders, everybody loses Rune prices are already a wide spread, with the change over to the new system they will all need to be more or less standardized based on the stats they give. I don't think Anet has considered nor has the resources to find a way to make sure that each player is taken care of based on the differences in price for runes that share the same stats with different 6 piece bonuses. It may be a good idea to offload really expensive runes now and avoid the headache, but there is no guarantee that that is the right choice based on whether or not Anet will compensate for the sudden shift. Either way the TP is going to get ugly up to the release date due to uncertainty, or be a disaster after the release. Also on a personal point of curiosity, how will the changes effect the seasonal runes, or runes required for achievements (eg scavenging)