Antina.5973

Yes, on dps variants you take Quickfire GrandMaster in Firebrand traitline. But this whole discussion is about poor execution of those rework changes, and there might be amendments to builds and such.

Exactly that, the whole feeling of tomes is gone, it's not a book you open to unleash scorching fires of Vabbi, it's just another engi kit where you pop in for a skill and pop out whenever you think it's not on cooldown any more.

Current DPS FB (both pure dps and quickness dps) bring worst parts of thief and engi mechanics to guardian and it is because of kits and initiative that I avoid mentioned classes. Now Anet forces this on you on a class with established playstyle, the old FB? This gameplay is gone, deleted from the game, you don't have this on other specs. For me that's the worst imaginable rework scenario, and now it's live in game. Thanks for breaking librarian's leg...

I'll try to keep it brief, so it's readable and not a huge rant. A few assumptions first. Assumptions and givens focusing on PvE here I assume 100% alacrity uptime I assume that FB has 5 pages, not taking the Archivist Trait Page regeneration is unaffected by Alacrity and gives exactly 1 page per 8 seconds Proof why current implementation is dull Let's try dps or quickness Firebrand. Your best damage skills in Tome of Justice are Ashes of the Just (skill 5), Scorched Earth (skill 4)... and skill Igniting Burst (skill 2). The first two cost 2 pages for a cast. If you want to cast all 3 of them it's a total cost of 2+2+1 = 5 pages and you have 5 pages total, you end up with 0 plus 1 for casting 3 skills in the same tome (Swift Scholar Trait). In the next 8 seconds you will get one more page, resulting in 2 pages total. After another 8 seconds your total pages will be 3 and it is at this time that ALL the skills in Tome of Justice will be available again (Ashes of the Just has the longer CD of 20 seconds, with alacrity 16sec). So about 16 seconds in the fight you enter Tome of Justice with 3 pages and can cast Ashes of the Just... and will probably just quit here.You don't have pages for anything else. Worst thing yet to come, the moment you get your awesome 2 pages (16 seconds later) Ashes will come off cooldown again, so you will use those 2 pages on it and quit the tome again. If the fight has no cool down you will end up doing just that until boss encounter is over. Sounds fun? Let's break it down on a timeline: Fight time 0s: 5 pages, we cast Ashes, Scorched Earth, Igniting Burst using 5/5 pages, gaining one from Swift Scholar Fight time 8s: we get one regenerated page, now 2/5 total Fight time 16s: we get one regenerated page, now 3/5 total, all skills in Tome of Justice are available, we go in and burn 2 pages on Ashes of the Just, ending up with 1 page left total. We can't do anything else Fight time 24s: we get one regenerated page, now 2/5 total Fight time 32s: we get one regenerated page, now 3/5 total, all skills in Tome of Justice are available, we go in and burn 2 pages on Ashes of the Just, ending up with 1 page left total. We can't do anything else If you haven't noticed, this repeats after opener, every step of 8 + 8 * K seconds is getting a page, every step 16 + 16 * K seconds is getting another page and using it on Ashes of the Just which just came off cooldown. You CAN'T use anything else, be it for damage or utility, by Ogden's hammer, WHAT PAGES?! K is a natural number, with zero Therefore the current implementation is very restrictive, boring and shall be changed. E.g. refund more pages after using 3 skills in a single tome, or at least bumb up the page regen. ⬛ tl;dr Pepe the frog enjoyer wants to learn something easy giving quickness, since there is a huge need for those in all the groups for strikes and raids. Pepe tries QFB, since others said it's easy. Pepe hits this glowing button with a person in flames every time it lights up and then clicks this book and and axe icon. Pepe is happy cause it's just 3 clicks for damage and another 3 clicks for quickness. Pepe once asked what are all those other book skills doing, but he was told not to care then because dps would go down the drain. There is yet another commotion on a nearby plaza, like everyday since the memorable patch. They say that their spirits go to a distant world, where dragons yet fly. But Pepe doesn't listen to surroundings, he wants to win that duel with a frog in Verdant Brink.

A few more have been reported here:

This rework is probably on par with the banner rework. It's a questionable execution, with bugs and poorly resolved edge cases. cFB feels absolutely dull to play now, renewed justice is kinda useless, UI doesn't say how much time till you get a page back and it seems server side, Swift Scholar being weird with page refunds, and not working at all when a tome is dormant, which is also a guess...

Oh my, I remember seeing those in the beta footage. I love your idea, also instead of last charge effect which we had, we could just opt in for charge options maybe. Altho maybe it should be much shorter more like overloads on tempest? Instead of insta cast, you could just "overload" mantra by casting it longer maybe the effect would pulse or something like that.

Just for the sake of recording history, I've finally sat down to put some of the clips I recorded just before balance patch hit, the one that deleted mantra animations. Thought I might as well link it here for people who didn't experience it ever.

It's not that dire, some of the big-brain folks already came up with preliminary rotation, cFB is not dead, not even close. Imho HFB will be comfier to play since you can access F2 skills at any time. In a world where HAMster exists we could argue that everything else is already dead.

This a thousand times. I noticed I do have completely different mindset depending on my current e-spec. They do feel like standalone classes, and that was a great bit about them. I just really hope Anet sees that they are deleting parts of firebrands identity with mantras and possibly rework to tomes, if the voicelines and animations are gone too. Please ANet let us retain e-spec identity! Please don't make everything the same for the sake of simplicity!

Willbender alac relies heavily on active gameplay, how much you can hit target in your F2. I might be one of 3 people in the game actually using that build, it is rare indeed. What I'm trying to say - making every alac/quick build a bot, passive or boring as in press 2 skills off-cooldwon is not a good approach. Alac willy has some great potential and is fun, it's problem is a bit more hidden. For some builds like scrapper or firebrand, you take a different trait, and maybe swap a skill or two. In case of alac willbender, you take a whole traitline just for F2 passive share, on power that's devastating, cause playing Virtues is unrealistic. As in you want full aegis uptime and a lot of boons on yourself. Virtues power guard was/is already a rare sight. On Condi alac willbender your damage also suffers heavily because give up on Permeating Wrath GM in virtues to take Battle Presence (you take Virtues on power alac wb just for that GM trait as well) and on top of that, in case of both condi/power alac build you take Phoenix Protocol GM in Willbender traitline over Tyrant's Momentum. So to sum up, you end up giving up on a lot of damage, have a build that requires something to hit to generate alac and which is probably the nail in the coffin - it shares absolutely no other boons. Some alac dps givers spit out tons of might, fury and other boons. Willbender can just take some CC (elite) and maybe stuff like SYG from core guardian utility. It's low dps, barely any utility, hard to play. Despite the mentioned issues, I'd play it a lot more if it wasn't so low DPS, the active playstyle and the fact it can't upkeep alac on downtime punish this build enough to justify some bigger numbers, maybe even top dps in alac bracket.

Loosing class identity is my main concern about recent changes, and by recent I mean since May 2021. Mantra chants were deleted, in the name of kitten what exactly? QoL? Deleting identity skills, art as in animations and voice lines from Mesmer and Firebrand was wrong, and a waste. Now the same seems to happen with tomes. Should we expect that Holo will loose forge soon? Or reaper it's shroud? Where is this butchery of class identities going.

Firebrand, tomes: Maybe instead of protection add some other boon on Tome of Courage, skill one, like superspeed, so it's actually a "charge" like name suggests and worth this one page. Or just make skill 1 in every tome free since they are super weak either way. T1-1 is weaker than axe autos, T3-3 is just some prot which is easy to access and some swiftness which is again easy to get elsewhere.

On topic of Guardian in PvE The proposed overhaul for last good standing Guard spec Firebrand is an experiment on a living organism, we all know it. Why we can't even get a nice juicy buffs for other 2 dead in pve specs? Dragonhunter longbow with 2 skills that root you in place is awful. CD increase to True Shot basically cancels the buff. 66%->100% Tether duration? Sure, it's 12 seconds now, instead of 10 seconds. All those are petty changes. Willbender off-hand sword - forgotten.

Firebrand - Small problem, since Tome 3 skills all gain Protection from Legendary Lore, would that stack with the Stability changed to prot on Chapter 1: Unflinching Charge?

The cooldowns and more than one page costs on FB tomes are too long, also super unintuitive. 8 seconds per page is also a long time, compared to initiative on thief.

For me FB is just the last standing spec for guard in pve.

Hello 😊 Since guardian will definitely have a bit of spotlight in the next balance patch I took a moment to write this post. As I understood the balance manifesto, they want to keep the identity of different specialisations, when I head of this I immaterially thought of Firebrand and Mesmer Mantras. Could we maybe take a moment to remember absolutely amazing animations and voice lines that were attached to mantas before May's 2021 patch. I have a partial understanding why it was done, however I don't agree with leaving it as it is now. Firebrand was all about tomes and mantras, one of which is gone now, and tomes (slight panic) might get reworked into something completely different further destroying this spec's identity. I'd love to see those voice lines or animations used again. I present my two ideas of how this could be done: - make the animations/voices play randomly when using mantras, there were already semi random as not always you'd hear chants, as you not always hear voice lines when getting certain boons. If someone doesn't like that, well they probably already have that checkbox in sounds settings ticked 🙂 (yes you can disable "I could outrun centaur" procs) - add a trait that makes mantras slightly different and a trade-off of that change will be added preparation, like pre-may-2021 that's needed. Now I understand that's probably harder to implement and balance, but I know there are some of us who would wish that returned. Be it fun/RP/or other reasons. One would be that instant casts had a cost of preparing that skills in advance, I loved that bit, it felt fair. This will also reduce a bit spammy-ness of the spec, as now we can just press the buttons whenever it glows, since there is no "last charge" anymore, there is no prep to be done, it just feels bad. It might be easy, but not everything that's easy is fun or rewarding. And what are your thoughts? xoxo Antina

You have my torch 🔥 This is one of the least fun traits to play with, and sadly every single condi build on guard uses it.

Well, also almost no mobility, no barrier, no ranged boons, oh wait a minute... it's not an engi i suppose 😞 I just wonder how will the shared pages work. I have two ideas in mind, all skills in tomes stay with the same 1 page cost, since it's intuitive, but tomes hava a small CD to enter, just like Specter's shroud for example. Could also be like engi's kits where you enter whenever you want since tome skills always had cooldowns, you can't just spam one skill with exception of first in tome

That's like one of my favourite animations in the game. Other were mantra chants, but those are already gone. Same for Old-school tomes 😞

Maybe if dps gets decoupled from support tomes they could finally buff DPS builds... I just hope it will be still perfectly playable as support. We don't have too many gamers playing that in general and last thing I'd want is to wait even longer with LFG/Group making cause nobody plays quick/alac. I personally play FB and love i for versatility, if they gut that, well, sayonara. You got one less quick/heal in LFG pool.

That's a good start!

can relate, anti-dh trash talk is there 😿 we just wanna spin for win 😿

Also upkeeping resolution for Righteous Instincts is trash, why can't we have Fury as required boon like revs? Where DH PvE buffs? Even spellbreaker is vable in pve now. 😞