milumilu.1759

I made a post going through some aspects of the problems this mantra rework will bring, it ain't a in-depth post and might sound somewhat apologetic and superficial, but people are being too silent about this issue, unless you want to delete firebrand from most game modes and make casual players hate the elite, this rework cannot go through. Please, spam me with confused emojis, insult me, hate me, prove me a biased noob, but don't be so silent about this rework, get vocal through multiple posts/topics and social networks to make it more noticeable.

In the upcoming February 14th balance patch mantras are going to receive a HUGE quality of life nerf in regressing to a functionality similar to how they were before may 2021. In case you didn't play firebrand back in the day, before may 2021, you used to need to "charge" your mantras through a very long, easily interruptible cast time, this also applied everytime you got downed/killed and in most scenarios you had to be very careful or suffer a big downtime on said mantra if you consumed the last charge of it. This new rework at the very least will charge your mantras while out of combat (in pve maps), but the QoL loss we will suffer in combat will make them a pain to play with in many scenarios, particularly fractals, WvW and PvP game modes. There's no doubt that through practice and muscle memory many players of all skill levels will master (again) the art of using their mantras wisely, and from a roleplay perspective, their charging animation and vocals were a pretty good touch... but truth is, the additional skill cap and roleplay aspect of this "new" rework just won't compensate how unfun, annoying and bothersome mantras are going to become if this rework goes through. I'm not a Firebrand main, but I've played enough with mine through all kinds of content of all difficulties to know how this is going to turn out, most of you will feel that playing with them will become a chore pretty quickly and drop mantras/firebrand completely from multiple game modes, compelling many non-dedicated players to switch to a class that has to deal with less annoyances outside arguably raids and strikes. I'm not talking about the balancing aspect of mantras right now, whether puking out boons is a good or a bad thing is up to debate on a topic of it's own, this post is about the "Fun factor" of these, and whatever the real reasoning behind this rework is, there are better ways to go through it without making mantras a pain again. I'm someone who rarely complains and tries to see the good side of everything and I'm only opening this topic to create some awareness on this issue as people are being quite tame and silent about it. But if you don't get vocal, spam more the forums/reddit through multiple posts, topics and complains. You will deeply regret this change that will probably take a year or two to be reversed again. While sometimes out of touch, CMC is a reasonable person and he and his team will think it more thoroughly before making such a bad change as they did before when they tried to destroy gyros if you get loud enough. Again, I'm not a firebrand main, worst case scenario I will just bench mine again, but whether you feel that mantras are too strong, whether you miss the old animations of them, whether you want a more challenging gameplay, there are better ways to balance them. If you let this change almost no one asked for go through. You will regret it.

Please for everything that's holy don't let these mantra changes go live. The quality of life the old rework offered made them fun and worth slotting in most occasions... I don't want to go back to those days of having to cast them, they were a huge pain and a big annoyance, please stop, they're fine as they are right now. Reaper changes missed the mark again with no changes to greatsword's animation speed. Stowing shouldn't be a thing, AA shouldn't be that slow, is it that hard to give them a trait to make shroud no longer soak damage? the tech is there, you proved it with specter. Great shout changes though. I'm not keen on weaver changes, elementalist has many problems, damage is not one of them. What's the point of making it go to 44k again? instead of making it's rotation more fluid or increasing it's lifepool which has no reason to be that low in the current state of the game (at least for pve). Guardian's Unscathed contender changes are pretty welcome and might open the gates to power builds, but a total removal would have been way better.

The AI is way better than in the last beta, but support aside. The elite as a whole feels too stiff and weak in it’s current iteration, even when compared to core engineer. Please consider these suggestions/feedback: 1 - Make our mech inherit 100% of our stats through a minor trait. Leave it’s Toughness and Vitality as static values for balance if you must. It feels too disjointed and limiting for our golem to give up stats depending on traits, that’s what our gear is for. You can easily adjust the power coefficients of it’s skills or like druid, reduce it’s overall damage by a determined % in support builds for balance instead. If you want to stubbornly stick to this design, please consider limiting it to Ferocity for bottom, Healing Power/Concentration for mid and Expertise for upper traits. For build diversity and consistency. The golem must at the very least, inherit 100% of our Power, Condition damage and Precision at all times, regardless of our chosen traits. 2 - Make all mech skills and signets ground target. As bothersome as this might be for some people, this would alleviate many AI and positioning problems we’re currently dealing with. 3 - Remove the unsummon/summon animation when dismounting, gliding, this one is a no brainer. Right now it is really bothersome and exploitable. Improve the stowing gimmick so the golem doesn’t summon by itself randomly and move it to f5 for consistency. 4 - Make our golem work underwater. Like ranger pets, we don’t even need for it to transform into a necro shark, just make it cast it’s skills around us or our target. 5 - Move the command skills to f2, f3 and f4. Give us back f1 as a selectable toolbelt skill among our equipped heal/utilities. You have the tech for this (look at revenant) In it’s current iteration it seems that you’re intending for us to run at least two signets all the time (swiftness for boom sharing+ condi/power/barrier) and i’m fine with that. However as it has been said countless times, old utilities/healing skills are balanced towards having their toolbelt counterpart, limiting it to only f1 is already a pretty big trade-off for an elite, giving up all toolbelt skills shouldn’t go live. 6 - Mace is still weak as a DPS weapon and needs some adjustments, perhaps adding torment or bleeding to it’s AA chain and increasing rocket punch damage would do the trick? Make rocket punch’s CC/damage come from a single source. Depending on two different sources (you and the golem) for it to work correctly creates some unnecessary landing issues, more so in competitive modes. 7 - In a world where Renegade and Mirage can perfectly cover alaricity for 10 persons, we shouldn’t be limited to just 5-man alaricity output. Please don’t wait for release to cover this. 8 - Many core traits/Runes don’t interact at all with the golem (boons on bleeding for example…) you may want to check them out. 9 - Tying golem revival to a damaging skill is bad design, perhaps moving the revival to healing signet instead of the elite would make more sense? Or just delete it altogether if you reduce it’s downtime, I’m not really sure about this one to be honest… 10 - Give our golem a received AoE-damage reduction passive or give it a 3/4s i-frame when we use an evade, at least for PvE. I don’t know if there’s already a damage reduction for pets like this within the game, if so… it needs some tweaks. The golem loves to stand on AoE fields, it doesn’t have evades and there’s no realistic way to solve this issue through micromanaging or IA without putting some serious work behind the scenes. Other MMORPGs like World of Warcraft got around this issue by giving pets a passive 90% received AoE-damage reduction in PvE, lazy but effective. Perhaps such numbers may be too much for Gw2, but some damage reduction would do wonders and give us time to react. 11 - Unlike rangers we can’t switch pets and our damage is more directly linked to our companion, on top of that Mechanist is too weak without their golem, so a 50 seconds repairing windows is still too much of a setback. Please consider reducing it’s downtime to 25s in PvE, I cannot speak about competitive modes. 12 - When you cast any damaging weapon skill, even without range or target. The golem goes nuts and decides to go and attack anything it feels like within a pretty big range. 13 - Please add dye channels to the golem. Rangers have multiple pets to suit their fantasy/styles, come on, pamper us! This shouldn’t be that hard to implement. 14 - I hate Sky circus. PERIOD, it makes no sense. 🤮