Pixel.8012

Hey all! Like a lot of Guard players I'm really excited about dual pistols, they seem super fun for a variety of builds across each game mode, but there's been a long-standing issue in guardian that will hold them back as a both a fun and interesting weapon choice by attaching them to the hip to something frustrating -- Radiant fire and the monopoly of torch on every condi guardian build. Torch is a fantastic weapon, and radiant fire is big damage from a single trait. Torch 5 not so much, but the instant cast alone from torch 4 is so powerful that every condi build on guardian wants some mainhand weapon coupled with torch, and maybe another mainhand weapon if you're lucky (right now this is only willbender, but historically firebrand has also brought scepter), not to mention the projectile from torch 4. This might not seem like an issue, plenty of classes have weapons that they want/need on both weapon sets, but guardian runs into a very specific issue with torch/radiant fire and a secondary weapon set that occupies the offhand skills slots -- either with a two-handed weapon, or with a second off-hand in the case of pistols. Because radiant fire will give you the flipover skill (zealots fire) without you manually pressing torch 4, the instant cast will often get hidden behind an active projectile charge, delaying your casts of the primary skill. On firebrand this mostly an inconvenience -- albeit a frustrating one -- but on willbender (because of restorative virtues), this can be backbreaking. For instance, restorative virtues reduces the cooldown of torch 4 but not of radiant fire, which causes Zealot's Fire to get overlapped by the trait proc's projectile cast with astonishing frequency. This frustration is compounded by the fact that, on builds like condi quickbrand, which brings a ton of ritualist gear, doesn't trigger the crits for radiant fire all too frequently. This makes the performance of the build and the flow of its rotation largely dependant on crit RNG, which feels awful. This has a secondary -- and more relevant -- issue, though. Because condi guardians have seldom needed to care about more than one-handed weapons, this hasn't been a big issue, but condi willbender builds being interested in greatsword has proven to be another issue that will be further compounded (and for more builds) with the addition of dual pistols -- Radiant Fire's current design is incredibly hostile to anything else sharing the offhand skills with torch. Whether that's willbender running Greatsword Scepter/Torch, or after this patch any build considering running Pistol/Pistol as it's secondary weapon set, players are going to have to contend with being punished by Radiant Fire more and more. Not being able to push Zealot's Flame off cooldown because you have another weapon set is already a loss in DPS, but swapping back and needing to throw the projectile to get access to the skill just feels atrocious. This problem is fixable though! There's a few solutions - Radiant fire no longer gives you access to a charge of Zealot's Fire - Radiant fire no longer gives you access to the charge, but the trait gives you an upgraded version of Zealot's Fire, similar to Lingering Curse on Necromancer - Rework radiant fire entirely to be a more broadly useful condi damage trait and less tied to torch specifically Condi guard is super fun, and with the different varieties of that core concept getting increased weapon diversity with dual pistols, it bears mentioning just how much of a burden both radiant fire and torch are for weapon diversity on condition Guardian builds, as well as (arguably more importantly) the general fun of those builds as well. I really hope this affects some sort of positive change because pistols look incredible, but if they get held back because of radiant fire then it's gonna be hard for guardian players to justify engaging with them like they deserve.

Why does hammer get more attention than willbender does as an entire traitline? There's a plethora of issues with the build in basically every mode and Anet's approach to the build has been deeply negligent and frustrating as an enjoyer of the spec. It needs more changes than a few minor nods, this is unacceptable.

Hey all, back again to talk about willbender. Gonna keep it (relatively, at least compared to my previous threads) short this time because there's not a lot to wall of text about, but it is something from today's patch I wanted to draw attention to Before today, Power Alac Willbender was over performing on DPS for a boon build, so ANet saw fit to knock it down a peg. 36k was too high for a boon build, so it got a performance nerf this patch. ANet also (correctly, IMO), addressed how much they nerfed the build and bumped it from a 4sec duration on F2 to 5sec. However, none of this addresses the actual problem with power alac willbender: It's too hard for the average player to provide their boon. This is probably obvious to most people, Alac WB's alacrity uptime is a function of playing the rest of the spec near perfectly. Now normally I'd be for a build requiring you to perform well to provide its boon, but there's a bigger, more invisible issue that prevents players interested in playing Power Alac willbender from performing to expectation. Greatsword. Specifically, greatsword stow cancels. While power guard has always had to contend with stow cancels to maximize its damage -- much more than any other class in the game, now that willbender has tied alacrity generation to number of hits over a window of time. Making sure you're getting as MANY hits as possible within the allotted 5 seconds is paramount to providing your boon, and now players that might look at Snowcrows for their gear and refer to the rotation and do EVERYTHING correctly still won't be able to apply their boon with 100% uptime. Let me reiterate, even someone that has geared properly, read and COMPLETELY memorized the rotation, and executed every skill in the perfect order may not be able to provide 100% alacrity. This is unacceptable. I agree that power alac willbender needed a nerf, but the spec was already unapproachable for many players and now that the margins are even tighter, it's a spec that only the most confident players with knowledge of an obtuse system will be able to play well. And I think it's fine for a spec to be difficult to play and provide good boons with! I think that Staxe Mirage's careful management of clones (prior to today's patch, that build is probably dead?) and Condi Alac Ren needing to properly manage Charged Mists is fine for instance, not every boon dps build needs to give its boon easily. But the fact that willbender needs to do its rotation perfectly while ALSO being gated by an arcane system that is explained NOWHERE is unacceptable. Alac Willbender's method of delivering alacrity is unique, and that's cool. Alac willbender should be hard to play, its identity as a high damage Alac DPS with no other boons is unique among its peers, and that fact alone is great for the health of the game. But it is absolutely unacceptable that greatsword's scuffed nature hampers the build for a majority of players so much, and if ANet wants Power Willbender to exist -- especially Alac Willbender, it is paramount that they address the stows on greatsword 4/5 to make the build ACTUALLY playable to a majority of players that might not even know stow cancelling exists, or how important it is. Nerfs/buffs to its performance cannot be reflective of how the majority of players actually engage with the class until greatsword is fixed, and until then you're nerfing what is to most players a bad build because few people actually stow cancel, and fewer still are using that to take advantage of a build performing at Power Alac WB's ceiling. (also if anyone from ANet actually reads this post, Focus 4 and Sword 3 have similar aftercast issues, they're just nowhere NEAR as egregious as greatsword's which is particularly egregious and should be the primary concern)

Hey everyone, the world's loudest willbender player here again to talk about something that is, surprisingly, not willbender this time – I want to talk about the way ArenaNet approaches Guild Wars design, the concerns I’ve seen from a large portion of end-game players across modes, and (hopefully) how ANet can actually start moving in the direction of actionable solutions. While I feel like my reputation on this subreddit is mostly “the willbender person” I actually have a background in community management and specifically parlaying community sentiment into actionable, discrete feedback for the development team – something I think the community at large would agree that ANet kind of desperately needs. I think most people agree that there’s a severe lack of community management and official community interaction between ANet and the broader playerbase that have, in my professional opinion, directly led to a handful of issues that I’d like to draw some attention to. So consider this a bit of an open letter to ANet and, hopefully, create a productive discussion for what ANet can learn from its community and, in turn, what the community can realistically expect from ANet. TL;DR: There's no expectation shared between the devs and the community in any capacity and it's a massive communication issue that manifests in other parts of the game's balance, and anet needs to be willing to invest in open communication with the community if this is a problem they feel is worth solving. Up at the top, I would really love to highlight some positives that I've noticed recently in the past year of the game. With all of the issues with the content release cadence, both in general and as a function of living world season 1, ANet is really honing in on a much more diverse game than I think a lot of us have been historically used to, and a lot of the community discussion with and around ANet hasn't quite caught up to that fact yet. I really do want to commend a lot of the hard work that has happened over the past 8 to 9 months, because it's really not easy and while there's still a lot of work to be done, the work that's already been done should not be understated or underappreciated. Balance at a meta level is markedly more diverse than it's been in a very long time and I really, really think anet has done a good job iterating towards that direction. But the biggest thing that concerns me here is that, by and large, no player deeply entrenched in any mode actually feels like ANet designs the game for them. Open world players feel like balance is focused around endgame PvE content, WvW players feel left hung out to dry from years and years of a stagnant meta with no meaningful movement on alliances until very recently, sPvP barely gets any attention vis a vis rewards or incentive to drive players to the mode so it just hemorrhages players, and endgame PvE players feel like the content cadence and balance indicates little development attention to that kind of content. This is a problem. No part of the player base feels heard or catered to, and both balance and content feel like an afterthought. In order for a game to have a community with a long-term relationship with its developer that propels the game forward, the communities within the game need to feel heard and understood, and it hasn’t really felt like there’s been an active effort to interface with the multiple communities that make endgame guild wars so diverse and vibrant. Part of this manifests in balance. I want to speak mostly to PvE balance here because it’s my primary mode, but I do also play PvP and a lot of what I’m going to articulate here is broadly applicable there as well, and I’d imagine WvW balance is similar. In any case – expectations for class/build output feels largely arbitrary. Why do some classes (guardian, mesmer, engi) get to do everything, but warrior, thief, and necro have incredibly limited utility? Why does Condi Quickbrand get to have 37k dps but Condi QuickZerk loses like 8k off that for absolutely zero net gain? Why does staxe mirage get to do 35-36k dps on content but Alac Specter sits at 28-29k? I could go on, but the point is, ANet doesn’t seem to have an internal goalpost for what output they’re okay with among builds, and it’s frustrating trying to play within that framework when a lot of it leads to builds that just sort of obviate everything else because they can either do WAY more damage or have WAY more utility – or, often times, both. ANet could really stand to benefit set an upper bound for the damage output of builds, and try not to stray from that except for in exceptional cases, and work down from there in terms of percentage of that damage and/or utility other types of builds should have access to, so content desifn and spec balance feel more cohesive and intertwined. This sort of fluid design would be more acceptable if the top end of GW2 content was constantly moving upwards and the design could evolve with it like other MMOs, but because GW2 stops at a lv 80 cap, this sort of emergent power creep both within roles and on the game at large has a knock-on effect on how compelling endgame content can remain in the long-term, and that’s dangerous. I think most people want to see ANet make big moves on balance and make the game interesting and dynamic – given the alternative is atrophying that Reaper/Dragonhunter players have been contending with for god knows how long now – and fail openly with a willingness to make changes and address feedback, but ANet needs to be 1) open with their expectations for what they want from different kinds of builds (how should selfish DPS compare to more utility focused dps builds? What percentage of the pure DPS builds’ damage do they want the boon dps builds to meet? How much utility is too much utility for a build to have access to?) and 2) Willing to invite public feedback on when and where they miss the mark, and then adjust their balance approach accordingly so the game can evolve to a point that the community understands why and how the builds have landed where they are, at least broadly. Lastly, and this is a personal grievance of mine but one I’ve seen echoed by more than a few players – There’s a sort of underlying sentiment that ANet’s balance approach, for better and for worse, has a tendency to focus its attention on the builds/specs that are currently already noteworthy, and this is dangerous because over a long enough time this leads to a sort of bias that begins to exclude builds that might not have yet captured their audience, or may have lost that audience long ago. Spellbreaker took almost 5 years to be a reasonable choice for PvE play, willbender finally found a meaningful identity a year into the expansion that released it, Harbinger STILL doesn’t have a mathematically optimal rotation because the inherent design is so jumbled that it feels inconsistent to an almost unpredictable degree, Vindicator’s had a dodge bug where you can force an equipped weapon strength modifier onto the dodge instead of the intended unequipped damage mod for five months now without even an acknowledgement from ANet. And this isn’t just constrained to specializations either, Warrior rifle and offhand dagger, revenant hammer and shield, guardian offhand sword, thief sword and mainhand pistol, and basically every core necro weapon save for staff have pretty major issues inherent to the weapon’s usability that ANet has largely ignored because they’re weapons that are kind of sitting quietly by so they aren’t receiving any attention, which is indicative of a larger pattern – ANet’s design philosophy is built around the squeaky wheel getting the grease, with quieter builds getting pushed to the forefront basically at their internal whim without much conversation happening with the players that do play and enjoy those builds/weapons. As a rhetorical question, why did firebrand tomes get fixed the patch after they got reworked but warr rifle, rev hammer, and thief sword have been near useless for years and years? These are the kinds of things anet needs to bare in mind during design, and the community should remember when it comes to the way we discuss builds and expectations for builds with ANet. Discussion with your community is important. Hard conversations with your community are important to have. But for the long-term health of both the game and the community, this kind of communication is inherently worth investing in. That’s how you end up with communities like Final Fantasy XIV that are willing to be empathetic to their development and work with the dev team insofar as they’re able, instead of feeling like an outside observer at the whims of the development team. For a long-term live service game like an MMO, this sort of relationship is critical to long-term growth, retention, and player well-being, and a lot of the issues I’ve highlighted above indicate that these aren’t investments that ANet has seen worth it in the short term, but both inherently and implicitly they have value for the game that can absolutely pay for itself. ANet, we love this game. We love this community. We want to see it succeed, and we want you to do so in a way that’s sustainable long term and lets us enjoy the game for years and years to come. But there needs to be investments in the community and in balance that makes the game feel sustainable, and establishing that expectation comes with a lot of active work. Hopefully, this open letter begins that conversation, because I don’t ever want to see it end. Thank you 💕

This stream was awesome for quality of life improvements and build diversity for most classes, but yet again willbender only got residual quality of life improvements targeted at dragon hunter (greatsword 4 aftercast fixes, sword buffs) or firebrand (buffs to condi guard in general, not just from this patch in particular but historically), but willbender has a few playability concerns that neither of the more popular guardian specs have and they absolutely need looking at; namely: 1) Willbender needs 1sec more duration on f1 Willbender's f1 duration doesnt last the entire duration of its cooldown, there's a 8.16sec cd and an 8sec duration on justice which makes willbender feel unnecessarily punishing in situations where you cannot afford to cast f1 off cooldown -- increasing the duration of f1 by one second keeps the rotation as it is fundimentally the same but allows for willbender to not immediately hemmhorage dps the second a party member drops any alacrity uptime or you can't find an opportunity to cast your f1. 2) Radiant Fire needs a rework, badly. Radiant fire has been a source of a bit of pain for firebrand player for the past few years, but because firebrand brings two mainhand weapons (axe and scepter) it's seldom an issue because you're not spending an eternity in your tome. But for willbender, you're hurting your build diversity substantially on account of the fact that willbender can bring greatsword, which restricts your ability to cast torch 4 until you're on sword/torch. However, because of the way that the cooldown for radiant fire works, if you miss a weapon swap by literally a half second at all, suddenly your instant cast for torch 4 is locked behind the projectile cast. This causes you to lose a lot of dps (often through no fault of your own, see whisper of jormag as a really easy example -- if you get launched in the air as part of the fight you can drift your weapon swap cooldowns and harm your damage through no fault of your own) over the course of the fight, and makes playing with greatsword feel horrid for willbender players that want to explore it as one of their weapon choices. This can be easily fixed by having radiant fire not trigger the flip-over skill, and instead just granting the flip over skill an ammo charge. That way, you're never losing the ability to cast your torch 4 because variables outside of your control. It's still a loss to not weapon swap off cooldown, but it doesn't throw a wrench in your rotation and artificially make certain variations of the build unfun for no reason. I love this spec, I don't mind if it doesn't get the same level of affection as the more popular guardian specs, but for an update largely targeted at increasing playability issues I really hope to surface some concerns that I and the small handful of other willbender players in endgame pve content that i've spoken to share about a spec we really care about, even if it isn't defining the metagame.