DarkCobalt.2849

I haven't logged in today yet, tried getting on just now and the launcher says "Downloading 0KB (0KB/sec)" 😞

From my perspective, channeled block is actually something interesting on a weapon, not all specs and weapons have access to it and it can be used to abuse certain raid mechanics. Most immediate example is Deimos where you can block his Mind Crush where you otherwise normally would have to go into Saul's ward in the middle. This opens up an option to run Vindicator as an oil kiter on Deimos where they can stay out and greed for damage, or otherwise make the class an easy pick for Deimos CM without losing too much uptime. On Samarog CM, you can channel the block while standing in place to deny his knockback during the spear drop mechanic (last I remember the jumping dodge no longer works when the Vindicator is rooted). You can't do this with Sword, but in theory you could switch to Staff for a block but sacrifice a ton of damage in the process, so it's nice to have it on greatsword instead. Another good example is Temporal Curtain on Mesmer's Focus and how much QoL it brings to many raid and fractal encounters, it's insanely valuable and my raid team even finds it difficult to replace a Mesmer sometimes because of the pull functionality, and that's something you can't really judge based on damage output. There's also an argument to be made that CC in general is valuable and is enough to swing a decision on which weapon to take, e.g. Necro warhorn being almost useless outside of the fact that it provides the most CC in the off-hand slot. But aside from the rather niche examples, otherwise I do agree, there really aren't many novel differences between the weapons. The saving grace originally was that (for most classes) the Core weapon options were intended to match one-to-one with playstyles, and elite specs offered a different take with some unique mechanics. Unfortunately Anet have walked themselves into a design trap, since now that we're blendering everything together there's far too many redundancies.. If they can't use the Elite spec traitlines and functions to make the weapons feel unique anymore because the weapons are supposed to be usable on every spec, then the game is at serious risk of getting completely homogenized.

Well, this just isn't true. The Revenant GS brings survivability as it has a built-in channeled block on GS4 and is also the weapon with the most free-form mobility with GS3 being able to dash wherever the rev wants. The bigger issue is the core spec counterpart: Sword brings nothing to the table to GS doesn't already bring, as it has less mobility and a significantly less reliable survivability skill, while also doing less damage, so why do we ever want to run Sword? The only thing that would be a bit more CC I suppose. If they made it so Sword brought something like definitively better CC utility, then there would be enough of a reason to run Sword over GS. You harbor some major misconceptions about the game's design. Core has plenty of examples of specific traitlines interacting with specific weapons (e.g. Warrior's Defense traitline and Hammer, Necro's Curses traitline and Scepter, Guardian's Zeal traitline and Greatsword, etc.). The interactions may not have been as deep or as in-depth as Elite spec traitlines and their respective weapons, but they exist nonetheless. This isn't inherently a problem with Core and Core weapons themselves because you can take them on any elite spec you want. The elite spec traitlines, however, cannot be taken on every spec yet the weapon will be available on every spec. It was originally fine to have Elite specs and weapons coupled together because generally speaking, that was also how Core was designed (again, many examples of 1 traitline 1 weapon), but now that philosophy is being broken and there's no direct easy solution to de-couple it.

That benchmark is the lowest of the viable condition builds though. Again, this is its maximum bringing only 1 aegis basically and not burning pages in other tomes. Vindicator is 39,614 as its maximum so even if it was taken down a few notches for needing to take Jalis, it would still do fairly well as it has the headroom to sacrifice damage in favor of utility.

The issue is that the 36k is its theoretical best, bringing all damage and no utility. If you swap out for utilities it will end up being worse than it already is. Granted, I agree those utilities are powerful, but Virt can bring something similar with its stability mantra and Feedback, as well as DPS Vindicator being able to bring Jalis for stability or even Ventari for bubble if it really came down to it, while scoring very high damage marks by comparison. They could also provide additional bonuses to DPS-specific grandmaster traits. Using the harbinger example again, they could make the grandmaster trait Doom Approaches double the effectiveness of Blight. Something of the sort. The point is to not adversely impact the DPS build whilst nerfing the qDPS/aDPS build.

In the past few patches we've seen: Condi Firebrand get nerfed incredibly hard because its Condi Quick build was overperforming (37k with allies), now its standard Condi DPS build is underperforming and one of the worst Condi DPS builds in the whole game. Untamed getting its cooldown reduction trait nuked out of orbit because its Condi/Power Alac builds were overperforming (35-36k), now this spec just doesn't exist anymore in high-end content. Actually, now that the Alac build straight up no longer exists, we may as well revert this change, right...? And now, Condi Harbinger gets a 50% Blight nerf that affects the entire spec because, I suppose, its Condi Quick build was overperforming (35k). It's now doing universally worse than Reaper on its DPS build when it's supposed to be the high-risk high-reward glass cannon spec. There's many other examples of this design philosophy (or tendency) of shotgun nerfing the entire spec, and it is starting to become harmful to the game. If one aspect of a spec is overperforming, the solution shouldn't be "nerf something that affects the entire spec" because that ends up hurting multiple builds when only one build needs to be targeted. The better solution would be to implement downsides on certain traits that need to be taken for boons, like for example making Blight 50% less effective but tying that specifically to the Deathly Haste grandmaster trait so that only the boon DPS build gets its damage lowered rather than the entire spec suffering. Not all classes benefit from this type of design though, so there needs to be a deeper rework of the boon-providing functionalities of certain classes like Firebrand, or beef up their condi-inflicting skills/traits that require some kind of trade-off with a boon-providing function in order to stand out (like taking more damaging traits in exchange for losing the boon function). In any case, this kind of shotgun nerfing needs to go and be buried. I'm tired of entire specializations having to suffer and just because one specific build is overperforming.

Can you please revert this Harbinger nerf? The class was doing a very high amount of damage, but it's supposed to as it's designed to be a glass cannon build that reduces its own HP in exchange for damage with Blight. Now, the class isn't doing much better than the other tankier options out there that have significantly better survivability, so what even is the point of making it so risky with Blight in the first place? If you're going to nerf the upsides to Blight to the point where it's almost just flavor text, you may as well just remove the downsides to it as well at this point. There can also be an argument that this build is overperforming with the Condi Quickness variant, we don't know if that's the case or not because you don't tell us. If this is the case, then we have exactly the same problem as we did with the Condi Firebrand nerf. You should have applied the nerf to the Quickness trait on Harbinger instead where Blight was 50% less effective, so you only nerf one of the variations instead of both. Instead, this is once again a shotgun nerf to all Harbinger playstyles. Please revert this change and revisit this.

Yeah this is precisely the problem, it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. If the weapon needs the spec trait to perform well, then the weapon is useless on other specs. If the weapon doesn't need spec-specific traits, then it usually is the best option for other specs that play similar builds. It's such a mess to balance that I'm not exactly hopeful that they will manage to figure it out before launch.

The problem is that it's power mech, if it's hitting that hard with Hammer then it's already better than Rifle. Granted, you lose the benefit of range, but it'll now be better than rifle on most fights if it's left untuned.

Quite the opposite to be honest. Of the few builds I've been able to test with our very limited rune access (basically only power builds), we've arrived at a the conclusion we thought would happen: many of the elite spec weapons are simply overpowered when in the hands of other specs. Herald? Use Greatsword. Renegade? Use greatsword. Mechanist? Use hammer. Power Ele on anything? Use Warhorn, and probably Sword too. Power Tempest? Use Sword. Power Anything on Warrior? Dagger everything. We're slowly approaching even greater levels of homogenization because the elite spec weapons are too strong and taking over the entire weapon pool, but at the same time they can't nerf the elite spec weapons because many elite specs were balanced around their weapons in the first place. With how much of a mess the current balance patch is, it's amazing they thought it was a good idea open these colossal floodgates. Instead of having a single moving target in regards to available weaponry on each spec, now they have 3 per class, per weapon. You adjust one, it now affects the other, thanks to the weapon being accessible on all specs. I don't really have much faith in them to properly pull this off with an expansion and even more weapons on the horizon.

So just to dig into these Willbender changes, our request was to be able to provide Alacrity without a target, and these changes practically solve nothing because using the F2 without a target means we don't have it available when we have a target. The Willbender F2 is a 20-second cooldown per charge. If we blow both charges without a target, we'd get a measly 10 seconds of base alacrity and need to wait ~35-40 seconds to recover those two charges. As soon as a target becomes available, what do we do then? This proposed update fundamentally changes nothing, as blowing the charges to provide Alacrity without a target is in direct odds with using the charges to get Flowing Resolve when a target is available, so it's better to instead save Flowing Resolve for when a target is available, which is exactly how the class is currently played. We'd be actively griefing if we decided to use the F2 in this supposedly intended way of providing Alac during downtime..

This feedback has been provided numerous times before patch, and I second it once again. Please for the love of all that is holy, just put the alacrity on Sand Savant and make it only come from shades. And while we're at it, remove it from CA on Druid too and place it elsewhere. PLEASE, STOP COUPLING HEALING FUNCTIONS AND BOON TOGETHER. It has ruined Druid and didn't land with Scourge, I don't know how much more universally-agreed upon feedback we need to keep providing...

From the balance preview, we were told that one of the goals was to Based on current testing that I've done with several of the boon builds using as close to best-in-slot equipment as I can get (no infusions, some unoptimal stats on accessories), I've found that for many of the classes, the patch has done the exact opposite. I'll go through each one and list out the concerns, including a brief before/after summary for those unfamiliar with how the spec plays, and focusing mainly on what the initial intended effect and expectation of the patch was and how the actual results go against it. Herald Before the patch, Herald could rely on the Draconic Echo trait to easily provide Quickness by using all of their facets on cooldown. Now, that has been moved to the reworked trait Elevated Compassion where using 6 Upkeep points pulses Quickness for 3 seconds. Power Quickness Herald (PQHerald) now is forced into a rotation to maintain 6 Upkeep points at all times in order to maintain Quickness, with very little room for deviation. While this build is less affected than others, it now means PQHerald does not have the liberty to use their Jalis roads as they need to maintain the 6 Upkeep drain to keep quickness. This results in less flexibility than before. Heal Herald (Healrald) is similarly forced into a rotation of maintaining a 6 Upkeep points for Quickness. While this is less of a problem in Glint, it is a very problematic issue in Ventari. Ventari is our dedicated healing stance, and we are now required to channel its formerly situational bubble skill to maintain Quickness. Additionally, as we are forced to rotate legends due to the upkeep drain, we have less choice in saving Ventari for when the healing is actually needed. Moreover, the upkeep drain prevents us from comfortably using heals when we actually need them (more on this later in other healers, this is a recurring theme). Again, overall less flexibility than before. (EDIT: Arguably, it's possible to dedicate channeling 6 Upkeep on Glint for Quickness and overcap it with enough boon duration and then use non-channeled healing skills in Ventari, but the same issue remains of being forced into swapping Legends.) An addendum to Herald's aforementioned Quickness concerns is now the tightness of other boons. Before, Draconic Echo allowed Healrald to pulse the Facet boons after consumption, which meant essentially near-permanent Facet uptime even in the other Legend. However, now that we are taking Elevated Compassion (and Draconic Echo being reworked), this is no longer the case. PQHerald has seen a significant reduction in its boon output and Healrald has as well to a lesser extent, leading to problems of boon uptime being more stringent in the party as a whole. This rework leads to overall less flexibility in team composition when paired with certain Alacrity classes (see below), where not all boons may experience comfortable uptime. Druid Before this patch, Druid could reliably give Alacrity via using its Spirit activations. At most, only 2 Spirits were needed to maintain 100% Alacrity uptime with a little bit of wiggle room, you could feasibly take 3 Spirits if one felt the need to, or take other utilities. The June 27th patch changed the class's Alacrity to instead come from Grace of the Land, where Alacrity now comes from Celestial Avatar (CA). This is perhaps the biggest offender of the aforementioned "exact opposite of intended effect". Why is Alacrity forced onto CA, our main source of emergency healing? Aside from the Alacrity duration having razor thin margins, CA itself has a 10-second cooldown and a resource bar as well. While it originally was boring and supposedly inflexible to always have 2 Spirits for Alacrity, we are now forced to enter CA off cooldown, completely stripping Druid of its biggest healing functions as we must use them to maintain Alacrity. It's pretty obvious here that the changes result in far less flexibility than before. On the more nuanced side, Druid lost a significant amount of its non-Alacrity boon uptime, the main offender being Protection. Before, Stone Spirit allowed for very easy uptime of Protection. With the recent rework of Spirits, we are still required to take Stone Spirit, but the Protection uptime is now much less accessible on Druid. We are now required to take the Invigorating Bond trait and use Pet cooldowns off cooldown to provide as much Protection uptime as possible. While the Pets weren't the greatest source of utility, now it has become mandatory to use a Pet that has a short enough cooldown (<20s) to activate the trait off cooldown, thus removing our access to potentially useful Pet utilities that may be on a longer cooldown (e.g. Wyvern for CC which is a 30s cooldown). Scourge Before this patch, Alacrity Scourge didn't exist. Now it does. But moreover, Heal Scourge used to provide a huge amount of Barrier that could protect the party throughout many of the encounters' hardest-hitting mechanics. After the patch, the Barrier output appears to have been reduced but can now provide Alacrity through the reworked trait Desert Empowerment. Similar to Druid, our Alacrity is tied to our main source of healing/mitigation. Instead of saving large Barriers for when we need them, we are now forced to use Barriers continuously off cooldown to maintain Alacrity. Additionally, we even need to take utility skills that provide Barrier in order to maintain full uptime on Alacrity, even with maximum boon duration. Scourge struggles immensely right now because of its inability to choose when it wants to use its Barriers, resulting in almost no adaptability to any fight situation. The Alacrity duration is also far too short at only 1 second base duration. This means Scourge has become one of the highest APM (action-per-minute) healers in the game, as it must use all Barriers off cooldown to maintain its Alacrity. Quality-of-life isn't great to say the least. As the Alacrity uptime is so tight and demands such strict playstyle and build requirements, Condition Alacrity Scourge is simply not an option, which is a crying shame as the DPS functions of Scourge also got significantly nerfed in the process of trying to deny a full-squad Alacrity playstyle (where you place shades around the arena and provide Alacrity to all Squad members). This is less of an indictment of Alac Scourge itself but rather an indictment of the design philosophy in general, where the spec has lost all other potentially viable playstyles in favor of trying to make a very doctored and restrictive Heal Alacrity build exist in a supposedly balanced PvE. Conclusion I'll keep updating this post as I test more classes, but these are the main ones that I've tried so far in Raids and Strikes. Overall speaking, the patch appears to have done the precise opposite effect of what its initial intent was, with the above classes experiencing less flexibility and poorer quality-of-life in moment-to-moment gameplay. Anet, please consider revisiting these changes, or revert them entirely.

Aged like the finest wine... In fact it's even worse than we initially thought because we didn't know many of the numbers yet, and it's way worse than what we were playing before.

Personally, I'm a little dismayed that the GW2 subreddit of all things has decided to continue with the protest, even posting a discord link in the blackout message to try and move users to a different platform. We're not a very large community and the game hasn't been in the public spotlight for years now. Whether or not you support the Reddit blackout or are for/against the API changes, ultimately privating a subreddit of a few tens of thousand users of a niche, nearly decade-old videogame is doing nothing more than hurting that game's community. Frankly, the GW2 subreddit is so inconsequentially small compared to something like r/Fitness or r/mildlyinteresting, it just isn't worth sabotaging the game community for the protest. At the end of the day we've barely made a real difference, but have utterly nuked our community. To me, that isn't really a worthwhile tradeoff, and part of the perception of Reddit mods being "too power hungry" comes from this mismatch in opportunity cost. This applies to pretty much all videogame-specific subreddits and post-blackout polls have indicated that most users would prioritize keeping their game communities alive than splintering it for the sake of boycotting a larger product that not all players would necessarily use or support but do benefit from.

Firebrand is very good for a support option, one of the best in the game. The healing build is a bit complicated because of how many skills you have at your disposal (with all of the tomes having their own hotbars), but it has the highest carry potential in the game with its utility. It's the only consistent provider of Stability and Aegis, which can make Fractals trivial if you know how to use those boons well. It also has Reflects too. The condi quickDPS build is also fairly good, at the moment it's pretty much the only real viable condi quick build. It can still take all of the nice utilities that the healer one can, so it has a lot of flexibility to adapt to situations where you need Stability, Aegis, Reflects, etc. Generally more used in raids, as in Fractals the healing one is the best choice for most groups. It's also decent for open-world farming with its massive cleave and easy access to boons to keep yourself topped off on Quickness, Fury, and some Might. As for the DPS variant... it exists. The May 2nd balance patch hit it really hard and it's probably not going to be recommended anymore as it's (almost) pure melee and doesn't do enough damage to make up for the short range. Still waiting on confirmed numbers and need to test run it in a few raids to find out if it's worth playing or not.

Yes they are viable but considering that Dragonhunter's only purpose is to be a power DPS for Guardian, being only middle of the pack is simply not up to par. Power Reaper is also not up to par, neither is Power Daredevil (Deadeye is much better outside of a few niche utilities that Daredevil brings with Mug). Herald is primarily a boon provider with Vind being Rev's main power DPS. Mech is overall very flexible, having a power option is just an additional thing since Holo is Engi's main power spec.

This is all very true, yes, but you've got to take into account that other classes are also doing more damage than Reaper in these scenarios and are easier to pull off. You can compare it against Spellbreaker, a class that can basically the same amount of utility that Reaper realistically can (CC, breakbar, boonstrip, projectile destruction, revive skill), but brings far more damage and is easier to play than Reaper with fewer restrictions on its rotation. The golem bench is unrealistic in terms of raw number, sure, but what I've found is that it does scale to actual encounters. A class that benches 40k vs 36k will do 30k vs. 27k at QTP during burns, for example. A higher-benching class might score a final DPS output of 18k at Samarog vs. a lower-benching one scoring 15k at Samarog. Don't get me wrong, focusing on the Golem number itself is indeed kind of dumb, but differences between classes' DPS outputs are not.

The numbers you're listing don't seem correct because bleeding is a much bigger part of Mirage's damage from that illusion crit trait Sharper Images and is way more than the "few" stacks you've claimed. If we take a look at the benchmark DPS log's breakdown: https://dps.report/4Hsr-20221203-161154_golem you can see that Torment does 42% of the overall damage at 12829 DPS and Bleeding does 33% of the overall damage at 9720 DPS. The staff skills on Mirage have very few applications of bleeding, meaning that a majority of that is coming from the crit trait. I'm also not sure where you're getting the 45% crit chance for the benchmark, because in the log I linked the crit chance is 58%. If we halve the crit rate of Mirage from taking Ritualists over Viper's and dropping to 30%, we will be losing roughly ~5k DPS in bleeding. That's far more than the ~2k loss you're proposing.

This is far from fine. It's ~5k behind other power benchmarks while being (almost) entirely melee, requiring that they take no significant damage during Shroud to get the full rotation done, and that the boss doesn't step out of the 2 wells that they use in their rotation. This is overall more restrictive compared to other melee builds while providing significantly less DPS.

To clear something up: 2 of condi Virt's signets are active uses, with Ether and Illusions both being a skill reset of some form and end up having higher APM than if you took other utilities.

It really boils down to this. Rather than the proposed gutting of Legendary Lore they should have tuned the mantras to where Condi QFB needs to take Weighty Terms or rework Stalwart Speed slightly to facilitate quickness uptime.

I'm really at a loss for words regarding why they felt the need to outright kill the Willbender build. Isn't it a good thing that we get diversity in class:role selection? We got a whiff of alacrity on Guardian for 1 patch and it's immediately being nuked from orbit in the next. Why even bother giving Willbender an alacrity trait to begin with then? Window dressing I suppose? Checking off the checkboxes for vaguely coherent class design? Well back to Mechanist I guess.

This is a good idea. The other two traits in that spot aren't very impactful in general and it would be nice to have alac be part of those rather than relying solely on staff ambush and staff clones.

In an effort to pull back the overperforming boon DPS builds, you've also targeted the general DPS builds as well with these changes. If quick-DPS Firebrand was a problem, why shotgun nerf a whole smorgasbord of burning traits and abilities that are used by Firebrands in general? This is a huge overcorrection and guts pure DPS Firebrand more than the condi quick one. The real solution would have been to reduce the quickness uptime and have the players build more boon duration or take Weighty Terms instead of Legendary Lore, not nerf Legendary lore into obscurity. But instead, we've decided to nerf all condi Firebrand builds of every form, when the DPS one (although overperforming by 2k DPS) is not that out of the realm of reason to begin with. (The condi quick one is way overperforming, but again gotta shotgun nerf the whole spec I suppose.) The same goes for Renegade. If you're going to nerf the standard Renegade abilities that are not related to alacrity then at least buff the trait that is in the same slot with Righteous Rebel. Instead, we've shotgun targeted all Condi Renegade builds. When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This brute force style of balancing is going to create more problems than it solves.