jul.7602

The CC skills don't need to be nerfed further. Stability needs to be reverted to duration stacking, and be democratized across all professions.

Agreed. Should be able to convert tomes of knowledge into something like mats.

Granted some abilities are a bit too strong, but I think the problem is really the insanely OP stat combos like Minstrel, Celestial, and trailblazer. Furthermore this game has unusually powerful modifiers to healing which require almost zero investment, and are beyond broken. Rice+benevolence+oil+monk+transference is more than a 50% boost to outgoing healing???? That's far too much value for just a few sigils, runes, and food; imagine how broken this game would be if you could get a similar 50% modifier to your condition damage, or power damage. Normalize all stat prefixes to give the exact same number total of stat points as the three stat prefixes. (eg. 1508 stat points for a full set of ascended armor). The works out to around a 30% stat nerf for 4 stat combinations relative to three stat combos.Replace toughness with power on Minstrel and trailblazer sets. Replace toughness on dire with expertise.Retire all healing modifiers on gear and food (transference, benevolence, rice, oil, monk ect.) and replace them to something like +%revive speed

I think this might be one of the biggest, non expansion patches I've seen in this game's history. At this rate, we might actually get the gameplay balanced by the mid year. I look forward to playing on these patches.

Kind of depends on what you mean by pirate-shipping. When you scale to 50+ players, each stacked with dozens of scourges then it's becomes a bit pirateshippy because of the ease which either team can pin-snipe, and the difficulty dogging through 50+ AoEs of death and cc.

What if we reworked our conditions to be more like the ailments and abnormalities in Monster Hunter, and Sekiro (yeah I know 99% never heard of it). Basically conditions would have the following design philosophies. Relatively fewer conditions, but each condition is unique, considerably more powerful and requires an immediate reaction from the player.Conditions do not stack in intensity or duration, are difficult to apply, especially in AoE. Few skills will even have conditions, and those that do will only have one and do negligible damage. In order to inflict the condition, you must exceed your target's "resilience" through several successive attacks, each one depleting the resilience meter until the condition is finally inflicted. Like a breakbar, but with conditions. Resilience recovers each second, but especially faster if you are not recently struck by that condition. To be more concise, inflicting a condition is rare, intentional and satisfying.After falling victim to a condition, your resilience to that condition is reset, and increased exponentially, making it increasingly difficult to apply the same condition several times to the same player. Breaking combat resets all resilience parameters. In monster hunter this is called tolerance and acts as a diminishing return.Conditions generally cannot be cleansed by other skills. Instead, the player can mitigate the effects by doing certain maneuvers. As an example, burning can be cleansed by dodging two times. There is specific counter play that is not dependent on specific abilities, with reasonable reaction times that can greatly limit their damage. Good players will excel, spammers and drones will suffer. Made in italics.With that being said this is how I would rework a few conditions. For the sake of PvE, lets just make a duplicate list of conditions that only apply to PvP and WvW, and leave PvE alone. Burning- Inflicts high burst damage, over relatively small duration. Can be inflicted in AoE by. Does nothing for the first two seconds(or whatever the exact time it takes to regenerate two dodges from 0). After this grace period, you take damage equal to 40% of your maximum health over the next 4 seconds. _Can be immediately cleansed (even during the grace period) by rolling twice, or rolling once in a water field. Leaping/rolling through an ice field will convert the condition into 3 seconds of invulnerability. Debilitate- Combine immobilization, chill, slow, and cripple into one condition that drastically impairs your target's mobility and ability to be aggressive. Can be inflicted 15 seconds. Does nothing for the first two seconds (grace period). Disable the player's auto-attack. All other skills/abilities take three times as long to activate. Movement speed buffs are negated, and the player's movement speed is reduced by 10%. Changing weapons or attunements will instantly reduce the remaining duration by 8 seconds. Entering or leaving an elite transformation automatically removes this condition. Leaping through lightning fields will automatically convert this condition and its remaining duration into superspeed, quickness, and alacrity. Panic-Combine fear and confusion into a condition that punishes clustering. 5 seconds. Upon infliction, all allies within 600 units are also automatically inflicted as well. First 2 seconds does nothing (warning period). At the end of the 3rd second, contaminated players lose 20% of their maximum health if they are within 300 units of another other allied player. At the end of the 5th second, players will become stunned for 3 seconds if they are within 300 units of another player. The damage is treated as if it were an attack, thus can be completely avoided by two well timed dodge rolls, or the appropriate amount of invuln/evade/block frames. Blasting/leaping/whirling in the vicinity of a light removes contamination from yourself (exempts you but not others from being harmed). Alternatively, you can try to spread out. TLDR: Make conditions much stronger, but infrequent. Countering conditions (outside of complete avoidance) should involve crisp evade timings, environmental interactions or teamwork as opposed to relying on 1-2 professions to spam their cleanses.

-775 of those changes will be updates to skill tooltips.-20 changes will be about new promotional offers-5 changes to skills.

I would forget anything Anet said about Alliances. Alliances were canceled after NcSoft laid a bunch of employees off.

Good post, rather than write my own post I'd rather build off of yours. Namely I would mention how dedicated healers, particularly minstrel tempests became mainstream. In my opinion I would partition HoT into three metas from launch to pre-pof: Revenant train, Signet of Inspiration (boonshare) meta, and finally the chill-condi. Early Heart of Thorns Revenants took the spotlight and comps were quick to abuse the 2 second cool-down coalescence of ruin to eviscerate enemy blobs.Healing tempests became integral in any medium to large scale compRelatively few groups were experimenting with boonshare.Mostly physical damage compsMiddle Heart of Thorns Boonshare stacking with 50+ seconds of quickness and resistance suddenly became immensely popular. Mostly physical damage comps.Comps were generally G/G/M/X/X or G/M/X/X/X with "X" being any class other than G or M.Late Heart of thorns until pof boonshare was nerfed and major changes to condition stackingI would argue the nerf to signet of inspiration was immensely critical, because prior to that guilds were able to stack minutes worth of resistance which made any condition composition useless as long as they kept rotating SoI.Mesmer stacking became less common and generally moved from 1 per party to 1 per 12-15 peopleChill-reapers, condi revs, and celestial purge guards became popular. G/R/E/N/X (G=cele guard, R=condirev, N=chillreaper, E=healing tempest, X=other) became the gold standard for compsBuilds became more refined, necros started to add epidemic to their bar.

That's my concern with point 2. If you nerf a skill that was overpowered in one game mode, across all current game modes then the skill will be balanced in the targeted game mode but underpowered in the rest of the game modes. A good counter example is stability. Back in the day stability granted full CC immunity and stacked in duration, but due to complaints mainly in SPvP they heavily nerfed it across all game modes so that it stacked in magnitude. While the change was perhaps reasonable in Spvp, it completely broke large scale WvW because there were an abundance of stun skills like static field or lines of warding that overrided the target cap and could stun your entire group if they were not covered. Essentially it took the stability:amount of CC ratio and vastly skewed it in one direction, which generally favored larger groups at the expense of smaller organized groups.

I've been playing this game for several years since I was in high school, and I've had a long time to watch the combat mechanics of GW2 go from Esport potential, to the sad state they are in today. Only be recognizing our past failures do we have any chance of salvaging the future. Failure #1. Infrequent and often trivial balance patches to a sophisticated and diverse game with limitless customization Guild Wars 2 offers many ways to customize your play style through dozens of different stat prefixes, traits, runes, sigils and skills. A single class could easily produce dozens if not hundreds of functional builds. Among those array of builds it is inevitable that there will be a couple of builds with unusually high performance that soon become classified as meta. With so much customization, and potential to produce broken builds, Anet should have taken a more involved role in balancing the game, especially during the launches of new expansions. It was a grave mistake to let builds like immortal-mesmer make a mockery of a once plausible esport contender, or builds like chill-reaper/revs and scourgebrand to run rampant in WvW. I believe that if anet was serious about having a balanced, competitive and perhaps even esport recognition, they needed to release combat patches at least as often as any other esport game such as starcraft 2 or LoL. The expected time-cadence should be about every 3 months, not the 5-6 months that we have right now. To make matters worse, the patches we have now aren't necessarily even tailored to PvP; they are instead holistic patches for PvE+PvP that usually only scratch the very surface of grievances for each game mode. This leads us into the next failure Failure #2. The reluctance to distinguish and balance the combat system according to different game modes There are arguably four major game modes in GW2, and combat varies so extremely across them that the game would never be balanced unless we treated them as different combat environments entirely. The first game mode is PvE which encompasses raids, dungeons and open world. For the most part any meta raid build would work just fine in a dungeon or in open world. The second game mode is SPvP which is generally taken to be 5v5 domination style combat. In general, these modes were balanced separately but I still feel like a few "PvE" changes were casually seeped into PvP. The third and fourth combat environments are unique to WvW. My classifications are a bit arbitrary but I'll explain why I chose to partition WvW into two systems. The first combat environment is basically small scale which encompasses the lone roamer, and up to maybe 6-7 man havoc groups. Build wise they are similar to Spvp but often have inflated stats due to more efficient stat combos and food, and more emphasis on sustained combat and cleave damage as compared to their SPvP counterparts focused a bit more on faster mobility and more single target damage so that you can rotate points more efficiently. The fourth combat mode which I would dub reverse quantum mechanics is large scale combat which generally encompasses organized groups or guild with 15 or more people led by some sort of driver. What prominently distinguishes large scale from small scale is that hybrid builds become almost entirely replaced by specialized builds focusing on either pure damage, or pure group sustain. I think the comparison between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics suitable because once you approach a certain size regime (player count>15) skills like group sustain, and glass aoe damage become exponentially stronger! If you take a meta build from each other these game modes and attempt to use it in another you will notice a sharp drop in performance because the objective and interactions of those game modes are entirely different. You can never balance any of the game modes by using a 1 size-fits-all approach because they are so vastly different. Failure #3. Allowing combo fields to become obsolete and phased out in favor monopolistic profession based system. Something that I think rarely gets discussed is how we basically made combo-fields obsolete by heart of thorns by taking all the advantages we got from combo-finishers and shifting them onto one or two professions. A quick history lesson, back in the Scarx days guilds used to rely on blasting fire fields to generate might (and empower), and blasting water fields to recover health. It used to be the hallmark of any competent and organized group to manage combo fields. However, ever since I believe HOT we suddenly had access to unprecedented group sustain capabilities through minstrel water tempests and for a time uber-boonshare. The problem with this transition is that when combo fields were the primary means of buffing a group, almost every profession and every build with a couple of blast finishers could contribute in the buffing process. Compared to now, there is no point in blasting fields because the return of investment pales in comparison to advantages of outsourcing all sustain and buffing responsibility to one person in the party. For example, there are only two widely accepted meta healers in existence; minstrelbrand and minstrelscrapper and every other build is leagues behind to the point where two classes have a duopoly on sustain. Mechanics like these hurt diversity in the game and often promote discriminatory behavior when including people in squads.

Pug buildsFrom years of pugmanding I find that you can never go wrong running a support build. They're easy to use and extremely tanky. Let the more experience players carry the DPS. From my experience running ARC in squad, 2 experienced hammer revs some healing support>>>>>6 players attempting to run off-meta dps. Guardian: Full minstrel-brandEngineer: Minstrels-scrapperEle: Minstrel tempest.Ranger: Minstrel druid Damage buildsHonestly, damage is very reliant on your targeting ability and mechanics. If whatever your doing is already getting you on top 8 DPS then your fine. In general these builds work the best Revenant: Zerker/maruader HammerScourge: Cele/power staffEle: Zerker/marauder/cele staffWarrior: Zerker/marauder spellbreakerGuardian: Burnguard (Honestly this build is still pretty underrated)

The entire game engine needs an update. I hate CPU intensive games that also refuse to use the cpu.

Problem:TLDR: The game incentivizes highly conservative mechanics like waiting in towers until(if at all) you accumulate an overwhelming numerical advantage to decisively wipe the enemy because if either of you wipe even once then you will lose the structure to the enemy long before you can regroup and walk back to the fight. I'm dead serious. One of the biggest problems we have in this game is the lack of equilibrium forces that encourage the disadvantaged side (outnumbered/outcomped) to fight. Among many other reasons this is why people sit in towers behind siege and don't fight. I genuinely like to believe that most people playing this game mode want to fight and have fun as opposed to turtling in T3 keeps. But we need to understand that this game does a horrible job at encouraging fights (especially ones where you likely lose). You don't get any loot, and if you die you often have to spend 4 minutes walking across the map to rejoin the fight assuming they haven't patched the gates. In essence, the duration and quality of fights are unnecessarily limited by logistics such as player movement and ridiculous amounts of coordination needed to set up and rotate flame ram+ shield generators before you get obliterated by counter ACS or cheese gate trebs. Solution: Nerf siegeTLDR: Across the board major nerfs to siege and fortifications to bring things back to reasonable levels. Nerf the living hell out of siege, keep lords, and fortifications and replace them with complimentary mechanics that make it easier for players to fight other players instead of doing all the work for them (excessively high damage and target cap). This post will mostly introduce an feature which we sort of had a long time ago in Vanilla called "bugged waypoints" which in essence allowed players to more easily reinforce keeps. This is a PvP which means players should be fighting other players. We don't need Keep lords with literal hundreds of millions of effective health, AC-130 modern warfare kill streaks at SMC, or literal WW2 Era trench warfare combat (counter ac to kill the counter ballista that kills the counter treb which theoretically counters the... flame rebhind the gate). Changes Arrow cart, damage reduced by 50%, and target cap reduced to 10.Trebuchet/catapults no longer splash/damage flame rams behind gatesCannons removed from towers and SMC, damage reduced by 50% and target cap reduced to 10Tower/keep/SMC lord scaling has been reverted to vanilla levels. Capture ring will require 30 seconds to take the objective (regardless of allies present).Shield Generators, remove the AC damage invulnerability trait.Burning oil removed.Reinforced gates and walls removed.Solution II: Add "Relay blueprints" TLDR: Add two types of buildable waypoints. One which is suitable for havoc groups, and skirmishing and another which is appropriate for massive scale sieges. Relay BlueprintSupply requirement:50Effective HP: Comparable to catapult Description: Constructs a special waypoint at the following location which allied players on the map may fast travel to, with certain restrictions. Relays contain up to 5 charges and are consumed whenever a player uses them to fast travel. These charges are replenished one a time every 45 seconds automatically. To limit abuse, players are given relay sickness when used which prevents them from using another relay for 2 minutes. Further, players inside of golemns or carrying banners are not able to use the waypoint. Players that use the waypoint will lose up to 20 supply. The superior version will replenish charges at a rate of 30 seconds. Philosophy: This is a PvP game. Players fighting other players should be the primary means of defending and attacking objectives. The problem with the current system is that fights are inherently designed to be brief and stingy. If the defending team jumps off the walls and wipes for whatever reason they will almost 90% lose the structure before they can reorganize or try again. Individuals and smaller groups are less likely to fight because if they die prematurely than they will miss out on the "fight" should it actually happen. Likewise the attacking force has only 1 chance to take the structure because if they wipe they lose all their siege and will have to try again after ~5 to 10 minutes or resupply and regroup. Waypoints will inherently be stronger on the defense because they wont be exposed, but can also be used for offensive purposes. Most importantly is encourages aggressive gameplay where players are constantly pushing/flanking in order to neutralize the enemies waypoints. Further, it alleviates the pressure of both teams to sit and wait until they have overwhelming odds to push. Additionally it rewards good communication and allows commanders to set up supply lines and staging grounds to attack larger objectives (capturing an inner tower on EBG and installing waypoints to pressure the keep). Mass Relay blueprintSupply requirement: 1,000Effective HP: Comparable to superior flame ram Description: More or less the same as above but with looser requirements on fast travel. Firstly, mass relays hold up to 20 charges and once all charges are consumed the entire thing shuts down for 20 minutes to recharge. After 20 minutes all 20 charges become available at once which should encourage players to spawn in organized waves as opposed to steady reinforcements like the mini relays. Secondly, players inside of golems or carrying banners are eligible to use these. Thirdly, players do not lose their supply after using this. The superior version contains 30 charges with more HP and more supply. Philosophy: These are expensive and relatively fragile given their supply cost. They can be placed literally anywhere as aggressively as the commander wants including inside of enemy fortifications. This will allow most guilds or medium size groups to respond to major objectives. Keep in mind that 2-3 people can easily burst these things down so strategic placement is advised, especially on offense. Some ideas would be putting these inside of towers adjacent to keeps that you wish to attack.

Everyone in this comment thread is basically wrong. Main revenue for this game in the long run is gemstore purchases. I love how everyone is acting like they know business and using it to split the community. Personally mounts should never have been in the game at all, but at the very least they need to be available to all expansions.

Go healing druid with full minstrel. If you're able to ping full ascended minstrel, monk runes, sigils of benevolence and healing food/oils then the commander will let you be int the squad. Any other build useless. Not trying to be mean, but you will not be welcomed to squad.