[is cerus cm possible? [Merged]]

8 hours ago, Dibit.6259 said:

This was the reaction with htcm. Took 6 days for the first successful clear by snowcrows, so we'll probably know within a week 👍

I'll just add my 2cents here and mention that Harvest Temple is a much more dynamic encounter than Febe. which is just another glorified dps sponge with rng on which mechanics become problematic.
HTCM is never going to wipe your group because "oh this RNG sucked" while Febe will, as soon as you get a bad split phase.

that said, agreed. the general vocal playerbase's yapping levels as soon as something is mildly difficult are usually like that.

but as Rubi mentioned, the encounter is currently not balanced properly so there's that.

[is cerus cm possible? [Merged]]

5 hours ago, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

There is a currently a bug that causes Cerus to gain more max health at the end of the 80% split phase, and we're working on getting a fix to you as soon as we can. We'll be increasing Cerus' total health at the same time to preserve encounter balance and will continue keeping an eye on this encounter to see if other adjustments are needed. 

that sounds like an unintentional mechanic, not a bug

[Follow up to the June 28 Balance Update Preview]

On 6/27/2022 at 5:41 PM, Jokuc.3478 said:

The concern is not whether axe mirage is good or not. It's about the fact that a balance decision was made simply because a developer did not enjoy a specific playstyle. If there was statistics that 99% of mesmer mains hate how axe work then there's something to work with, but it seems like the motivation here was entirely personal.

as a mesmer main, I don't mind the fact that the staff build was made viable while not murdering the axe build, but rather the fact that the whole chaos traitline got buffed to a point where it became better than the illusions traitline on the Axe build.

especially considering that Duel/Illusions Axe had a very nice flow and loop on the rotation, while Chaos/Dueling Axe ends up having a slower and less satisfying pace to it.

the staff build becoming viable while not nerfing axe (in fact making it stronger, even if by accident) is a pretty good thing, realistically. the major problem is how overloaded staff was on release and how good it still is. and the major bugs that axe has (read the whole transcript, not just out-of-context screenshots please) were not fixed to this day, the rotation became less enjoyable and the overall attitude from the specific developer in question is really not the best. I am not defending said dev, I believe it would be good for PR if they made a public statement on the leak themselves and/or got (even if temporarily) removed from the balance team - bonus points if the firebrand spec got gutted in the meantime, since it seems to be the dev's favored class, which is really in need of a balance bonk - straight up demanding for the dev to get fired, killed or commit suicide is NOT okay, though.

buffing a weapon because you don't like the other option is okay, so long you don't nerf the weapon you don't like.

buffing a class to do a support niche because you like it (firebrand) while at the same time destroying another class that filled a similar niche (chronomancer) for 3 years non-stop is not.

 

if you want to complain about unethical balancing, there's the problem with ANet.

Chronomancer could provide both quickness and alacrity and it was not being played. now it has to pick between one of those boons and the boon application, damage output and healing output have not been made better.

[Petition to Anet to revamp balancing patch approach]

signed, let's get more people to it

[Follow up to the June 28 Balance Update Preview]

1 hour ago, Josh Davis.7865 said:

Hi all,

Game Director Josh “Grouch” Davis here. On Friday we posted the profession update notes for the June 28 release and since then there’s been a lot of heated discussion about the changes and what they might mean for the game. I’ve read thousands of comments since Friday, and I think there’s plenty of reasonable feedback – there always is. I’m not here to address those issues individually, but rather, I’d like to share some of my own perspective and talk about our next steps as a team.

A Clear Direction

It’s clear that we should have provided better context for the changes. It’s much more difficult to assess a given change without a shared understanding of the underlying goal of the change and the problem it’s trying to solve for. I’m not saying that we think that the update is flawless or that this is purely a communication issue – there are always valid criticisms of execution, and we welcome that feedback.

For this update, we opted to forego including ‘design notes’ in the release notes that explain the ‘why’ behind the changes, and instead chose to provide a general overview in the June Studio Update blog. This wasn’t an arbitrary decision on our part, but in retrospect, it was the wrong decision. We’ll change our approach for future updates.

In the near-term, the team will be writing up the ‘design notes’ for the June 28 profession changes, which we’ll publish on the official forums as soon as they’re ready. I’d like to ask for your patience as we work on this while also supporting the release.

Perhaps more importantly, we need to share the long-term vision for Guild Wars 2 profession balance and how it applies to PvE, PvP, and WvW. This has been provided piecemeal over the years (and some of it has bubbled up through unofficial channels without full context), but we haven’t provided anything official. This is a good opportunity for us to introduce some new voices in the internal discussion as well–Cameron Rich for example, who recently took on the role of Lead Systems Designer for Guild Wars 2. This future post will be a larger collaborative effort that will take some time to complete, especially as we bring new voices into the process, but we’ll aim to have it ready before our next major professions update.

Feedback

As game developers, it’s our mission to deliver experiences that our players will love. One of the best ways to achieve this is by including the ‘voice of the player’ in the development process, before things ship live. I think this is especially true for a game like Guild Wars 2, where many of you have spent the last 10 years investing your time and energy into this world.

We can do better on this front. We don’t have a definitive solution yet – but there are plenty of options for us to evaluate, with different costs and tradeoffs for each. What I do know is that it’s my responsibility to the team and our players to ensure that our developers have the tools they need to do their job – and player feedback is one of the most powerful tools we have in our toolbox.

What I can commit to today is that going forward we’ll preview our profession changes much further in advance of a major update (not the Friday before), even if it means that the changes are still in-progress and the preview isn’t exhaustive. This will give the team time to assess feedback and make any necessary changes prior to an update going live. I think it’s especially important that we do this when we’re making larger changes to long-standing systems or mechanics.

Always Changing

I recognize that some of you are frustrated. Through the years, profession balance hasn’t always received the attention it deserves, and there’s always been a lingering concern that the next update may be a long way off. Before I was an ArenaNet employee, I was a Guild Wars 2 player, and I felt those frustrations myself. Your character and profession are the vehicle through which you experience the game, and the balance and feel of it have a significant influence on your moment-to-moment enjoyment of it. This is precisely why we created a dedicated profession balance team after the release of End of Dragons.

Guild Wars 2 is a “live” game, meaning that it will continue to grow and evolve in the years ahead. On the whole, it’s very different today compared to where it started 10 years ago, and those changes didn’t come all at once. Similarly, addressing core issues in profession balance and design is going to be a long-term, incremental effort. We can’t change everything at once, nor should we.

We’ll undoubtedly make mistakes along the way. My commitment to you is that we’ll listen, we’ll own and address our mistakes, and we’ll keep moving the game forward.

Wrapping Up

Tomorrow morning the June 28 release will go live along with the balance changes previewed on Friday. As soon as we can, we’ll follow up with the ‘design notes’ for the update. From there, we’ll be reading your feedback, evaluating the impact of the changes, and determining our next steps. We’ve added a follow up balance update to our release schedule in the coming weeks to address critical issues. Then, in mid-fall, we’ll have our next major professions update. Somewhere in between we’ll share our profession balance philosophy.

Finally, I’d like to thank those of you who have approached this discussion in a civil manner. To those that have chosen extreme toxicity, called for developers to be fired, or sent death threats–you're not welcome in our community.

Josh Davis
Game Director

>>> Tomorrow morning the June 28 release will go live along with the balance changes previewed on Friday. 

tl;dr "we say we care about player feedback, but we really don't."

[Game Update Notes Preview: Profession Skills]

Just now, Ruisenior.6342 said:

Don't talk to loud, maybe they'll find a solution for the problem by removing the class from the game XD. Meanwhile ill keep playing staff/staff mirage thats our consolation price.

well, the direction the balance team is going ends up with removing all skills other than the skill 1 on your weapon and making all of them the same thing, so the difference between all classes is just cosmetic. except mechanist will do 2x as much damage because of the mech, and firebrand will somehow still be better because they like firebrand.

I guess that's balanced by word definition.

[Game Update Notes Preview: Profession Skills]

42 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

Not in the case of chrono which is now being forced to run wells and shield for extra alacrity or quickness over two grandmaster traits in the same tier dedicated to them(first the staff gets two separate traits in same tier and now the shield), while breaking their interrupt combo builds, interrupt/delayed reactions/lost time. The chronomancer changes were overall poorly thought out.

 

But good points rest of the post.

well, the post was mostly in regards to pve, as I don't play pvp/wvw as much.

Mesmer in general deserves a whoooole post on why ANet can't balance this class right, it's always been problematic, and Chronomancer as a traitline only potentializes how problematic the class can be for balancing the game.

it's one of those situations where the class either will be too strong or too weak, never in the middle. and Virtuoso now brought another aspect of imbalance, where specifically the power dps variant in pve, which runs dueling + domination feels bad to play compared to a dueling+illusions variant, which performs poorly. that specific problem can be traced back to how ANet, over the years, has shifted a traitline called DOMINATION, which used to focus on crowd control and boon strip effects, aka controlling the tempo of the fight, into an aggressive damage traitline that increases the outgoing damage from both the mesmer and the mesmer's illusions (clones, phantasms, blades)

chronomancer is a whole can of worms I wish I had time to go in-depth. but yes. the class that's themed around manipulating time is now unable to be proficient at it... also, well of SENILITY? isn't that an ableist term? the fact that the class could provide alacrity and quickness wasn't a problem during the first half of PoF, the problem is that firebrand and renegade were bad at providing those essential pve boons, it was hard to justify taking either of them over a chronomancer + druid. what ANet did to remedy that, was overbuffing those classes while simultaneously nerfing chronomancer until the "both boons" build became worthless, and when the power quickness hybrid variant became problematic (which, only came into existance because 1- ANet killed every other power dps build and 2- ANet gave a stupid rework to seize the moment that enabled power chrono to take a 30% dps loss but provide permanent quickness to 5 allies with 0% boon duration, which shows a lack of understanding of the class) they've gutted it. oh, yes. power quickness chrono was still worse than the current condition quickness firebrand build. which is not getting nerfed. I guess ANet just hates chronomancer and/or its players...

I'm assuming the alacrity path will become relevant for WvW portal bombing at least.

[Game Update Notes Preview: Profession Skills]

Just now, Ruisenior.6342 said:

Good resume.

 

Not only that but, if I'm not mistaken as an example they nerfed some classes that they were trying to put inline with those changes like druid. Nerfing it's healing on Celestial avatar form and might application. The guys behind this are some kind of geniuses🤣

Thank you!

 

And yeah. I could go in-depth for every single change and why it's bad, but I think just picking one example from the dps department and one from the support department illustrates the situation well enough... (also, I don't want to spend a whole day bashing on ANet's balance team. I'm sure they work really hard to find whatever copious amount of drugs they took to think this patch was good for the game. looking at you, Solar.)

[Game Update Notes Preview: Profession Skills]

3 hours ago, Xylas Lothian.8473 said:

All these people freaking out and saying they won’t play more because of a balance patch have clearly never played an MMO before. You guys need to relax. If the balance changes aren’t effective I am sure it will be addressed in a future patch.

That’s how MMO’s have been for the last 23 years.

I can understand being frustrated about your “main” class being changed in a way you don’t prefer, but the fundamentals are all the same.

Banners are still buffs, for example. No one is going to “sit in air” for the 5% crit, they’re trying to make it more a more viable stance for pve. How many elementalists switch to air to do anything other than CC? The Shadow Arts stealth changes are also amazing for support thieves because you can actually get the abilities that apply benefits when you stealth while in pve content now without sacrificing active dps or healing. The ranger spirits pulse so that defensive and supportive players still get the buffs. Specter’s can dps (slightly) by just spamming barriers on someone, which doesn’t trigger the spirits right now.

They are trying to reduce the amount of raiding needing specific classes so that more people can get into raiding… which will make the game grow. I know you hardcore progression raiders are super used to your specific group make-ups but that turns A LOT of players off from raiding and is a big reason a lot of people don’t play GW2 currently.

Also there’s 9 classes with 3 elite specializations each… play something else for a while if the changes are so bad that you can’t even be bothered to adjust your playing.
The gear progression is also horizontal. I’m sure most of you have full ascended and legendary gear on your main. That character will be just as powerful when you try it out again later, and adjusting stats on existing gear has got to be the easiest thing I’ve ever seen of any MMO I’ve ever experienced. Especially on purples because you literally just right click it.  
Take this with a grain of salt and relax. Everyone acts like the game is ruined because it’s less specific about class makeup for harder content and that’s literally the biggest issue with raiding. Class specific buffs are an outdated concept. Not everyone that plays a warrior wants to use banners. Not every ranger wants to use Spotter. 
As for the pvp changes I’m sorry your optimal build may have gotten nerfed, that sucks and I sympathize because it’s happened to me  in many games including this one. But that’s how these kind of games stay alive. There are other class and build options though. 🫤

OH BOI, LET'S GO POINT BY POINT:

-> yes, MMO balance is always a mess. I agree with that statement. now, the fundamentals of guild wars 2 pve is getting changed. classes that were previously considered "bad but necessary" because of unique modifiers are now "bad and no longer necessary". so much for class diversity, right?

-> Air stance is part of the power elementalists rotations, in the case of power weaver, for example, you cycle between air/air -> fire/air ->fire/fire -> fire/air(or water if fresh air is traited) -> air/air and loop. now, you're losing 5% critical chance when not attuned to air/air, which means you're either having to invest ~100 more precision and overcap on air, or 100 less precision and get screwed by non-crits on fire/fire, potentially fire/air, which are the two highest damage stances the class has. same applies, with a bigger emphasis, to both tempest and catalyst, unless you're on a condi damage build. keep in mind condi builds already naturally overperform power builds due to the current state of the game.

-> there are 9 core classes, each with 3 elite specializations. let me mention specifically Warrior's latest elite specialization, the bladesworn.

Bladesworn is a very clearly power-based damage spec. it doesn't have good condition builds. power builds need the +150 precision from banner of discipline, as well as MANY assassin's pieces, ant THIEF runes to get to 100% critical chance. it's a big loss of stats. this balance patch basically makes warrior lose that 150 precision with no trade-off for power traitlines. the whole elite specialization has zero synergy with the Arms traitline, which is the condition-based traitline, where the crit chance compensation went.  that class is now losing a huge amount of personal damage that's not being compensated by the new ability of no longer taking the banners and thus becoming a pure damage dealer spec. meanwhile, condi berserker is also getting nerfed because of the banner stats loss, while getting a completely random "5% more critical chance from fury" trait, which doesn't do much other than making earth/tormenting sigils proc more often.

this balance patch effectively makes it so classes that are competing for the same niche of providing a specific boon to the party have no advantages over others. to put it simply, why would you play a quickness-based chronomancer with low dps (since you're forced to take a shield, inspiration traitline, signet of inspiration and wells that won't do a whole lot of damage compared to having a sword+focus offhands, phantasmal disenchanter+mantra of pain+mirror image to fuel your shatters, and also be unable to heal your group, when you can play a heal or condi firebrand which has easy quickness access, lots of heals in the case of healbrand or the superior form of damage(condition-based) with a really high damage output, in the case of condi quickbrand?

or why would you want a druid with less healing and a much more complex healing cycle than heal mech for providing alacrity and the necessary offensive boons. heal mechanist, which even gets buffed this patch.

-> the horizontal gear progression means that once you're fully built, the only improvement you can get is becoming a better player yourself. it's that simple factor of "git gud" - which, you're probably thinking right now "oh, yeah. that toxic mentality". to make matters worse, this patch effectively punishes players who have spent the time and effort into "getting good" by virtue of making their efforts into taking a class they enjoy to it's peak, meaningless. the power from characters in the game doesn't come from just gear, it comes from traits, which are being changed, and how much points those traits allow you to allocate into power/ferocity, which increase the outgoing damage, instead of precision, which only increases your chance of scoring a critical hit, therefore doing more damage. your argument is ultimately advocating that ANet must eventually remove all skills from the game other than an auto-attack factor, which should be normalized so the only difference between classes is what they look like. 

which is removing the gaming elements of guild wars 2.

not every warrior wants to use banners indeed. but now, there's no reason for a raiding group to take a warrior instead of taking a firebrand, a mechanist and 3 virtuosos on each subgroup of their squad.

firebrand and mechanist can argue who's going to be the healer and who's going to be dps, but the virtuosos, especially condi, have the best damage in the game, with a pretty intuitive rotation.

that means that, out of the 36 existing classes in the game, there's virtually no reason to play 33 of them. in fact, there's reasons to NOT play them. "but alacrity druid could replace the mechanist depending on how good the coefficients on heals are?" well, no. mechanist provides barrier, which is better than healing as it works as damage prevention. it's friendlier towards the writs that dps classes want to take for optimal damage

-> as for pvp, specifically structured pvp, yeah, it's just another mess of a balance patch. it's not that impactful as the pve one in this case. and much healthier to have messy shakes in that game mode because that stress of "my old build doesn't work anymore" tends to become "I can mess around with new stuff now" without any penalties, since you don't need to care that hard about class synergies in pvp, as opposed to class matchups.

not saying class synergy doesn't matter at all in pvp, it's just that the game mode tends to prize more selfish builds so that you don't have to rely on your team to do your own thing. if your team composition helps you achieve your build's goals, that's a bonus.

 

While in instanced pve such as dungeons, fractals, strikes and raids, you try to build classes assuming you'll count on other people to help achieve whatever objective AS A TEAM. your personal success depends on your friends. and THAT is what's being removed with balance patches for a while now, but especially on this patch.

[Game Update Notes Preview: Profession Skills]

Oh god. this is not a troll post.

[Game Update Notes Preview: Profession Skills]

@Rubi Bayer.8493just would like to point out that your post got ratio'd. if anet cares about player feedback, that's the perfect timing to postpone a balance patch and actually have people work on it for once

[Game Update Notes Preview: Profession Skills]

1 minute ago, Hida Oni.7652 said:

i always feel frustrated, when devs instead of buffing weak skills and classes (to make everyone ~at same level), just nerf the crap out of everyone who doing ok,  making everyone derpy kitten  in term of efficiency

except they're buffing firebrand again. one of, if not the single most overpowered classes in the game. and the class that basically loses nothing to go from a pure damage dealer/healer to a boon provider that's also doing damage/healing. not to mention it can do above average damage+perma quickness and every offensive boon + protection + regen while also healing with celestial gear. now it's getting the only nerf it's gotten in the past 2 years reversed.

[Game Update Notes Preview: Profession Skills]

tl;dr chronomancer gets worse, firebrand gets better. alright.

one class providing every boon in the game but no damage or heals with aegis somewhat on demand = too strong

class providing every boon in the game minus one while having A LOT of damage and/or heals with aegis on demand  = perfectly balanced.

 

 

For real, though... when will ANet hire people who actually play the game to do the balancing instead of doing arbitrary changes in hopes the game becomes balanced?

also, suggestion on how to increase player interest/retention in regards to raids: make Legendary Divinations/Insights sellable to NPCs for some gold. 

those things just stack up in your bank/inventory once you're done with the legendary ring/armor. 

just bring back old signet of inspiration at least. yes, it was a dumb strong skill back then, but given the power creep that was added to the game, it would've been a pretty fair skill right now.

ALSO, STAFF WEAVER. IT DID AS MUCH DAMAGE AS SOME OF THE CURRENT ELITE SPECS BUT REQUIRED 10 TIMES MORE SKILL TO ACTUALLY PLAY THAT THING, FOR LYSSA'S SAKE.

[Bug? Combo Finisher UI indication no longer shows.]

still not fixed

[(Edit) the 6th bonus on superior runes of the pack that doesn't work with Furious sharpening stones]

surprising how some bugs are still unknown10 months after rune updates

[(Edit) the 6th bonus on superior runes of the pack that doesn't work with Furious sharpening stones]

Edit:it's the 6th bonus of the Superior Runes of the Pack that is not being taken into account

[(Edit) the 6th bonus on superior runes of the pack that doesn't work with Furious sharpening stones]

Furious sharpening stones are supposed to give 3% of your precision value as Power and Ferocity. however, as you gain more precision, it starts giving you less than 3% (roughly around 2,84% of the actual value).I tested with a few different precision values and the sharpening stones are CONSISTANTLY giving me 4 less power/ferocity than they should, but here's an example on the current build I'm testing, ineptitude being there instead of superiority complex simply to have the correct crit damage value:after experimenting a bit more, someone told me to check if it could be the runes, which didn't occur to me could be the case. 125 precision * 3% is 3,75, which gets rounded up to 4, which is the missing value.

testing with eagle runes, the values are correct.