Foxx.9150

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.

that sounds like an unintentional mechanic, not a bug

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.

signed, let's get more people to it

>>> 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."

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.

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.

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.)

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.

Oh god. this is not a troll post.

@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

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.

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.

still not fixed

surprising how some bugs are still unknown10 months after rune updates