ZEUStiger.3590

Amazing. More unobtainable achievements, now not just in PvP, but in PvE too. Exactly what this game needed.

I hope you won't balance it around everyone playing virtuosos. Because that seems to be what every strike since EoD has been designed around. The melee hate is insane.

Not sure if this has been mentioned already, but staff 3 (in PvE?) only applied 1 stack of Unblockable, even tho its tooltip implies 3 stacks.

I'm against this suggestion. I was also saddened by F1's simplicity initially, but I think I understood the reasoning behind it. They wanted to make this build usable by both berserker (who has access to F1) and bladesworn (who doesn't). Therefore they couldn't place anything unique on F1, lest it would be inaccessible to bladesworn. So instead they put banal stuff there like regen and burst healing (and immob, which is a nice little bit of utility, but not something that would make-or-break a build). Healzerker would spend more time spamming F1 in berserk mode, so its utilities would probably be at least partially comprised of Rage skills. Healsworn, on the other hand, will not be able to access staff F1, but will be able to compensate for it by spending more time autoattacking (offsets the regen from F1) and by using Shout utilities which synergize better with bladesworn's ammo traits (offets the burst healing from F1). I hope this will help you understand this weirdness in the design.

Tried it on the golem, in raids and strikes, and it seems to be a very capable healer build. More so than I expected. The main problem, as everyone has mentioned above, is the ally targeting on staff 3. Players dislike ally targeting already for its inconvenience and mismatch with the gameplay style cultivated by the game over 11 years, but here the problem is not just doubled - it's tripled: not only does the skill's functionality differ drastically depending on who you target (it's basically 2 skills shoved into one - you target the wrong agent and you lose out on arguably the best skill staff can offer), but it ALSO makes you charge towards the target. When you're playing a tank role in raids - this will often lead to you turning the boss towards the group, if the player you happened to target doesn't stand perfectly near the boss's center. And in general this leads to quite annoying gameplay of either frantically spamming your left mouse button over friendly names on the screen, or binding and pressing "Target Nearest Ally" keybind and praying that it won't betray you. And I also haven't tested if it worked properly if you target non-player allies, which is something that will happen often. I urge you to do something about it. I get that you wanted to pack more function into this weapon than 5 skills could offer the space for, but this skill singlehandedly makes staff unfun to play and will be a major hurdle that turns players away from playing this build. I can once again suggest using the tech of weapon skill switching that was made for untamed's hammer when used on other ranger specs. Let players choose whether they want to use the offensive or the defensive version of this skill. But I suspect you won't like this solution because you want to offer in-combat versatility in PvP/WvW by allowing them to choose which version of the skill to use by selecting the appropriate target. Another issue is the inability to grant quickness on berserker if no enemy is hit by the F1 skill. And yet you're still compelled to keep bursting with F1 even during downtime in a fight, if not to upkeep regeneration, then at least to upkeep berserk mode's duration. Feels like the skill goes half-wasted when it doesn't give quickness. Hitting an ally (which includes yourself) should be considered a successful hit for the sake of Heat The Soul trait. On that note, why is there such a dichotomy in how boons are applied between berserker and bladesworn? Why does bladesworn get to grant alacrity upon USING burst, but berserker requires to HIT AN ENEMY with a burst to grant quickness? Besides this, I guess the only other things I could wish for would be for staff 4 pull to be a circular AoE instead of a cone (but the current version is already good enough for a class that previously had no pull whatsoever on its terrestrial toolkit); and for staff 5 block to be, well, better than it currently is in every respect. Because, let's be honest, even necromancer's Corrosive Poison Cloud is way better than this skill, and it's simply incomparable to guardian's shield 5, firebrand's F3>3, revenant's tablet, mesmer's feedback. And - for crying out loud - it's STILL not a reflect, just a mere block. Requiring to swap an entire traitline just to have access to a pityful tiny-sized 2 second long reflect in shield 5 and staff 5 is insulting. Hell, even holosmith has a better Photon Wall - it reflects, lasts 50% longer, and isn't channeled. But even besides this, the current healzerker build you can make with staff is surprisingly competent, and even if the previous paragraph would remain unaddressed - I think it would see a decent amount of play in PvE. But ally targeting needs to go. P.S. Just to be extra clear: the ability to target allies with skills is not the issue. It's great, in fact. Being able to execute a supportive skill without an enemy present is often handy. The issue is the split functionality on the skill depending on who's targeted. Make the skill always execute its support function regardless of who's targeted and that solves the issue in PvE. P.P.S. Did you know that "Target Nearest Ally" keybind happily targets clones, shattered clones that are about to despawn, and even DEAD PLAYERS? Nothing quite like yeeting yourself off a cliff with staff 3 just because your "Target Nearest Ally" button targeted a shattered clone that was a fraction of a second away from despawning, right before you clicked that staff 3 skill. Make staff 3 and gs 5 interruptible already...

Staff 5 channeling gets immediately interrupted by autoattack if it's enabled.

As a PvE berserker player, for once I'll be anticipating a balance patch without an overwhelming sense of dread. I don't remember anymore when I've last had this feeling. Good job at identifying problems and addressing them. I scrapped a good half of the text I was expecting to post today. Glad to see you gave up on the idea of having an ICD for Heat the Soul. This may actually make quickness berserker playable. Hopefully now more players give the spec a chance thanks to berserk mode changes. I was going to suggest making the ability to exit berserk mode baseline, because I wasn't expecting you to budge on the cooldown of berserk, but at 8 seconds this should largely be a non-issue anymore. There are, however, some outstanding issues still remaining that I want to mention Relic of the Thief should trigger from warrior F1 skills The current implementation of Relic of the Thief works only on weapon skills 1-5, which makes its interaction with berserker and bladesworn clunky. For all intents and purposes warrior F1 skills can be considered "weapon skills", since they depend on the currently used weapon. Berserker can gain adrenaline from utility skills and keep using its F1s without touching the actual weapon skills for a long time, but this causes the buff from Relic of the Thief to simply expire. Bladesworn can use multiple gunsaber F1s consecutively with the help of Dragonspike Mine, which causes the buff from Relic of the Thief to expire. This creates a need to keep needlessly weaving in weapon skills just to upkeep the buff. Players should not be punished for properly utilizing their class's toolset. Revert Arc Divider back to what it was before the 2023-06-27 patch and fix the aftercast animation cancelling Buffing the damage only made it usable on bossfights again, but it doesn't address the blatant functionality loss that came with the June 27 patch. I've said enough on this subject in this half-a-year-old feedback post. Arc Divider is worse than it was in every respect except for dpsing in endgame content. Until the latest damage buff it was worse than even the non-berserker GS F1 Arcing Slice, which has a faster casttime and grants fury. Rifle is still not a viable ranged power dps weapon Nothing else needs to be said about this. Soldier's Comfort is still not good enough for permanent protection uptime At 2.5 seconds every 10 seconds (the interval of Soldier's Focus, another example of garbage design btw, just like the ICD of Heat the Soul was) even with 100% boon duration warrior is only capable of providing 50% protection uptime, and that's assuming that Soldier's Focus will be expended precisely the moment it appears, which is simply unrealistic, good luck predicting it with no display of ICDs. In this patch you will be buffing it to 4 secons, which still means only 80% uptime under unrealistic ideal conditions. I hope staff will bring with it something that can offset this, because this ain't it, chief. Condi berserker is no longer using torch The recent nerfs to burning application left berserker in a state where off-hand sword is better than torch, berserker's dedicated weapon. Unless something is done about this - in a couple of months you'll have people complaining that torch is a dead weapon, as there is no reason to use it on other builds, and not even its own elite spec is using it. Granted, it's funny to see off-hand sword seeing use in PvE for the first since release, but I suspect that this wasn't how you meant to achieve that. 😄 Some other potential QoL changes and bugs Reset the adrenaline decay time upon gaining adrenaline out of combat There are many utility skills which grant the player extra adrenaline. While they work perfectly fine in combat, outside of combat they lose a chunk of their functionality, because the adrenaline you gain from them starts decaying immediately. There are good reasons to want to use burst skills outside of combat (for example hammer's F1 for mobility or any F1 for quickness, if quickness application would be moved away from hitting the target to simply using the burst skill, like it currently works on bladesworn) or to simply prepare for the combat by pregenerating adrenaline (playing longbow in WvW is a bit of a PITA because of this) and while on core warrior and spellbreaker you can sort of get away with using a lower-adrenaline-tier skill (since the immediately decaying adrenaline won't allow you to fully utilize the adrenaline you gained), with berserker this basically prevents you from even entering berserk mode, and even if you manage that by spamming the button - you pretty much won't be able to reliably use any burst skill at all, becase the decay will immediately put you below 10 adrenaline, the minimum amount needed to use the lowest-tier burst. Fix the size of longbow F1 AoE indicator The size of the ground-targeting decal mismatches the actual size of the AoE from core longbow F1 on all adrenaline levels. It's bigger than the actual radius by like 50%. The visual effect of core longbow F1 field (i.e. flame particles etc) has also been always way too small compared to the actual area the skill covers, but at least it doesn't mislead the player like the ground-targeting indicator. I was unaware of the 2017 change that made the AoE radius of longbow F1 the same across all adrenaline levels. Berserker main, like I said... Regardless, the ground-targeted AoE indicator size mismatches the real size of the AoE field. Mirage is still missing the visual effect around the health orb on dodge The effect went missing in 2023-06-27 patch. There used to be a while flash around the health orb on the actionbar/skillbar whenever the mirage performed a dodge. This is a fairly important for gameplay, as it was one of the few indications that a dodge succeeded. The sound and the visual effect on the player's model are too easy to miss in the midst of the combat, and mirage's dodge lacks the forced player movement that other classes' dodge have, making it rather difficult to spot at a glance if the dodge actually happened unless you have your eyes glued to the skillbar.

For me it outright causes CEF to crash. https://i.imgur.com/9gVZJDe.png Added to the OP.

Updated the original post to reflect everything that was fixed. Only 2 issues remain, #10 is a rather big UX problem.

And I'm telling you about another design "painpoint" that stems from the same root cause - the necessity to have a target. Either eliminate precasting as a concept (my preferred option), or any build whose boon generation revolves around interacting with an enemy will be discriminated against in one of the core endgame PvE gamemodes.

Nearly all boons are irrelevant outside of combat bar swiftness. And yet fractal prestacking exists, and everyone insists on doing it. And so, any class that isn't able to grant boons outside of combat will have no chance of penetrating the fractal meta.

Axes of Symmetry isn't an ambush skill. It's axe 3.

Tell that to the fractal crowd that wants to abuse their precious boon prestacking. Why is prestacking still allowed to exists? Horrible misuse of singularities, when their main purpose was to eliminate the downtime of waiting for cooldowns before engaging a boss.

Oh really? Is that only a pain point of alacrity willbender? Man, how unfortunate for them! I guess quickness chrono, alacrity chrono, alacrity mirage (all 3 require an attackable target to summon phantasms and for clones to not despawn), quickness berserker (requires an attackable target to hit with burst), quickness deadeye (requires an attackable target to steal from) are all doing just swell then.

Revert Arc Divider changes, reduce aftercast duration instead. Proper feedback, doubt you've read it. EDIT: Since you've added a new tech that lets us switch between different weapon skill variations (as seen on ranger's hammer in the beta), you could let us choose between the old and new Arc Divider versions. Your reasoning for making the change to this skill was that you're "hoping it's a usability improvement", to quote the preview stream. It clearly isn't, the playerbase has been very vocal about this. But if you're married to the new version so much that you refuse to revert it - you could at least let the player choose whether they want a ligher-hitting 3-spin skill or a heavy-hitting 1-spin. After all, this was all about "usability improvement", right? There were no unspoken intentions to nerf it somewhere, riiiight?