HoneyBadger.5691

• Your assigned team: Griffonfall • Your original home shard: Stormbluff Isle • WvW guild: Wheres Our Alliance [SLOT], Yes • A description of the issue: I was correctly assigned to Giant's Rise for reset raid. Upon logging in later that night to play again, I'd been moved to Griffonfall.

Thanks for the reply! Helps lots.

As the title says

Addressing a few of the points made after my post Nerfing offensive skills hurts outnumbered fighting. Winning outnumbered in zergs largely revolves around doubling enough players before the rest can kill you. Roaming, it's a similar situation, where the patch made it a lot harder to secure a down outnumbered. The balance (if you can call it that) heavily favors difficult to kill builds, making it even worse. Far too long this game has been about almost entirely catering to newbies, without concern for maintaining a healthy veteran and competitive community. With lots of hype over new games/expacs, and covid keeping less people at home, that stream of newbies is drying up quite a lot. Lots (most) vet/competitive players have left for greener pastures, and can look back on the heap of mistakes and unfulfilled promises from the developer that lead to this situation. However, they do seem to have shaken things up going into EoD, so it could be a fresh start for the state of the game and trust in the developer. I'd really like to see it succeed.

Friendly reminder most of us (including many who stopped playing) enjoyed the game far more before the Feb. patch that nerfed everything in WvW and PvP. All it accomplished was making the game slow, unrewarding, and much less fun. If you want to keep GW2 alive beyond EoD's honeymoon phase, I think reverting it entirely would go a long way, and be an easy fix. Celestial stat also needs to be reverted, since it's obviously OP when it's useful, but that's another issue all together. Cheers.

Why do you feel this is true when the enemy is under the same stability constraints as you? Of course they may opt to use 2 or more FBs per party to ensure they have stability uptime when you do not, but that obviously comes with a cost as you pointed out. I'm suggesting you can't run a solo guard and stack range damage in an attempt to pirate ship, by creating a range bomb strong enough people can't survive a push into melee range. It doesn't work well atm, and nerfs to CoR, an already buggy skill, and drop the hammer will further reduce revs ranged damage. Anet did say they were going to not implement some of the changes in that post right away, but in their final patch notes for release they all in there...

Would like to address here at-length what I believe to be a catastrophic balancing mistake in regards to stability access via firebrand. Not saying this because I don’t like the class. I've played it in gvg, open field, and small scale support roles extensively; it will always be one of my favorite classes. WvW team-based combat relies on constant stability to function. However, the current proposed patch notes mandate two firebrands per-party in WvW, which is class stacking, and will also force Tempest out of meta. Allow me to explain (using a meta boon duration of 62% w/ food). Specifically, Firebrand uses Stand Your Ground (SYG), Tome of Courage Ch1/5, and Mantra of Liberation to apply stability. SYG gives 9.75s on a 30s cd, Ch5 gives 8s, and Ch1’s give 6.5s. We start with SYG, then use the combination of stacks from Ch5 and Ch1 to maintain stability as SYG fades until we are out of pages. We can use a single stack from Liberation, an ‘expensive’ but sometimes necessary play, to bide time for SYG to come back off cd if necessary. Within this framework, some use Tenacious Defense in Valor to get courage tome back quickly, while others use Virtues for Battle Presence when they expect fights to end or be decided quickly, but either way, the party largely relies on the stab from SYG/Tome of Courage/Liberation to function. The patch proposes SYG have a 45s cd, Ch1 stacks be 1.6s, and Liberation stacks be 1.6s (sans it’s final cast, a last ditch attempt at not wiping). What this means is using one firebrand leaves you waiting on SYG for ~30s, which is completely unworkable. No, you can't pirate ship either, since there isn't a ranged bomb strong enough to stop people from gap closing on you. The only answer to your balance changes is to run double FB per-party. Scrapper per-party is also mandatory. Why mandatory you may think? Because nerfs to Firebrand’s Tome of Resolve cleanses are so severe (1 on Ch1, 2 on Ch5) that the game is still unplayable despite now being able to maintain stability, and scrapper being great at cleansing and providing some stab, is the only workable answer. Furthermore, because of the combined demand for 2x FB and 1x Scrapper per-party to be able to engage in our WvW combat experience, Tempest is now poor. It has no stab and moderate cleanse, leaving it unable to fulfill what’s needed in the third slot. The removal of 10-targets will make this problem even worse (such as SYG, Tempest overloads, Herald facets, Renegade alac, etc). It is a straight nerf to class variety as having a small number of something for it’s unique value will be gone. Please reconsider the train wreck of a mistake this patch’s modifications to stability-applying skills are.

So sad to see WvW walked off the plank because of some ill-conceived notions of what balance should look like. After all the feedback that you STILL intend to ship this patch tells us you DON'T care about player feedback or intend to keep the game mode alive in a meaningful way. People have lost like all trust in you as a developer, and there is NO coming back from any egregious mistakes that drive people away. The only good choice is to just throw out this patch and make reasonable small changes like you've done before. You are LITERALLY taking what fun we have left in WvW and are throwing it into a dumpster fire.

I'll get right to the elephant in the room, after reading...yea, everything lol; speaking mostly to wvw here. The changes towards how things work like warrior rifle seem great, but the damage nerfs are way, and I mean WAY too heavy handed. You'd be better off throwing out all these coefficients and just scaling back existing ones by something like 15% to start. The current frustration mostly revolves around people getting essentially one-shot. There is no point in stacking excess support because all the support in the game won't save you from dieing to focused damage. You also force everyone onto FB with these changes, because FB has what is necessary for the game mode to work. Nerfing FB or other supports is the polar opposite of what you need to do. I'm not saying buff FB, but you need to give other supports more stab/usability/boon access overall. By nerfing support aspects (including heal, cleanse, stab durations, cooldowns etc) you encourage people to NOT engage in fights unless they have their cooldowns, or when they've used them, just full run. By trimming back some damage and buffing non-fb supports in aspects that make them relevant, you would...a) stop people from getting bursted down so easilyb) make fights last longer, for more counterplay, comebacks, and fun overall (we don't play to run back across the map, see Desert BL...)c) create more class varietyd) give people more of a reason to actually readily engage in fights

mispost.

I am not sure what is the “buff.” signet of mercy was better with healing power. What Anet said is flat out false. Only FB dishes much boons (other guardian options do not), and is much better served with healing power over concentration. In any case, it does not matter, signet of mercy only role is the instant revival. Lost the 10% revive speed for the equivalent of nothing. And the only interesting change, courageous return, is only 1 sec in PvP (basically useless), and valor is not used by FB anyway, and DH and core are pretty dead in PvP. Overall, insignificant, but surely more of a nerf. Support Fb does use Valor so it's the only build that got buffed from all these changes. It also gets the benefits from the mace 3 buffs. No FB build runs valor, at all. All builds run FB, honor and virtues. And if you are not, there is no room for flexibility here, you are just doing it wrong. You know why? Cuz the only mediation you could (and not even need to) have is contemplation of purity. If you are running RI instead of elite mantra you are doing something seriously wrong. The stability is the prime support FB provides with instant Rez. And valor offers nothing if you are not running mediations.This isn't accurate, as valor fb has been optimal in pvp and wvw for around a year now. Even in a double fb party in wvw, both using valor is better than having one on each, because the value of tome of courage is so much more than battle presence or a slight cdr on tome of resolve. RF tends to be optimal on fb in small fights with MF for the tome reset since there usually isn't a second fb to rotate tomes with. Of course, people do different things, but I'm speaking to what works best here.

Not sure where to begin, if I was to address what is wrong with this patch it'd take post upon post of walls of text. From class-breaking changes like removing cripple on manifest sand shade, to changes like 1s stab on elixir U rendering a utility useless, to removing fall dmg traits providing quirky and unique gameplay, the best thing to do is not ship this patch until it makes reasonable sense.

It's really sad to see so many vet / tryhard players go and it's not going to get better until changes are made to the game mode to remedy it. Read: changes, not empty promises or Soon™. Do something. Yesterday.

Actually a friend of mine had a great idea. Just remove the target cap buff from Sand Savant. You fix the problem with 10 target shades. Scourge balanced, without having to change background code for target cap sharing among different aoes.

Would be nice if stacking scourges isn't a thing (this patch is a scourge buff), and firebrands (it's a fb buff too). And as always, nerfing fb won't fix anything but make the class eventually unplayable. You need to bring other supports up to being viable. And as long as scourge can have 10 target shades. We're gonna keep stacking them. This has been it. For two years.

The guard changes still are bad.Makes fb less survivable (doesn't need to be nerfed lol).Changing SYG stacks does nothing but hurt small scale.Courage w/o aegis on ch2 will make surviving while in tome way too hard for small scale.Also scourge shade, is not good to remove shade from the scourge even momentarily.You are better off not touching that yet if you can't change target cap to 5 with function as-is, and dropping target cap later if you can find a way to code it. tl;dr, drop all the guard changes, drop the shade change for now, drop mesmer changes besides CI, consider reverting Fgyro and toolbelt skills. For the sake of good balance & class design.

Ret is a self-sustain traitline, whereas Salvation is group-support, so that wouldn't make much sense. Also rev does way more damage than a guard or warrior in a zerg, generally speaking. I can't think of a use-case where a damage rev would use ret, because it's outside the purview of it's role.

Some thoughts on how you can make other supports viable. Druid; Larger CA AoE, prot/vigor/regen application. Make seeds cleanse more condis, larger aoe. CA5 party stab, and elite glpyh aoe stab outside CA, personal stab inside CA. Staff needs wider aoe on auto. Revenant; Tablet needs much larger aoe for how clunky it is. Make the effect like wash the pain away, with less healing farther away. 240 radius large, 360 medium, 600 radius small heal. Same for cleanses on it. Give aoe stab on blowing up the tablet (ventari elite). Tablet movement aoe prot, vigor, regen. Tempest; AoE stab on overload earth, aoe stability on shouts. More stacks on Rebound! than others. Scrapper; Decide on an identity. Could use more utility, or more baked in cleanse (post-antitoxin nerf, which is the only reason it's good in wvw). Chrono & Warrior; totally unworkable at this time, chrono needs a rework or revert the more recent changes just to begin balancing it. Warrior I'm at a loss for.

This balance is really quite simple, it's a scourge and firebrand buff. You need to understand, while most of the scourge changes are good (cutting back some of the boon corrupt and a small amount of dmg)The major problem resides in a 10 target cap. Target cap being 10 instead of 5 only affects WvW, because pve (should) only use demonic lore, and there are only 5 on a team in pvp.Making scourge shades limit to 5 targets total would resolve the everlasting scourge problem (too much boon corrupt + damage). You also seem to want to nerf firebrand survivability in small scale fights (removing aegis from ch2). Not good. Hard enough in wvw already.First you nerfed scrapper utility, then healing, now cleanse. It will have nothing left making it worth playing. Need to decide on an identity. Double firebrand likely becomes meta, as does stacking more scourges. I'm pretty sure this is the opposite of your intention?If you want to make other supports viable, they need to do a) stability, protection, regen, vigor b) healing c) cleansing, at the very least.You need to give every support group stability option, not the same as fb, but something supplementary. Nerfing firebrand is not the answer, because you need critical boons, cleanse, and healing to have wvw zerg fights.If you nerf support, we'll just end up pirate shipping on high damage builds. (another miserable meta no one wants).Hope balance can move in the right direction, because it's mostly there (minus a few critical flaws).