[State of weaver (feedback)]

Quickness at the cost of sustain..lol no ty. Weaver was played perfectly before even quickness was invented. Specs like reaper gets quickness at zero cost on top of ferocity all baked into the same trait

[Balance patch preview]

19 hours ago, Ram.5981 said:

Overall, I think the majority of the changes are good. But this... WTF, Anet?  Did you get too many complaints that the only one-shot super glassy build on ele was killing to many people, so you nerfed the hell out of one of the main damage skills so do virtually no damage?  Maybe that's a typo?

 

Edit: should mention  <- WvW player

With this,  I don't need anymore to keep a slot reserved for glass ele scepter....it's was my only reason for having a glass ele in the whole game and now....I can just run cele/condi gear on every spec and succeed 10x easier and faster...oh well...scepter is still amazing on cele gear, no biggie

[A criticism of the current meta-game and my thoughts on the biggest issue that I want addressed]

34 minutes ago, Philalive.8654 said:

Yeah, I agree that there are more issues than just boon stripping in the game.

My logic of this being able to fix more than it would first seem is basically this:

You can't really kill anyone in a decent-ish group without Strips & CC. Protection, Stability, Barrier, damage mitigation through stacking and so on are way to strong to crack no matter how many Holosmiths/Berserkers you have in your party. In my experience people start dropping when 1. Holosmith greeds slightly of stack and gets deleted or 2. Supports start falling behind after a few people down, they get CCd, etc. I'd say I'm a heal Vindicator main atm and at least I feel like as long as I'm not CCd I can basically keep my group alive through anything. When I get pulled or CCd things go south very fast (assuming the teams are fairly balanced).

So we definetly need boon strips to be able to kill anything (within reason). That's why we have Renegades and Necromancers - for boon strips. Now this role used to be filled with offensive Necromancer builds eg. Power Reaper or Power Scourge. Those builds didn't really provide much support and were quite good targets to kill, and they did alright damage but not enough to out-compete actual DPS builds. But instead of that, we now have 2 full minstrel supports that spam boons, barriers and transfuses - as well as boon strip.

This makes every squad way tankier than it has any right to be. However, if we make (somewhat) intelligent changes to the builds that are the biggest issue; the overperforming Supports with boon strip capabilities and the underperforming DPS boon strip builds. We should see that squads lean back towards at least 3 Supports, 1 DPS boon strip and 1 DPS instead of 2 supports, 2 supports with boon strip and 1 DPS that we have now.

That would DOUBLE the amount of Berserker (other flavors available) gear users in blobs at the moment which I think we can all agree is a step in the right direction. I also don't think you could really justify Celestial Support Renegade if they didn't provide boon strip so hopefully the meta that would emerge after fixing the support builds and bringing up some DPS strips would be healthier than the one we have now.

As I see it atm, the WvW meta is on fire and we need a fix with some haste. There are a lot of issues to tackle after this but imo, this is the best place to start.

Shared defenses - especially reflects, really do need some looking at in the future too. They're a scary topic to mess with though because the game is so heavily balanced towards projectiles basically not working at all.

Again: necromancers and revenants must not have access to copious boon corruption/strip under any circumstances! You're talking about professions who have access to boonbot specs like vindicator and harbinger, then you want to give them amazing boonrip ....and who's gonna stop them after??

Boonrip should be given solely to Thieves-Warriors...and even rangers in some capacity. The first two haven't got access to boonbot specs and thus makes sense to give them great boonrip and ranger could use something other than GvG druid healing meme.

We want to diversify the meta...not cement it even more by polarizing the few remaining roles in the hands of over-spammed/represented professions like necromancer and revenant, on top of that, you want to give boonrip to celebunker nightmares like harbinger and vindicator...who will stop them after?...not like now it's easy anyway, don't make it impossible but I am at least certain the current devs will come to the same conclusion.

[Since PvE got a second legendary armor set... where is the WvW accessory?]

On 5/25/2024 at 3:52 AM, Infusion.7149 said:

@disForm.2837 If I did not have the help of some mesmers I would probably have never completed the JPs

I decided that I'd rather have a bag full of accessories, amulets than doing JP and dead metas...especially JP..no kittening thank you

[A criticism of the current meta-game and my thoughts on the biggest issue that I want addressed]

12 hours ago, Philalive.8654 said:

Hello!

I’d like to talk about the WvW meta and some balancing issues that I have with the game currently. I'm not the biggest expert on this game or in WvW, there are much more knowledgeable players than me around but none that'll waste their time writing a forum post (or even remember that the forums exist probably). But I do have some experience, I've been around Guild Wars 2 from release in 2012 and for the last couple of years been pretty deep into WvW. I've done a decent amount of blobbing in both open-field stuff as well as organized BvB in EotM. I've dabbled in GvG during the 20s hype last year among other things. Anyway,

The meta is 5-man sub-groups, generally you have a “Primary-” and a “Secondary-” support in every sub-group, they’ve been locked in for a long time. Most of the meta shifts have changed what we fill the rest of the 3 slots with.

The primary support (also known as “Firebrand”, xd) is in charge of keeping stability up on your sub-group as well as providing other boons like protection, swiftness, and so on.

The secondary support is the group's healer, they’re also responsible for the majority of the cleansing as well as some less important boons.

I think this is a strong base to build on, I don’t think there are any inherent issues with this and it’s almost as old as MMORPGs are themselves (Holy Trinity anyone?).

Recently however the meta has shifted towards squads running way more supports, not just having 2 per sub-group, but at least 3 and most of the time 4 supports per sub-group. There’s obviously nuance here but these days it looks something like this:

1 - Support Firebrand as primary support (Stability, boons, various utility).

2 - Heal Vindicator as secondary support (Excellent Healing, decent cleansing, good resistance).

3 - Support Scourge as tertiary support (Transfuse, Barrier, boons, strips).

4 - Support Renegade as quaternary support (ALACRITY, Stability, Damage reduction, utility). Commonly swapped out for Support Chronomancer in a few groups (ALACRITY, lots of utility and boons).

5 - DPS Holosmith (Damage). Potentially a Berserker instead for Banner-stomps.

Honorary shout-outs to Celestial Firebrand, Support Scrapper, Support Druid, DPS Dragonhunter, DPS Tempest/Catalyst/Weaver.

Now obviously there are discussions to be had about classes, specs and builds within roles that should also be had but I’m trying to focus more on the overarching ideas here.

I feel like a lot of the changes recently on their own make sense in context and have, for the most part, good justifications (sometimes you are for sure just rolling a dice though, right?). A prevalent theme has been to buff underperformers and be cautious with nerfs (which I disagree with but isn’t necessarily the problem with current balance in WvW and another discussion to be had).

However, when we look at the result of these many changes over time it’s played out pretty poorly. We’ve ended up in a very static boonball meta.

These days as a DPS player I basically expect my party to provide me with the same boon coverage that I expect from a competent PvE raid group. We have extremely good alacrity uptime from Renegades, resistance is basically permanent from just the heal Vindicator - but just in case the Renegade can also do permanent resistance, the Firebrand does a ton of resistance and Chronomancer can do some, stability is expected to permanently be applied by the Firebrand but when that fails you have redundancy on the heal Vindi and the Renegade that is spamming road on cooldown and the Chronomancer with F4, mantra, well, etc.

We’ve had so many small buffs here and there for most of the support builds but we rarely have any nerfs, so obviously boon coverage is going to trend upwards. However, the real issue is when you, on top of these very boon-favoured support buffs, also keep nerfing basically every boon-strip and corrupt in the game.

Here are some recent-ish examples (I’ve missed a lot I’m sure):

Banish Enchantment:

1 - Increased energy cost from 20 to 30 in WvW only.

2 - This skill now has a 5-second cooldown in WvW only.

Null Field:

1 - Increased cooldown from 25 seconds to 35 seconds in WvW only.

2 - Reduced range from 1,200 to 900.

3 - Increased the cooldown from 35 seconds to 45 seconds in WvW only.

4 - Reduced the field duration from 5 seconds to 2 seconds in WvW only. Reduced the number of pulses from 6 to 3 in WvW only.

Well of Corruption:

1 - Increased cooldown from 32 seconds to 40 seconds in WvW only.

2 - Reduced power coefficient per strike from 0.45 to 0.35 in WvW only.

3 - Reduced power coefficient per hit from 0.35 to 0.28 in WvW only.

Unholy Feast:

1 - Increased power coefficient from 0.88 to 1.0. Increased bonus damage health threshold from 25% to 50%. Reduced number of boons corrupted from 2 to 1.

2 - Reduced power coefficient from 1.3 to 1.0 in WvW only.

3 - This skill now removes boons instead of converting them into conditions.

Spiteful Spirit:

1 - Reduced power coefficient from 0.4 to 0.1. Reduced number of boons corrupted from 2 to 1. Reduced additional boons corrupted against foes under 50% health from 2 to 1.

2 - This trait now removes boons instead of converting them into conditions.

Devouring Darkness:

1 - Reduced the number of boons corrupted from 2 to 1 in WvW only.

2 - Increased cooldown from 10 seconds to 18 seconds in WvW only.

Enfeebling Blood:

1 - This skill no longer converts boons into conditions.

Lesser Enfeeble:

1 - This skill no longer converts boons into conditions.

Signet of the Locust:

1 - Reduced the number of boons removed from 2 to 1 in WvW only.

Break Enchantments

1 - Reduced the numbers of boons removed from 4 to 2 in WvW only.

1 - Reduced the number of boons removed from 2 to 1 in WvW only.

Winds of Disenchantment

1 - Reduced target cap from 10 to 5.

2 - Reduced incoming boon duration reduction from 100% to 33% in WvW only.

3 - Lowered the duration from 5 seconds to 4 seconds in WvW only.

kitten, we’ve basically taken every boon strip in the game out back and absolutely murdered them.

These massive and continuous nerfs to boon corruption and boon strip taken along with all the massive buffs to boon application (along with some realisation in the player base that boons/support are OP) have made the meta into squads with 4 supports per 1 DPS player where movement is detrimental, you’re just better off standing still, transfusing all your downs, proccing all your resurrect traits in the same place and bunkering down while letting your players do a golem rotation and praying the enemy cracks first.

It feels like moving your blob these days probably just kites you out of more beneficial AoEs than it does detrimental AoEs. There’s always been an issue that the more movement you do as a commander the more stragglers you’ll end up with, every movement risks having people off the safety of the stack dying. Inherently this makes the game bias less movement so we need skills to counter this. Unless you like standing still and doing a golem rotation but we have that already, at the golem, so let’s keep it there.

The game has shifted so strongly towards a static numbers and rotation game where it’s about you and your friends standing still and pressing buttons off cooldown (there’s some nuance, but less than there used to be) whilst praying that you win. It feels like we’re more reliant on squad composition; like finding 40 people that want to support 10 DPS, then the whole squad is relying on those 10 DPS to be competent.

A lot of the impact you could have as an individual player has been diminished. It’s shifted towards you “not screwing up” at your job instead of being able to shine with good gameplay. Newer players are heavily discouraged from playing DPS (in my experience the most popular role) since the whole squad is relying on just 10 people in a full 50 stack to do all offensive pressure on their own, if you’re not great at the game yet you have 4 people being upset because they feel like they’re 4 support players supporting someone who’s not performing their job. This used to be fine, you could get away with it much, much easier previously, which in my opinion was much healthier for everyone involved.

Fights often just break down to: shuffle slightly to the right, stand still and do a golem rotation for a few seconds, shuffle a bit again and wow we did it, they cracked. They didn’t die on a well coordinated burst (like a Well call), just cracked after x amount of time when one group started missing Illusions or lost a rally war. It feels bad when fights are just the two groups standing on top of each other pressing buttons and if either starts moving they’ll die instantly.

With Alliances actually releasing soon (I almost can’t believe it) it’s super sad that pretty much every single guildie, friend, associate, neighbour’s cat, random team chat player and even the rats all agree that the meta right now is terrible.

One of the biggest problems since the great butchering of Necromancer on July 27th has been the removal of the offensive strip/corrupt archetype (Power Reaper, Power Scourge). Virtuoso and Spellbreaker could also fill this role but never could quite live up to Necromancer's dominance in the space.

This was actually a very healthy part of the group composition meta-game, the only real issue was that it was too dominated by a single class: Necromancer. They’ve basically been replaced completely by boon stripping supports instead, which are, I think, very quite unhealthy since it very heavily promotes triple+ support sub-groups.

The choice for your boon stripping shouldn’t be between a Power Scourge that basically does strips and nothing else and a Support Scourge with transfuse and Barrier on top of the strips.

Blobs need to be less tanky and not as bunker-y as they are right now. Bringing back and promoting the offensive boon strip archetype will instead move the game back to a more reasonable state where we’re not just invincible boonballs and literally 80% of the squad is on Minstrel or Celestial.

For example I especially think it’s good if fields (wells, null field, etc) are fairly long in duration. It doesn’t really affect smaller scale stuff since they’re naturally way more mobile and will just move out of it. It only really punishes overly static and slow gameplay. Having long durations on things like Null Field, Wells, and other stuff is what used to make it so dangerous to just stand still for too long. It also promotes good strategy like cornering a group and, most importantly, discourages mindless boonballblob stacking.

Playing a boon class right now doesn’t even feel good now while they’re supposed to be all the rage, I look at my party window playing support Chronomancer and think, yup 30s resistance, yup 30s alacrity, 25 might, check that, 30s fury, 60s swiftness, 30s protection, 11 stacks of stability with 12 seconds left, 30s vigor and you think, wow, I’m really making an impact right now. Except you haven’t pressed a button yet and those boons are actually from the other 3 supports in your sub-group.

So for something more concrete instead of just a rant, here goes something.

Necromancer is the only class I haven’t played much so I’ll leave the specifics to someone more knowledgeable on the class but I feel like we need to buff the offensive traits and abilities on Necromancer, more damage, more boon strips/corrupts. Tying some extra boon corruption/boon strip to offensive traits that compete with powerful support abilities is a good start. I’d love for wells to be dangerous and impactful again but I also don’t want to just have Barrier Scourge be stronger and call it a day (although even that would be an improvement atm).

Virtuoso has a lot of potential to be an alternative to Necromancer, they’re already quite solid in terms of boon stripping. While I agree that Null Field is already a pretty loaded skill (since it cleanses as well), and I agree buffing that probably just makes Chronomancer better and not much else, I don’t think nerfing it and not providing any alternatives makes the game better. Boon strips are rare to come by so we need more alternatives and bigger commitment than just a single utility skill.

Thankfully, we already have great contenders on Virtuoso for buffs! Things like: Rain of Swords, Sword of Decimation and Thousand Cuts. They’re basically not used anywhere in the game right now (Thousand cuts on cVirt in PvE I guess) buffing them won’t mess with roaming content in any way since that type of skill is just too easy to dodge/move out of which makes them a good candidate in my eyes.

You could move Virtuoso towards more of a damage focused specialisation and actually make them worth using for the damage. This also has the added benefit of probably not touching Virtuoso’s power in GvGs as much as adding some boon strip to Sword of Decimation would for example.

I also feel like this would be healthy for Virtuoso in general, since mesmer already has very powerful utilities already, I feel it’s important to make them an actual trade-off instead of concentrating all the power to F1, F2 and traits. Having a DPS build being able to slot some utility for the squad is good, but it shouldn’t be free.

The 3rd obvious example here is Spellbreaker, it’s always been much stronger in smaller scale content compared to large scale content (not counting bubble shenanigans). My personal take on why this is the case is because the Warrior’s core weapons suffer badly from 2012-syndrome, none of them were designed for the type of combat and context that we have today in WvW. (Feels like most things that end up as good DPS in WvW are kind of by accident more than deliberate design).

Berserker works and feels much better in this context because most of your power and half your time is spent pressing F1.

I feel like a lot of why Spellbreaker struggles so much in large scale battles can be summarised quite well with looking at the Greatsword abilities:

1 - Standard auto-attack.

2 - Stationary skill with no range that only makes sense if your design perspective is from 2011.

3 - Actually good skill because it's movement with evade-frames but not very impactful as an offensive tool in this context.

4 - I… uh… Yeah just don’t press 4.

5 - I… uh… Yeah just don’t press 5. This is a rare example of making something that usually feels great to have (a movement skill) actually terrible and clunky to use.

Compare this to Vindicator Greatsword (that is well designed and feels great to use):

1 - Standard Auto, decent.

2 - Excellent AoE Damage with extra range, very usable

3 - Good dash, super responsive, very good AoE damage with some range.

4 - On-demand block, super useful. The follow-up doesn’t feel great though.

5 - Extremely good AoE damage with auto-aim to concentrate damage without you trying.

The rest of the weapons are good in their own context but have no place on an offensive Spellbreaker build in a blob. Longbow is a great example of a weapon completely carried by Zerker F1 that’s largely useless without it. But I’ll give Hammer some slack and say that it’s actually decent, getting CCd in the F1 leap is suffering incarnate though.

Anyway, I could talk for days about things I think should be looked at / changed but I’ll end it here and keep it at boon strips since I feel like that’s the most important change I’d like to see in the near future.

Let me know if I’m crazy or if you have better ideas, I’m all ears and hopefully the balance team will keep it in mind.

Any class should be forced to sacrifice damage/defense for support and support specs/classes should have no access to boon strip and that how you change the meta. This is the reason why tempest support is dead in water, they nerfed everything that made tempest tank support...now there is only the support aka no more meta, on spellbreaker the same point more or less...to support/heal you lose dmg. You cannot go even cele tempest/spellbreaker then do dmg, support, heal and condi clear at the same time and this is why you see armies of vindicators, scrappers,chronomancers, scourges, firebrand pushing forward like an unstoppable force.

Problem is neither gear or boon application...it's a design issue, simply some professions do not sacrifice enough for what they get

[Please introduce Target cap for all projectile denials]

17 minutes ago, gerberlyfe.9736 said:

Put a target cap on all bubbles and walls and limit them each to 5 or 10 projectiles denied. Why does aegis block only one melee attack but then a bubble blocks infinite projectiles? it makes no sense and it's not fair or fun.  It shouldn't be omega aegis designed only to immeserate and obsolete entire weapon types and classes  for really no reason. You could still get strong value if there was a reasonable cap of 10 projectiles denied. There is no other effect in the game that has infinite effects like that and the fact that they bubbles are naturally chained together gives zergs an intrinsic and unnecessary advantage over roaming builds and allows harassment of spawn etc.
Often off-hours on my roaming ranger or deadeye, a group of maybe 10 of a larger server can just infinitely harass my spawn because they have access  to an uncounterable trump card for many roaming builds. 
Infinite projectile denial has no counterplay for most mesmer, ranger and deadeye roaming builds and other builds for no reason. Just abolish it.

Cry me a kitten river! To have the balls to come here and ask to remove the only resemblance of counterplay against braindead pewpew roaming meta, you can time burst or change to melee when projectile denial is up...but that it's actually skilled/hard to pull but that's not as easy as sitting at 1200 range pewpewing from stealth and dodge BS.

P.S signed a ranger who mained the class for 6K hours. The vast vast majority of ranger mains in wvw sit at 1200 with their bow, cowering behind a wall of tanky BS but when I get in your face ( with melee ranger), most of you just start running like headless chickens with the GS.

Ranger, mesmer, thieves..you can all swap to melee weapon sets and have the mobility to get the kitten out on a whim with stealth, meanwhile the professions who rely on projectile denials can only stand there and take it all...man up and learn to play the kittening class!

[Pistol is not bad...it's just outdated]

For something designed as main ranged condi weapon, it does a good job in PvE at least...it's competitive the problem: is the condi application is not enough and simply too slow for PvP environment. The weapon would have been great 5-6 years ago not now; you need to overwhelm the enemy in a short time and with decent frequency to stand a chance against all those defensive layers and this gets progressively worse as the skill level of the opponent increases.

1. Landing Fire 3 is the only way to put a moving target on the defensive and you in advantage. Landing Fire 3 is very hard on moving targets and requires a hard CC like gale or earthquake
2. Fire 2 should be increased to 2 x stacks of burning if there is no intention to speed up Fire 3 or instead replace Raging Ricochet with "next fire bullet deal 3 x stacks of burning.
3. Air 2 daze should be increased to at least 3/4s daze in PvP/WvW or remove the daze and add confusion or torment but 1/4s daze is not enough time to capitalize on enemy, whatever you have interrupted will be up in the next fraction of a second, what even was the point? A well-placed daze should give you time to turn things around....1/4s not enough to do anything decent
4. Earth 3 should be 2-3x stacks of immobilize

Do remember that eles cannot swap weapons, and we cannot change strategy or approach mid-battle

[Upcoming Balance Changes]

16 hours ago, Stallic.2397 said:

The new diamond skin is pretty redundant. You could already cleanse practically the same way on Catalyst.

Weaver and Tempest don't make a ton of fields so triggering combos will not be consistent. The change is mostly for catalyst, dagger players or a niche core build. Granted, the trait was incredibly outdated and needed a change. So anything is better than nothing. 

But I would have preferred a cleanse when hit with barrier every few seconds with no health threshold. Then implemented more barrier output across all specializations. 

The other trait changes are pretty good though.

Literally, it will work only with a dagger/dagger catalyst and that's it

[Finally a +300 vitality trait...I can dream]

Never thought I'd see the day.....something that guardian had for years and now even more with dragon hunter and willbender. A +vitality trait not limited to weapon and specialization, add the +dmg traits buffs in the same traitline and I can see something cooking already in my mind for a fun-based gameplay. What is happening now is that Anet is finally bringing up ele to the same level of other professions: for years ele players had to choose between damage or sustain, where other professions don't , I am really enjoying this "levelling the field" approach with the balance...some will call it powercreep...I call it "fair treatment" 

[Vindicator has far too much evades, blocks, defense to be doing the amount of damage, and aoe damage that it does, what's the philospophy?]

On 5/22/2024 at 1:40 PM, Sahne.6950 said:

I dont see how arcane lightning is improving the hammerbuild... but apparently people run it... 

Have to take your word for it. 

I feel like the only good hammerbuild is infact Earthweaver. If you havent tried that build, i advise you give it a shot.

Loads of copy paste from "pro" players with no recognition of the actual origin of a build. These builds pop up once somebody on ele doesn't croak on sight when facing some wannabe pvper on yet another fotm 123 build

[literally every game is condi reaper, thief, support chrono]

9 minutes ago, Sahne.6950 said:

I think i vaaaguely remember a time where MAT´s consisted of nothing by Catalysts......

Ele has always been meta during those couples of times where some skill got buffed to provide too much burning....nerf that and ele goes back to yolo zerk gameplay to stay relevant at silver skill level. It was the same with the 5x fire dagger eles winning a MAT and catalyst short reign thx to scepter fire1...this talk of elementalist like is some grandiose class design always ready to dominate  ..it's silly at best

[Next up for nerfs]

2 hours ago, Khalisto.5780 said:

nerf everything I don't like even if it's not strong

It's more like , nerf everything till I can win

[Vindicator has far too much evades, blocks, defense to be doing the amount of damage, and aoe damage that it does, what's the philospophy?]

Didn't know they were so many vindicator players......waaaaait a minute!....aren't you lot spellbreakers?.....no?!....odd, wonder what you will be in a couple of months

[Chrono: Undo Oct 17th 2023 Nerf to Split Second]

Stealth....blink....blur...distortion...shield block...1200 range...instant mantra CC.....accordingly to the OP that's not enough sustain for a power spec going around with a zerker amulet. Now imagine all of that but with a condi amulet along with toughness....and people disagreeing with him are obviously trolls who want their profession to be easy play🧐....I tend to avoid the gw2 forum like the plague...it's not like it gets any better here.

PS. this really doesn't sit with me at all! Of all classes and specs...and GW2 players ask to buff the most kitten inducing spec of them all, for as long as distortion and stealth exist as they are ....for as long as traits like this remain in the game

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Infinite_Horizon

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Silent_Scope

Mesmers will remain as it is now...and people will  be happy about it, because it would be already much more than it deserves to be

[Chrono: Undo Oct 17th 2023 Nerf to Split Second]

11 hours ago, Vinny.7260 said:

How is this post still going?

We know ArenaNet doesn't typically go back on their nerfs. They'll buff something else Chronomancer specific... Maybe.

You can see the stats, this thread is kept alive by the OP and over 50% of the replies are from him...the other 30% are from the guy arguing with him

[Forum complaints = poor balance]

8 hours ago, Zerosugar.7682 said:

So yea name same it all really, if you cant or wont balance the abilities so they are not stacked with stability and other things then just say. so we know weither to try or give up on the pvp side of things.

the core aspect of the game seams more balanced then the paid content, why is that? did the dev's give up n just focus on pve?

if you want a game to have a long life, make sure pvp has balance, even if it means if you're good at range but bad at melee, thats fine. just let the players know what you're vision is for the game.

The word Overpowered has lost its meaning these days, it's used loosely and without any proof to back it up. All sorts of people post nerf threads every single minute of the day...every day. Something is overpowered when it does more than intended...not when it beats you and that's something the majority of people get gratuitously wrong. Only a clown would expect to go out there, see a class, any class and already start dancing at the prospect of an easy kill, what balance means is there is a 50/60% chance of you either losing or winning a fight.

Balance doesn't give a kitten about what is written in a fantasy book, what your friends tell you or what your imagination suggests, whatever you play....you can't win them all and you can lose or win against anything.

Basically over 80% of nerf threads are nothing more than a rant from yet another bruised ego, with the remaining 20% actually telling you a story of broken balance. The single build that can teamfight, hold nodes and duel at the same time...that's OP in a sense.....that single duellist build that just destroyed you may be not in most cases

[Balance and development choices are making less and less sense to me.]

Huh?...scepter condi ele?.....Scepter has always been power, and got used as condi weapon for a brief time when they overbuffed fire auto-attack, after the nerfs, it's laughable to consider ele scepter as a condi weapon. Pistol as it stands is the to go for condi ranged ele

[Toxic Guilds]

It's thanks to toxic guilds that you learn to counter the most cheesy builds this game has to offer...

[Vindicator has far too much evades, blocks, defense to be doing the amount of damage, and aoe damage that it does, what's the philospophy?]

The same arguments every time...

"My build takes skill, you lose because you suck"

But the interesting part is how the fotm build for how "skill intensive" it is , will happen to be rather common always  , enough to warrant several nerf threads. 

Skill intensive builds are neither common or meta for the class most times than not

Common =/ skill intensive...walking with a chip on the shoulders won't change that  

P.s may I add something more?

More often than not, the same individual on a different build on the same class...gets steamrolled by the same "nab" they just trashed  a moment ago while using their "skilled build" and when that happens...ha it's because I am now the one running the cheese build and that's why I won...and that comes from the "nobility of pvp". 

Ha..forgot to say that when I win and they lose...I was a on a core spec and they weren't on their fotm spec...but ofc I am the nab and they're pro

The gw2 playerbase full of individuals with integrity and honesty...

[Literally insane to nerf warrior..but leaving vindicator]

Literally out of this world balance....this is mindblowing....out of all build they go and nerf warrior which at best was annoying to kill...but leave vindicator, the sustain to dmg ratio is just out of whack . But I wonder is there even any point in asking for the correct balance?

[Chaotic Transferance - RIP - April 16, 2024 - Please revert]

2 hours ago, ZephidelGRS.9520 said:

As much as I love the interaction, Elementalist's elemental auras are garbage compared to Chaos Aura. That's the only reason why they're allowed to be shared en masse. Meanwhile, Chaos Aura effectively cuts the enemy's damage by 83% in PvP interactions (Protection + Weakness), even more damage if we consider Weakness's side effect to nullify critical chance. This is extremely powerful in tipping the scale of the fight, I have witnessed it myself in WvW where a small group of us managed to slaughter an enemy zerg via Chaos Aura spam.

This is a good reminder to those saying that Mesmers don't have support capabilities; it's not that Mesmers don't have such capabilties, but every time Mesmers do support the game just breaks. I mean, sharing Distortion? Copying boons? And now Chaos Aura spam. What could go wrong with allowing a class that actively breaks game mechanics to share the peasants that same ability to break game mechanics? (/sarcasm).

Personally, I'm not upset with this change. Yes it'll kill the identity of support Mesmers during the past 6 months, but it preserves the power of Chaos Aura for our selfish use. If we're going to share it again I fear they'll nerf the aura to uselessness like the Ele's auras.   

They added confuse emote...for telling the truth.

[Ranger Mace Daze Spam]

On 4/7/2024 at 1:05 PM, Trevor Boyer.6524 said:

The Ranger maces are good in pve but impractical to run in pvp for several reasons:

1. In pvp things do not stand still. The maces both mainhand and offhand, are too slow and have no ranged pressure.
2. Due to no ranged pressure or built in defenses, maces make a bad +ing roam option. They also make a bad side node option because all good side node builds have to lean on synergized condi/defensive builds or power builds with a lot less power output traded in for a lot more sustain, then the maces just deal bad damage. And due to the limited ranged and no ranged pressure, people can kite it too easily on the side node and just avoid strikes.
3. Literally anything with stability or frontloaded shielding like DH F3 or Photon Wall that allows you to block while attacking, just treads all over mace Rangers. If you can't IMMEDIATELY secure the CC chain gimmick and actually maintain it, you lose.
4. The only half functional mace Ranger I've encountered was ran by Doze and it was a Druid. It had to run full DPS/CC build to make the gimmick work with marks & midnight king relic. It feels super OP hard counter when you do not have stab and you do not have mechanics like DH F3 or Photon Wall. But if you do, you can just turn on the Ranger and kill it while ignoring CCs. It can't brawl like Soulbeast Sword that actually has evades. The CCs is all it has. If you shut it down, it dies too easily. It is also bad, worse than Engis, when focused by more than 1 person. These Ranger mace builds can't stat for practical builds to run in conquest matches or even 2v2s. They're atrociously bad when getting +d. If they want the maces to be functional at all, they have to stat for some weird 1v1 builds and in that case they just get booted into respawn any time they get focused. Absolutely no mechanics to deal with 2 people chasing and can't stat for sustain if they want the maces to be practical to use at all.

So to clarify what's actually happening here with Ranger maces:

It's really good at shutting down and hard countering things that do not pump stability that don't have functions like DH F3, Photon Wall, or Distortion, ect ect. It's also good at shutting down low skill-cap players in general who attempt to stand on nodes in its face rather than kite & utilize their range vs. the maces. But it in turn gets way too hard countered by anything with the aforementioned mechanics to deal with it, by anything that kites it, and by getting +d in general. It has serious mechanical holes in its design structure that prevents it from being competitive. There are big reasons why it was not used the previous MAT, why it isn't being used in daily ATs, why no Ranger above G2 is running it, and why we won't be seeing it in the upcoming MAT either.

I agree the maces need changes, but saying "they need nerfs" is the wrong way to look at this. If anything, they need some kind of rework to reduce the damage potential but to also enhance the mace's practicality to actually hit things. I mean seriously, they give everything massive tele-burst potential nowadays. So when you take a class that's traits and foundational theory were designed completely around ranged bow play and then start giving it slow melee only no-porting weapon kits, it doesn't synergize well for today's metas.

I'm not being "biased" either. I don't use those maces. They're completely impractical to use against even G2+ players. I'm just explaining why.

When you see more than 2-3 rangers with the same weapon/build on an average of 3 games....you can bet that combo is OP...when you see more than 1 ranger in the arena at the same time regularly...you can bet that combo is broken...Mace/Mace is broken OP and there is no denial

[Cleansing Fire- Lackluster]

On 4/7/2024 at 1:07 AM, Stallic.2397 said:

Given the spam of conditions in PvP, cleansing fire still doesn't have enough to take up a utility slot. CD is too long and it only removes 3 conditions

Recommendation: Cleansing fire heals for every condition cured. (On top of it's other effects).

Preferably 500 heal for each condition. 

Cleansing fire removes 6x condis alone, 8 x if taking water GM, that's good enough on its own and definitely a life saver when dealing with condi spammera. The rest thrown at you should be either dodged or blocked, the utility is definitely strong and worth taking

[Game balance changes feel AI generated]

Here are the facts:

1. Everyone in the office can chime in during the balance process, this will result in over-representation for some classes and almost non-existent content for others: a negative change is most likely to be removed from the expected list if the class is over-represented and positive changes are more likely to happen
2. Playing rate is strongly considered during balance patch, simplistic but effective gameplay options are popular and tend to be left alone for the greatest amount of time
3. They favour simplicity over complexity, tending to punish complexity if reaching the same results as simplicity

[Pistols Grant Elementalists the Choice between Greater Damage and Defense]

The funny thing is...I expect Anet to even nerf pistol at this point because it has TOP6 golem benchmark ...where the class is not even played in whatever raid meta is at the moment from the looks of it