Dagger.2035

I also forgot to add that the stat split between PvE and WvW doesn't make any sense. They didn't have to waste developer time implementing this solution. Celestial is even stronger in PvE since boon are handed out like candy in that game mode. You don't even have to invest in concentration to get 25 might instantly. They should have just adjusted the stat to undo their changes to it.

Celestial was a good stat set prior to the addition of concentration and expertise and I'm confident it will see a ton of use after the change. The developers have boons on the brain and until they change their ways it will continue to be strong. People defending it must admit that all of the top roaming builds were Celestial and it has had a presence in the large-scale meta which expanded recently. I don't know how much more evidence you need. Going forward you will just have to make tougher choices with your traits and gear. I did defend Celestial 3-4 years ago, but after trying out some of the builds myself I can no longer defend it. My main issue is that it has a ton of sustain and can output damage comparable to solo-roaming power builds. I'm talking about roaming builds which primarily use Maurader's and Dragon's. When Celestial builds have a single target 5k DPS floor and can burst quite higher and exceed 10k DPS, where's the trade-off? The sustain from the stats and defensive traits is way too high with that kind of damage potential.

Yeah, my math is probably off since the total damage is summed over the hits. So the total damage loss 0.8 + 0.8 = 1.6 = 1.6 / 2.0 or 20%. But the end result feels worse and the slowness of the burst makes it less effective. I do agree that things need to be fair. But don't you think things have gone too far in favor of group play? When damage was higher the AOEs could be negated by being coordinated and moving as a group. Now most groups sits still and shrug off the damage.

The balance change have made a huge difference. Defending as a cloud used to be more fun since both sides would collect bags, and the defenders had a decent chance of wearing down the zerg. Back in 2021, two power guardians, two power heralds, or two power reapers had enough burst to generate downs and finish them off quickly. What happened? A 20% nerf was applied to all AOE skills. You may think big deal 20% isn't that much, but it adds up. A burst is usually made up of multiple AOEs. When you consider this, the nerf is much greater. Two skills do -36% damage, three skills do -51% damage, four skills do -60% damage. It had a big impact since most damage bursts are made up by layering several AOEs together. As proof, the two revenant hammer skills used to kill a sentry, now the sentry still has 50% health. I mentioned several builds above, but staff weaver and burn guardian had much higher damage potential. I won't get into burn guard (even though the burn trait was nerfed to 3 targets recently), but I do think the meta is better with condition builds since they can bypass the toughness stat. Another change which affected the weaver was the removal of the 10 target skills. The weaver had non-stop AoEs so you can put constant pressure on a zerg. When the zerg was worn down, and places themselves against a wall, then elementalists could try and break the zerg with the 10 target skills. Place your meteor shower on them, with a delayed ice spike, then summon the fiery greatsword and cast firestorm and fiery whirl. You just cast two 10 target skills with ice spike and meteors landing at the same time and fiery whirl into the wall keeps all your damage at one location. I feel the 10 target skills were fair in this situation since you had to play glass, enter melee range, and had to have good timing with the 180 second cool down. More professions should have had 10 target skills like this, but instead of doing that target caps have been reduced. Fast forward to today. There's proliferation of support builds with barrier, healing, boons, and cleanses. Sources of strips have been reduced. Even 5 target skills are being reduced to 3. The capture circle is half the size of it used to be so you can't even delay the cap. Why even try to defend. Now you can't even generate downs and the blob no longer needs to move out of AOEs to avoid damage. The fight is so one sided towards the larger organized group. Don't bother defending at all. Make it unfun for them as well and don't feed bags.

You are probably right about why it got nerfed, but who cares since Celestial is problematic elsewhere. This low damage meta just plain sucks. I'm mainly roaming in Celestial and running Minstril builds in large-scale.

Being spawned camped can be fun as well. Just equip a few pulls and let the legendary defenders do the work. After a few kills and some corpse jumping the attackers tend to back off.

My wife doesn't play video games 😞

They also nerfed the sad remains of the burn guard. I really hope people start dodging fights when they are outnumbered. There's nothing else you can do.

It seems like they only balance for GvG now. Damage must be low enough to allow supports to have time to press buttons and make fights last longer. Open world WvW and roaming don't matter. As for the changes to defenses it seems like they must be getting suggestions from a below average guild with no strategy when placing siege. I do see Anet tags with guilds like DUSK often.

Props for trying new things, but thief seems stuck as the lowest tier option for WvW. This comes down to flexibility and being able to adapt to the current situation when queues are in effect. Other professions provide better options for large-scale damage, large-scale support, and roaming builds. I would rather play Revenant, Guardian, Elementalist, or Necromancer than Thief and I'm a Thief main. I still play it for fun from time to time, but it really sucks to be stuck on it when your team is at a disadvantage and needs help. I'm sure some thief heroes will claim that they have success, but I would counter they would do more on another profession. The best build for large scale is still staff daredevil and since it is melee only, it is very situational. Depending on the ebb and flow of the fight there will be many times where it is too dangerous to engage in melee combat which really hurts its overall effectiveness. If any thief here uses arcDPS (and healing extension) and spends at least 100 hours to try and fully learn another profession's builds you will see that I am right. The latest thief weapons are a big disappointment for me. Scepter was a big disappointment since we didn't get a 5-target AOE. I still don't see why scepter skill #2 can't be repurposed as an AOE. The axe gave me hope that we may have a non-projectile auto-attack like necromancer, but that didn't happen either. I really feel a key to this profession's success in WvW is getting a proper ranged weapon or making a Spectre Well do AOE corruption. When clouding and outnumbered greatly the two strongest builds IMO are a glass power staff Weaver and a burn guardian. If you have just a few people who can play these well, then you can change the outcome of the fight. These are the only builds which can quickly cross 500k to 1 million damage. I was on an awful server so a couple of us had to constantly play these builds to help out our team. We knew we were carrying the fights for years and arcDPS proved it. Many times, we are doing 90% of the squad's damage.

The way I see it is that game is balanced with these sliders kind of like changing treble or bass on a speaker system: Damage vs Sustain Boons vs Strips Ranged vs Melee Crowd Control vs Stun Break/Stability Projectiles vs Projectile Hate One direction tends to favor individual skill and unorganized play while the other tends to favor builds, squad composition, and coordination. They have been pushing everything towards boon balls and karma trainers for years. Now things are out of whack. Even rewards come into play. It is much easier to farm kills on a god mode support build. Supports should always receive less kill credit for the health of the game. Also, some support builds need to be destroyed. They generate so much skill lag, the skill lag is almost like another defensive buff. I'm also sorry for warriors, the DPS build needs to be destroyed it is too effective with the skill lag, while other DPS builds struggle to fire off their skills. Many other DPS builds need to layer skills and AOEs to be effective but that is impossible when you need to press each skill 5 times.

Why not remove the problematic traits which convert conditions to boons? Oh, wait...boon balls!

I've been waiting for this moment for years, but I'm afraid it's too little too late. The game is for boon balls and karma trainers, if you like to play the game differently this game isn't for you.

I'm glad other people are seeing this bug too since I was about to delete GW2 and re-download. I tried a repair today, but that didn't fix it.

This was the start of the problem. You can review the original comments and many of us predicted this outcome. Sustain is too high and once you outnumber your opponent by a certain threshold it is too easy to stack extra supports and be untouchable.