Nezuralli.2794

Not a matter of balance, I only think the new versions are less fun to use. I'm aware that the change to Wind Storm for example was because people kept getting themselves stuck in geometry accidentally. That happened to me too but still had a lot of fun with it so call it personal preference.

With the UI to select between Unleashed and "leashed" skills on Ranger being a thing can we please have the option to switch between the old and new functionalities of skills like Wind Storm, Earthen Rush, and Burning Speed? I quit playing around the time those were changed to no longer blow the player back or move them past the target because it killed my enjoyment of those weapons. I'm coming back and surprised to see those changes somehow stuck around. So if they're here to stay I humbly request the option to use the old versions.

Well thank you for reading.

Hello everyone, I've been giving each of the core elementalist trait lines some thought, one a day. In an effort not to buff or nerf anything, only to make the trait lines more fun. To play, build around, and fight against. Focusing as best I can on making traits thematically appropriate and feeding into each other across lines. Making the minor traits applicable to any kind of build, reworking traits with 300 second cooldowns, and creating interesting combos between the elements. I've purposefully left out any numbers that I could because there's really no point. If an idea is cool, work around it and figure out what numbers make it balanced afterwards. There's a bit too much to copy paste into a single thread here so I'm just going to link what I've posted already over on reddit. Please, give me your feedback. What you think is good and bad and why. Did I overlook something that would result in a broken combo somewhere unexpected. Etc... Elementalist Fire Air Earth Water Arcane

Spicy harpoons lol

You're right about that. I avoided adding anything else onto that one in particular because it's an adept but I suppose it could have some expertise or burning duration added on there. And I'll add a link to the wiki for the normal traits so people can quickly check. Thank you.

Hello everyone, I've been giving each of the core warrior trait lines some thought, one a day. In an effort not to buff or nerf anything, only to make the trait lines more fun. To play, build around, and fight against. Focusing as best I can on making traits thematically appropriate and feeding into each other across lines. Making the minor traits applicable to any kind of build and encouraging less seen playstyles like the classic sword & board. I've purposefully left out any numbers that I could because there's really no point. If an idea is cool, work around it and figure out what numbers make it balanced afterwards. There's a bit too much to copy paste into a single thread here so I'm just going to link what I've posted already over on reddit. Please, give me your feedback. What you think is good and bad and why. Did I overlook something that would result in a broken combo somewhere unexpected. Etc... Strength Arms Defense Tactics Discipline

This got some attention last night, although I was hoping to spark some talk about possible balance changes not "who says and does what".The 10x less damage stat is from a comment from Anet that less experienced players do 10 times less damage than experienced ones. Which explains a lot when you do regular training runs like I do. In an ideal world I would stick every one of those training players on Valkyrie Reaper because it's easy to play with high health and does high damage by auto attacking in shroud. Of course that's not meta and it shouldn't be, but I'd like to see other options like it for the other classes you know? That's what I would hope the conversion traits are used for. Sorry if that message got lost in the rambling. I posted this on reddit and got loads of mis-understanding so I clearly need to learn to write better.

I'm not a new player, I spend more time in that build editor than I do playing the game. But that's terrible advice for a new player. They don't know what they don't know and so can't look for it just by browsing the wiki. The game should do the bare minimum to teach players and ease them into it.

Most stat sets serve no purpose in any game mode making build craft much more narrow that it would appear. However at the same time a new player is quite rightly overwhelmed by it. Making every stat set available to all classes or even tying stats to gear at all was a huge mistake in my opinion but we're well past fixing that. The solution has been played with a bit by the balance team but never far enough to make running anything other than Berserker best in slot for most classes. Why would you ever run Crusader, Marshal, Rabid, or Vigilant? Do you even remember what stats these sets give without checking the wiki? That solution that we've seen work is : Traits that allow for Crit Chance, Boon Duration, or Condition Duration to be swapped off of gear for another stat. That's it. The important distinction is that these are Traits, as in, profession specific. So they are allowed to be overpowered compared to what all classes have access to.A few examples of this are : Revenant receiving 40% Crit Chance from Fury and 33% from full Endurance, Necromancer receiving 50% Crit Chance from Vulnerability and 33% from Shroud, 20% modifiers on specific conditions allowing you to hit duration cap with just Krait/Balthazar runes, sigils, and food, etc... So what would happen if there were other stats that could be "replaced" like this? There actually are plenty of attempts by the game to encourage it, they're just woefully inadequate. And those are : The Conversion Traits Such as, 10% of Toughness is converted to Power from the Warrior Defense line. This is actually a really interesting idea when you think about it, the higher I stack my Toughness the more Power I get. These conversions are very thematic to the class and encourage building up a currently "useless" stat (toughness is extra worthless due to raid boss agro problems but ignore that for a second). Now imagine this was an insane 100% conversion and you got yourself some Soldier's or Knight's gear. Go ahead and run the numbers yourself but I'll just tell you: it still would be less damage than Berserker. Which is actually perfect! We don't want to remove glass canon builds as an option. However now you have an actual choice to make : Trade off ~some~ damage for the ability to use Toughness gear, which was otherwise completely worthless (and still will be to most other classes without a similar trait). This pushes class identity, build diversity, and especially the new player experience to new levels. Glass canon will still be top damage and raid meta but new players who are simply doing what the game already encourages them to do wont be doing 10x less damage and complaining that story content and open world is too hard. The fact is, getting one shot by any enemy, even a raid boss, feels cheap when you're too inexperienced to be perfectly avoiding damage. But that's what new players are forced to do in order to do any damage and not feel equally awful for smacking an enemy for 20 minutes with a mace because they wanted to run the appropriate sounding Knight's gear on their Warrior. The difference between a meta build and not should not be 3k DPS to 30k DPS, that's simply a failure of balance and makes true end game content seem completely impossible to new players and story content beatable with only auto attacking to compensate. We should be encouraging Toughness, Vitality, and Healing Power as stats to look for on builds other than pure raid healing/support builds because that is a much cleaner experience for a new player to learn the game in while still being able to see the difference they make in a fight through damage, team healing, conditions, and/or boons. This could even allow for the fabled "Hybrid" damage build to be a possibility if tuned correctly and open up all the stat sets with both Power and Condition Damage. Try to think of examples of conversions already existing or new being pushed to ludicrous levels but requiring a non-offensive stat and imagine if that would break the game. For example Ranger has 7% Vitality to Expertise in the Wilderness Survival line. Even with a Maximum Vitality stat set like Shamans and Warrior Runes that only equals 13% Condition Duration. The tradeoff is : you're using Shaman's gear... so you're not even above 1000 Condition Damage and your bleeding does 80 damage per second, good luck. Let's say we make it 5x better and now with maxed out Vitality you can get 65% Condition Duration as a trade-off for running a more defensive trait line and stat set. That's still 20% less than running Vipers with runes and sigils plus you get a decent amount of Power damage. Now if you've been reading and thinking to yourself that PvP and WvW would be a nightmare to have changes like these added I'll explain how they're actually where they would shine the most. What's the number one complaint new players have with PvP? "I walked onto the point and got CC'd and killed in about 2.5 seconds." So naturally they try and add some defense to their build, only to find that the time to kill them has increased to 4.5 seconds and they now have no chance of killing anyone. It's exactly the same problem as before, the difference between a meta build and not should not be 10x damage. Active defenses will always be more effective than passive, that's exactly how most PvP builds work. By blocking or ignoring damage entirely while running a high damage setup. This will still be the meta and always will be because it allows for the highest skill ceiling. But we need a way to slow down the time to kill without allowing for un-killable Bunker builds. You can't just add a Defensive stat set amulet as we've seen before, because one class or another would be able to abuse the hell out of it in combination with their active defenses. So basically we need to use these conversion traits as a way to make our own stat sets on the classes where they make sense. We see this already with builds like Valkyrie Reaper, which is able to have a high Vitality and still do damage thanks to all the traits that replace Precision on it's gear. AND THAT'S STILL NOT META. Let me repeat that, even after getting 100% Crit Chance without putting a single point into Precision and dumping all of that into extra health (effectively a health pool of about 60,000), that's not even listed as a viable option on MetaBattle. That's because higher damage is always worth it but higher health or toughness is cut through almost instantly anyway without active defenses. Thanks for reading, what stat combos would you want to see available on your characters? I personally want to see some way to buff condition duration specifically for Elementalist, rather than focusing on either Bleeding or Burning alone so I can play my Support Tempest and still do damage.