JayKay.5649

Ty for your time. Appreciated. Sorry but that tells me you either had a balance vision and scrapped it or there was no vision at all. I won't go into every detail, but to me most changes are either generic bandaids to artificial problems or changes for the sake of change. Sure catalyst saw play in speedruns, but there will always be a "top pick". Catalyst is punishing to play and now you nerfed dps cata and quickness cata. Before it was good on dummy golems more or less and now it's okay at some and worse at almost every other encounter. Also introducing skills that function differently in different gamemodes is not very new player friendly. (catalyst sphere quickness and firebrand heal mantra aegis) Banner/spirits is similiar. Sure they felt obligatory to bring in a group, but some implementations make the skills worse or straigth unfun. Additionally spirits don't apply boons around them, they puls around the ranger now. Which makes now mechanist the mechanic king + even with 100% boon duration, druid has to stay around the group for good uptimes. And stability was removed aswell. Did you think ranger/druid/untamed would be too broken with one group stab? Anyway I hope you have a master plan or we will just circle around balance forever. Imo you shouldn't balance specific builds. If catalyst was so much played, it should get a small nerf. The same rule applies, if firebrand/mechanist or any other build see too much play in every gamemode. But most importantly, rework unused skills again. Buff weak stuff BEFORE you nerf the middle/high end stuff. Bring more FUN interactions into the game instead of nerfing the remaining cool stuff that is left in the game. Make elite specialisation special. Let them shine in certain parts. Give us the tools, so everyone can choose their own playstyle instead of forcing autoattack builds on your players. Let me play with 10 minions (visually) or let me buff my group so I can feel as a powerful leader. Let me play an easy build, if I choose to, but keep the option to bring a few more buttons into the mix and reward me for those choices. Let me play a devastating mage. Also unique stuff can be shared with other classes and don't have to be removed from the game. For example thief/engi used to be the only class with smoke fields. Now ranger has access to it too. Give 4-5 classes access to a certain things and let the other classes out. Instead they get other fancy stuff. Make a checklist and every class/elite spec gets access to 50-60%. The combat system is still the best for an MMO, please use it at it's full potential. Make fun interactions with traits/runes+combo finishers. Look into unused skills. Most of the time they are outclassed by other stuff or you can't move while casting. Let me interact more activly with my teammates. Pressing buttons in a certain sequence should be rewarding for myself and for my teammates.

Honestly next tuesday SAB will be gone and it will "automatically" fix itself. Last years SAB was already making problems. This will happen with next years SAB release again. I beg you, don't just sweep it under the carpet. Fix it for good.

Sure it would change how you attack/defend an objective. But that is currently a thing in the game and it mostly matters in case you are in a small group. It wouldn't change much outside of that scenario,. And if you make them too strong/meainingful, nobody would attack t3 objectives anymore. An example is the lord at palace on desert borderlands. Since stability doesn't work against the ring, it can completely destroy a zerg, If you know there is an enemy group, you have to play very passiv.

At the end WvW is a pvp gamemode. The content is player driven and you should only change the setting/circumstances a bit. What WvW needs is balance/meta shifts, same as conquest. This way there is enough change, how you approach the gamemode. If you change a lord of a tower, 99% wouldn't care after a few days. "Improving Reward System" is already new content for many. Especially for PvX players. Sometimes you do bvb fights in OS and many would leave, because they don't get much there. I hope they improve outnumbered/attacking t3 and so on to get more incentive to fight.

Great follow up. I am glad weapons are back on the menu. ☺️ I don't think it's necessary to exclude certain stuff, but what triggers the status reset. Like if you swap your gear template with all sorts of buffs, you do it on purpose and imo everything should be removed. Traits can be abused, but are a minimal factor at the end as long as your allies would lose unique buffs too. Either keep everything on trait template swap or remove everything. No middle ground. But I have no insight on eod especs, so that could change ofc.

Some ideas to make elixiers more interesting. I would merge the boons a bit or scrap them. Make an elixier which cures blight, defensive boons, stun breaks etc.. An elixier, which gives you more blight, offensive boons and/or damages + conditions foes around you. For pvp an elixier to evade stuff to compensate the health loss maybe. Providing permanent fury somehow would be nice, so you actually can replace scrapper/firebrand in PvE group content. I would suggest more positive affects from blight. e.g. reduced shroud cd the more blight you have, when you exit shroud. This way it feels more like a kit and leads to a more fluid gameplay maybe.