Atomnium.1532

I'm very happy that we got a stream to see the changes and gauge the changes before they go live

Ele what ? Don't know what you talking about

Assuming no change since BETA and speaking about PvE : Scepter Heal herald is pretty much broken, with about double the barrier that the Mechanist mace provided before a salvo of 3 nerfs. We are talking about 13k+ permanent barrier from pressing 1 and 2 and nothing else, obviously while providing about every boon in the game but alacrity with the highest boon range and the highest permanent ticking healing through the best healing% bonus of all classes and specs. Basically imagine current herald but is generating 3k barrier/sec. It also does more dps than sword by again spamming 1 and 2. Basically, the beta version is the best power weapon and the best healer weapon combined. It aint staying like that but still the most promising weapon. Chrono heal is probably gonna be very strong too adding even more tools to an already solid healer Pistol Guardian is likely the most fun and useful weapon in the dps department as it provides a lacking weapon swap to condi builds. Axe thief is getting nerfed, let's be honest it's just happening, the game won't go to let's have 67k dps right now. And the gameplay is actually very resident sleeper. Ranger mace is a decent addition to the support kit in particular but generally a cool weapon. Warrior staff is decent, might be very fun but really I don't see warrior butting into the support role with the terrible healing and boons it provides, might end up being another power weapon so meh. The other 2 weapons are practically unusable garbage, the engineer bow should basically go back to the drawing board or to the trash bin altogether as it has literrally no build where it would be a good idea to use it ever...except... afk botting... I'm guessing it's a PvP or WvW weapon(this is still probably a stretch too) and the 'new necro power weapon' does less damage than dagger auto attacks when using perfectly every single sword button, so after tuning maybe, but in the meantime it is just one more dead weapon in the necro arsenal, joinining the axe in both function and efficacy.

Every CC-condi is just a ticking drain on breakbar, no special effect : https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defiance_bar#Control_effects Chilled is 33 defiance bar/sec

No, Arenanet has a firm belief that patches should be feeling like a gatcha. They'll actually willfully hide informations from their patchnotes to create surprise. (Mace mechanist change for example, 3 weeks after the patch and it is still not documented anywhere on any patch notes) The Follow up message is basically 'here's the direction we are thinking of, we will now proceed shutting down all channels of communication until the patch is released and will implement additionnal changes without warning'

Read Desert Empowerment tooltip.

I'm sucha normie, i put my vote and it was the most voted for in every case

I agree, i'd much rather have abundant stab than having it removed from firebrand and feel like you lose the control of your character frequently, i've never been a fan of repeated loss of control and gw2 can be a pain in the behind when it decides to chain CC you. But as I said, I'm sure some purist will argue that punishing standing in aoe and not dodging should be part of the experience and it is not a crazy stance either.

I mean Firebrand is indeed very much overperforming in Fractals especially, the value of stab and all. Advocating for the firebrand stab application to be democratized or removed both have their trade-offs. Do people really want a world where you are CC-punished a lot and feeling like you are a pinball in some circumstancess ? Do people really want a world where regardmess of comp, CC is non existent because healers provide stab to the degree of FB ? I'd like the game to not feel like you lose control of your character for 4 seconds everytime a maggot farts, but some people may say that the player should be punished for not avoiding kitten properly. But anyone who thinks FB is 'balanced' is made of copium.

Some decent stuff on catalyst with sword warhorn, pretty much boon vomit. Mace scrapper has some good things going too.

We're mostly in agreement. My prediction is that we'll have 1-2 years of iterration in that cursed direction until they realize that it was a poor design. I mean it's not like Anet is a stranger to drastic vision shifts.

Oh I'm not excusing or advocating for the devs decision to put such an emphasis on these boons and have the game revolve around them. What I'm saying is that pivoting away from that design is not a simple toggle. Huge work has to be done afterward to rebalance around the absence of these as the core of certain specs. It would be a big shift, I believe as most here that it would be a net positive to remove them altogether/make them baseline and that numerical outliers can be dealt with after quickness alac would be baseline. Remember that it took YEARS for Anet to make enough specs provide them so that we don't have to stack the 1-3 specs that provide it and have some degree of diversity, I'm not expecting undoing the years of design around it to be done in a monthly balance patch, that's what I'm saying. I absolutely believe that eventually, quickness and alac will change or be removed, but I don't think it's likely that it'll come soon™.

I think the desire for those boons to be gone has been heard from the devs at this point, but I'm guessing even if the will to satisfy this community desire was there it would mean like dozens of traits would need to be entirely reworked, a big balance shift that would require massive number tuning all over the place and an amount of work that is unreasonable without impairing the other tasks that developers need to do for content release. But considering we're at like the 12th thread about this in the profession forum with a somwhat consensus that Q and alac need to go, content creators already conceding that those buffs are not healthy for the game, new arrivals in the game like Preach pointing specifically to that point and saying that they don't like it. The feedback is overwhelmingly clear. I'm fairly confident that the devs actually know about the Quickness/Alac conversation but that even IF they would to finally consider it, it would be a pivotal change that would be addressed in an expansion where you can justify pouring more ressources into a core change to the combat like this one. There is also the gamemode problem. If Quickness / alac speed was really baseline, what about sPvP ? Do we just have gw2 pvp move at +50% speed and move on without thinking of the consequences ? Even WvW. And wouldnt that feel even worse than now if whenever you entered a pvp match or wvw you didnt have this speed ? It's not really a simple toggle, there are tons of tentacles to what Quickness and alac impact.

Just putting it there, i do not understand the decision to select Untamed as the Quickness spec since Soulbeast has quickness things in it (through the essence of speed and live fast). It would absolutely make more sense to grant it to soulbeast, would synergize quite well with Moa stance and could be applied on stances in lieu or in addition to stanceshare or as a pulsing boon while at least one stance is active to favorise smart gameplay.

Wrong thread sorry