Xzygy.1452

Please reconsider this change. We FINALLY have an alternative to Firebrand in WvW for zerg stability, and it actually works. It's not perfect, but it is close enough to compete. The nerfs to alacrity alone will increase the cooldown already, just leave it be. Firebrand has been the only option literally forever for stability in WvW, except for a brief stint where WB was viable, before you also killed that. Please do not kill our ability to fill the stability role in this game mode. Or if you're going to, at least give us SOMETHING else to play, other than guardian. Some of us just don't want to play the paladin archetype.

A very long time ago, I was a skill clicker. You'll read stories often of clickers becoming keybinders, but never keybinders becoming clickers. The difference it makes is massive. You don't need to find and select the ability you want, your finger knows where it is and hits it. There is no upgrade you can make to your PC, no item or consumable you can have, that will make a larger difference than learning to keybind. It feels like this is hard to do, but take it slow. Pick one ability, just one. put it somewhere on your keyboard that is comfortable to hit while also hitting your WASD (I prefer ESDF) for movement. When you use that one ability, try to hit the key, but click everything else as you're used to. Play that way for a day or two, and when it feels like second nature, add another. Don't rush it, don't try to do everything at once, just one ability. It will happen, slowly, but it will.

If they did make it so that a handful of people could take down a 50 man comped, coordinated blob in coms, I'm pretty sure the entire game-mode would be unplayable. Many of us that run in a coordinated group aren't even interested really in the objectives, we want to fight the other guilds. The game we're playing doesn't have the same objectives of the one you're playing, and we're not terribly interested in fighting small groups unless they're picking our runbacks, pin sniping, or trying to cloud us. Our presence doesn't make the game unplayable, it just means that to play the game you want to play, you need to do it smartly. Be where we aren't, take advantage of the fact that the group can only be in one place at a time. Take objectives in small groups, fan out, alternate between hitting the other two sides. Avoid orange swords. Coordinate what you're doing in map chat. Provide scouting calls to the tag on your map. Hit and run, don't follow a predictable path, like taking camp then towers, then making a play for the keep. When others call out small numbers incoming to an objective, help defend, but when the zerg shows, pop smoke. This is called "Havoc." One group doing this can be very effective, but many groups can be overwhelming. When everything has swords on it, you can't know what's being hit.

WvW Zerg perspective here. I'm a multiclass support, have played everything in the current meta extensively. I design many of the builds for my guild and am constantly testing new ideas to find what others have missed. For example, we had a highly effective willbender support in place of firebrand until alacrity share got split off and place in the same line as a core stability trait. It had more cleanse, more than double the healing, and still maintained high stab uptime. First off, there is a major design flaw with core mesmer that can't be addressed by a weapon, and if it were, the weapon would be massively overpowered in small scale pvp and probably pve. Clones simply do not function in large scale fights, they vaporize immediately. While there is a trait to give phantasms distortion, there is no such option for clones. As a result, the only build that works well in the current meta is a chrono that shatters without clones for strip. A simple solution to this would be for clones to gain distortion until shattered after they're killed. This would eliminate the misdirection element, as the graphic is obvious, but preserve the core function of the clones as a mechanic so that shatters could be used consistently. To my knowledge, there isn't counterplay that involves intentionally damaging clones or phantasms for resource denial, both are either ignored except to avoid the hit/shatter, or they killed passively with AoE. Also, phantasms should spawn with distortion by default for 100% of their lifespan. I should not have to trait to make my spells work. Again, there is no intentional counterplay being damaged by this change, no meaningful decisions removed. Without addressing this flaw, mesmer zerg play will continue to be degenerate in nature, as it relies on 0 clone shatters as a core source of strip. Additionally, the combination of ranged attacking clones and melee focused Mirage rifle ambush means that we will not see Infinite Horizon played consistently as a way to bolster healing throughput by stacking ambushes. Recommend that you cause the clones to port to melee, or to the mesmer before they use their ambush. In general, the multi-press abilities cause delay of critically important effects, as does the phantasm. Healing is by definition reactionary, so there being delays on all primary healing sources precludes meaningful skill use and results in spamming a rotation of unnecessary heals, trying to predict incoming hits. I would very much prefer that the effects be combined into one. I like the attempt at introducing decision-making, but this is not how it plays in real fights. I almost always 323, where I would separate the two abilities if I felt like I could rely on them more consistently, or if the ability either lasted longer, or left behind a residual effect that could be triggered for the duration of the cooldown in exchange for increasing the cooldown. That might only be useful when stationary, though. The phantasm stun is entirely ineffective. Aside from it taking lethal damage, often before casting its effect, stuns need to be primarily used reactionary. There's a cast time, then there's a summon animation, then the phantasm fires, then the travel time, and it's a projectile, then the stun. There may be a way to stack effects to make it useful, like timing it to land a shatter, but this is not a support function, and because clones can't be relied on, I'm not using these except 0 clone shatters to heal. I'd really like to see this phantasm fire an arcing shot onto an area that cleanses conditions and not stun. The 5 ability is very interesting, but I have yet to have anyone actually make use of it. As is, I primarily use this when running away to shield myself and other players, then pop it to provide an escape for someone further behind than myself. I've tried to use it proactively, but it relies on the person to click it, and they rarely notice it fast enough to take it. I've watched many people die right on top of it without taking it, which is very frustrating. I'd really like to see this effect changed to port a downed teammate to me. This would preserve the rescue feel of it, while making it more consistently useful. While I know this is beta and numbers are still being tuned, I feel that this feedback is also useful. Cleanse needs to be increased significantly (20%+) for this build to be on par with other cleanse in wvw. Healing needs to be about doubled for it to be on par with other cleanse according to my meters, **OR** give us another source of stability. On heal maybe, since the other two are mobile. Either make this viable for cleanse or make it a viable alternative to firebrand for consistent stability generation. Rifle 4 or 5 would be excellent choices for this, and would provide us with 3 primary sources of group stability (Mantra, Distortion) with shatters used for small stab, like on a wall or while doing a ranged poke. If this is done, the healing would need to remain about the same, the cleanse would actually need to be reduced, but we'd finally have a FB alternative. I hope that this is useful feedback.

Commander disconnected and we would have liked the ability for the lieutenants in the squad to be able to mark people and/or ground targets, but these didn't seem to work until the commander was back on the map, which took forever, because of the queue. It felt like the kind of thing we should have been able to do especially when the commander wasn't there. Very strange that it only works while the commander is on the same map.

Oh, your opener didn't work. Let me stand here hearing whooshing noises for an hour while your CDs come back. Oh, didn't work again and I get the smallest amount of damage on you. Oh, whelp there he is in narnia. I guess I win. Stealth in this game is far more annoying than if they just had stealth.

At least with Druid, I don't think you can numbers tweak your way out of the fact that you've placed the alac generation on something that many druids used situationally. As a result of this change, they can no longer do this. Mukluk's video was a great explanation of that effect. The berserker/arc divider changes seem extremely heavy handed. Damage now is about 1/3 of what it was before, when I thought the point was to reduce the number of swings, but keep the overall throughput high. You can do it faster, sure. But it still feels really bad. Also, I'm not at all sure what you mean by "with no investment" as the build intentionally sacrifices 10k or more dps to grant alac. Does that mean that we're supposed to have some clunky interaction we wouldn't normally do in order to grant alacrity? It'd explain druid and scourge a lot, actually.

When you guys met and talked about this, there was someone in the meeting saying that the feedback was wrong. That person is the problem.

The stated goals and the changes don't match. Bring vindi wvw healer in line with other supports. Ok, so I'd think you'd reduce healing boost cleansing since they're doing a lot of healing and maybe 2/3 cleansing. But you nerfed both? My guild will drop vindi as a supported build due to these changes, which is a shame.

Its a shame to see the lovely graphic they created go completely to waste. Why not turn it into a counterattack instead?

I don't understand how reducing the healing output to match other heal specs is considered to bring them in line when the cleanses are only about 2/3 of others. Right now the tradeoff is easy, vindi brings more heals less cleanse, which is acceptable. Now vindi just brings less cleanse. So why bring vindi? Oh, and then you just kick them in the teeth by nerfing their cleanse. Will have to see actual numbers, but this will cause my guild to drop vindi healers, which is unfortunate. I liked the direction we were going where I had several options for cleanse support all bringing near equal value. Sad day.

We've been seeing fully built flame rams in the strangest places and finally found out why. Apparently people are building these open field or behind a door, using Iron Will to get a 50% Damage Reduction for 10 seconds before pushing out. It's kind of adorable, as degenerate gameplay goes, but this certainly isn't what was intended. What I'm really curious to see is the first time someone builds 6 of these things in the SMC Lord Room and holds indefinitely. I'm not 100% sure how to fix this other than limiting ram placement to be within striking distance of an enemy door.

Really hoping they spread out stability generation to a few other classes. I hate that FB is effectively mandatory in every comped party. With so many viable cleansers now, I'd like to see the same treatment with stability. Doing it on mesmer would be fantastic, though probably on virtuoso, not chrono to avoid completely overpowering the CC. Seems like with the reduction in overall stability, having equal numbers in fights is more important than ever. I'd like to see zerg busting come back, though I'm not sure how they should accomplish that. Past a certain point of numbers imbalance and you just get chain yanked till you're dead no matter how much stability you have. Some incentive to actually winning your matchup would be nice, as would overhauling participation to make sure people are, you know, participating. Would like to see tagging fixed so that we don't end up with dps pulling >100 bags while the FB gets 15-20 in the same period. Also why support players level so much slower. I had no idea this was a thing until I played dps for a bit and found I was gaining wxp at a several fold increased rate.

That's an awfully adorable asura female forum icon you've got there. We're not long from days where we'd mock dudes for haivng something like it, but this is becoming more mainstream. I remember a gnome female with bright pink pig tails named "Plushy" in my WoW guild back in the day who sounded like a long haul trucker guy in voice coms. Our collective acceptance of such things, especially in GW2 has moved significantly, to the point where it's rarely questioned these days. I'd probably argue that how you're feeling about the metaverse largely involves the early expressions like VRChat and VTubers, but these will likely become more and more commonplace over the next decade as these technologies improve. MMOs are already a place where a 60 year old woman doesn't need to represent herself as an old person, or where a 12 year old boy wants to represent himself as a huge, ripped Norn. Realistically, I'll be giving blender a shot at some point, it looks like fun, but modeling, painting, lighting, rigging, and animating are massively time consuming, and a lot of that work is already done. It'll be easier for me to access thee in-game resources, but a better solution would be for the game itself to encourage the behavior for the free advertising.

This game will run on a potato, has a vibrant, gorgeous world, and is full of character and little details that I'm sure would be loads of fun. I didn't know I needed this in my life until now. That sounds like ridiculous fun, I'll just need to keep a bucket handy just in case.