Profession Balance: Next Steps and Preview of June 30 Balance Update

[Kayberz.5346]

6 minutes ago, JTGuevara.9018 said:

So, you mostly play pvp. Then you should know better since that is where bladesworn is the weakest. Correct. You do not know what you're talking about.

You believe there are no substantial and systemic problems with bladesworn because you had personal success with it. You prove my point with your own words. "I did good with it! What's the problem!" See...you represent the mentality I used to have, where I let personal success cloud my perspective and analysis of the game and what I play. People hate to admit the flaws and drawbacks of something they had personal success with. Unfortunately Anet listens to these types of players because they are the loudest.

Also, you succeeded at release, where nobody really knew anything about the new classes and how to play them. It is typical post-expansion face-roll where pvp is always at its worst.

And you aren't letting your own failure cloud YOUR perspective?

 

You try and make an argument that i dont pvp therefore have too "limited" of a perspective, your argument fails, then you pivot and move the goalpost. Typical contrarian tactic.

 

It literally doesn't matter what i say or what data i provide , you will find a way to spin it to fit your own narrative.

 

Im done talking in circles with people that are incapable of arguing in good faith

 

 

Edited July 18, 2022 by Kayberz.5346

[JTGuevara.9018]

20 minutes ago, Kayberz.5346 said:

And you aren't letting your own failure cloud YOUR perspective?

 

You try and make an argument that i dont pvp therefore have too "limited" of a perspective, your argument fails, then you pivot and move the goalpost. Typical contrarian tactic.

 

It literally doesn't matter what i say or what data i provide , you will find a way to spin it to fit your own narrative.

 

Im done talking in circles with people that are incapable of arguing in good faith

 

 

 

I've pivoted nothing. My argument stands. It is as consistent and clear as day. That is because I've made a collective, SYSTEMIC analysis of a specialization, not an individual one like you have. Whether it's from the perspective of a raider or pvp player is of no consequence. I call out raiders simply because they are loudest in promoting it.

Also, one more time for the audience reading: Bladesworn is a flawed spec by design, both in pve and pvp. Where it is worse in a pvp environment.

Also, another thing I probably should have mentioned before: I don't have the expansion!

Therefore, I've no personal stake or analysis to even make in whether I succeeded with bladesworn or not. Because I don't have it! I've played it during the beta and that was all I really need to know. I felt the clunkyness even then. Yes, I know you're not going to be convinced. That's not the point. The point with all public discourse to convince the audience.

[Kayberz.5346]

10 minutes ago, JTGuevara.9018 said:

 

I've pivoted nothing. My argument stands. It is as consistent and clear as day. That is because I've made a collective, SYSTEMIC analysis of a specialization, not an individual one like you have. Whether it's from the perspective of a raider or pvp player is of no consequence. I call out raiders simply because they are loudest in promoting it.

Also, one more time for the audience reading: Bladesworn is a flawed spec by design, both in pve and pvp. Where it is worse in a pvp environment.

Also, another thing I probably should have mentioned before: I don't have the expansion!

Therefore, I've no personal stake or analysis to even make in whether I succeeded with bladesworn or not. Because I don't have it! I've played it during the beta and that was all I really need to know. I felt the clunkyness even then. Yes, I know you're not going to be convinced. That's not the point. The point with all public discourse to convince the audience.

So someone who doesn't even have the expansion to play the spec they are critizing and making a "collective, systemic analysis" of has the audacity to try and claim they know and understand the spec better than someone who has played it extensively since its release, with a background of having played since the 3 day headstart with over 3k hours on warrior alone?

 

🤣🤣🤣

 

These forums Truly are a clown Fiesta 🤡

 

Edited July 18, 2022 by Kayberz.5346

[JTGuevara.9018]

Just now, Kayberz.5346 said:

So someone who doesn't even have the expansion to play the spec they are critizing and making a "collective, systemic analysis" of the spec has the audacity to try and claim they know and understand the spec better than someone who has played it extensively since its release, with a background of having played since the 3 day headstart with over 3k hours on warrior alone?

 

🤣🤣🤣

 

These forums Truly are a clown Fiesta 🤡

 

It's called speaking with your wallet as a customer. After recent infamous events, I'm not putting a penny into gw2. I've better games to play as opposed to a DLC featuring an off-brand, discount samurai with a gun duct-taped to a sword. That's not worth the 30 bucks.

By the way: 5k hours...

[Kayberz.5346]

16 minutes ago, JTGuevara.9018 said:

It's called speaking with your wallet as a customer. After recent infamous events, I'm not putting a penny into gw2. I've better games to play as opposed to a DLC featuring an off-brand, discount samurai with a gun duct-taped to a sword. That's not worth the 30 bucks.

By the way: 5k hours...

But you're not the biased one right?🤡

 

Btw I multiclass, over 3k+ hours on other classes, probably why i had no issue quickly adapting to bladesworns completely different playstyle.

Edited July 18, 2022 by Kayberz.5346

[JTGuevara.9018]

4 minutes ago, Kayberz.5346 said:

But you're not the biased one right?🤡

 

Nope.

[Ascency.3580]

hoooooly..

what am i reading? like the last 4 pages about bladesworn hot kitten.

this whole conversation about bladesworn vs berserker vs we is silly. and while warrior in general needs a desperate tuning to become viable, ofc bladesworn should be able to have a higher dps potential when played correctly. the fact one particular dev said otherwise is the reason why we are in this dark place after june 28 patch. its clear he has no clue how balance should work. a harder to play class when played correctly should always be able to do better then one that is easier to play. not by a lot. not to a point where someone wanting to play the "weaker" class should ever be kicked from groups, but still. thats where putting in the effort is actually rewarded. especially in a game where u dont get much reward for completing any content. if the gameplay itself wont be rewarding ppl will just get bored.

[Zsoak.5409]

@Josh Davis.7865

Few questions regarding the state of warrior.

1. Is there a chance you'll provide the proposed banner changes ahead of the August 2 release?
2. Should we expect any further changes to address the state of warrior in the August 2 release, or just the banner changes?

(To name a few regarding the 2nd question: the entire class feels outdated, a lot of weapon skills (e.g. Sword, Mace, Hammer, even GS) and utility skills (e.g. Physical, Stances, Meditation) as well as entire traitlines (e.g. Arms, Defense) need complete rework (not just number-tuning), and also currently there is a huge performance gap between specs (Bladesworn potential dps way overtuned, CZerk mediocre at best, PZerk gutted, Spb may not even exist). There are a ton of ideas and suggestions available on the warrior forums (e.g. Balance Requests Omnibus and other individual topics).)

Thanks!

[GeekyPlatypus.8627]

Please have a look at Vindicator for pve, it literally has no viable specs.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

On 6/30/2022 at 6:51 PM, Josh Davis.7865 said:

Hi all,

We’re back with an update regarding the June 28 balance changes and our next steps. In this post, we'll outline our plan for the next month and provide a preview of a small balance update coming later today. Our earlier forum post on this topic can be found here.

Today

In just a few hours we’ll be releasing a hotfix update that includes changes for the elementalist, engineer, revenant, and ranger. These changes are previewed at the bottom of this post. For context, hotfixes are ‘emergency updates’ that typically focus on addressing bugs, crashes, and exploits in the latest release. Because of the short dev time for hotfix releases (less than 24 hours from start to finish), they don’t go through the multi-week release process that we normally use to increase stability and quality. This means that today’s balance changes are smaller in scope and lower risk. We felt that it was appropriate to bend the rules a bit and make progress on your concerns, rather than wait for the next scheduled release.

Next Week

Last Monday, I mentioned that we’ll be drafting the design notes for the June 28 release. We’ve made some progress, but we chose to refocus our time on today’s hotfix and future planning. We’ll share the design commentary sometime next week (note: Monday is a holiday).

July 19

After today, our next opportunity to make changes will be the July 19 release. The build for this release is already “locked down” and moving through the pipeline, so we don’t have much time to make changes here. Our priority here will be to address Furious Burst, the warrior’s +5% critical hit chance trait that’s currently residing in the Arms specialization. We may make additional changes in this release as we continue to monitor game metrics and your feedback, but from a development ‘best practices’ standpoint, we’ll be focusing our attention on the following release.

August 2

As we mentioned earlier this week, we’ve added a follow-up balance update to our schedule on August 2. For that release, we'll be looking at addressing warrior banners and chronomancer’s relatively low damage output through chronomancer-specific traits and increasing the damage on core weapons (like the treatment ranger is getting today). Once we’ve released today’s hotfix we’ll move onto planning the details of this update.

October 4

The next major professions update is slated for October 4 (reminder that release dates are subject to change). A public preview of that update and its design goals will be given well in advance. As promised, prior to that release we’ll also share the long-term vision for Guild Wars 2 profession balance and how it applies to PvE, PvP, and WvW.

Wrapping Up

We (I, especially) learned a lot this week, and we’re actively discussing ways to prevent situations like this from happening again. Thank you for your patience and support.

Josh “Grouch” Davis
Game Director

----

June 30, 2022 Hotfix Balance Updates

Elementalist

In the June 28 update, the Zephyr’s Speed trait was updated to grant +5% critical chance, but it was only active while the player is in Air Attunement. Staying in one attunement doesn’t match with the gameplay of the elementalist profession, so we’ve updated the trait to apply the critical chance increase in all attunements. The movement speed buff from Zephyr’s Speed still only applies while attuned to Air.

• Zephyr's Speed: The +5% critical hit chance applied by this trait is now active regardless of attunement. Note: The text description is not yet updated to match new functionality. This will be addressed in a future update.

Tempest

Tempest was given access to alacrity via the Lucid Singularity trait in the June 28 update. We’ve seen some interesting build experimentation since then, but we feel that the current base alacrity duration from the trait is too short to be fully effective. We’re increasing it slightly today, and we’ll keep an eye on it for further adjustments.

• Lucid Singularity: Increased the duration of alacrity applied by this trait from 6 seconds to 7 seconds.

Engineer

With the updates to rifle and Aim Assisted Rocket, we wanted to increase viability of power mechanist builds by building synergy between Aim Assisted Rocket and Mech Arms: Jade Cannons. We overshot here. Since the mech also gains the benefit of the Aim-Assisted Rocket trait, it is adding a large amount of passive damage that does not require direct player input and has caused the mech pet to deal more damage than we’d like. We plan on making further specific adjustments to Aim Assisted Rocket in our August 2 update, but before then we’re making some quick corrections by reducing the damage output of the pet’s auto-attacks, particularly with Jade Cannons. We’re also reducing the range of the rifle ability Jump Shot to keep enterprising engineers from going places where they don’t belong.

Rifle

•  Jump Shot's range has been reduced from 900 to 800.

Mechanist

• Mech Arms: Jade Cannons: Damage multiplier reduced from 0.6 to 0.35 in PvE and from 0.28 to 0.2 in PvP and WvW.
• Mech Arms: Single-Edged Cutters: Damage multiplier reduced from 0.6 to 0.45 in PvE. The damage multiplier of the final strike has been reduced from 1.2 to 0.8 in PvE only.
• Mech Arms: High-Impact Drivers: Damage multiplier reduced from 0.6 to 0.45 in PvE. The damage multiplier of the final strike has been reduced from 1.2 to 0.8 in PvE only.
• Jade Dynamo: The quickness applied by this trait has been reduced from 4 seconds to 2.5 seconds in PvE, PvP, and WvW. Fixed a bug that caused the Mech Command skill cooldown reduction to not apply in PvP.

Ranger

Soulbeast's damage output previously relied on lining up a burst window while the skills “Sic ’Em!” and One Wolf Pack were active, paired with the damage from the off-hand axe skill Whirling Defense. Outside of this, soulbeasts have low sustained damage. This created a high skill floor for playing the specialization effectively, making it difficult to create strong baseline performance for players who did not execute on or were not aware of the mechanics to produce this damage window.

In the June 28 patch, One Wolf Pack was changed to have a lower but more consistent impact on damage output. As a result, soulbeast power damage builds have significantly dropped in performance.

Now that the obfuscating factor of this burst window has been reduced, there is a lot of room to improve damage on core ranger weapons that soulbeast (and core ranger) can use. These will improve sustained damage in normal ranger play and give options that can help nudge soulbeast builds closer to high-end viability.

Longbow

• Long Range Shot: Increased damage multiplier from 0.7-0.9 to 0.9-1.1 in PvE only.

Greatsword

• Slash: Increased damage multiplier from 0.64 to 0.8 in PvE only.
• Enduring Swing: Increased damage multiplier from 1.3 to 1.4 in PvE only.

Short Bow

• Crossfire: Increased damage multiplier from 0.4 to 0.5 in PvE only. Bleed duration when not flanking increased from 1.5 seconds to 2 seconds in PvE only.
• Poison Volley: Damage multiplier per hit increased from 0.25 to 0.3 in PvE only.

Axe (Main Hand)

• Ricochet: Damage multiplier increased from 0.8 to 0.9 in PvE only.
• Splitblade: Damage multiplier per hit increased from 0.1 to 0.5 in PvE only.
• Winter's Bite: Damage multiplier increased from 1.25 to 1.8 in PvE only.

Sword

• Slash: Damage multiplier increased from 0.7 to 0.8 in PvE only.
• Crippling Thrust: Damage multiplier increased from 0.7 to 0.8 in PvE only.
• Precision Swipe: Damage multiplier increased from 0.96 to 1.4 in PvE only.
• Monarch's Leap: Damage multiplier increased from 1.25 to 1.8 in PvE only.
• Serpent's Strike: Damage multiplier increased from 0.8 to 1.5 in PvE only.

Dagger (Off Hand)

• Crippling Talon: Damage multiplier increased from 0.75 to 0.9 in PvE only.

Soulbeast

Dagger (Main Hand)

• Double Arc: Damage multiplier increased from 0.5 to 0.8 in PvE only.

Revenant

Invocation

We’ve added the missing +5% critical hit chance via traits in PvE.

• Roiling Mists: Increased the critical hit chance applied by this trait from +20% to +25% in PvE only.

Herald

The June 28 update introduced a source of group quickness to herald via the Draconic Echo trait, but the skill rotation is very tight and has little room for error, which can result in reduced uptime on quickness. We’re increasing the duration of quickness applied by Draconic Echo to improve build viability here.

• Draconic Echo: Increased the quickness duration applied by this trait from 1.5 seconds to 2 seconds in PvE only.

Friendly accountability nudge, but August 2nd is two Tuesday away. You stated that you all will try to get things previewed in advance from now on. Can we expect that preview over this weekend or early next week so that there is enough time to respond to any feedback?

[Jees.5478]

I buy 2000 gems from the ingame store when you fix the vindicator dps. I buy 4000 gems when you fix warrior and vindicator.

 

I buy 0 gems when you don't fix the vindicator.

 

So can we make a deal?

[Cait Sith.4650]

9 hours ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

Friendly accountability nudge, but August 2nd is two Tuesday away. You stated that you all will try to get things previewed in advance from now on. Can we expect that preview over this weekend or early next week so that there is enough time to respond to any feedback?

Taking into account how they wrote it, the previews in advance should only be valid for the major balance patches, so we'll only get one in September probably, regarding the October patch. And somewhere between August and September you'll get the long-term vision, in another post. 😬

[Gotejjeken.1267]

14 hours ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

Friendly accountability nudge, but August 2nd is two Tuesday away. You stated that you all will try to get things previewed in advance from now on. Can we expect that preview over this weekend or early next week so that there is enough time to respond to any feedback?

 

What you quoted was the preview 😃

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

5 hours ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

 

What you quoted was the preview 😃

You know what I mean.

[Geoff Fey.1035]

They mentioned they would "address Warrior banners" and "chronomancer... damage through... traits and... damage on core weapons". It sounds like the weapon damage is going to be focused only for Chronomancers and all that Warrior is going to be touched upon is the Banners.

Have they noted anything else in different sources? If multiple professions are going to be given the Ranger treatment then that would be a welcome bump to sate people for the 2 months until the major update.

[Dante.1508]

On 7/13/2022 at 5:56 AM, Josh Davis.7865 said:

Hi all,

In the original post of this thread we mentioned that we'd be looking at addressing the placement of the warrior's crit trait in the July 19 release. Here's a quick update.

In the June 28 release, we updated the Furious Burst trait in the Arms line to include +5% critical chance while under the effects of Fury. However, power warrior builds don’t typically incorporate the Arms trait line, meaning that warriors were not fairly compensated for the Fury change. After the July 19 update, the grandmaster minor trait Pinnacle of Strength in the Strength line will provide a baseline +5% increased critical chance, in addition to its other effects. Furious Burst will also keep its increased critical chance while under the effects of Fury.

If you're being introduced to this thread for the first time with post, please make sure to check out the original post for a breakdown of our next steps regarding the June 28 balance update.

Thank you!

Josh

Seriously thats the best they could come up with... How about you go back to the drawing board and over haul warrior and even some of its ranged options.. What a joke.

[Rubi Bayer.8493]

Please refer to this thread for the latest balance update and discussion.