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

[Jski.6180]

1 hour ago, TexZero.7910 said:

Or and i know this is crazy talk but we could not kneecap guard and actually focus on bringing others up.

 

You know the opposite of what this forum loves to do.

Kneecaping the only way guard too power creeped to ever work right. The game would be a mess if every thing was brought up to that level.

[SoulBlaze.3059]

Revenant is in the worst place it has ever been, damage is lower than every class, almost no HP, healing keeps getting nerfed, glad I payed money for the most worthless class in the game for PvP and PvE.

[Lonesomechunk.4731]

I know its super unlikely but a while back I think i saw someone from Anet mention they wanted to address underpowered weapons sometime, I'd love to see that if so, especially staff on elementalist, its not really viable at all in pve since most other weapons offer more boons and more damage so it doesnt have any purpose anymore, plus theres a lot of weapons from other professions im sure could use some love! I'd love to see a staff rework that gives it a renewed purpose, maybe as a condi weapon? idk 
also having alacrity for tempest be a grandmaster trait is a little unnecessary imo, tempest dps and healing isn't THAT crazy to warrant that and builds like mechanist or firebrand dont have to sacrifice healing for boons but im happy that we got an extra second of alacrity

[TexZero.7910]

16 minutes ago, Jski.6180 said:

Kneecaping the only way guard too power creeped to ever work right. The game would be a mess if every thing was brought up to that level.

Yep. This is about the type of response i figured i'd get.

 

Too many people on this forum ready to burn everything to the ground because they can't see the forest from the trees.

[DanAlcedo.3281]

3 hours ago, Barraind.7324 said:

 

Meanwhile, Bladesworn is already back to benching 38.6k (the top power build currently).

Warrior just needs banners to not be mechanically garbage.

 

 

BsW being the best and only build. My biggest fear became true. 

Ohh well... 

[Elricht Kaltwind.8796]

This is fantastic, I had no idea my ranger build would be receiving a major buff on a Thursday night! Really helps ease the pain of the nerf to Leader of the Pack!

[DanAlcedo.3281]

I really hope you take your time with Warrior. 

Number changes on the Banners are not enough. 

It's like a car with upside down seats. No matter how much faster the car goes, it's still bad design. 

[Melian.5368]

Lucid Singularity has no WvW split. With celestial gear (very common amongst roamers) that's 10 and a half seconds of alacrity. You can chain overloads on 4 sec cooldown. Just saying. 

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

3 hours ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

Catalyst?  Weaver?  We're at almost 0% class representation.  What year do you suppose you'll do something about that?

Just give up hope. They think weaver is in a great spot and cata is still op.

[SoulBlaze.3059]

Maybe someday revenant will actually be useful in PvP, have more than 16K HP, have more than 1 stun ability, have more than 1 stun break, and not have its healing nerfed over and over every patch. Literally unplayable. Can we start a vote to rename the class to Clown, because thats how I feel trying to play it. get 3 shotted by other classes due to a single stun break, absolutely wrecked healing. Yet guardian can half someones health in 1 second and then heal full in another. Weird how the dev favorites keep getting better. 

[Nimon.7840]

Very good communication. Keep it up!

 

[Jski.6180]

44 minutes ago, TexZero.7910 said:

Yep. This is about the type of response i figured i'd get.

 

Too many people on this forum ready to burn everything to the ground because they can't see the forest from the trees.

It has more to do with other game types then just pve things are simply unkillable unless they are one shot and that not good for the games other then pve (failing an pve event or benchmark).

[Kodama.6453]

8 minutes ago, Nimon.7840 said:

Very good communication. Keep it up!

 

Except that they stealth nerf stuff without telling us, I guess.

[Ariant.7409]

Taking over a week to share notes on design choices doesn't make any sense unless those changes were phoned in with zero rationale. Leaving warrior and chronomancer in this state for a month is not acceptable. And after this patch I don't exactly have faith the August 2nd changes will fix anything. Actions > words

[Razor.9305]

3 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Pure DPS herald is still only managing about 25k DPS from what I'm hearing, so they could do this and the effect would be "oh, hey, on par with other quickness-DPS builds now".

Part of the problem is just how bad herald damage is to begin with in raid situations. You could literally allow herald to provide full DPS with full Quickness and it would still merely be roughly on par DPS-wise to other options.

I just put a video up on it, it's almost 32k with allies .
With the changes you can provide 50% quickness uptime with that rotation, although you lose like 3-4k dps by swapping the trait.

I'm not disagreeing that it should be better, just want to clarify. Ideally the cooldown changes are reverted and the quickness is 2 seconds base, that should make it a lot more enjoyable to play.
To address the damage output, fix Devastation traits instead so that power Renegade is playable again too. That traitline has been torn to shreds the past couple years.

[TexZero.7910]

10 minutes ago, Jski.6180 said:

It has more to do with other game types then just pve things are simply unkillable unless they are one shot and that not good for the games other then pve (failing an pve event or benchmark).

You're not helping your cause and it's nice to know that Anet isn't listening to a bronze rank pvp'er.

[Jojo.6590]

5 hours ago, Josh Davis.7865 said:

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.

 

Something to add for you to look into if you are able to is phantasms. 

 

Change phantasms so that they can NOT be targeted and killed. Make it what it simply is a delayed burst with a fancy animation/affect. Outside of PVE and even in some PVE areas phantasms die too fast to complete their affect/attack, on top of this several are still very buggy and won't complete their attack too. 

 

This change would reduce a massive amount of visual clutter that many people complain about when fighting Mesmers as they won't have to worry about targeting through a set of clones and another set of phantasms. This would also then see use of phantasms in large scale play such as zergs too and would allow for better balancing of these skills and Mesmer as a whole.

[Sereath.1428]

Herald gameplay is so putrid even with duration increases. Having to double tap all facets as soon as they become available is very poor design, instead the quickness output should be designed around the energy upkeep system at the very least. Just an example: "Using a consume skill grants quickness to allies around you and for every point of upkeep increase quickness duration by 20%".

[TrollingDemigod.3041]

1 hour ago, TexZero.7910 said:

You're not helping your cause and it's nice to know that Anet isn't listening to a bronze rank pvp'er.

The problem here is though, he's correct and you are wrong. Good try though I rate it 2/100.
Game should be balanced first and foremost, it's not FPS and it's not single player game either in which you could be 1 shotting anything in sight.
You're the one not seeing the "forest" here.

[jebro.6370]

1 hour ago, SoulBlaze.3059 said:

Maybe someday revenant will actually be useful in PvP, have more than 16K HP, have more than 1 stun ability, have more than 1 stun break, and not have its healing nerfed over and over every patch. Literally unplayable. Can we start a vote to rename the class to Clown, because thats how I feel trying to play it. get 3 shotted by other classes due to a single stun break, absolutely wrecked healing. Yet guardian can half someones health in 1 second and then heal full in another. Weird how the dev favorites keep getting better. 

Revenant was META for a long time in the past...  maybe not so much recently but it also had its time in the OP spotlight.

[draxynnic.3719]

1 minute ago, TrollingDemigod.3041 said:

The problem here is though, he's correct and you are wrong. Good try though I rate it 2/100.
Game should be balanced first and foremost, it's not FPS and it's not single player game either in which you could be 1 shotting anything in sight.
You're the one not seeing the "forest" here.

He did start by claiming that guardian hasn't been nerfed at all, when there was a pretty significant nerf to the burning damage, and willbender lost a significant amount of sustain with F2 losing its ammo.

Could argue on whether that's enough or not, but his starting point was factually wrong. I think we do need to wait until things shake out, though, to avoid overnerfing and confirmation bias. The hotfix here is pretty clearly a "quick fix to some of the things that were obviously off" update.

[Serephen.3420]

Thank you, taking action often speaks louder than words, and while this is small it's a good step in the right direction. 

[ShionKreth.1542]

Nudging soulbeast back to end-game viability when it was already there before your changes... smh

[Zaxares.5419]

Thanks for the update, and for sharing your reasoning behind the changes. Overall I think this is a good first few steps, although of course certain pain points still need to be addressed (most of which you already know of, like Warrior and some more love for the other Ele specs).

I'm not sure if this might be imbalanced or not, but I would request that Nature Spirit (in addition to getting the bug that it no longer heals other spirits fixed) get one more buff. Make it so that it pulses Stability, similar to its old incarnation. Druid is in a fairly solid position right now, but I think giving the elite Stability as well would give it a rock-solid nudge to keeping it firmly on par with what Healbrand (no Alac and lower healing, but can provide Aegis and Stab) or HealMech (no Quickness and has to choose between giving Stability or other buffs, but deals more damage than Druid and the mech being the source of the buffs means the player can be off doing other mechanics while the mech stays behind to deal damage/give boons) can provide.

[Kuma.1503]

Looks like Rifle Auto Attack was stealth nerfed this patch. It's now benching considerably less than kit autos and mace. This was already the case pre-nerf, but now the gap has widened again, negating the buffs entirely Why wasn't this included in the patch notes?

More importantly, with this nerf, and the nerf to Ranged Mech, the upcoming nerf to Aim Assisted Rocket is excessive. You've cut down Mech autos. You've cut down rifle. If A-AR is nerfed, in all likelyhood. Our support line with High Impact Drivers will start outperforming Jade Cannon + A-AR.

It will be more optimal to simply take mace and give might with Melee mech if going for PURE SELFISH DPS, than taking the selfish dps loadout. 

In short, this engi update was a failure. This update with the intent to "Support power rifle builds" was just a round of nerfs in disguise. 

Edited July 1, 2022 by Kuma.1503