Game Update Notes: July 19, 2022

[Rubi Bayer.8493]

07/19/2022—July 19 Release Notes

Living World Season 1—Clockwork Chaos

In the wake of the climactic events of the Personal Story, a villainous plot is coming to fruition. Queen Jennah has announced a grand gathering to celebrate the tenth anniversary of her rule and the enduring spirit of Kryta, but behind the scenes, not all is going entirely according to plan. Meet up with your friends Rox and Braham to attend the commencement ceremony and confront the enemy behind the recent disturbances face to face!

After years of being unavailable, the Clockwork Chaos episode of the Living World story line has been restored and restructured as a linear Story Journal episode. This episode is permanently available for free to all players and does not need to be unlocked. Over the coming year, we'll release two more episodes of Season 1 to chronicle the commander's battle against a lurking evil between the end of the Personal Story and the beginning of Living World Season 2.

• The original Clockwork Chaos achievements, along with a set of new achievements, are now in a Clockwork Chaos category in the Story Journal achievements section.
  • Completing the new achievements will progress a new Clockwork Chaos Mastery meta-achievement to earn new rewards.
  • Existing achievements will retain their completion status if you earned them during the original Clockwork Chaos release.
  • Some existing achievements have been updated with additional goals or revised goals to ensure that they can still be completed.
• The original event's worldwide clockwork invasions have been replaced by a permanent recurring invasion event taking place in Gendarran Fields every two hours.

Core Tyria World Boss Improvements

We've made updates and adjustments to each of the four starting zone world bosses. Our goal is to bring them closer to our current design standards by adding skill telegraphs and defiance bars, improving encounter mechanics, and rebalancing health pools to accommodate the power level of modern profession builds. The Great Jungle Wurm, Shadow Behemoth, and Svanir Shaman Chief also received some model and texture quality improvements, and one champion loot bag will be added to the completion rewards for each event.

Great Jungle Wurm

• Updated the model for the Great Jungle Wurm to improve texture quality and model detail.
• Increased boss health.
• Updated mechanics of the encounter.
• Improved messaging of skill telegraphs.
• Rebalanced skills across the encounter.
• Added additional rewards for successfully completing the encounter.

Shadow Behemoth

• Updated the model for the Shadow Behemoth to improve texture quality and model detail.
• Increased boss health.
• Updated mechanics of the encounter.
• Improved messaging of skill telegraphs.
• Rebalanced skills across the encounter.
• Increased portal health.
• Adjusted portals to now take condition and critical damage.
• Added additional rewards for successfully completing the encounter.

Fire Elemental

• Increased boss health.
• Updated mechanics of the encounter.
• Improved messaging of skill telegraphs.
• Rebalanced skills across the encounter.
• Added additional rewards for successfully completing the encounter.

Svanir Shaman Chief

• Updated the model for both the Svanir Shaman Chief and his transformed state to improve texture quality and model detail.
• Updated the model of the Svanir Dragon Totem.
• Increased boss health.
• Updated and changed mechanics of the encounter.
• Improved messaging of skill telegraphs.
• Rebalanced skills across the encounter.
• Added additional rewards for successfully completing the encounter.

Fractal Mistlock Instability Improvements

The Mistlock Instability system is intended to keep Fractals of the Mists feeling fresh, with each instability introducing a new twist that provides additional challenges when completing an encounter. However, some instability combinations have a tendency to be more frustrating than challenging or fun. In the July 19 update, we are making adjustments to nearly every Mistlock Instability to reduce frustrating difficulty spikes, reward players for taking advantage of positive play opportunities, and increase synergy between instabilities across the board. We'll be keeping a close eye on these changes and how players adapt to them.

• Adrenaline Rush: Reduced enemies' damage reduction when unaffected by enrage from 20% to 10%. Enraged enemies now deal 100% increased damage but cannot crit.
  • Critical hits with a 150% damage increase could result in random spikes of lethal damage with very little counterplay. Our goal is to smooth out those spikes by lowering the highest potential damage and raising the lowest potential damage.
• Afflicted: This instability now increases the duration of both resistance and resolution. Boon duration increase has been lowered from 50% to 33%.
  • Resistance upkeep was a bit too easy with this instability active and did not directly contribute to protection against enemy condition damage. Resolution has been added to this instability's duration benefit to give it clear counterplay for players to take advantage of.
• Boon Overload: Rather than increasing incoming strike damage, each boon on the player now reduces maximum health by 1.5% to a maximum of 18% with full boons.
  • Changing from incoming strike damage to maximum health percentage ensures that all incoming damage is relevant to the risk of boon upkeep with this instability active. It also enables better synergy with other instabilities that focus on increased raw damage.
• Flux Bomb: Flux Bombs now affect 50% less space, have 50% shorter duration, and occur 50% more frequently. Additionally, enemies standing in Flux Bombs from this instability are now afflicted with random conditions.
  • Flux Bombs are incredibly noisy, and a reduction in size and duration should help clean up the field of battle. The increased frequency creates more opportunities to strategically place these around the battlefield, and afflicting conditions on enemies further incentivizes proper placement of both enemies and bombs.
• Fractal Vindicators: Vindicator damage has been increased by 20%. Health has been reduced by 33%.
  • Vindicators are meant to be threatening and a clear priority target when they spawn due to their high damage output and ability to compound existing encounter mechanics. The health decrease encourages players to take these enemies down as quickly as possible, while the damage increase makes it riskier to leave them alone.
• Frailty: Rather than reduce health, players now take 10% increased damage from all sources.
  • Health reduction is a very punishing condition when it's always on. Changing to increased damage provides clearer counterplay from keeping up protection, while improving synergy between this instability and the newly reworked Boon Overload.
• Hamstrung: The slow effect caused by this instability has been capped at 33%.
  • Losing movement speed when damaged is a very powerful form of compounding failure when left uncapped, mitigating the potential for rallying moments in which the players come back from the brink of death. The new 33% cap maintains the risk of unhealed damage intake and reinforces the usage of swiftness and superspeed as counterplay in dire moments.
• Last Laugh: Enemy explosions now take 1 second longer before firing but deal a flat 25% damage to health. Stunned enemies now apply regeneration, stability, and protection to nearby players on death.
  • Last Laugh can be very frustrating in fractals with large groups of enemies. The extra second to maneuver around the attacks gives players some additional grace, while the flat attack damage percentage reinforces the need to respect the mechanic. Enemies applying regeneration in addition to protection and stability further reinforces the desire to coordinate finishing off stunned enemies.
• No Pain, No Gain: Stripping boons from enemies now applies that boon to nearby allies.
  • The previous effect of life stealing when stripping boons had reduced value if the player was at full health. Applying boons to your party is nearly always a benefit and introduces some interesting synergy when this instability is coupled with Boon Overload.
• Outflanked: The damage reduction from being attacked head-on has been removed. Players now take 100% increased damage when attacked from behind. Non-boss enemies now take 100% increased damage when attacked from behind or the side.
  • Outflanked caused some serious damage spikes that were capable of one-shotting players, which is rarely fun. The change to an offensive benefit that affects both players and enemies further enforces the risk/reward for players and can result in faster clear times when groups take full advantage of the instability.
• Social Awkwardness: The pushback mechanic when standing near another player can now be negated by stability.
  • There are many mechanics in fractals that encourage players to stand together. Allowing players to use stability to counter the pushback of this instability creates the opportunity for clever skill usage and group coordination.
• Stick Together: Incoming damage when not within a range of 300 of an ally is now increased by 25%, down from 60%. Players now deal 5% increased damage when within a range of 300 of an ally, rather than taking 20% reduced damage.
  • Stick Together created some moments of spiky damage intake and could feel unfair on encounters with mechanics that force players away from each other. Reducing the percentage increase and flipping the positive from a defensive boon to an offensive one further smooths out the damage curve and actively awards players who position themselves correctly throughout the encounter. These changes also create more synergy between this instability and others, such as Social Awkwardness (which can now be countered).
• Sugar Rush: Reduced the attack speed and movement speed increase on enemies from 35% to 25%. Enemies with Sugar Rush now have 25% reduced critical-hit chance.
  • Enemies with high attack speed can be very dangerous, as more frequent attacks mean more opportunities to critically hit. When combined with other instabilities that increase damage intake, this instability could be incredibly deadly and result in a higher chance of enemies one-shotting players. Toning down the attack speed increase and reducing crit chance allows better synergy with all instabilities.
• Toxic Sickness: The Toxic Sickness vomit attack now affects both allies and enemies, and applies the poison, torment, confusion, and debilitated conditions. In fractals, debilitated decreases outgoing damage by 10% per stack, up to 30%.
  • We wanted there to be a clear risk/reward element to Toxic Sickness, focusing on creating opportunities for strategic positioning among the group to take full advantage of this instability. The rewards are high, although the punishment for failure is higher.
• Toxic Trail: In addition to cleansing the area, blocking a trail attack now applies the exposed condition to enemies near the source of the trail. This effect can be triggered once per second per trail.
  • This instability needed some extra incentive for engaging in the trail cleansing mechanic, especially in scenarios with fewer enemies and therefore fewer trails. The ability to apply exposed to enemies by cleansing the trail creates some strategic play opportunities and interesting synergy with other instabilities, such as the new Outflanked.
• Vengeance: Vengeance now affects elite foes. In addition to applying weakness, stripping boons now deals damage to nearby enemies.
  • Weakness was a good incentive to engage with boon stripping mechanics but did not feel powerful enough on its own. The additional damage applied by stripping boons rewards engaged players with faster clear times.
• We Bleed Fire: This instability has been removed from the active rotation.
  • We Bleed Fire was a frustrating instability to play around because it was difficult to read in combat with many enemies. It could also double up with other abilities to create gameplay moments that felt unfair or stacked against the player. Rather than reworking this instability, we have shelved it and spent the additional time on polishing and improving the rest of the lineup.

Raids

With this update, we're making some changes to raid rewards in an effort to simplify and standardize these systems by improving inventory management, consolidating reward currencies, and ensuring that players are properly rewarded for taking down these challenging encounters.

• Completing any raid encounter with challenge mode active now awards a bonus event chest containing 2 gold coins, 10 Magnetite Shards, 2 Provisioner Tokens, bonus experience, and a random exotic item.
  • This reward can be obtained once per week per encounter.
  • The weekly achievement for completing 5 unique challenge mode raid encounters, Top-Tiered Terror Toppler, has been removed.
  • Players will need to manually disable Emboldened from the new Emboldened mote or they will not receive Challenge Mode rewards. We are working on a fix for this and will update as soon as the fix is live.
• Gaeting Crystals have been retired and players will automatically have any Gaeting Crystals in their possession exchanged for an equal amount of Magnetite Shards.
• The weekly Magnetite Shard currency cap has been doubled.
• Raids and achievement rewards that previously awarded Gaeting Crystals now award Magnetite Shards.
• Merchants who previously traded items for Gaeting Crystals now accept Magnetite Shards in their place.
• The Portable Gaeting Crystal Exchange item has been renamed Qadim's Portable Magnetite Shard Exchange.
• Legendary Divinations have been retired and replaced by Legendary Insights. You can consume your existing Legendary Divinations from your inventory to exchange them for Legendary Insights.
• Legendary Insights will now be added directly to your wallet. You can add your existing Legendary Insights to your wallet by consuming them from your inventory.
• Scholar Glenna now sells Gifts of Prowess and Gifts of Compassion, which you can purchase for the same number of wallet-based Legendary Insights used in their Mystic Forge recipes.

World Polish

• Updated iconic characters in some Living World Season 1 story missions to become temporarily stunned rather than needing revival if they are defeated.
• Updated the models used by Watchknights and Twisted Nightmares to be consistent with changes to the Twisted Marionette.
• Personal Story Home Instance:
•  Fixed a bug that caused NPCs to appear inside walls and collidable objects. NPCs now appear on regular terrain as intended.
•  Fixed a bug that caused a quaggan hatchling standing near the Orrian Oyster gathering node to interrupt gathering attempts.
•  Fixed a bug that caused a cat model to overlap with a skritt model in the human home instance.
• Sky Pirates—Aether Investigation: Fixed a bug that caused Inspector Kiel to lose her quest marker.

General

• Newly made crafting research consumables will now be automatically consumed instead of going into a player's inventory. Crafting research consumables made prior to this update are unaffected by this change.
• Removed the Imperial Everbloom purchase limit from Zazzl, the strike mission rewards vendor.
• Improved the visuals for higher-contrast mouse cursors.

Dungeons

• Fixed a bug that prevented explorable dungeon path completion from registering players as having unlocked vendor purchases. After logging in, all players who have previously completed a dungeon exploration path will receive credit for two path completions per unique path for dungeon vendor unlocks.

Items

• New Mists-Charged Jade trinkets are now available in the Skirmish Supervisor's Ascended Trinkets tab in WvW. These trinkets offer the new Dragon's and Ritualist's stat options from the Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons expansion.

Profession Skills

Engineer

Mechanist

• Mech Frame: Variable Mass Distributor: Fixed a bug causing the jade mech's critical-hit chance with this trait equipped to be exactly 17.8% less than the displayed critical-hit chance in its pet stats tooltip.

Guardian

Willbender has been a powerful force in PvP since the enhancement to Righteous Instincts. We're mostly happy with the impact that change had on power guardian builds as a whole, but it pushed willbender damage a bit over the top. We want to be careful not to bring damage down too much, and we've started with adjustments to the off-hand sword skills and Rushing Justice. We'll be keeping an eye on the impact of these changes and will make further adjustments if necessary.

• Rushing Justice: Reduced power coefficient from 1.5 to 1.2 in PvP only.
• Executioner's Calling: Reduced power coefficient of secondary attacks from 0.4 to 0.33 in PvP only.
• Advancing Strike: Reduced power coefficient from 1.4 to 0.9 in PvP only.

Necromancer

Elixir of Ambition is still an extremely powerful skill in PvP even after the reduction to its might application in the June 28 update. For this update, we're reducing the duration of the boons it applies, but we'll be keeping an eye on how it performs. Corruptor's Fervor is another key piece of the build, bringing a high protection uptime that can be difficult to interact with. We're reducing the protection duration to make these builds a bit more susceptible to incoming pressure.

• Elixir of Ambition: Reduced boon durations from 5 seconds to 3 seconds in PvP only.
• Corrupter's Fervor: Reduced protection duration from 3 seconds to 1.5 seconds in PvP only.

Revenant

The vindicator's defensive tools in PvP have continued to overperform. Avatar PvP amulet builds became even more difficult to kill following the recent changes to Legendary Centaur Stance and the Salvation trait line, but even aggressive vindicator builds that take Imperial Impact over Saint's Shield have strong survivability through high vigor uptime and solid self-healing on top of their other defensive skills.

The healing skills in Legendary Alliance Stance are notable outliers in healing potential, especially due to how frequently they're available to use. We decided to leave the healing amounts untouched to maintain the impactful moment when using these skills, and instead increased the cooldown to create a larger window of opportunity for enemy players to push through damage. Bringing these skills in line with other revenant heals required a significant cooldown increase, and we wanted to give some slight compensation by reducing the energy costs. Wrapping up the vindicator adjustments are reductions to vigor uptime and two additional changes targeted at Avatar amulet builds to further bring down their self-survivability with reductions to Saint's Shield and Unyielding Devotion.

We left most of Salvation and Ventari untouched for this update as we want these tools to be available for potential support revenant builds, and we want to gauge the impact of this set of changes before doing anything further. We're prepared to follow up with additional changes to vindicator survivability as needed. Going forward, we'll try to strike a balance between enabling support builds and keeping selfish defensive builds in check.

• Selfish Spirit: Increased cooldown from 10 seconds to 30 seconds in PvP only. Reduced energy cost from 10 to 5 in PvP only.
• Selfless Spirit: Increased cooldown from 10 seconds to 30 seconds in PvP only. Reduced energy cost from 10 to 5 in PvP only.
• Song of Arboreum: Reduced vigor duration from 4 seconds to 2 seconds in PvP only.
• Unwavering Avoidance: Reduced vigor duration from 3 seconds to 1.5 seconds in PvP only when the Vindicator specialization is equipped.
• Saint's Shield: Reduced base healing and barrier from 1,738 to 1,054 in PvP only. Reduced healing and barrier attribute scaling from 0.7 to 0.5 in PvP only.
• Unyielding Devotion: Reduced strike damage reduction from 15% in 10% in PvP only.

Warrior

In the June 28 release, we updated the Furious Burst trait in the Arms line to include +5% critical chance when under the effects of fury. However, modern power warrior builds don't typically incorporate the Arms trait line, meaning that warriors were not fairly compensated for the fury change. In this update, we've added +5% increased critical chance to Pinnacle of Strength in the Strength trait line. Furious Burst will retain its increased critical chance.

• Pinnacle of Strength: This trait now gives 5% increased critical chance in addition to its other effects.

[Rubi Bayer.8493]

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug that allowed players to interact with Rox and replay her opening dialogue, interrupting progress in the Scarlet's Playhouse chapter of "Clockwork Chaos."
• Fixed a bug that prevented players from receiving credit for defeating challenge mode raid bosses if the Emboldened effect was removed by activating challenge mode.
• Fixed a crash related to the jade bot’s Scavenger Protocol effect.

[Rubi Bayer.8493]

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a server crash that occurred when entering the Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons chapter Empty.
• Fixed an issue that prevented the Stomping Around siege turtle collection from unlocking properly when players acquired a turtle egg. Players who were unable to unlock the collection previously will need to obtain another egg to progress.