November 29 Balance Update Preview

[Ruisenior.6342]

  -Elementalist scepter changes are for the most part meaningless, and in my opinion dagger will remain far superior specially on pvp/wvw. Spells on water and fire atunments didnt need any change at all, we needed a big improvement on air and earth but not in terms of damage but utility (at least earth changes seem to bo ok).

Fire: If im not mistaken now dragon's tooth is basically the same  spell but with no ground targeting? So it will require the enemy to stay stationary till it lands? And it will lose alot of versatility in terms of combo field procs.

Water: Water changes are awful, i was used to cast water trident on situations where i was playing defensively, so now we have to land a 'projectile' spell to heal up XD, what if im blinded or i want to kite/run away or heal an ally? Losing vulnerability aplication on spell 2 is a big nerf too specially on pve.

Air: Air changes won't make any difference

Earth: Earth changes on paper are ok.

   -Those changes on firebrand will kill the spec on soloplay, losing our pasives is a big hit. But i think they will remain the same on group content.

   -When Reaper's Onslaught trait will grant quickness to alies too so we can be usefull on a party? Bufing greatsword damage feels good and Death perception trait rework mererly improved reaper damage on group content where other players granted them boons, but kicked reapers damage so hard on the solo content department, having to invest alot on fury sources to bump our crit chance to the cap while losing alot of damage to achieve it. How about to revert back the damage reduction modifier?

   -Deadeye kneel mechanic rework ??wut¿¿

   -Goodbye to rifle engineer, it was good till it lasted 😰

 

At this point i can say that Anet is definetly crushing their game

Edited November 12, 2022 by Ruisenior.6342

[Antina.5973]

On topic of Guardian in PvE

The proposed overhaul for last good standing Guard spec Firebrand is an experiment on a living organism, we all know it. Why we can't even get a nice juicy buffs for other 2 dead in pve specs?
Dragonhunter longbow with 2 skills that root you in place is awful. CD increase to True Shot basically cancels the buff. 66%->100% Tether duration? Sure, it's 12 seconds now, instead of 10 seconds. All those are petty changes. Willbender off-hand sword - forgotten.

[Downstate.4697]

Sceptre buffs wont do anything for ele in wvw. It also wont be used for dps in pvp since it will get deleted by things with much better mobility and more consistent damage. Maybe the changes makes FA weaver slightly better in ranked and maybe it makes some sort of side node build work.

Be nice if you shared your vision for ele because from what ive seen youve missed the mark consistently since PoF.

Its being held back by the fact all its weapons are hybrid. Make weapons more clear in their purpose. If staff is a support weapon then go all in on support. If sceptre is a power dps weapon than go all in on power damage.

Overall thanks for the patch. Just because ele is performing doesnt mean its fun.

 

[Dadnir.5038]

3 hours ago, HnRkLnXqZ.1870 said:

There is a trait called Enhanced Storage Capacity Unit that extends the heat-bar from 100 to 150. The meta for Holosmith has always been PBM, as it resulted in the highest damage output. So I think this is an approach to make this rather under-used trait more worthwhile. 

You might not have understood the sarcasm in what I wrote.

[Jianyu.7065]

37 minutes ago, Chyro.1462 said:

Wanna bet they get all these pages full of feedback to the changes, but will barely change anything about them by the time the changes go live?

 

Absolutely agree that not much will change if anything at all. Definitely not impressed by "we want to hear your feedback (but we don't care)"

[Julischka Bean.7491]

16 hours ago, Luvi.2581 said:

Please don't go through with the being leashed to your mech thing. There are much, much better ways to balance mechanist and this is absolutely not one of them.

I agree.  This morning I fought each of the Three Bosses in Escape from Lion's Arch with my Mech.

With having to keep alive, I saw that I was constantly losing sight of my mech, which made me wonder how far away she, my mech, was from me.  When the changes go live, would I find myself doing 50 percent less damage?

Then I realized that I do not know how encompassing the radia of 360 is.  How will I know if I am still within the sweet zone?

I see bad things arising  😞

Hopefully, I am just being a drama queen 🙂

We shall see...but I am serious.  How will we know we are within 360 from our green friend?

 

Edited November 12, 2022 by Julischka Bean.7491
changed a period into a comma, got rid of spaces, scribbled more text.

[sirrush.8950]

I do not look forward to finding where my mech is in a sea of people during a meta event so I can go stand next to it. Also how is the information that our mech will be in a weakened state be told to the player.

Are you going to have a buff on the mech that I have no other reason to target, are you going to try and fit it in on our already crowded buff bars, or just not tell people so only the ones who read the patch notes know what is going on?

 

Also this really makes shift signet even more mandatory than it is already. On heavy movement fights you are going to be using it often to reposition your mech meaning for extra move speed and buff sharing its going to force all dps to use J drive.

 

If I'm going to have to micro manage my mech can you atleast look at some minor pve buffs to help off set dps loss due to having to constantly move the mech in position. Mech DPS is already on the lower end but still reliable. If you start to take away the reliability of the spec there is not much reason left to play besides flavor and its better to re-roll. It power quick scrapper will end up having a higher dps than full dps power mech.

[Sagedurk.7358]

13 hours ago, Kherae.2109 said:

-Guardians have shared 'cooldowns' in the form of tome pages...but the traits mention 'you retain X virtue while it is on cooldown', so not only do they have cooldowns on tome skills and page regen to worry about, they also have to worry about virtue cooldowns?  It feels awful seeing that. Maybe if the cooldowns are something like weapon swap, okay. If they're what they currently are, that's going to be horribly painful and unwieldy.

Guardians don't have tomes, Firebrand has.

Stop equating Firebrand with Guardian, it's not even half the class

 

You know that Willbender doesn't have any passive virtues, right?

Battle Presence still mentions sharing the passive virtue of resolve when you're on Willbender

The healing bonus on Absolute Resolve? Straight up vanishes if you trait Phoenix Protocol, yet, it still says the same

 

This might be such a case, where the tooltip of the trait doesn't reflect what it actually does for an elite spec

[Bazsi.2734]

The pure power coefficent tweaks are okay I guess but... apart from that, literally nothing makes sense.
But I lost the plot a long time ago, so I guess you do you boo... but just the few changes that made me cringe-laugh the hardest:

- Changing firebrand onto an initiative system is just... why play with only the drawbacks of a guardian or a thief, when you get to do both? MAXIMUM SUFFERING! DeSiGn iS mY pASsiOn!
 

- Removing 1500 range from kneeling is also such a galaxy brain idea... too bad I cannot understand its greatness, but at this point I'm starting to think the reason might be genetic(I only have 23 pairs of chromosomes after all).

- Trying to make scepter a viable DPS weapon in PvE(and failing at it)... while dumbing it down in the process (removing ground targets from some skills etc.).

If we erased all functional changes(except for immob preventing vindicator dodge) the patch would be like a good 7 or 8 out of 10. But with all these vErY gOoD and pRoPErLy tHoUgHt oUT changes, I'm going to give it a "I'm not allowed to say bad things about anything on this forum" out of 10.

[WhiskeyJack.6021]

Necromancer Reaper needs more love than that. The Elite skillset is very poor and needs some love.

[Scarecrows.3602]

I think the changes to deadeye kind of lose a lot of its core personality, especially the range reduction (just speaking personally, a deadeye’s rifle having less range than a ranger’s longbow seems… odd). I don’t really have a problem with the ability to move while kneeling, but it’s not really going to be changing much either.

If anything, Deadeye’s issue has been not enough range, since it thrives on the fantasy of a sniper posting up out of reach to pick off enemies one by one from a mile away.

[Scarecrows.3602]

13 minutes ago, Bazsi.2734 said:

- Changing firebrand onto an initiative system is just... why play with only the drawbacks of a guardian or a thief, when you get to do both? MAXIMUM SUFFERING! DeSiGn iS mY pASsiOn!

You know kitten well that Firebrand was too versatile. No class should be able to spec so fully into pure burning damage and still have access to half the boons in the game for no cost to their DPS. Stop acting like a 14-year-old because they fixed your broken toys.

[Dragon.2536]

Berserker PVE: Someone of developers atleast played berserker? We must use all utilites to just stay in rage little longer, with this we cant use cc when it really need. Usable mostly only axes (too fast fast skill spam, difficult use on mobile fights) for adrenaline gain trait, orher weapons dont have same trait and have lower damage. Will this be changed in this game or spec still be unplayable forever? Berserk duration need remove from utility, thats weird.

[Iustitian.9176]

Firebrand will be definitely nerfed: 

- 8 sec refill time per page is too high (should be 5)

- mixed cooldowns and page costs over all 3 tomes

  -> just why, it's just more complicated?

- tome 3 skill 1 without stability anymore is really bad

- trait Archivist of Whispers will be useless 

- new trait mechanic for Swift Scholar is a joke (minimum 24 secs waiting for using 3 1-page-Skills to get 1 page back?!?)

 

The benefits are 

- skills in tome 2 and 3 can be used more often

 

The Renewed Focus update description is missing in the forum.

Traits Renewed Justice, Tenacious Defense and Power of the Virtuous will affect the skills inside the tome then, otherwise it would be absolutely useless. Just renewing the trait activation cooldowns of tomes would be really bad.

[Bazsi.2734]

4 minutes ago, Scarecrows.3602 said:

You know kitten well that Firebrand was too versatile. No class should be able to spec so fully into pure burning damage and still have access to half the boons in the game for no cost to their DPS. Stop acting like a 14-year-old because they fixed your broken toys.

Ah yes, something was designed by a <REDACTED> so it's overpowered by design... so lets solve it by absolutely ruining the spec. I agree something had to be done (it was obvious in the fall of 2017), but this aint it.

[Stadsport.8714]

3 hours ago, ZEUStiger.3590 said:

No. At this point they should only touch berserker-specific stuff, like traits, utilities and primal bursts. Changing any core weapon skills is going to have a collateral effect on bladesworn and spellbreaker, which are both already is a good spot.

I know how bad it looks. I know that it sounds insane that a spec needs a whooping 40% damage buff to stay competitive with other dps classes. But that's just indicative of the rampant powercreep, powercreep that warriors haven't kept up with over the years of stagnation under banners. They can try to bring every other spec down (be it every other warrior spec, or every other spec in the entire game, your choice), or they they can bump up just the one spec that needs help. I know which option would I prefer.

And this is GOOD. Staying in berserk as long as possible needs to be emphasized. If they don't do that, if they don't make you dedicate your utility slots to extending berserk - you're back to bannerslave mode, where your utilities are so useless that you lose little-to-nothing from switching them to banners. Cue groups demanding that you be their quickness provider because "youll have the same dps anyway m8".

Extending berserk as much as possible is an expression of skill.

Extending berserk as much as possible while also having your utilities available to CC whenever needed is an expression of skill.

Not extending berserk when not needed, when you anticipate an invulnerability phase to happen, so you can let berserk decay, cooldown, and be ready to start again when needed - is an expression of skill.

That's how I interpret it too. Numbers were berserker's only problem 6 months ago, and they still are its main problem now. But instead of buffing numbers - they're making design changes. I can only hope that these design changes chase the goal of making this spec usable in PvP and WvW, and aren't done just for the hell of it, because the devs are incapable of realizing that it's numbers and numbers alone holding berserker down in PvE.

What I'm much more worried about is that the devs have a mandate to keep EoD specs strictly better than HoT and PoF specs to encourage the purchase of the latest expansion. If this is the case, then no matter how much we cry about it - berserker and spellbreaker will always linger behind bladesworn, at least until the next expansion...

Honestly all the discussion in the world about HOW to buff berserker and/or warrior is... Superfluous. I really don't care how we get there, if we have to buff weapons or berserker-only skills or traits or just through Bloody Roar, and I don't disagree with you about staying in Berserk mode or anything. But we HAVE to get there, and I just can't wrap my brain around why ANet continues to disagree. 

Edited November 12, 2022 by Stadsport.8714

[Vampiremax.8350]

20 hours ago, Double Tap said:

Firebrand

• The page mechanic for firebrand tomes has been reworked.

Btw, someone probably already mentioned it, but what happens to Radiance > Renewed Justice? Do you now just get a page for killing an enemy or will it reset cooldowns from Virtue Tome?

Edited November 12, 2022 by Vampiremax.8350

[Mike.7983]

At this point just cancel all these Nov 29 changes, almost all of them are poorly planned out and just going to cause a rift in player dev relations.  Deadeye range makes no sense, firebrand tome nerf is to extreme, reaper/war/ele buffs felt like a band-aid at best, revenant(vindicator) still trash after with main issue not being addressed and to top it off the mirage staff ambush change.  Punishing the 99% cause of the top 1% like last time.  Mech pet AI management will be a nightmare to babysit if using a ranged trait while trying to stand on the raid.  Stop all these proposed changes and try over again.  This will only cause mains to rage quit game in frustration as player and dev communication isn't working.  The whole earlier live stream saying we will fix the underperformers obviously was a big lie as almost all changes will do nothing to do what was promised and it felt like someone took random ideas out of a hat at the last second with little to no planning what so ever.  Asking devs after this rant to start communicating with the player base on changes, none of these will make anyone happy.

[Frenade.6745]

Hey, 
Thanks again for the stream and the communication! I personally like the overall direction.
As a Tempest enjoyer, here are my notes. 

Elementalist
- Scepter rework looks great!
- Staff could also use reworks, especially in air attunement. "Lightning Surge" or "Static Field" could be an AoE vacuum pull (Like Firebrands "Chapter 3: Heated Rebuke"). And earth attunement's "Eruption" could detonate faster.
- Would love to see reworks/buffs for outdated utility skills as well.
- Would also love to see Elementalist's DPS being less reliant on utility skills and instead lean more on weapon skills, traits and combos.
- Other Classes' Elite skills are getting their cooldowns reduced, for more active and reactive gameplay. Elementalists could really use this update as well. Get rid of our 90 sec+ cooldowns and balance those skills accordingly if needed. 
Tempest
- Previous buffs to "Aftershock" and "Eye of the Storm" was great, adding both Aegis and Stability to our kit. But we need more buffs following this direction, to make Tempest a relevant support in the current PvE meta. 
- Alacrity application is still our biggest cumbrance. I understand if "succesfully completing an overload" is a big part of the spec's identity, rewarding players for good timing and game knowledge (synergies with stability and opportunities for interrupts, etc). But right now it's too punishing when we fail our overloads. A solution to this could be that alacrity applies when starting an overload, or perhaps a pulsing application, but this doesn't fit Tempest's overall kit imo. Another solution would be to provide Tempest with additional means to apply Alacrity, as a fallback when our overload fails. The obvious contender being "Rebound", our Elite skill. If "Rebound" applied 5 sec of Alacrity, it could be used as a fallback option. (Similar to how Guardian's "Feel My Wrath" provide some extra Quickness in Firebrand builds.) Players would then also have to prioritize what's more important when their overload fails. To provide that extra alacrity, OR to save "Rebound"s cooldown for a potential incoming lethal blow to the group.  Reducing "Rebound"s cooldown to 50sec would also be relevant imo. To make it a more active skill, rather than a reserved panic button.
Weaver
- Will be cool to see what Weaver can accomplish with the Scepter rework. Looks promising!
- Would like to see more options than DPS/Bruiser for Weaver. For example; The recent change to "Elemental Refreshment" enables us to grant a tiny bit of barrier to allies, so why not make this a build opportunity for a Support/Barrier Weaver? (Similar to Scourge, but with its own niche) The reactive playstyle of timing a huge clutch barrier for the group fits the theme for Weaver and the Path of Fire expansion imo. And the fact that Weavers don't really apply any major boons to the team (similar to scourge) means that their access to barrier-sharing wouldn't become a jack of all trades, but rather a specific and valuable role in group play. 
Catalyst
- Glad to see the "reduced outgoing damage" removed. Having negative damage modifiers is never fun!
- Hammer 3 change looks really solid!
- Replacing Resistance with Aegis here feels off. "Spectacular Sphere" likes to be combined with the extra boon duration from "Sphere Specialist", which Aegis can't really utilize compared to Resistance. Also splitting the trait between PvE and PvP even more is not great from a player pedagogic POV.
- Catalyst's Elite skill "Elemental Celerity" has been irrelevant since its release. The 90sec cooldown doesn't align with what the skill brings to the table imo. It's effect is very situational, and it's not very useful or fun to use in its current state. A more realistic cooldown would be closer to 30sec. A shorter cooldown would also make it synergize better with the "Lesser Arcane Shield" trait. 

Keep it up Cal, Roy and the team, 
Cheers! 

 

Edited November 14, 2022 by Frenade.6745

[Spiral.3724]

21 hours ago, Double Tap said:

Firebrands will now need to more carefully decide how they spend their pages, whether they want to focus on damage, support, or a mix of both.

Firebrands ALWAYS had to carefully decide. I'm a WvW player and being disciplined with your pages is vital to the playstyle.
I vehemently disagree with the proposed changes to firebrand. The way books and pages worked was unique to the class. You've making every class the same -- and boring. Please find another way to nerf Firebrand, if that's what you feel is needed. 

Edited November 12, 2022 by Spiral.3724

[miudes.2357]

All this favors the random game, and  the name of the game it is "guild wars" not "random wars"

[Enigma.6089]

Overall I quite like the sound of the change to tomes and I am looking forward to trying them out however I do think the tome 1 skills are an issue especially tome of justice, but also the other tomes.

What situations do you imagine it is ever a good idea to use justice 1?

The damage is less than axe auto so it is a dps loss on that front and it costs you a page that is far better used on any of the other skills. It made sense before when you were semi-locked into the tome as you needed something as a filler between the more powerful skills. There is no situation where it is not better to simply drop tome and use axe instead and save the page for later.

Personally I would either buff it to be actually useful or make the 1 skill not use a page at all (given camping tome would be worse than camping axe this doesn't seem like it would be such a big deal).

I don't like the mechanist change at all. I would rather you found a better way of nerfing the skill floor as this just sounds like an unnecessary quality of life nerf.

Managing pet AI is already a headache which takes out a lot of the fun factor of having a pet and now you need to manage the pet AI even more and will be punished if you don't (or if the AI decides to do something stupid).

I'm fine with nerfing the skill floor, but nerfing the floor by adding an extra dose of punishing frustration is not the way I would choose.

Edited November 12, 2022 by Enigma.6089

[miudes.2357]

1 minute ago, miudes.2357 said:

All this favors the random game, and  the name of the game it is "guild wars" not "random wars"

I mean WvW

[Stand The Wall.6987]

you've just destroyed corrupt boon. its one use was to corrupt stability back to back. the only thing it needs is a cd decrease.

 

cmc, pls reverse your direction for wvw. we need MORE boon strip, not less. if you want to make group bombs have increased cd, fine, but then make the bombs more powerful. the more you nerf boon strip the more you cater to the side with more numbers. this is the opposite of what you should be doing. make the smaller group have a better chance so they have a reason to log in and try. do you have any idea how many people don't even bother to log in cuz they know there is a blob waiting for them? if you don't address this the entirety of alliances will be in vain and wvw will continue to slowly die as it has been for the last 8 years.

 

edit

ALSO you gotta stop doing some of these pvp only splits when wvw needs the change too. for some traits and skills it makes sense but in terms of small scale and duels its really hurting balance.

Edited November 12, 2022 by Stand The Wall.6987

[stormemperor.3745]

Sometimes I just want to play deadeye in openworld, get some nice spot, kneel and shoot from 1500 range. Thanks to skyscale and 1500 range I can position wherever I want and snipe stuff. Just for the fun of it.

Thank you for killing another joy of mine in the game,

Demoted to the kaineng jp.