Firebrands now basically have 1 Virtue slot...

[Behemovt.8904]

I just tried dps fb after the patch for the first time now so here are my two cents on the topic.

Imo cdps fb as well as qdps fb are fine, yes it feels really wierd at first, but it's still fine. I actually enjoyed it after 30 minutes of play or so. The playstyle is totally different and old rotations won't work. It's a satisfactory change, if we can expect a follow up update soon, because it doesn't feel finished at all at this point.

What I noticed is that Quickfire as well as Loremaster seem broken. To be honest at that point I'm not sure Loremaster works at all. If it works you can consider it as a deleted trait if it doesn't receive some love in the future.

Edited November 30, 2022 by Behemovt.8904

[draxynnic.3719]

5 minutes ago, Behemovt.8904 said:

I just tried dps fb after the patch for the first time now so here are my two cents on the topic.

Imo cdps fb as well as qdps fb are fine, yes it feels really wierd at first, but it's still fine. I actually enjoyed it after 30 minutes of play or so. The playstyle is totally different and old rotations won't work. It's a satisfactory change, if we can expect a follow up update soon, because it doesn't feel finished at all at this point.

What I noticed is that Quickfire as well as Loremaster seem broken. To be honest at that point I'm not sure Loremaster works at all. If it works you can consider it as a deleted trait if it doesn't receive some love in the future.

Which is actually pretty concerning, because those are the GMs you'd want to use most of the time, at least in PvE.

[Tenebrius Drakkar.5098]

Support and Dps builds are dead. Don't think about being qcdps now : you will need all the dps you need to be in line with Mech dps and other "1 - 2 - 3 skills" profession builds.

 

You did the perfect Elite specialization, which has already been nerfed several times in the past. You could have made other changes rather than making Fb unplayable, and no fun at all. Now you just changed entirely how this specialization works, making it quite equal to core Guardian efficiency ...

 

Well, in other words : you killed Fb, and for no reason compared to other cheated classes in need of dps balance.

 

😞

Edited November 30, 2022 by Tenebrius Drakkar.5098

[VillyWatchesYou.3810]

12 hours ago, Tenebrius Drakkar.5098 said:

Support and Dps builds are dead. Don't think about being qcdps now : you will need all the dps you need to be in line with Mech dps and other "1 - 2 - 3 skills" profession builds.

 

You did the perfect Elite specialization, which has already been nerfed several times in the past. You could have made other changes rather than making Fb unplayable, and no fun at all. Now you just changed entirely how this specialization works, making it quite equal to core Guardian efficiency ...

 

Well, in other words : you killed Fb, and for no reason compared to other cheated classes in need of dps balance.

 

😞

This patch was mainly to tone down hfb support, the DPS specs have all been given buffs, it's not enough for sure but it's a good start. The problem with hfb is that for a long time they have been a meta stable in pretty much all PvE content and "pushed" out other support classes simply because hfb was just better in terms of how the meta works. This is why it's a drastic change and when we talk support dps, you should not be able to do 30k dps while flinging out boons galore, that's not balance at all.

[SentriX.3209]

It deffinitely needs tweaking but I really like this direction.

[Tormented Gizka.8190]

It feels godawful to play condi/quickness Firebrand now. I'd resigned myself quickly to being locked into one tome and the ridiculous page costs, fine. But having no visibility on the tome skill cooldowns works especially poorly when playing with high latency, and it combines with no visibility on all the traits' internal cooldowns. Unfortunately, Willbender plays even worse with latency, with the rubber-banding from movement-based skills. Bah.

[Solstice.5790]

Just tried healing the 100 CM fractal on hfb, I am not touching that elite with a 10ft pole anymore.
 

Maybe you were able to a little too much before. But no matter what spec, right now you can't even do one thing.

[mikko.4013]

52 minutes ago, Solstice.5790 said:

Just tried healing the 100 CM fractal on hfb, I am not touching that elite with a 10ft pole anymore.
 

Maybe you were able to a little too much before. But no matter what spec, right now you can't even do one thing.

It is kinda funny, I have been playing HFB (cele/seraph) pre-patch and post-patch, especially in 100CM, and I still find it pretty relevant for the job (aka healing + quickness + might + fury + CC + a small DPS contribution).

 

The new HFB does feel clunky/slow when I compare to what it used to be, but I find it still viable.

 

I think ANet will fine-tune firebrand in the future, either on the pages regen or on the pages cost of tome skills.

[Tenebrius Drakkar.5098]

It would be a good start, yep 🙂

[Zedd.8239]

On 11/29/2022 at 10:53 PM, Gaiawolf.8261 said:

The solution seems pretty straightforward to me. Increase the base page recovery rate (start at 1 page per 6s base, that's 5 pages every 30s like we had with ToJ) and adjust the skill page costs so we have enough to use at least ToJ effectively. Increased utility of Tomes 2 and 3 can still be regulated with the higher page costs for more powerful skills to represent their higher Tome CDs.

That would allow us to go all in on one role without being able to unload all of them like we used to. 

For reference, just using Tome 1 used to allow casting the 5 skills every 30s. Now firing off our 5 skills requires 56s of page recovery. 30s to 56s! For just one tome! Which also leaves 0 pages left for any other tomes. That's formerly 10 utility tome skills in reserve down to 0 for any one that doesn't follow math.

Note, I think that last part is fair. I have no problem with going all in one one tome leaving nothing for other tomes. Or we can choose to use only a few skills and leave a few in reserve for utility. That's tradeoff, as mentioned in the design notes.

But Tome 1 usage going from a full suite of skill usage every 30s to 56s? No. That just feels really really bad to play. Not fun at all. And that wasn't even close to OP before. Still having full Tome 2 and 3 skills in reserve was the overtuned part. 

While I don't fully agree with everything you mention here, I agree with most of it. It'd absolutely be a step in the right direction to have pages recharge faster than they currently do. I think it's fair to make us choose which tomes we want to use. Making it so we can't fully unload all 3 tomes at once is reasonable. But the current implementation simply isn't reasonable. Not to mention it feels really clunky.

Not being able to see tome skill cooldowns makes the recharge issue even worse. If you finally have enough pages to use a tome, activate it, and find out half of your skills are on cooldown, you lose access to the virtue's passive despite not actually using the tome. If you put it away without using it, it also goes on the full cooldown in addition to the virtue cooldown.

There's also the issue of having your tome skills interrupted. If you use a tome skill and get interrupted, you lose those pages. That's always been an issue and is perfectly fair. But the consequences of that are significantly worse now that pages are shared. Now all you have to do to shut down a firebrand is interrupt a few of their big tome skills and they're out of options. And that's very easy to do because they all have lengthy cast times with big, obvious animations.

I'm also aware that stability is a thing and make frequent use of it. But at the rate stuns and other CCs are thrown around in WvW/PvP, there's a very good chance you'll lose all stacks within seconds. To make that worse, they keep reducing sources of stability. But that's another whole discussion.

When you combine all of these issues, using tomes feels more like a punishment than a class mechanic now, and that isn't a good place to be.

I really think if they had slowly rolled out these changes and made tweaks along the way instead of just blowing everything up all at once, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. We went from overpowered in some situations to completely under-powered in far more situations.

I play a support FB in pretty much every game mode and these changes have destroyed my enjoyment to the point where I'm simply avoiding playing it. Mission accomplished, ANet?

Edited December 3, 2022 by Zedd.8239
Grammar, formatting, general derpiness

[Buran.3796]

Man, roaming FB is a weakling POS...

[Zedd.8239]

On 12/3/2022 at 10:26 AM, Buran.3796 said:

Man, roaming FB is a weakling POS...

Yeah, it's pretty sad. You can barely defend yourself now. I wouldn't expect to be unstoppable but it'd be nice if it'd take more than a few poorly timed stuns to disable us.

I say poorly timed because the timing doesn't even have to be all that good. Everything takes so long to use that by the time the right tome is up and ready to use you've already been interrupted and lost most of your pages.

Not a huge deal when each tome had its own pages. But now that has to happen to just one of your tomes and you're out of commission. It's stupid.

Edited December 15, 2022 by Zedd.8239

[Nero.7369]

On 11/30/2022 at 1:00 AM, Nero.7369 said:

This is my first impression tho after playing with it for about an hour today. Will run fractals CMs on on different builds like hfb, celefb,qfb and cfb play some wvw in the next few days.

so it has beed a few month. and specially after the adjustments i am really happy.

I really love the switch in and out of the tomes. it just feels awesome.
Page Management is a thing and at a decent spot. I only kinda feel a nerf to celefb cause it made most use of all tomes at the same time. And yea condi dps firebrand has to sacrifice offense now to make use of the utility.

Thing is tho, we still have all the utility with us and can access it on demand. and i kinda thought the goal was to reduce the perma access to utility. The limitation via paging is already okay i guess. But if the goal is to reduce the access I have to make a suggestion even if i dont really like it: let us pick 2 out of the 3 tomes. so we can not get all the utilities all the time.
- hfb can go with F2 and F3
- cfb can go with F1 and F3
- celefb can go with F1 and F2
- qfb can go with F1 and F3

This would actually reduce the perma access of utility we have. Might be overkill, and i love it how it is rn. but just wanted to point out that this might be an option.

I think that the passive should not be disabled for such an long time, only for 5-10 seconds. specially with the frequent swaps those are kinda all time disabled. so only a short disable would be more in line imo.

For core guardian tho... the passives should never be lost imo because compared to DH, WB and FB the actives are kinda weak.

I also just didnt play much wvw or pvp with it. Willbenders mobility is just to nice to go back to FB there :S

Edited February 4, 2023 by Nero.7369

[Gaiawolf.8261]

After the December adjustments, it feels good, especially if you're not gung ho on chasing BIS or top DPS. I just wish FB had some decent roaming options in PVP/WVW. The latest patch seems to help sPVP, but no love for WVW outside of a zerg/GVG.