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June 27 Balance Update Preview


Rubi Bayer.8493

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1 hour ago, ZetsuZack.9217 said:

My biggest thing I have concerns about is the "making mech range penalty more visible". Basically if necro doesn't get changed can we not nerf mech skills?

There are lots of things in thit patch that shouldn't be done.

Scourge nerfs, Necro corruptions, Mech CD penalty,  Berserker's Arc diviner hard  damage and aoe nerfs, Ignored CD reductions for PvP/WvW engineer skills such as tool-kit, Quickness in blast finishers for Scrappe (I'm not personally upset with this one, but I understand players that are), etc.

😕

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I'm going to make a prediction that after alac/quickness are fully balanced, open world metas will be mostly trivialized.

As it stands, a lot of the tension is maintained precisely because most squads don't have much boon support, something which is made very stark when you actually have boons and healers and things fly by. But that thrill of zooming through a meta is going to become rote pretty fast if groups have alac/quickness all the time.

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Please for the love of god Anet do not let these changes hit the live game. Specifically talking about Mirage/Scrapper/Bladesworn and ESPECIALLY scourge. This has to be one of the worst and most dissapointing patchnotes ive ever read from you, its like you have no idea how your game works or what people actually enjoy about it.

instead of trying to hamfist and rush changes into the game actually take time to find solutions to the problems you have, Removing core parts of kits and unique designs will just make playing x elite spec pointless because the others are just better and there will be nothing unique enough to pull you to one or the other because you are trying to make everything the same. you did it with scrapper gyros trying to turn them into basic static wells and your doing it again now. STOP IT.

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I have tried to comment detailled on the announcement and erased it several times. 

As we will not write any sense into the devs regarding rolling out these changes in a PvE system in my eyes never having been that good and balanced.  Let's take the costs for new equip, re-roll the rest where possible, and silently wonder if GW2 is too successful in the A-Net pool so it needs to be humbled in favour of other titles.

This is making me sad... I am tired of rebuilding all my characters and catching up with new builds every 5 minutes.

Maybe it's time for another 3 year break. Bye my scourge , bye my mirage, bye...... args

All you think what you want. I am simply tired of it  but once in a lifetime needed to get rid of my feelings.

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On 6/14/2023 at 5:38 AM, Sirvaleen.1379 said:

That's a funny one I learned recently. Even though not dealing damage, all the Toss Elixir toolbelt skills are considered like projectiles. Projectiles that can be destroyed or blocked by enemies 🤣

"Like with all elixirs, if affected by block, reflect or intercepted by invulnerable target while in air, elixir will be destroyed and won't have any effect."

It was incredibly stupid... anyone trying to use a toolbelt elixir in a no-profectile field ended up losing it.  So basically when you needed to pop stability, you could be locked out of using your skill that provided it (elixir B toolbelt).  

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11 minutes ago, soul.9651 said:

... Open world and its metas were like that for years already

They are but they still can and do fail. And they at least have decent contours of encounters at their current pace.

But there are definitely points in super-powered squads where if you can't mount and get to the next event immediately it will be dead before you arrive.

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On 6/8/2023 at 5:12 PM, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

While I understand complaints against roots, I also feel like this is a unique skill for druid that separates it from other support classes. Instead of deleting it from the game, why not just adjust the mechanism of it? Perhaps it could just apply immob (instead of creating roots) or you could adjust the cooldown. If you look at other games with druid, you will see vines/roots are a major aspect that can be used more than every 48 seconds..

 

On 6/8/2023 at 5:12 PM, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

Eclipse: This trait replaces Ancient Seeds. Your celestial avatar abilities inflict conditions on enemies.

 

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7 hours ago, BlackNephilim.6591 said:

I'm not even mad about it any more. I have spent way too much time in the game lately. By what they do to my favourite builds now they will gift me with a summer of being outside, playing guitar and seeing friends. And maybe in 3 months they will undo at least some of the damage and so maybe I'll be back in fall. 

And I think that is the only right thing to do about this patch. Stop working around the kittens anet throws at us with full hands and enjoy life. Stop investing emotions. It's summer folks, there's so much to do instead of logging into a game with delusional developers. 

If their player base plummets they may get a feeling for the amount of people who quietly enjoyed the game as it was. Let the boonballs and thieves run alone through an empty wvw with no victims for them. Be outside, enjoy a barbecue instead or a nice walk. Life is precious, your time is precious. 

Might as well get a real kitten instead of the anet version ^^

Of course, this is the problem right?

Games don't have to fix jack squat if players just leave for a hiatus and come back and "see if things changed" (They usually don't...) And you're right! It is summer and it's nice out! I'm about to go for a jog.

Unfortunately though, as with big corpos, money talks for them. We all know that Anet listens to wvw players very often.

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Doesn't the Signets of Suffering "rework" make that trait totally useless in PVE? How many NPCs actually have boons that can be stripped?

Edit: I have to ask...why the confused emoji? Were people not understanding my point or are they disagreeing? If disagreeing - can you point to a situation in which NPCs in PVE have boons that can be stripped? I've never noticed that many.

Edited by misterman.1530
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Something Kitty's been requesting since forever: buff the maces into a viable option! (And Body Blow-trait too!)

Currently they're somewhat in the limbo as CC weapon but very little damage potential and they haven't really seen any adjustments through all these balance patches. At least hammer finally got a rework. Also, Body Blow-trait does require a buff to be of any use in PVE. Meanwhile its competitors Sword and Longbow are getting some buffing. And yes, from what Kitty's been testing, maces currently work best as condi weapons with that Body Blow-trait slotted and that trait is pretty much exclusively useful for mace Berserker.

Anyway, the numbers for buffs. Using the numbers from Kitty's condi zerker:
Body Blow: Increased the Bleeding from 1 stack to 2 stacks. (3k DPS buff from 21.5k to 24.5k on mace+mace condi berserker but doesn't affect others)
Skull Grinder: Increased the Bleeding from 4 stacks for 8 seconds to 6 stacks for 12 seconds. (Still smaller buff than the sword's Flaming Flurry buff coming with this patch due to Burning's 2,5x higher condi damage multifier.)
Auto-attack chain: Added 1 stack of Bleeding for 6 seconds. (on all skills to get the auto-chain closer to sword's since sword already does same damage faster with added Bleeding and Mace pretty much uses "auto chain -> 2-3 skills -> auto chain"-style rota so there's not much auto-attacking to begin with.)

Might be too late for the initial patch but if these were added to one of patches soon after, Kitty would be grateful for getting some use for her shiny Moot.

Edited by LadyKitty.6120
Fixed formatting as apparently markdown doesn't work anymore.
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I have an idea on virutoso's Bladeturn Requiem.

First of all, I think distortion should still be removed for virtuoso and rebalance from there.

Suggested change:

Make bladeturn requiem damage scale up with the number of blocks up to a certain limit. 

Currently the skill is only meaningful for its block and the deadly blade buff. It encourages player to trigger it with just one blade.  With the proposed change, it will have more counterplay potential. If you block attacks with high blades, you will have a long lasting high damage spin which can seriously hurt melee attackers. It will also have very good use in WvW zerg. Even in PvE, if you use it well, it can increase dps.

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Some of these changes are exceptionally bad for the game and really need to not be included in the 6/19 update and either completely reworked or the existing traits/skills left as they are.

ENGINEER/MECHANIST:
"Mechanist's penalty for being too far from its mech is something that we've been keeping an eye on since it was added to the game. We think there's room for improvement, and in this update, we're changing the penalty from a mech stat reduction to an increased cooldown for the mech command skills. We believe that this change will make the penalty more visible and easier to understand."
 

  • Mechanical Genius: This trait has been reworked. Instead of the mech incurring a stat-reduction penalty, command skills now take longer to recharge if activated while the mech is farther than a range of 360 away from the engineer.


You completely miss the problem going on with the present iteration of mechanist which can be boiled down to two main issues:
1. Visibility - The problem isn't a lack of visibility/awareness of the PENALTY, it is a lack of visibility of the MECH itself. In content where there are 3-20 Mechs, picking out my own Mech is nearly impossible, completely without considering visual effect bloat. 

If you want to make a visibility change so that players are aware of the penalty, then you need to make the player's own mech highly contrasted from those belonging to other players AND  give some sort of high contrast visual indicator when the mech & player are separated by too great a distance, maybe something like the colored screen border used for raid effects & reaper.

2. The bigger problem is that AI management isn't fun. Roll back several years to before PoF, this is a large part of why Rangers wanted an option to do full damage without a pet penalty. Simply changing the kind of penalty for distance only doubles down on a bad change and makes it worse. Micromanaging a pet isn't skill level, it is frustrating. The mech will forget to attack, its own DPS is slowed down, and who knows where the AI decided to park it in the first place, certainly not in the first, second or third space I would have picked.

This one needs to be straight up rolled back to its original state. If the concern is that Mechanist has too high of DPS for too low skill cap, drop the raw base numbers to give it a solid middle tier DPS. Or if you absolutely HAVE to have options for increased skill, then do something with combo effects to boost it out of middle tier to a higher tier DPS.  Maybe tie those to active use of signets? Something other than forcing players to micromanage a bad Pet AI and trying to find a pet that is lost on their screen.

NECROMANCER:
"Scourge has always been intended to be a viable support option, but the lack of quickness or alacrity has held it back in endgame content outside of specific cases. That won't be an issue anymore, as we've adjusted Desert Empowerment to be that source of alacrity. With scourge support likely becoming more viable in general use, we felt that its reviving power was just a bit too high and have made some adjustments to bring it more in line. We'll be keeping a very close eye on alacrity scourge's performance and will follow up as needed."
 

  • Signets of Suffering: This trait has been reworked and causes signet skills to remove boons from affected foes.

This is seriously punishing to a lot of builds. Reaper has taken hit after hit to its shroud duration and this is yet one more that reduces the viability of reaper shroud focused builds by taking away the signets passive affects while in shroud. But then this also impacts every other aspect of necromancer because it guts the signet lifeforce generation that is core to how the necromancer works.

This one needs to be left out entirely. 


Boon Strip vs. Boon Corruption

  • Unholy Feast: This skill now removes boons instead of converting them into conditions.
  • Spiteful Spirit: This trait now removes boons instead of converting them into conditions.
  • Enfeebling Blood: This skill no longer converts boons into conditions.
  • Lesser Enfeeble: This skill no longer converts boons into conditions.

This is straight up nerf to necromancer across the board. Boon corruption is a key part of what makes a necromancer. This nerf gives a hard hit to condition based necro builds.

Finally, worst for last:
 

  • Desert Empowerment: This trait has been moved to the grandmaster tier, replacing Feed from Corruption. The barrier from this trait will now only apply around the shade and will affect 5 targets. This trait now also grants alacrity to allies when you grant them barrier.

By placing this in the grandmaster tier so that we must choose between barrier generation and the larger shade, this effectively destroys the role of the support scourge in a way that is not and cannot be made up by adding alacrity. Scourge doesnt NEED alacrity. If support scourge is seeing a drop in use because it doesn't stack well against other support options, then it should be buffed up, not gutted and reworked into a pale echo of other support classes. 

Roll this one back, leave it out, and come back later with changes that dont run necromancer through the blender.

Edited by Moira Shalaar.5620
added quotation marks for clarity
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2 hours ago, Sithaya.2370 said:

 

This is making me sad... I am tired of rebuilding all my characters and catching up with new builds every 5 minutes.

Maybe it's time for another 3 year break. Bye my scourge , bye my mirage, bye...... args

All you think what you want. I am simply tired of it  but once in a lifetime needed to get rid of my feelings.

I feel exactly the same. Enjoyed my mirage build so much. And by far for too short of a time.

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On 6/9/2023 at 3:37 PM, ZEUStiger.3590 said:

There is no need to tone down damage. PvE-wise berserker is in a decent spot currently. If anything, it could use even more of a damage buff considering that it's not capable of providing any group utility. Unlike, for example, reaper, which has a respectable arsenal of utility among its utility skills (which, of course, have an opportunity cost, but warrior has none whatsoever), and, completely unsurprisingly, has over 3x the playrate of berserker currently in raids, and over 9x in fractals. All while having effectively a very similar dps benchmark if you disregard weaponstowing exploits.

 

EDIT: I see some confused reactions to this, so here, let me give you a rundown. I'll use my list of utilities from the last balance patch preview:

Summary:

  • Berserker is better than reaper at pushing enemies away, and giving their group defensive boons that normally might be given by support players anyway
  • Reaper is better than berserker at pulling enemies close, instantly repositioning via teleports, blocking projectiles, stripping boons, CC, and slightly better at burst power damage

Dunno about you, but I can easily see which one between these two is the clearly superior choice. And the playrates support that.

I agree with everything youre saying. Its just

I JUST WANT ARC DIVIDER NOT TO GO DOWN TO 1 SPIN. NONE OF THESE CHANGES MAKE ANY FLAMING SENSE AND I WAS TRYING TO BARGAIN. I SWEAR TO BALTHAZAR THIS IS BECAUSE SOMEONE AT ARENANET HAS NEVER FORGIVEN US FOR 4 WARR 1 MES COF P1 5K AP OR KICK

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btw did anyone notice "Desert Empowerment: This trait has been moved to the grandmaster tier, replacing Feed from Corruption." @ scourge ... like sad and horrible enough that we apparently lose feed from corruption

but i don't see anywhere what we get instead on the line 2 of the scourge elite? does it just disappear or what

not that it likely will change anything, but hm?

edit: app in some other thread someone said the "feed from corruption" trait was moved there, but it was changed to only give barrier so eh idk. looks like the death sentence for the whole spec

(in Wvw. who cares about pvE balance... everything is playable there anyways)

Edited by kamikharzeeh.8016
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I'm still salty about alacrity on Celestial Avatar. Imagine if Firebrands had to put the majority of their healing on cooldown in order to maintain quickness. You want quickness? Get locked out of Bow of Truth and Tome 2 Nerd! 

I'm so salty.

Edited by nucklepuckk.1805
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8 hours ago, Moira Shalaar.5620 said:

Some of these changes are exceptionally bad for the game and really need to not be included in the 6/19 update and either completely reworked or the existing traits/skills left as they are.

ENGINEER/MECHANIST:
"Mechanist's penalty for being too far from its mech is something that we've been keeping an eye on since it was added to the game. We think there's room for improvement, and in this update, we're changing the penalty from a mech stat reduction to an increased cooldown for the mech command skills. We believe that this change will make the penalty more visible and easier to understand."
 

  • Mechanical Genius: This trait has been reworked. Instead of the mech incurring a stat-reduction penalty, command skills now take longer to recharge if activated while the mech is farther than a range of 360 away from the engineer.


You completely miss the problem going on with the present iteration of mechanist which can be boiled down to two main issues:
1. Visibility - The problem isn't a lack of visibility/awareness of the PENALTY, it is a lack of visibility of the MECH itself. In content where there are 3-20 Mechs, picking out my own Mech is nearly impossible, completely without considering visual effect bloat. 

If you want to make a visibility change so that players are aware of the penalty, then you need to make the player's own mech highly contrasted from those belonging to other players AND  give some sort of high contrast visual indicator when the mech & player are separated by too great a distance, maybe something like the colored screen border used for raid effects & reaper.

2. The bigger problem is that AI management isn't fun. Roll back several years to before PoF, this is a large part of why Rangers wanted an option to do full damage without a pet penalty. Simply changing the kind of penalty for distance only doubles down on a bad change and makes it worse. Micromanaging a pet isn't skill level, it is frustrating. The mech will forget to attack, its own DPS is slowed down, and who knows where the AI decided to park it in the first place, certainly not in the first, second or third space I would have picked.

This one needs to be straight up rolled back to its original state. If the concern is that Mechanist has too high of DPS for too low skill cap, drop the raw base numbers to give it a solid middle tier DPS. Or if you absolutely HAVE to have options for increased skill, then do something with combo effects to boost it out of middle tier to a higher tier DPS.  Maybe tie those to active use of signets? Something other than forcing players to micromanage a bad Pet AI and trying to find a pet that is lost on their screen.

NECROMANCER:
"Scourge has always been intended to be a viable support option, but the lack of quickness or alacrity has held it back in endgame content outside of specific cases. That won't be an issue anymore, as we've adjusted Desert Empowerment to be that source of alacrity. With scourge support likely becoming more viable in general use, we felt that its reviving power was just a bit too high and have made some adjustments to bring it more in line. We'll be keeping a very close eye on alacrity scourge's performance and will follow up as needed."
 

  • Signets of Suffering: This trait has been reworked and causes signet skills to remove boons from affected foes.

This is seriously punishing to a lot of builds. Reaper has taken hit after hit to its shroud duration and this is yet one more that reduces the viability of reaper shroud focused builds by taking away the signets passive affects while in shroud. But then this also impacts every other aspect of necromancer because it guts the signet lifeforce generation that is core to how the necromancer works.

This one needs to be left out entirely. 


Boon Strip vs. Boon Corruption

  • Unholy Feast: This skill now removes boons instead of converting them into conditions.
  • Spiteful Spirit: This trait now removes boons instead of converting them into conditions.
  • Enfeebling Blood: This skill no longer converts boons into conditions.
  • Lesser Enfeeble: This skill no longer converts boons into conditions.

This is straight up nerf to necromancer across the board. Boon corruption is a key part of what makes a necromancer. This nerf gives a hard hit to condition based necro builds.

Finally, worst for last:
 

  • Desert Empowerment: This trait has been moved to the grandmaster tier, replacing Feed from Corruption. The barrier from this trait will now only apply around the shade and will affect 5 targets. This trait now also grants alacrity to allies when you grant them barrier.

By placing this in the grandmaster tier so that we must choose between barrier generation and the larger shade, this effectively destroys the role of the support scourge in a way that is not and cannot be made up by adding alacrity. Scourge doesnt NEED alacrity. If support scourge is seeing a drop in use because it doesn't stack well against other support options, then it should be buffed up, not gutted and reworked into a pale echo of other support classes. 

Roll this one back, leave it out, and come back later with changes that dont run necromancer through the blender.

I completely agree about the corruption change and not sure why it is being changed in the first place? 

That said regarding the shades, it's exactly what they did when they gave tempest alacrity. So while I didn't like that much either (as some don't need to choose a grandmaster for alac), it is in line with other changes they've made in the past. 

If scourges get their new alac trait changed, I would hope tempest would get the same consideration. 

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I mostly play PVP necro specs and removing boon corruptions from weapon skills and two GRANDMASTER traits is a really huge blow to most necromancers in PVP. They can say they do not want to have range boon strips in WvW but Lesser Enfeeble is a small AOE around the necro so it`s basically a melee corrupt and both Unholy Feast and Spiteful Spirit are 600 range radius around the necro. Also without the boon corrupt what is even going to be the point of ever taking the spite GM trait Spiteful Spirit?

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 Anyone else getting like, pretty tired of hoping for warrior salvation from balance patches, & then getting served the repeated "Lack-of-understanding-infused patches"???

 Like, why does [Daring Dragon] need to be axed when it's clearly fun, people are enjoying it, & there's an even less-taken & more useless Grandmaster that they could just slap alacrity on instead? OR Why can't [DD] just remain as-is & give alacrity proportional to the number of bullets you load before you slash?? OR Why doesn't it only give alacrity if you full charge it, while retaining existing functionality???

 I am so, So, SO tried of "PvP/WvW" or just "fun/utility traits and skills" being gutted in service of making things "technically useable but clearly not ideal cause it wasn't designed that way in PvE". Cal even said in the introduction of Bladesworn for End of Dragons when they previewed it that [Daring Dragon] was supposed to be a PvP trait. His exact quote was. "Well, in PvP if you miss with a Dragon Slash that's clearly not ideal. So this way you'll get to re-enter dragon trigger." And now, just like [Dragonspike Mine] that design is being eaten away in favor of just giving Bladesworn technically usable' in a support role in PvE. (When a. No one asked for or wants this, and b. Even if you're going to do this there are SOOO many ways you could otherwise do it and preserve the fun of [Daring Dragon] -- see above ^.)

+ Why is all of this ^ ok, but we can't get a patch to fix Dragon slashes getting caught on uneven terrain or make Dragon Trigger a true toggle like [Kneel] to make it less clunky?

++ Why does Warrior ONLY get-to-do-X-on-burst-skill-hit?? You guys know there's other mechanics in the game right? Like, Warriors don't have to be lame. Look at Lost Ark or any other game for like 5 seconds. They can have swords the size of houses, cut beams of wind at each other, dodge around at the speed on lightning, dual wield Greatswords, it doesn't have to be anime or metal af, but c'mon let's be real: This class hasn't gotten a real update outside of some Defense tuning in 10 years.

 Why does Berserker need to lose 3-hit arc divider? It's literally one of their 2 remaining fun&good buttons!

 Meanwhile: Harbingers can perfectly utilize cele gear, have a gravity well that has no animation telegraph & doesn't render on a 20s CD (and they can give themselves alacrity.)

 Warrior remains the only class without a true teleport. (No the 300 unit one doesn't count, it sucks.) Most of its utility skills' blow, and NEARLY ALL OF ITS WEAPON SKILLS AND TRAITS ARE OUTDATED OR USELESS.

For fun I'll just list the Useless Traits here:

- Every trait that isn't [Burst Precision] or on the middle line in Arms.

 +6

- [Crack Shot], [Vengeful Return] - Oh My God they still have a downstate trait, [Doubled Standards], & [Heightened Focus]

 +4

- [Brave Stride], [Restorative Strength] & [Body Blow].

 +3

- Pretty much everything in Tactics now that the shout trait is gone and [Martial Cadence] is getting nuked from space.

 +8

 So that's 21 on Core. 21 of Warrior's selectable 45 core traits are USELESS. That's nearly half. With the most 2 egregious examples obviously being a downstate trait & a Grandmaster that give you bonus 20% attack speed only when dual wielding weapons of the same type (which is doubly a joke because off mace & sword are butt) which doesn't stack with any other attack speed bonus in the game.

ANet... wtf.

 For me this patch was the breaking point. Cheers to my fellow players still playing Warrior. I will be playing other games.

 

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